Shakespeare's Othello and Antony and Cleopatra and the dramatic transformation of their main sources Gli Hecatommithi by Batista Giraldi Cinthio and Plutarch´s The Life of Marcus Antonius

Cinthio and Plutarch¿s The Life of Marcus AntoniusIn her essay The Common Liar1, Janet Adelman deals with Shakespeare's influences while composing Antony and Cleopatra2. She focuses on the history of the two title characters and their long tradition, which was and still is very popular. This is an obvious derivation of this play, but due to the amount of similarities between many of Shakespeare's works and other texts it is also extremely obvious, that the dramatist cited various kinds of literature in search of material. Therefore it is generally agreed between commentators of the plays I will deal with here, that the playwright used Plutarch's The Live of Marcus Antonius3 as the main source for Antony and Cleopatra, just as he consulted Batista Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi4 before composing Othello5.Consequently I will focus on these two immediate sources as the material Shakespeare consulted while composing the plays, rather than on the history and tradition of their plots and characters like Janet Adelman does. Unlike Adelman's interpretation of sources already mentioned above, the traditional understanding I am going to follow highlights the difficulty of stating, whether Shakespeare took parts of the supposed sources on purpose, or if the analogies are only accidental. But due to the vast similarities between Cinthio's tale and Othello, and Plutarch¿s biography and Antony and Cleopatra, which I will Further primary text quotations all refer to The Norton Shakespeare; Act, scenes and lines are stated in brackets following the quotations come to later, one can take for granted, that the dramatist not only read these stories, but furthermore turned to them with the intention of utilising them in his plays.[...]1 Adelman, Janet. The Common Liar: Tradition as a Source in Antony and Cleopatra. The Common Liar. 53-101.2 Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2619-2708. Further primary text quotations all refer to The Norton Shakespeare; Acts, scenes and lines are stated in brackets following the quotations3 Plutarch. The Live of Marcus Antonius Shakespeare's Plutarch: The Lives of Julius Caesar, Brutus, Marcus Antonius and Coriolanus in the translation of Sir Thomas North. Ed. T.J.B. Spencer. 174-295. 4 Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. 239-252.5 Shakespeare, William. Othello. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2091-2174.