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This article studies jealousy in Shakespeare's Othello, showing that knowledge of the true author's life experiences with the extremes of pathological jealousy will deepen our understanding and appreciation of this unsettling play. This essay builds on the previous Oxfordian study of Othello by A. Bronson Feldman, the first psychoanalyst to take up Freud's call that we re-examine Shakespeare's works with a revised understanding of who wrote them. Freud cited Othello in his 1922 explanation that "projected jealousy" defends against guilt about one's actual or fantasized infidelity by attributing unfaithfulness to one's partner. In Hamlet, Shakespeare anticipates Freud's formulation when Gertrude says, "So full of artless jealousy is guilt" (4.5.21).
Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig in 1937 that he was "almost irritated" that Zweig still believed Shakspere of Stratford simply relied on his imagination to write the great plays. Freud explained, "I do not know what still attracts you to the man from Stratford. He seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim [to authorship of the canon], whereas Oxford has almost everything. It is quite inconceivable to me that Shakespeare should have got everything secondhand - Hamlet's neurosis, Lear's madness.. .Othello's jealousy, etc." (Freud, Zweig Letters, 140; see also Waugaman, 2017).
When Shakespeare scholars acknowledge Freud's Oxfordian opinions at all, they attack his motives, overlooking Freud's expectation that Shakespeare's life experiences would bear a significant relationship to his plays and poetry. Psychic determinism, one of Freud's core concepts, observes that all mental activity is meaningful, and is connected with past life experiences. Psychoanalysts who still support the traditional authorship theory seem to have a blind spot for the biographical dimension of Shakespeare's works.
Feldman published two articles on Othello, in 1952 and 1954. Only in the 1954 article did he raise the authorship question, by giving many details of Oxford's life, linking some of them - such as Oxford's belief that his wife was unfaithful to him and his Othello-like military ambitions as a young man - with the play. The present article is an extension of my previous chapter on betrayal in Shakespeare (Waugaman, 2013), since jealousy is based on a fear of being betrayed. As I noted in that earlier essay, "there was no lack of betrayal in the life of...