Othello's Secret: The Cyprus Problem

Description

Othello's Secret uncovers the relationship between the play and the conflicts that have torn apart its Cypriot setting, providing a new and powerfully political reading. Exploring the domestic and military anxieties connected by Shakespeare, Christofides highlights the ways in which these issues resonate with current ideological and geographical divisions in Cyprus, divisions rooted in the 16th century struggles to control the island. Challenging the conventional view of Othello as a Venetian play, this book offers a fierce and personal example of how early modern literature can purposefully contribute to even the most complex geopolitical debates.

R M Christofides is a Shakespeare scholar with interests in Cyprus and the Middle East. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Apocalypse: Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture and numerous articles on the relationship between early modern culture and the present.

By examining the understudies history and culture of Cyprus in the context of sixteenth-century writing, Christofides raises new questions for early modern scholars of drama ... His book demonstrates how histories from varying times intersect with Shakespeare and place. * Sixteenth Century Journal * As Christofides reads Othello alongside Cyprus's twentieth- and twenty-first-century turmoil, he conveys the religious, national, and ethnic hybridity of both the island and the play ... Othello's Secret enthusiastically embraces critical iconoclasm; it is the book on Othello and Cyprus, which is to say its formal hybridity authentically reflects the cultural hybridity of its subject matter. * Shakespeare Quarterly *