Most scholars agree that Othello was written in 1604, a year before King Lear. Yesterday's post was concerned with how Shakespeare used Pliny's Naturalis Historia as a source for a considerable amount of Othello's vocabulary. And he may have retained the content of Pliny's dedication of the work for an important moment in King Lear, as well. Pliny's dedication is an unusual one: it's to nature itself. Here it is:

Hail to thee, Nature, thou parent of all things! and do thou deign to show thy favour unto me, who, alone of all the citizens of Rome, have, in thy every department, thus made known thy praise.

Now compare that with the first words spoken by Edmund, the treacherous half-brother of Edgar, and one of the most villainous characters in Shakespeare. Edmund, who believes in what might be called a dog-eat-dog or survival-of-the-fittest approach to life, is here delineating why his plan to frame Edgar and become the sole inheritor of his father's land and title is from his point-of-view "natural":

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I

Stand in the plague of custom, and permit

The curiosity of nations to deprive me,

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

Lag of a brother?

It certainly seems possible at least that the seed that created this unequaled subplot (the story of Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund) was planted as Shakespeare was reading for his work on Othello.

Another major source for Othello was Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia published in approximately 77 AD. It was the likely source of some of the more exotic natural references found in the play, particularly in the speeches of the title character. According to Norman Sanders (see yesterday's post), it was where Shakespeare found "the cannibals, anthropophagi, hollow caves, mines of sulphur, gum-dropping Arabian trees, chrysolite, mandragora, colloquintida, the movement of the Propontic and the Hellespont waters, and possibly his reply to Brabantio's charge of seducing his daughter by means of witchcraft".

This fact helped to answer a question that I've always had in regard to the plays: How is it that each one has its own linguistic world, clearly distinctive from the rest? Part of the answer has to be that he allowed his reading to deeply influence not just the plots of his plays, but also their diction. At times, his work seems to be almost of a synthesizing nature - as he allowed his imagination (with its unparalleled education in poetry and drama) to be fertilized with the knowledge he found in the preparatory reading that he did for each play.