Othello it and reworked hints in creating the character of Othello. While supplying the source of the plot, the book offered nothing of the sense of place of Venice or Cyprus. For knowledge of this, Shakespeare may have used Gasparo Contarini's "The Commonwealth and Government of Venice", in Lewes Lewkenor's 1599 translation. The earliest mention of the play is found in a 1604 Revels Office account, which records that on "Hallamas Day, being the first of Nouembar ... the Kings Maiesties plaiers" performed "A Play in the Banketinghouse at Whit Hall Called The Moor of Venis." The work is attributed to
Antonio (The Merchant of Venice) to an individual's sexual identity but only to specific sexual acts any individual might engage in. As Bray writes: "To talk of an individual of this period as being or not being 'a homosexual' is an anachronism and ruinously misleading. The temptation to debauchery, from which homosexuality was not clearly distinguished, was accepted as part of the common lot ... homosexuality [as understood in 15th-century England] was a sin 'to which men's natural corruption and viciousness [were] prone' " (16–17, Rainolds qtd. in Bray, 17). Antonio (The Merchant of Venice) Antonio is the title character in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of