Shakespeare's Othello Was First Performed

The earliest surviving record of Othello comes not from a theatre poster but from a royal accountant’s ledger. The Accounts Book of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, notes that on 1 November 1604 — Hallowmas, or All Saints’ Day — the King’s Majesty’s players performed a play “called The Moor of Venice” in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The author is logged, charmingly, as “Shaxberd.”

The venue mattered. This was a command performance before King James I, whose patronage had transformed Shakespeare’s company into the King’s Men the year before. The play’s leading role almost certainly fell to the company’s star tragedian, Richard Burbage, while Desdemona would have been played by a boy, since women were barred from the English stage.

The first trace of Shakespeare’s tragedy is a single line in a courtier’s expense book.

The ledger that preserves this date survives at The National Archives in London, one of the rare original Revels books to escape destruction. It is the closest thing we have to a curtain-raiser for one of theatre’s most enduring tragedies of jealousy and ruin.