ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an analysis of femicides, commencing with cases that did not proceed to court, the killers having suicided. Othello on Trial, the first play in Theatre in Education public engagement project dramatising high levels of violence against women, puts him on trial for murder. As for Othello, it has been rated not only as 'a case study' for tracing the course of late twentieth century critical thinking about Shakespeare that registers all the concerns of newly emergent readings of gender, power, sexuality, race and empire. It was 'a key text in the works that introduced poststructuralist theory' to the interpretation of early modern English literature, thus underlining even more directly the link with Smart's work. But casting Othello as a white defendant in a murder trial does more. It queries what his crime is in English law while showing how Smith's analysis sells short the significance of Othello's final speech.
