Introduction

Three of the four core articles in this issue of JEMCS focus on notions of sexual desire and their relation to variables of race, social rank, and geographical situation. Rebecca Olson's "'Too Gentle': Jealousy and Class in Othello" opens this line of inquiry by arguing that the theme of sexual jealousy in Shakespeare's tragedy deserves to be examined alongside a parallel concern with how social privilege functions in the play as a catalyst for erotic desires and anxieties. According to this logic, Desdemona exemplifies that group of Shakespeare's female characters who elicit the profoundest jealousy from their husbands and suitors (one might think also of Hermione in The Winter's Tale or Imogen in Cymbeline), a group distinguished by their status as the only children of powerful men. In this respect Othello stages the convergence of sexual and social misgivings about the display of aristocratic bodies-misgivings that grew increasingly pronounced in the seventeenth-century English cultural imaginary.