Biography

James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University, has long focused in his writing on theater’s cultural impact. His books include Shakespeare and the Jews; Oberammergau; 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which won the Baillie Gifford prize; Contested Will; 1606: The Year of Lear; Shakespeare in a Divided America; and most recently The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. He has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded Guggenheim, Cullman, NEH, American Academy in Berlin, and American Academy in Rome fellowships.

Project Summary

Three years ago, Yale University Press commissioned a short biography of Othello for its ‘Black Lives’ series. Much has changed in the political and cultural landscape since then, including a backlash against DEI, so that a book about this fictional character’s life over the past three centuries or so--a life bound up with issues of race, slavery, and a struggle for equality--has taken on greater urgency. Othello came into existence in Italy in 1565, with the publication of Giovanni Battista Giraldi’s Hecatommithi, the main source of Shakespeare’s tragedy.  He first appeared as a dramatic character at London’s Globe Theatre around 1604, played by the star actor, Richard Burbage, in blackface.  Othello would not be performed by a Black actor until the nineteenth century, when Ira Aldridge toured Europe and Britain in the role (though never got to play Othello in America, his birthplace). Much of the book’s focus is on Othello’s American life, from the first enslaved person there of that name (executed in New York in 1741), to the slaving ships sailing out of Rhode Island christened Othello (including one that in 1765 witnessed a slave revolt), to his importance to activists like Frederick Douglass, to the subsequent and groundbreaking performances of leading Black actors, including Paul Robeson and Denzel Washington. Othello’s fraught life continues to illuminate divisions that are a legacy of the Renaissance world into which he was born.