Books like Othello
A Moorish general in the service of Venice marries a senator's daughter and is talked, by a man who tells him he is his friend, into murdering her on their wedding sheets.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Othello
Romeo and Juliet
Two teenagers from warring Verona households fall in love at a masked ball and spend four days outrunning the city's entire machinery of adult hate before it kills them both.
King Lear
An old king divides his kingdom between two of his three daughters by asking them to say how much they love him, and walks out into a storm and his own disintegrating mind when they take him at his word.
The Great Galeoto
A play: when a wealthy Madrid gentleman takes his late friend's son into his home, the town's idle talk about the young man and his patron's wife begins to make the scandal it imagines.
Desire Under the Elms
A play: on a stony New England farm in 1850, Ephraim Cabot, seventy-five, brings home a young third wife, Abbie, to the fury of his son Eben, who believes the farm is his.
Henry IV
A play: twenty years after a fall from his horse at a costume pageant, a wealthy Italian still believes he is the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, and his old circle arrives with a doctor to try to cure him.
Mourning Becomes Electra
A play in three parts setting the Oresteia in New England just after the Civil War: General Ezra Mannon comes home to a wife who hates him and a daughter who adores him.
Medea
A woman scorned by her husband murders their children in an act of revenge that has haunted literature for two and a half millennia.
The Aspern Papers
An American editor takes rooms in a crumbling Venetian palazzo, posing as a lodger, to get his hands on the love letters a dead Romantic poet wrote to the very old woman who lives there with her niece.
The Crucible
A 1953 play about the 1692 Salem witch trials, written in answer to the anti-Communist hearings of its day, in which a town lets a vengeful girl's accusations run its court.
Mario and the Magician
On holiday at an Italian seaside resort in the late 1920s, a German family goes to the show of Cipolla, a hunchbacked hypnotist who bends his audience to his will.
The Portrait of a Lady
A young American woman in 1870s Europe navigates suitors, social codes, and the trap of a marriage that looks like freedom but feels like a prison.
After the Divorce
When Costantino is sentenced to prison for a murder he didn't commit, his wife Giovanna, under a new law allowing divorce, takes a richer husband in their Sardinian village.