Othello (character) of "The Three Apples", one of the stories narrated in the "One Thousand and One Nights" ("Arabian Nights"). Desdemona is the only named character in Cinthio's tale, his other characters being identified as the Moor, the squadron leader, the ensign, and the ensign's wife. While Shakespeare closely followed Cinthio's tale in composing "Othello", he departed from it in some details, particularly in the tale's depiction of Desdemona's death. In Cinthio, the Moor commissions his ensign to bludgeon Desdemona to death with a sand-filled stocking. In gruesome detail, Cinthio follows each blow, and, when the lady is dead, the Moor and
Othello in at least six productions. His Othello was called by Harold Hobson of the London Sunday Times "the best Othello of our time," continuing: "...nobler than Tearle, more martial than Gielgud, more poetic than Valk. From his first entry, slender and magnificently tall, framed in a high Byzantine arch, clad in white samite, mystic, wonderful, a figure of Arabian romance and grace, to his last plunging of the knife into his stomach, Mr Marshall rode without faltering the play's enormous rhetoric, and at the end the house rose to him." Marshall also played Othello in a jazz musical version, "Catch