Read Othello by email.
Three weeks, and one lie does all of it.
The first scene never says his name. For 1,548 words Othello is “the Moor,” discussed in a dark street by two men who mean him harm. Twenty-three mornings, one scene at a time, at the speed a lie of this kind actually takes to work.
Five or six minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Three weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
23 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1604
- Installments
- 23
- Each installment
- 5–6 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 27,906
- Reading time
- 1 hour 56 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 12 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 6 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Othello?
Fifteen scenes carry 27,906 words, which is why it takes twenty-three emails: seven of the fifteen are too long to send at once. That is the shape of the play. It is not a story of many events but of a few very long rooms in which one man talks another out of his marriage, and at a scene a morning the thing that strains belief in a theatre becomes hard to argue with. Iago gets three consecutive days on the temptation scene alone.
Speaker names come in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse kept as verse — and Iago’s prose kept as prose, which matters in a play where he changes register depending on who is listening. Act III Scene 3, the temptation, is the longest scene at 4,072 words and arrives in three parts; six other scenes arrive in two. Every cut is made at an entrance or an exit, taking the combination that makes the longest part shortest, and all eight land on an entrance — so an installment ends when somebody walks in, which in this play is usually the point.
Installment 1 is the playbill — fifteen persons of the play, Venice and a sea-port in Cyprus — and then the first scene, in which two men wake a father in the night to tell him about his daughter and never once name the man they are describing. The shortest installment comes later: sixty-seven words of Othello handing letters to a pilot, delivered the morning before the scene that takes him apart.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Othello?
Just under two hours straight through (27,906 words). By email, it’s 23 daily installments of five to six minutes — about three weeks, or faster at a premium pace of two or three scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — all fifteen scenes in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, including the Willow Song, the Herald’s 101-word proclamation of a night off, and the dramatis personae. Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse lines kept as verse. Othello’s scenes are long — fifteen of them across 27,906 words — so seven need more than one email, which is more splitting than any other play here, and the median installment still runs 1,205 words. The shortest is sixty-seven.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Each recap covers only the previous scene. The play gives itself away regardless: Iago explains exactly what he intends at the end of Act I and then spends the next three weeks doing it, so the suspense was never about what happens — it is about how long everyone else takes to see it.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.