ABSTRACT
Recent computer-based, rare-word studies of the Sonnets suggest that Shakespeare was either writing or revising at least some sonnets during the first decade of the 1600s, the same time that he was writing his major tragedies, among them Othello, though we also know that at least two of the sonnets (138 and 144) were written as early as 1599 (and perhaps much earlier in the 1590s), since that year versions of these two poems were published in The Passionate Pilgrim. 3 In any case, it seems quite possible that the Sonnets were on Shakespeare's mind when he wrote Othello, given the many thematic similarities between the two works: the unstable balance between love, work, and self-esteem; the insecurities caused by differences in race, age, class, culture, and gender; the predominance of black and white imagery in both the sonnet sequence and the play, and the relation of such imagery to racism depicted in these works—and embedded in the English language; the tension of same-sex friendship against heterosexual love and the link between homosociality, homoeroticism, and misogyny; the dialectic of idealized love and degraded sexuality; the pain of unfulfilled desire and the humiliation of sexual jealousy; and the gradual silencing (in the case of Othello) or the complete elision (in the case of the Sonnets) of women's voices, to name just a few. 4 In fact, Othello seems to offer a kind of photographic negative of the Sonnets' triangulated relationship between the poet, the fair friend, and the dark lady. In the play, the older protagonist rather than the lady is black, the woman is “right fair” and virtuous, and the male friend is a demi-devil, while Cassio, another male friend, is at best an innocent victim and at worst a gull. 5
