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
Timeline of Shakespeare criticism and duty in the individual character as Shakespeare did." Machado de Assis, 1896: "One day, when there is no more British Empire or North-American Republic, there will be Shakespeare; when we stop speaking English, we will speak Shakespeare." Charles Lamb, 1811: "We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation of life, when we should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very 'sphere of humanity' he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge,