ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the differences between quarto and folio versions of Othello are at least as important for interpretation as the differences between the two early versions of King Lear. There are various possible explanations why the two-text Othello has taken so long to establish itself while the two-text King Lear has flourished. Much critical attention, especially in the last decade, has been devoted to the question of Othello's color. As Lara Bovilsky has pointed out in an important chapter titled "Desdemona's Blackness", "discourses of race and gender are not fully separable in the early modern period and indeed possess numerous identical features", making "traffic between gender and race harder to detect". Modern editors have typically resisted the blackening of Desdemona and have, through their annotations, created a more distinct color line between Desdemona's whiteness and Othello's blackness than exists in either early version of the play.
