ABSTRACT
No one could buy Othello and read it during Shakespeare's lifetime. It was not printed until 1622, six years after the author's death, and this version (called a “quarto” because its paper had been folded in four to make the pages) was the first Shakespeare play to be newly published in over a decade, since the quarto of Troilus and Cressida in 1609. Theatregoers interested in Othello had to see the play in performance before 1622, and this was true of about half of Shakespeare's plays—at least eighteen had not been published by then.
