In the more than 400 years since it was first performed in 1604, Shakespeare’s Othello has been translated into French over thirteen times and into German over thirty, as well as into dozens of other languages. This Shakespeare success story seems part of a familiar narrative of English language and literature’s rise to global dominance, beginning in the colonial period and reaching new heights in an Anglo-centric world literary market. Yet a closer look at Othello’s translation history also recalls the historic limits of English’s cultural power. The tragedy of the ‘jealous Moor’ was itself, after all, based on an existing Italian text by Giovanni Batistia Giraldi Cinthio, Un Capitano Moro (1565). And while Shakespeare’s new title would endure through future translations, many aspects of his narrative would not. In fact, by the time Othello arrived in Istanbul and Cairo in the late nineteenth century, some aspects of the play were almost unrecognisable. Seemingly the first Shakespeare play translated into both languages, Othello was rewritten as the tragedy not of a Moorish but of an Arab hero –the first of several ways in which the English text was recast to serve new political agendas, religious norms and aesthetic tastes. Written in a period during which the relationship between the Empire and its Arab provinces was reconfigured, partly in response to British and French colonial activity, the new Othellos provide a case study through which to examine the intercon-nected imperial, racial and literary hierarchies of the period, and the ways in which literary translations worked to reproduce or to complicate them.

The Ottoman Turkish translation, titled Otâlo, was published in Istanbul in 1876. This was the beginning of the short-lived First Constitutional Era following the dethroning of Sultan Abdülaziz, and the run-up to the 1877–8 Russo-Ottoman War. The deposing of the sultan had followed a period of power struggles between the powerful bureaucracy of the Sublime Porte and the royal court; the former ruler was replaced by his nephew Murad V, who was succeeded almost immediately by his brother, Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). The latter had promised to promulgate the constitution proposed by the group of reformists known as the Young Ottomans, but in fact, the first parliament was discontinued by late 1877, after less than a year.