‘Are we turned Turks?’: The Cyprus Problem in Othello, Soliman and Perseda, and Selimus

The connection between Shakespeare’s Othello and the island runs deep, and not just because four of the five acts are set in Cyprus. This paper asks what the nature of that connection is. It considers whether and in what sense Othello might be called a Cypriot play, whether the eponymous protagonist can reasonably be termed a Cypriot, and what it might mean to connect an island fatally divided by issues of identity with a literary figure fatally divided in an analogous way. Focusing on Shakespeare’s play as well as antecedents by Thomas Kyd and Robert Greene, the paper sketches out a preliminary and potentially productive relationship between the troubled island of Aphrodite and early modern literature, a corpus indebted to Mediterranean history and mythology. The ways in which this body of literature draws on popular understandings of Cyprus enable a readerly focus on the island ’s modern strife as much as its ancient past, and it is this radical refocusing that this paper initiates.