6. Othello: Courtly Love and Chivalric Justice, in Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance, 2nd ed

Chapter 6: Othello: Courtly Love and Chivalric Justice explains the sudden onset of Othello’s jealousy in terms of the known propensities of intermediaries in courtly love to betray their function and thereby alter perceptions of relationships among lady, lover, and their go-between. It interprets the dichotomies between Venice and the Levant on the contested ground of Cyprus as contrasting worldviews represented by Othello as a chivalric knight and Iago as a picaresque adventurer, or picaro, with associated dichotomies of the idealistic and the materialistic, the Christian and the Turkish or Jewish