Othello: Fully Annotated with an Introduction, by Burton Raffel

William Shakespeare

Jan 2005 · Yale University Press

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The Annotated Shakespeare Series allows readers to fully understand and enjoy the rich plays of the world’s greatest dramatist

"A drama . . . get[s] Yale’s red-carpet treatment."—Library Journal

One of the most powerful dramas ever written for the stage, Othello is a story of revenge, illusion, passion, mistrust, jealousy, and murder. If in Iago Shakespeare created the most compelling villain in Western literature, in Othello and Desdemona he gave us our most tragic and unforgettable lovers. This extensively annotated version of Othello makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. 

Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary, pronunciation, and prosody and provides alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations give readers all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. In his introduction, Raffel delves into the interpretive disagreement over Othello's origins and provides an analysis of the characters Desdemona and Iago. In a concluding essay, Harold Bloom engages our attraction to both power and tragedy in his discussion of Iago, Shakespeare's "radical invention."

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Burton Raffel was Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities Emeritus and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Among his many edited and translated publications are Poems and Prose from the Old English, Cligès, Lancelot, Perceval, Erec and Enide, and Yvain, all published by Yale University Press. Harold Bloom was Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, and the author of many books, including The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?