Shakespeare and the “green-eyed monster” of jealousy

This chapter studies jealousy in Shakespeare’s play Othello, showing that knowledge of the true author’s life experiences with pathological jealousy will deepen our understanding and appreciation of this unsettling play. This chapter builds on the previous Oxfordian ¹ study of Othello by A. Bronson Feldman, the first psychoanalyst to take up Freud’s call that we re-examine Shakespeare’s works with a revised understanding of who wrote them. Freud (1990), who wrote to his friend Eduard Silberstein about having seen a performance of Othello in Vienna in 1873 when Freud was seventeen, cited Othello in his 1922 explanation that “projected jealousy” defends against guilt about one’s actual or fantasized infidelity by attributing unfaithfulness to one’s partner. In Hamlet (1603), Gertrude anticipates Freud’s formulation when she says: “So full of artless jealousy is guilt” (IV, v, 21).