This second edition of Othello has a new, illustrated introduction by leading American scholar Ayanna Thompson, which addresses such key issues as race, religion and gender, as well as looking at ways in which the play has been adapted in more recent times. Othello is one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies—written in the same five-year period as Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. The new introduction attends to the play’s different meanings throughout history, while articulating the historical context in which Othello was created, paying particular attention to Shakespeare’s source materials and the evidence about early modern constructions of racial and religious difference. It also explores the life of the play in different historical moments, demonstrating how meanings and performances develop, accrue, and metamorphose over time. The volume provides a rich and current resource, making this best-selling play edition ideal for today's students at advanced school and undergraduate level. “The new introduction for the revised edition of Othello by Ayanna Thompson is a welcome reconsideration of the 1997 original Arden3 edition … Thompson's introduction recognizes and incorporates the vast critical world of early modern race studies that has developed in the past twenty years … [It] is wide-ranging yet absolutely clear, providing a new frame for the play that students and academics alike will find useful for years to come … The superb introduction … opens new avenues of research and frames the play in ways that bring it up to date with the latest scholarship.” ― Sixteenth Century Journal A major new edition of Shakespeare's powerful tragedy with a new introduction bringing it up-to-date for today's students. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English dramatist, poet, and actor, generally regarded as the greatest playwright of all time. Ayanna Thompson is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, USA. She is the author of Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (The Arden Shakespeare, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach (The Arden Shakespeare, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (2011) and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (2008). Professor Richard Proudfoot served as Senior General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare for 35 years, until his retirement from King's in 1999. In 2001 The Arden Shakespeare published Proudfoot's Shakespeare: Text, Stage and Canon a critical overview of the scholarly achievements made in the field of Shakespeare studies by the end of the twentieth century. ANN THOMPSON is Emeritus Professor in English at King' s College London UK. David Scott Kastan is the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University, USA.