With its focus on gender, power, race, sexuality, and violence, Othello is an important site for new critical approaches to the study of Shakespeare's works. Both criticism and culture are represented in this collection of recent essays which provides readers with examples of feminist, new-historicist, cultural materialist, deconstructive, and post-colonial perspectives on Othello. With discussions of recent stage and screen productions, and analysis of the use of the play in such contemporary events as the O.J. Simpson murder trial, this compelling critical volume presents a wide variety of ways of understanding the continuing significance of Shakespeare's play both in his own time and in ours.

LENA COWEN ORLIN is Professor of English at Georgetown University, Washington DC, and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Acknowledgements
General Editors' Preface
Introduction; L.Cowen Orlin
'Let it be Hid': The Pornographic Aesthetic of Shakespeare's Othello; L.E.Boose
Cultural Materialism, Othello, and the Politics of Plausibility; A.Sinfield
Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello; M.D.Bristol
Impertinent Trifling: Desdemona's Handkerchief; H.Berger,Jr
Brothers of the State: Othello, Bureaucracy, and Epistemological Crisis; E.Hanson
Othello on Trial; E.C.Bartels
Othello's Identity, Postcolonial Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello; J.Singh
Raceing Othello: Re-Engendering White-Out; B.Hodgdon
Black and White, and Dread All Over: the Shakespeare Theatre's 'Photonegative' Othello and the Body of Desdemona; D.Albanese
Further Reading
Notes on Contributors
Index.