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Othello was hugely popular throughout the 17th and 18th century and is one of the few Shakespearean plays never altered during the Restoration period. However, over the 19th and 20th centuries various interpretations of the play emerged in response to changing notions of race and sexuality. In 1826, Ira Aldridge was the first African-American to play the role of Othello in London. He played the role many times on European stages. In 1938, Royal Shakespeare Company director Tyrone Guthrie consulted the Freudian psychologist Ernest Jones about the relationship between Iago and Othello. As a result Laurence Olivier’s Iago was portrayed as repressing his sexual attraction to the Moor. In 1985 Ben Kingsley and David Suchet’s depiction of Othello and Iago also stressed the latter’s unrequited homosexual longing. This was the last RSC production to cast a white actor in the role of Othello. In 1997 Jude Kelly and the Folger Library produced a version of Othello in which British actor Patrick Stewart played the title role as a white actor in a cast of 22 African-American performers. This production is referred to as the ‘photo negative’ production and certainly shone a fresh light on the notions of race and minority

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The play was first published by bookseller Thomas Walkley in quarto format in 1622, before it was included in the publication of the First Folio the following year by Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell. The differences between the two publications have caused much scholarly contention. The Folio version contains around 160 lines that are not in the Quarto, and it lacks about a dozen lines found in the original publication. The Quarto is likely to be a dictated version due to its peculiar punctuation and profanities, whereas the Folio is most likely from a licensed copy of the script that had been reviewed by the Master of the Revels, as it adheres to the 1606 ‘Act to Restrain Abuses of Players’; the profanities have been removed.

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The famous early modern actor Richard Burbage played Othello in the original production, and the first recorded performance of Iago was Joseph Taylor, a member of the King’s Men in 1616. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Othello was one of the first plays performed when the theatres were reopened. It was a new era. King Charles II proclaimed that women could legally perform and a December production of Othello that year at the Vere Street Theatre, starring Margaret Hughes as Desdemona, marks the first recorded performance of a woman treading the boards of the English stage.

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Most scholars believe that Othello, one of Shakespeare’s most popular and powerful tragedies was written between 1602 and 1604. According to the Master of the Revels’ records it was first performed on Hallowmas day (1 November) 1604 for King James I in the banqueting hall at Whitehall Palace. Unlike the majority of Shakespeare’s plays there is much evidence of Othello’s early performance history. Records show performances at the Globe, Blackfriars, Hampton Court and, most notably, at the wedding of King James’s daughter Elizabeth. Apart from the theatres closing between 1635 and 1660 due to Puritan rule, scholars have records of the play being performed every decade for 400 years.

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Othello is a tragedy written by the big dog of English theater himself: Billy Shakespeare. The play tells the story of a powerful general of the Venetian army, Othello, whose life and marriage are ruined by a conniving, deceitful, and envious soldier, Iago.
Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, written and performed in 1604 and first printed in 1622, is based on the Italian short story Un Capitano Moro by Cinthio

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first performed by the King’s Men at the court of King James the First

on November 1, 1604. Written during Shakespeare’s great tragic period, which also included the composition of Hamlet (1600), King Lear (1604–5), Macbeth (1606), and Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7), Othello is set against the backdrop of the wars between Venice and Turkey that raged in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Cyprus, which is the setting for most of the action, was a Venetian outpost attacked by the Turks in 1570 and conquered the following year. Shakespeare’s information on the Venetian-Turkish conflict probably derives from The History of the Turks by Richard Knolles, which was published in England in the autumn of 1603. The story of Othello is also derived from another source—an Italian prose tale written in 1565 by Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio (usually referred to as Cinthio). The original story contains the bare bones of Shakespeare’s plot: a Moorish general is deceived by his ensign into believing his wife is unfaithful. To Cinthio’s story Shakespeare added supporting characters such as the rich young dupe Roderigo and the outraged and grief-stricken Brabanzio, Desdemona's father. Shakespeare compressed the action into the space of a few days and set it against the backdrop of military conflict. And, most memorably, he turned the ensign, a minor villain, into the arch-villain lago.

The question of Othello’s exact race is open to some debate. The word Moor now refers to the Islamic Arabic inhabitants of North Africa who conquered Spain in the eighth century, but the term was used rather broadly in the period and was sometimes applied to Africans from other regions. George Abbott, for example, in his A Brief Description of the Whole World of 1599, made distinctions between “blackish Moors” and “black Negroes”; a 1600 translation of John Leo’s The History and Description of Africa distinguishes “white or tawny Moors” of the Mediterranean coast of Africa from the “Negroes or black Moors” of the south. Othello’s darkness or blackness is alluded to many times in the play, but Shakespeare and other Elizabethans frequently described brunette or darker than average Europeans as black. The opposition of black and white imagery that runs throughout Othello is certainly a marker of difference between Othello and his European peers, but the difference is never quite so racially specific as a modern reader might imagine it to be.

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Othello begins in the city of Venice, at night. Iago, an ensign in the Venetian army, is bitter about being passed over for lieutenant in favor of Cassio. Iago tells Roderigo that he serves Othello, the Moor who is the army's general, only in order to serve himself. Iago knows that Desdemona, the daughter of nobleman Brabantio, has run off to marry Othello. He also knows that Roderigo lusts after Desdemona, so Iago manipulates him into alerting Venice. Iago's duplicity arises even in the first scene.

Learning of his daughter's elopement, Brabantio panics, and calls for people to try and find Desdemona. Iago joins Othello, and tells him about Roderigo's betrayal of the news of his marriage to Brabantio. Cassio comes at last, as do Roderigo and Brabantio; Brabantio is very angry, swearing to the men assembled that Othello must have bewitched his daughter. Brabantio's grievance is denied, and Desdemona will indeed stay with Othello. However, Othello is called away to Cyprus, to defend it from an invasion of Turks.

Iago assures an upset Roderigo that the match between Othello and Desdemona will not last long, and at any time, Desdemona could come rushing to him. Iago decides to break up the couple, using Roderigo as his pawn.