In the Library
Othello
William Shakespeare, 1604
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 5
- Length
- Length 28k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
A handkerchief embroidered with strawberries, the first gift a husband ever gave his wife, becomes in another man's hands the single proof of a betrayal that never happened. That is all it takes. Othello stages the most intimate murder in Shakespeare, and its horror is that you watch the poison enter drop by drop: Iago needs no real evidence, only a tone, a pause, the word 'honest' repeated until it curdles, and a great soldier who has faced armies finds he cannot withstand a whisper. The cruelty for an audience is total, because every lie is spoken to your face and invisible to the man it destroys, and Desdemona, who argued for this love before the Venetian Senate and followed it into war, keeps loving him as the ground gives way. When it is over, Iago is asked why, and he will not say. Shakespeare withholds the reason too, and the silence is the most frightening thing in the play.