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."
About the AuthorBurton Raffel (1928-2015) 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.
Harold Bloom (1930-2019) 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?