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Post-Colonial Critical Theory

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Feminist Critical Theory

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Carol Ann Duffy - Feminist Critical Theory

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Marxist Critical Theory

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Those who are 21 or under on 11th July 2022 can enter the HG Wells Short Story Competition for FREE. There is no entry fee, and the winning story will win a prize of £1,000. All short-listed stories will be professionally published in a quality, paperback anthology.

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2022 Competition - 21 and under - The HG Wells Short Story Competition

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Those who are 21 or under on 11th July 2022 can enter the HG Wells Short Story Competition for FREE. There is no entry fee, and the winning story will win a prize of £1,000. All short-listed stories will be professionally published in a quality, paperback anthology.

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Educated (2018) is a memoir by the American author Tara Westover. Westover recounts overcoming her survivalist Mormon family in order to go to college, and emphasizes the importance of education in enlarging her world.

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Reasons To Stay Alive shows you the dangers and difficulties surrounding mental illness, uncovers the stigma around it, and identifies how to recover from it by sharing the story of Matt Haig's recovery after an awful panic attack and subsequent battle with depression and anxiety.

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In the years after the Civil War, Jo March lives in New York and makes her living as a writer, while her sister Amy studies painting in Paris. Amy has a chance encounter with Theodore, a childhood crush who proposed to Jo but was ultimately rejected. Their oldest sibling, Meg, is married to a schoolteacher, while shy sister Beth develops a devastating illness that brings the family back together.

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The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's follow-up to her classic novel The Handmaid's Tale, returns to that dystopic theocracy 15 years later via three protagonists: Agnes, a girl in Gilead who from a young age rejects marriage, though her parents intend to marry her to a powerful Commander.

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From the author of The Kite Runner comes a heartfelt saga about Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women whose friendship shines with hope and humanity against the backdrop of war and destruction. Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed.

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'Lyrical Ballads' Wordsworth and Coleridge 

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'Lyrical Ballads' Wordsworth and Coleridge 

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In this anthology, Coleridge set out to write about ‘persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic,’ but though supernatural they had to possess ‘a semblance of truth sufficient to procure...that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’. Wordsworth intended to 'give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us’.

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There have been numerous interpretations of Othello over the last 400 years. Virginia Mason Vaughan discusses four recent critical approaches: feminist, new historicist, marxist and post-colonial.

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There have been numerous interpretations of Othello over the last 400 years. Virginia Mason Vaughan discusses four recent critical approaches: feminist, new historicist, marxist and post-colonial.

was crafted at the dawn of the 17th century, shaped by complex social and geopolitical issues that new historicist critics, who seek to place literary works within a historical framework, have recently sought to unravel. Yet from its first staging to the present, Othello has also been among the few Shakespearean plays to be repeatedly staged to enthusiastic audiences, not only in England, but across the globe. This continuing appeal suggests that the tragedy transcends the time and location in which it was written, provoking new interpretations from generation to generation, place to place. In order to fully appreciate Othello, we need to see it in its multifaceted historical context - then - and consider the myriad ways it speaks to audiences now.

Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, an Italian source for Othello and Measure for Measure

Shakespeare took the idea for Othello from a tale of doomed mixed-race marriage in Cinthio's De Gli Hecatommithi, 1565.

Postcolonial reading: 'something from Cyprus'

Postcolonial readings focus on the play's representation of Ottoman Turks. Shakespeare derived Othello's plot from a short narrative in Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi (1565), but set his play within the context of Venice's struggle during the 1570s with the Ottoman Empire for control of Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean island that overlooked the shipping lanes between Europe and trading centres in the East. Venice owned Cyprus from 1470 to 1569, but in 1571 Turkish forces seized the island. Later that year an alliance of Christian powers defeated the Turk in the famous naval battle of Lepanto. As a young man, James VI of Scotland (James I of England in 1603) celebrated that battle, fought 'Betwixt the baptiz'd race, / And circumcised Turband Turkes'. References throughout Othello to 'the Turk' or 'turning Turk' evoke the intermittent conflict between Europe's Christian powers and the Islamic Ottoman Empire, which was as much an economic competition as a clash of religions. In sermons and treatises, English writers like Richard Knolles, who published The General Historie of the Turks (1603), demonised the Ottoman Empire as barbaric and cruel, even as they admired its military success and bureaucratic structure.

Description of the Battle of Lepanto in Knolles's History of the Turks

Richard Knolles' General Historie of the Turks (1603) demonizes the lion-like Turks but admires their military power.

Shakespeare draws upon the Christian-Turkish binary but also undercuts it by making the play's most villainous character a Venetian and its hero an outsider. Fearful of vesting military power in one of its own citizens, Venice's republican government contracted with foreign mercenaries who could easily be dismissed once the crisis was over (as Othello is in Act 5). Although Othello has been chosen by the Venetian government to lead its army, 'the Moor' (a term that originally referred to practitioners of Islam) remains an alien in Venice. Like the liminal island of Cyprus, he is caught in the middle, neither European nor Turk yet embodying both, and in his suicide he highlights his service as a Christian hero by killing the 'turbaned Turk' within, who 'beat a Venetian and traduced the state' (5.2.352-53).

Othello 's geopolitical impact is not limited, however, to conflicts between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Othello's blackness and his background as a foreign mercenary prefigures the hybridity postcolonial theorists have identified in colonial subjects. Brabantio and Desdemona are fascinated by his strange stories of cannibals and anthropophagi; Othello's first gift to her is a handkerchief given to him by an Egyptian charmer, 'dyed in mummy [a black liquid distilled from corpses] and steeped in the ancient lore of charmers, sibyls and magic'. The Moor's stories allow Desdemona to experience the exotic/erotic delight found by many early modern readers in travel narratives that described the 'antres vast' of unexplored territories in Africa, the East and the New World.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

Headless men and men with mouths behind their shoulders: these are some of the wondrous creatures depicted in The Travels of John Mandeville, a book still hugely popular in Shakespeare's day.

New historicist reading: 'far more fair than black'

New historicist critics often debate whether or not race was a factor in early modern representations of non-English peoples. Although Othello's racial identity is clearly a factor in Shakespeare's text, when the play was first performed the audience would not have seen it as squarely focussed on race as we do. As editor Michael Neill observes, 'to talk about race in Othello is inevitably to fall into some degree of anachronism, while to ignore it is to efface something fundamental to the tragedy.' As a result, Shakespeare's Othello has been appropriated worldwide as a vehicle for the exploration of racial and ethnic tensions.

In the opening scene Iago refers to Othello as 'the thick-lips' (1.1.66) and later he raises a toast to 'the health of black Othello' (2.2.29). Through these and other comments we learn that Othello is a black African of sub-Saharan origin. In 1604 England was not yet formally immersed in the slave trade, but as early as 1565 English privateers had bought captured Africans, and Shakespeare may well have known some of them or other people of African heritage. Contemporary conceptions of race and racism, influenced by the history of racial slavery and 18th-century pseudo-science, are often based on hard and fast racial categories that were only incipient in Shakespeare's England. While Iago's and Brabantio's remarks in Act 1 exude what is today accepted as racism, the Duke's pronouncement that Othello is 'far more fair than black' and Montano's claim that 'the man commands / Like a full soldier' (2.1.36-37) indicate the high esteem others have for him. Nevertheless, references to Othello as black and a Moor, as well as his lack of understanding of Venetian customs, establish his liminal position in Venetian society.

16th-century costume guide

A wealthy Moor, 1598: In his guide to global fashions, Cesare Vecellio shows the fluid meaning of the word 'Moor' at the time Shakespeare was writing.

In Shakespeare's time Othello was performed by Richard Burbage, a white actor who wore black make-up and a wig of black lamb's wool. (Burbage's powerful cross-racial performance should not be confused with the caricatured blackface used in 19th-century minstrel shows.) Still, by the early 19th century, a truly black Othello was no longer tenable in England and America. The English actor Edmund Kean chose instead to appear as a North African in light brown make-up, suggesting an African from the Mediterranean rim rather than a sub-Saharan. With the exception of Ira Aldridge, a black actor who portrayed Othello throughout northern Europe in the 19th century, the role was taken by white actors in various shades of make-up until the African-American actor Paul Robeson undertook the role in London (1930) and New York (1943). Since then, black actors have usually impersonated Shakespeare's Moor.

Portrait of Richard Burbage

17th-century portrait of the actor, Richard Burbage, probably the first man to play Othello. He played the part wearing black make-up and a wig made of black lamb's wool.

Usage terms © By Permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Paul Robeson as Othello and Uta Hagen as Desdemona in New York, 1943-44

When Paul Robeson played Othello in New York in 1943, it ran for 296 performances - still the longest Shakespearean run in Broadway history.

Usage terms © Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Feminist reading: 'a maiden never bold'

Feminist critics highlight the ways Shakespeare portrays gender roles. In Act 1, Scene 3, Brabantio describes his daughter Desdemona as 'a maiden never bold', yet in choosing a foreigner she has violated the Venetian norm of arranged endogamous marriages (the practice of marrying within a local community or ethnic group) and rejected her father's authority. Still, she honours the patriarchal dictum that, once married, the wife owes her husband the same respect and duty she had shown her father. Emilia, too, defers to her husband Iago's wishes. Even after she realises the full extent of his villainy, she admits, ''Tis proper I obey him, but not now' (5.2.194). At the same time, romances, poems and plays often countered patriarchal authority in favour of romantic love. Just as the Duke overrules Brabantio's demands in Act 1, Scene 3, in fictional narratives the blocking father figure cannot prevail and young lovers marry. If Othello ended after Act 1, it would be, as many commentators have observed, a romantic comedy.

Alas, Desdemona and Othello's love is no match for Iago's plots and the green-eyed monster jealousy. Infidelity was the ultimate marital crime in early modern England. The prospect of illegitimate children subverted the bedrock of the era's social and economic system, the inheritance of property from father to son. In a speech that is often described as 'proto-feminist', Emilia argues that a wife's infidelity is a response to the husband's behaviour:

Say they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant of former having in despite -
. . .
Yet have we some revenge. (4.4.82-88)

Desdemona rejects this reasoning, promising 'Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend' (4.4.100). As she nears death in the play's final moments, she exonerates Othello by claiming no one has murdered her except herself.

From the play's earliest performances, audiences responded sympathetically to Desdemona's plight. After a 1610 production at Oxford, Henry Jackson recalled that Desdemona 'entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance'. That changed in the late 20th century, however, when feminist critics underscored Desdemona's initial independence and Emilia's eventual strength, and outlined the ways both women - as well as the courtesan Bianca - were constrained by the male characters' patriarchal suppositions. From a feminist perspective, early modern England's preoccupation with cuckoldry demonstrates a basic male insecurity about women's sexuality.

Broadside ballad on cuckolds

This 17th-century ballad, 'Cuckolds Haven', shows the early modern obsession with cuckolds - men who were depicted with animal horns as a sign that their wives had been unfaithful.

Marxist reading: ''Tis the curse of service'

Marxist critics are concerned with the economic and psychological impact of early modern England's hierarchical social system. In 1604 James I took Shakespeare's acting company under his patronage, making Shakespeare a 'servant' of the king. Indeed, service to someone in a higher position was expected from the lowest kitchen maid to the lords and ladies of the king's court. The pecking order in Othello is clear. The Duke and aristocratic members of the Venetian Senate give orders to Othello, who in turn commands his Lieutenant Cassio. Ensign Iago is subordinate to both. All three ostensibly serve out of loyalty to the state and for the status their military position brings, but they can be dismissed at the pleasure of their superiors. Iago resents Cassio, a man with 'a daily beauty in his life' (5.1.19), hates being tied to Othello's service and yearns for preferment.

The different gradations of status embedded in the text are often represented in military terms, with Iago presented as a rough-speaking non-commissioned officer, resentful of Cassio's rank and courtly manners. But the play's exploration of rank and class go beyond the military. Iago's repeated advice, 'Put money in thy purse', suggests that a new economic model has replaced the feudal obligations of service, which had been based on a bond of loyalty and duty between servant and master. As a 'servant' of the king, Shakespeare - who applied for a coat of arms to be named a 'gentleman' but was also an entrepreneur who loaned money and invested in land and rents - was implicated in both models.

Photograph of Hugh Quarshie and Lucian Msamati in Othello, 2015

In the RSC's 2015 production of Othello, the lead role was played by Hugh Quarshie and Iago was played by Lucian Msamati.

'O bloody period!'

Shakespeare wove the contradictory discourses of his age into Othello's tangled web, whether it be the conflict between women's self-rule and patriarchal marriage, western society's fascination with and fear of the Islamic or African other, or the resentment caused by shifting economic parameters. 400 years later the discourses have changed, but as contemporary appropriations of Othello remind us, the issues have only intensified.

Footnotes

[1] James VI of Scotland, 'Lepanto', in The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. by James Craigie (Edinburgh: William Blackwood for the Scottish Text Society, 3rd series, no. XXII, 1955), p. 202.

[2] Ian Smith, 'Othello's Black Handkerchief', in Othello: The State of Play, ed. by Lena Cowan Orlin (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 95-120 (p. 103).

[3] Michael Neill, 'Introduction', Othello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 125.

[4] See Neill, p. 9.

[5] See Neill, p. 161.

Written byVirginia Mason Vaughan

Virginia Mason Vaughan is Research Professor and Professor Emerita of English at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts where she taught for thirty-eight years. She is the author of Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and The Tempest for Manchester University Press's 'Shakespeare in Performance' series (2011). With Alden T. Vaughan she also co-authored Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Shakespeare in America (Oxford Shakespeare Topics, 2012) and co-edited The Tempest for the Third Arden Series (1999; rev. ed. 2011). She is also a co-editor of Women Making Shakespeare (with Gordon McMullan and Lena Cowen Orlin [Arden Shakespeare, 2014]). Her textual edition of Antony and Cleopatra for the Norton Shakespeare 3 was published this year, as was the monograph, Antony and Cleopatra: Language and Writing, for Arden Shakespeare.

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Critical approaches to Othello | The British Library

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There have been numerous interpretations of Othello over the last 400 years. Virginia Mason Vaughan discusses four recent critical approaches: feminist, new historicist, marxist and post-colonial.

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Around 10am, as I was settling into my classroom and joking with my students, a security guard showed up at the door and asked, “Are you Professor Luzzi?” The smile disappeared from my face, as I sensed something had gone horribly wrong; that intuition was confirmed when I saw a dean and vice president of the college come tearing up the stairs to fetch me and deliver the news: my wife, Katherine, had had a terrible car accident. I raced to the hospital, but it was too late: Katherine died that morning. She was 8 1/2 months pregnant. Forty-five minutes before her death, our daughter Isabel was miraculously delivered by emergency cesarian. I had left the house at 8:30am; by noon, I was both a widower and a father.

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In my talk, I hope to change the way people feel about literature. My aim is to show that literature is not just an elitist collection of “classics, something you are “supposed” to read or have to study in school, but which are difficult, remote, and otherwise disconnected from everyday life. Rather, I will propose that audience members can and should make literature a part of their everyday. I will go ever further and say that, when you are facing extraordinary difficulties and challenges, literature can save your life. I will base my talk on a personal experience. On November 29, 2007, I left my home in upstate New York at 8:30am to teach a class at Bard College, where I am a professor. Around 10am, as I was settling into my classroom and joking with my students, a security guard showed up at the door and asked, “Are you Professor Luzzi?” The smile disappeared from my face, as I sensed something had gone horribly wrong; that intuition was confirmed when I saw a dean and vice president of the college come tearing up the stairs to fetch me and deliver the news: my wife, Katherine, had had a terrible car accident. I raced to the hospital, but it was too late: Katherine died that morning. She was 8 1/2 months pregnant. Forty-five minutes before her death, our daughter Isabel was miraculously delivered by emergency cesarian. I had left the house at 8:30am; by noon, I was both a widower and a father. At noon, I had also entered what the poet Dante called “the dark wood,” that universal space of suffering that unfortunately all of us, at one point in our lives, must enter. For my TEDx Albany talk, I would like to speak of how literature in general, and Dante’s poetry in particular, helped save my life during the years of grief and mourning that followed Katherine’s death.

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Joseph Luzzi: How Literature Can Change Your Life

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In my talk, I hope to change the way people feel about literature. My aim is to show that literature is not just an elitist collection of "classics, something you are "supposed" to read or have to study in school, but which are difficult, remote, and otherwise disconnected from everyday life.

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Manic moments of jealousy in literature 

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Manic moments of jealousy in literature 

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“When we feel jealous, we tell ourselves a story. We tell ourselves a story about other people’s lives,” says Parul Sehgal

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"When we feel jealous, we tell ourselves a story. We tell ourselves a story about other people's lives," says Parul Sehgal Parul Sehgal: An ode to envy, an editor for The New York Times Book Review, in her TED Talk, a poetic meditation on an oft-resented emotion. "These stories make us feel terrible because they are designed to make us feel terrible. As the teller of the tale and the audience, we know just what details to include to dig that knife in. Jealousy makes us all amateur novelists."

Indeed, jealousy turns us all into the weavers of emotionally grim tales. But as a life-long scholar of both jealousy and literature, I'd have to agree with Sehgal that the most jealous characters are often the most interesting. Here are my 9 most memorable moments in literature where characters act mad in the name of jealousy:

1. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin

"It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when - in this moment of deprivation - the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage - the insensate agonizing need to possess exclusively."

Not long after this passage comes the famous scene, which Sehgal mentions in her talk, in which Swann sits at home after having just left his Odette. Suddenly, for no real reason, it occurs to him that maybe she's gone to meet someone else. He leaves his house, gets in a cab, and stands outside her house. On a street full of dark houses hers is the only one with light coming from it, "between the slats of its shutters, closed like a wine-press over its mysterious golden juice." He tiptoes up to the window to see who it is - he is tortured and hell-bent on finding the truth. And he sees ... two old men. It's the wrong house.
2. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton
"No account whatever had been taken of her relation to her treasures, of the passion with which she had waited for them, worked for them, picked them over, made them worthy of each other and the house, watched them, loved them, lived with them. ... Nothing so perverse could have been expected to happen as that the heir to the loveliest thing in England should be inspired to hand it over to a girl so exceptionally tainted."

The Spoils of Poynton is a novel famously about chairs and lamps, and indeed the thrust of the plot is premised on possession of all kinds. Mrs. Gereth, the owner of the estate of Poynton, is deeply indignant that another woman - especially her son's garish and unworthy fiancé - should come into possession of her estate and all the many fineries in it. Her jealousy is the impetus for her to goad Fleda Vetch, the protagonist, into trying to woo her son away from his fiancé.

3. Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms

In Casares' novella, an unnamed narrator finds himself on an island, where he falls in love with a woman he's never met whose name is Faustine. He's obsessed with her, but she won't talk to him. Not for a lack of trying; the narrator discovers later that the island is an experiment by a scientist named Morel, who had invented a photography machine to capture his friends frozen into the same motions over and over again for eternity. Driven wild by the possibility that Faustine might be dallying with Morel, the narrator decides to hijack the machine to (appear to) be with Faustine forever by inserting himself into the permanent image of Faustine and the other captives on the island. In the closing pages of the novella, he reflects:

"I am obsessed by the hope of removing Morel's image from the eternal week. I know that it is impossible, and yet as I write these lines I feel the same intense desire, and the same torment. The images' dependence upon each other (especially that of Morel and Faustine) used to annoy me. Now it does not: because I know that, since I have entered that world, Faustine's image cannot be eliminated without mine disappearing too."
4. George Saunders, Tenth of December: Stories
One of my favorite renderings of sexual jealousy - or lack thereof - is in Saunders' short story "Escape from Spiderhead." The narrator, Jeff, is a prisoner who gets doped (and duped) into falling in love with two different women, with whom he has sex and professes to love equally. When he realizes he is part of the same triangle with another man, and each of the two women has had sex with the two of them (and yet another man), he is probed by the experimenters.

"Well, I feel a little jerked around," I said.
"Do you feel jerked around because you still have feelings of love for one of the girls?" he said. "That would need to be noted. Anger? Possessiveness? Residual sexual longing?"
"No," I said.
"You honestly don't feel miffed that a girl for whom you felt love was then funked by two other guys, and, not only that, she then felt exactly the same quality/quantity of love for those guys as she had felt for you, or, in the case of Rachel, was about to feel for you, at the time that she funked Rogan? ... Think deeply on this."
I thought deeply on it.
"Nothing," I said.

Saunders so wonderfully renders the dynamics of love and jealousy as chemical applications; once they are removed, the subject of the experiment no longer experiences sexual jealousy the way any normal person might if they found out the object of their professed love had just slept with someone else within hours.
5. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
In the latter half of the novel, Humbert Humbert's devastation at having been robbed of Lolita, the young fire of his loins, leads him on a interstate chase and ultimately to an incredibly awkward shoot-out with Dr. Quilty. In the epic dual between them, Humbert has Quilty read his death sentence, which he has written in verse, aloud:

"because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die"
6. Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
In a moment that echoes across pages and centuries, the narrator sits in her home and broods over the loss of her most recent lover, wondering where he is and who he's with. She has to know the truth of what he's doing, even if it means subjecting herself to the torture of her jealousy. One night she drives in the rain through the town where this former lover lives. She parks by his house and sees a figure that doesn't seem like his in the window. Unable to see clearly through the darkness and rain, she goes up to the balcony. In a later scene, she drives slowly around town inching toward white cars she thinks are his until she realizes the license plate is different.

"If I couldn't be with him and he wouldn't talk to me, I at least wanted to know where he was. Sometimes I found him, though more often I did not. Even if I did not, I still preferred looking for him to sitting at home."
7. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
One of my favorite moments of jealousy in literature, simple and straight to the heart, is the moment in Little Women in which Amy, the youngest March sister, in a jealous rage that she has to stay home while her two eldest sisters go to the theater, burns her sister Jo's manuscript while she's out. What's most chilling, though, is Jo's reaction when she realizes her sister isn't kidding:

"'What! My little book I was so fond of, and worked over, and meant to finish before Father got home? Have you really burned it?' said Jo, turning very pale, while her eyes kindled and her hands clutched Amy nervously."

Like a punch to the gut.
8. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In the early days of their marriage, Terez is quietly driven mad by Tomas' infidelity:

"Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden she would be saddled with until not long before his death."

It is this obsession with Tomas' alternate life that leads Terez to seek out a friendship with Sabina, Tomas' lover. Her jealousy and her desire to see Tomas in his life with Sabina, indeed to even become Sabina in their alternate reality together, lead her to the novel's unforgettable scene in which she photographs Sabina naked with just her grandfather's hard black bowler hat.
9. Shakespeare, Othello
The handkerchief of mischief in Othello has become a symbol of the potential damage from one simple turn of jealousy. Iago, hell-bent on destroying Othello, convinces him (on some pretty shaky evidence) that his wife, Desdemona, is sleeping with Cassio, one of Othello's officers. Iago claims that Cassio often murmurs in his sleep about his love for Desdemona and tries to sleep-kiss Iago. Just the thought of Cassio wanting to kiss his wife is enough to flip Othello:

"Damn her, lewd minx! O, damn her!
Come, go with me apart; I will withdraw,
To furnish me with some swift means of death
For the fair devil."

Of course, these are just my favorite moments of jealousy captured on the page. What are yours? Please share in the comments.

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9 memorable, manic moments of jealousy in literature

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"When we feel jealous, we tell ourselves a story. We tell ourselves a story about other people's lives," says Parul Sehgal Parul Sehgal: An ode to envy, an editor for The New York Times Book Review, in her TED Talk, a poetic meditation on an oft-resented emotion.