Othello and his Islands: Papers from the First Three Othello’s Island Conferences*

In his 1603 poem Lepanto, James I of England and VI of Scotland explains that when the Venetians learned that the Ottoman Turks had designs on the island of Cyprus,

It was agreed, that into March, Or Aprill euery yeare, The army should on Easterne Seas, Conuene from farre and neare.

(sig. B2v)

In March or April every year since 2013 there has been another kind of convening on Cyprus, that of ‘Othello’s Island’, an annual conference on mediaeval and Renaissance art, literature, social and cultural history (http://www.othellosisland.org/), held in 2013 and 2014 at the Cornaro Institute in Larnaca and in 2015 and 2016 at the Centre for Visual Arts Research in Nicosia and inspired and guided by Dr Michael Paraskos. This special issue brings together selected essays from these first three years of the conference, and I have not attempted to erase in the editing process the sense of place with which many of them are charged: it is part of the point.

It is also notable that although almost all the essays speak specifically of Cyprus, they do not speak of the same Cyprus, not only because they reflect two different conference venues but more fundamentally because Cyprus is rarely the same as itself. In the opening essay, Roger Christofides points out that ‘from the perspective of the 21^st century, both Othello the dramatis persona and Cyprus the geocultural entity are products of what the American administration of George W. Bush called the “Greater Middle East”.’. As I note in my own essay, Nestore Martinengo cites Pliny as saying that Cyprus was once joined to Syria. For the Renaissance, all islands were potentially mobile: there are several stories of floating islands, including one supposedly located in a lake at the top of Snowdon. Cyprus, however, moves more than most. The video in the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia about the Swedish archaeological expedition to the island in 1927 says that its leader Einar Gjerstad ‘put Cyprus in the right place—he saw that it belongs to the East, but mainly to the West’, but as Antonis Hadjikyriacou’s essay explores, by no means everyone would agree that that is the right place. At a moment when talks about potential reunification of the island are looking hopeful, it feels particularly appropriate to consider some of the places where Cyprus has been. As early as 1614 Edward Brerewood, professor of astronomy at Gresham College, noted in his Enquiries touching the diuersity of languages, and religions through the cheife parts of the world, noted that ‘in Cyprus, diuers other languages are spoken, beside the Greeke’ (sig. C1r); in these essays, many languages are spoken about Cyprus.

At the outset of his essay, Christofides asks ‘Is Othello a Cypriot play?’. For Christofides, the question of particular interest is ‘what does it mean to connect an island fatally divided by issues of identity with a literary figure fatally divided in an analogous way?’, and this is what he devotes the bulk of his essay to exploring; however, he also notes the wider point that Othello is one of the jewels of an early modern literary canon which he identifies as ‘a corpus indebted to Mediterranean history and mythology’, and registers an interest in the ways in which this body of literature draws on popular understandings of Cyprus. It is that wider question which the essays in this special issue collectively take up, even though the ways in which they do so are different in each case. Together, they allow us to grasp some crucial points about the past and present of the Cyprus in which Shakespeare set four acts of Othello (and in which other dramatists of the period also set scenes or whole plays, as touched on in my own essay), to understand some of the ways in which the inhabitants of early modern England could have learned about Cyprus and why they would have understood it to matter, and thus to see what is at stake in the choice of Cyprus as Othello’s island.

The second essay, Lieke...