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Book Salon
Othello

  • This month we're reading Othello by William Shakespeare. Our faculty host is Helen Brooks.

    Listen to an interview with our Book Salon host.

    "Othello is the one play by Shakespeare that, for me, continues to engage most vividly with some of the hot issues (to borrow a phrase) of the twenty-first century. Here, I can only mention a few: race relations; war and its boundaries; gender-bias; inter-generational differences; colonialism; and human psychology."

    Helen Brooks, PhD '80, senior lecturer emerita of English and the program of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies

About this quarter's book selection

One of Shakespeare’s four classic tragedies, Othello is fraught with themes concerning the essence of the human experience. For that reason it is arguably Shakespeare’s most personally relatable work and the one that evokes the most sympathy among readers.

Othello, a Moorish soldier, has just wed Desdemona, the beautiful daughter of a Venetian senator. The young couple has little time to revel in their love before Iago, an officer upset that he was passed over by Othello for a promotion, begins to plot their ruin. With a personal villainy unparalleled in any other Shakespeare work, Iago creates a tangled web of lies and deceit that causes tragedy to unfold. Shakespeare’s vivid illustration of Othello’s rapid descent into jealousy, rage and violence still holds powerful relevance more than four centuries after its conception.

Shakespeare, a poet and playwright often called the greatest writer in the English language, is believed to have written Othello around 1603. This Signet Classics edition is rich with additional commentary on the life and world of Shakespeare, a special introduction to the play and several dramatic criticisms, as well as other resources. 

The Stanford Book Salon [Seriously Unstuffy]