Cinthio's Hecatommithi was Shakespeare's major source not only for Othello but also for a play almost contemporaneous with the tragedy: Measure for Measure (1604). Listed among the comedies in the catalogue to the 1623 Folio, Measure for Measure has since been identified with a troubling subgenre variously called ‘problem plays’ and ‘tragicomedy’, largely because of the apparent discrepancy between its dark themes of commerce, sexuality and punishment, and its forced ‘happy’ ending in multiple but coerced marriages. It is helpful to think theoretically about this generic problem. Fredric Jameson has made a useful distinction between genre as ‘semantic’ – essentially, tonal – and ‘syntactic’ – essentially, structural. Applying Jameson's terms to Measure for Measure, it becomes clear that the difficulty is that his ‘semantic’ aspect of comic genre, the light-hearted or life-affirming ‘spirit of comedy’, is absent, while the ‘syntactic’ structure, the conventional ending with the multiple marriages often seen as constitutive of Shakespearian comedy, is present. Thus Measure for Measure is not a comedy in semantic terms – rather its mood is dark, tinged with death and sexual violence – but it is a comedy in syntactic ones – it ends with marriages.

That Shakespeare used Cinthio's story in this context as a structure for self-conscious generic experimentation is clear: Measure for Measure works as an attempt to push at the boundaries of comedy, tugging its semantic and syntactic content in different directions to profoundly unsettling effect. This chapter will argue that something similar is going on in Othello, a play written when Shakespeare had written a dozen comedies and a bare handful of tragedies. If Measure for Measure gives us the semantics of tragedy and the syntax of comedy, in Othello we see how it is the semantics of comedy and syntax of tragedy that seem to be pulling the play apart. That movement towards division and separation and the play's haunting doubleness, discussed as the hendiadys effect in Chapter 1, amplified in racial terms in Chapter 2, and conceptualized as the interplay between domestic and public in Chapter 3, is here echoed in generic terms. The elements of comedy in the play are various, and many need to be activated in terms of expectations raised by Shakespeare's other plays, those of his contemporaries, and some of the formal antecedents of Othello.