The figure of Desdemona in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations

This chapter explores ways in which William Shakespeare’s heroine, Desdemona, is depicted in the illustrations contained in various editions of Shakespeare’s works. Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare stands as a landmark as it opened the way to that great effort of emendation and modernisation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare’s complete works, continued by Lewis Theobold, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Geo Steevens, Thomas Hanmer, Boydell and Elizabeth Inchbald. Rowe, then, the creator of such female characters as Calista, who is made to commit suicide as a ‘penitence’ for her adultery, unsurprisingly fails to sympathise with Desdemona and remains shocked that Shakespeare could have imagined such impropriety. Shakespeare’s stage directions as usual are simple, Othello, with a light enters with Desdemona asleep’. Desdemona goes on to add the important point that: ‘Shakespeare is one of the very few dramatists who seems to have observed that women have more moral courage than men.’