Othello remains one of Shakespeare's most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlight’s the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has. In twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in Othello the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him. The first play in the Seeing Shakespeare Series, Othello is illustrated by English contemporary artist Chris Ofili. Future titles in the series include A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Marcel Dzama and The Merchant of Venice with images by Jordan Wolfson.

In the board game 'Othello', players must turn double-sided counters to their advantage. This doubleness is shared by Shakespeare's play of 1604, marked from its outset by a dual and paradoxical title 'Othello, or the Moor of Venice'. This study teases out instances of doubleness, duplication and paradox to discuss the play's language and its themes. Chapters cover the issues of substitution, of racial polarity and its confusions, of the contested place of the domestic in the play, and the mixed generic signals this comedy-turned-tragedy gives out to its audiences. Throughout the emphasis is on the close readings of the play on the page and on stage, informed by the recent scholarship that has made Othello so pressing a play for the vexed cultural politics of the twenty-first century.

A major survey including new and celebrated works by Turner Prize–winning artist Chris Ofili. Set to accompany the first major museum show in the United States of contemporary British artist Chris Ofili, this richly illustrated volume surveys two decades of artworks that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration to yield hybrid juxtapositions of high and low culture. Best known for intricately constructed works featuring beadlike dots of paint, elephant dung, and images culled from popular media, Ofili’s unique lexicon combines African culture, Western art history, and hip-hop music, spanning a wide variety of sources which include the Bible, Zimbabwean cave paintings, Blaxploitation films, and William Blake’s poems. Animated by exotic characters, outlandish landscapes, and folkloric myths, Ofili’s most recent work resonates with references to the paintings of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin. This compelling new book offers a fresh perspective on the artist’s vital practice, which both celebrates and calls into question the power of images and their ability to address fundamental questions of representation.

Set in an enchanted forest, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the ideal subject for artist Marcel Dzama, whose work frequently references dreams, fairy tales, and mythical worlds. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s celebrated romantic comedy intertwines multiple narratives under the influence of transformation and witchcraft. The play is often staged with actors wearing animal masks, an aspect which appeals particularly to Dzama, whose work is characterized by the fusion of human and animal, fantasy and reality. The second title in David Zwirner Books’s Seeing Shakespeare series revisits the ultimate fairy tale through the eyes of a contemporary artist who feels a special affinity for its imagery.

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in the year approximately 1603, and based on the short story Un Capitano Moro ("A Moorish Captain") by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565. This tightly constructed work revolves around four central characters: Othello, a Moorish general in the Venetian army; his beloved wife, Desdemona; his loyal lieutenant, Cassio; and his trusted but unfaithful ensign, Iago. Because of its varied and current themes of racism, love, jealousy, betrayal, revenge and repentance, Othello is still often performed in professional and community theatre alike and has been the basis for numerous operatic, film, and literary adaptations.

Believed to have been written in 1603, Shakespeare's Othello is a tragedy that puts the playwright's prodigious creative gifts on full display. Based loosely on a Renaissance-era Italian tale, Othello follows the stormy relationship of the Moorish general Othello and his lovely wife Desdemona. Addressing timeless themes of love and betrayal, as well as surprisingly contemporary concepts such as race-based stereotypes, Othello is a satisfying read for modern-day fans of the Bard.