American Research Journal of English and Literature

 Although the Moor of Venice in Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi who serves as the Brigade Commander of the Venetian Army in Cyprus (Giraldi, 1565) undergoes a status transformation as the General of the overall Venetian Army Othello in Shakespeare’s intertextual exercise Othello (Shakespeare, 1622), his character and his destiny do not change. As in the sordid and melodramatic original tale of sexual jealousy, suspicious of his wife’s fidelity, he resorts to killing her for the sake of honour, and later commits suicide on realisation of his victim’s innocence. In terms of designation and authority, far superior to Shakespeare’s General Othello is the Bodhisattva King Chulla Paduma in “Jataka Story 193” in the Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births (circa 200 BC), which is annually dramatized in Sri Lanka during Buddhist festivals. Even though he had as a prince first-hand experience of his wife’s attempt to kill him for the sake of her paramour, the king, when he encounters them years after his survival, does not order to kill them but drives them out of his kingdom on dictating to them the provisions in the existing penal code relevant to the crimes of adultery, conspiracy, and murder. Although documented in the 5th Century CE (Cowell, 1895), King Chulla Paduma’s strategy still sounds modern, human, decent, and ethically and intellectually advanced, while the primitive and unethical behaviour of Shakespeare’s Othello that emerged in 1603 during the European Renaissance (Muir, 1968), has caused much concern among critics and scholars of dramaturgy as well as those of other various disciplines. On assessing the moral and didactic foundations of the two stories as plots for two theatrical exercises in two distinctive cultural settings, the paper attempts to carry out a comparative study of the cultural influences that may have urged to determine the actions and behaviours of the two protagonists.