Othello Goes to Lisbon, 1765

Abstract

This note documents the shipment of two copies of Shakespeare’s Othello to Lisbon in 1765. If the copies arrived—and there is no reason to believe that they did not—they constitute the earliest documented circulation of a work of Shakespeare’s in Portugal. However significant that may be, the shipment points to a wider phenomenon of diasporic Anglophone recusants reading widely in English over the course of the eighteenth century, with a view to a cultural, perhaps even scholarly accommodation of their Catholicism by Britain’s Protestant polity. As an episode in diasporic book history, the find is of importance to both our understanding of the cultural work of recusant communities on the European mainland and of the small non-native readerships for English-language print in states where geographic and linguistic remoteness from the language’s homelands, coupled with the predominance of French as a language of cosmopolitan learning, made the accomplishment rare. A print culture historicized and studied as national, as though bounded by political frontiers, also existed in an archipelago of distinctly inflected reading communities across the continent, in schools, convents, seminaries, and families which both were and were not English, Scottish, and Irish, as they were also (for example) Spanish or Portuguese.