When he adapted
Cinthio's tale about a jealous Moor, Shakespeare invented a few more reasons for the ensign to hate the lieutenant: Cassio has won the post that Iago believes to be rightly his; Cassio may even have cuckolded Iago, Iago thinks.
Giraldi
Cinthio. The story originally had nothing to do with England and presented Scotland in a positive light.
Once more, Shakespeare, who rarely devised his own plots or stories, went to a source, but this time in the original, "Un Capitano Moro," in Hecatommithi or Gli Ecatommiti (1565), a collection of stories by
Cinthio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi), so that Shakespeare turns this Italian prose fiction into English drama.
It came to Shakespeare through Whetstone's play Promos and Cassandra (1578) from the Italian narrative tradition: a novella by Giraldi
Cinthio was published in 1565, and later he reworked it himself into a drama.
Part 1, "Appropriations of Poetry and Prose," includes: Harry Berger, Jr., "Sprezzatura and Embarrassment in The Merchant of Venice" (21-38); John Roe, "A Niggle of Doubt: Courtliness and Chastity in Shakespeare and Castiglione" (39-56); Thomas Kullman, "Dramatic Appropriations of Italian Courtliness" (57-72); Maria Del Sapio Garbero, "Disowning the Bond: Coriolanus's Forgetful Humanism" (73-92); Melissa Walter, "Matteo Bandello's Social Authorship and Paulina as Patroness in The Winter's Tale" (93-106); Karen Zych Galbraith, "Tracing a Villain: Typological Intertexuality in the Works of Pinter, Webster,
Cinthio, and Shakespeare" (107-22).
A frequent "modern" argument (first made in sixteenth-century Italy by Geraldo
Cinthio in the context of epic poetry) adopted by defenders of contemporary Spanish theatrical practice was that the Aristotle of the Poetics did not live to see the formal innovations of early modern literary expression and thus should not be used to assess the validity of new formal literary structures.
English and literature scholars from the US and UK examine the boundary between the real and the fictional, especially with Desdemona; comparison to A Yorkshire Tragedy and
Cinthio Giraldi's Hecatommithi; the use of black speech; the role of the handkerchief in constructing an idea of blackness and race; Othello's subjectivity in the context of the Ottoman Empire; the power of speech in the play to create racial and gendered identities; war and martial aspects; consummation and Othello and Desdemona's marriage; Othello's language; and the scene between Emilia and Desdemona in Act 4.
(2) Such is not the case, however, of the Novelas ejemplares-, their title boldly proclaims the influence of the Italian novelle, written first by Giovanni Boccaccio and followed by Matteo Bandello and Giovanni Battista Giraldi (
Cinthio), among numerous others, as the genre became increasingly popular from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.
Cinthio's Hecatommithi, both long recognized as sources for the