Shakespeare’s “Jealousy . . . The Green-Ey’d Monster”

Shakespeare’s now famous descriptions of jealousy are apparently unique.  The Oxford English Dictionary records the first appearance of “green-eyed jealousy” in The Merchant of Venice when Portia joyfully responds to Bassanio’s correct choice by banishing all her “doubtful thoughts, and rash-embrac’d despair, / and shudd’ring fear, and green-eyed jealousy” (3.2.109-10).[1]  The OED cites the second appearance of the phrase in its most quoted passage from Othello when Iago warns: “O beware my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” (3.3.165-67).  But surprisingly the earliest citation in the OED for “green-eyed” (meaning to view with jealousy) after Shakespeare is from Milton’s “At a Vacation Exercise in the College” (1628) in the line, “how green-ey’d Neptune raves, / In Heav’n’s defiance mustering all his waves,” a problematic citation because sea water is often depicted as green (see LLL, 1.2.82), and Neptune seems more angry than jealous here, especially given another reference in Milton’s Comus.[2]  Shakespeare’s descriptions of jealousy have become so popular we almost take for granted their currency, but even the phrase “green with envy” is not recorded as used in English, according to the online OED, until the late nineteenth century (Phrases, 8).

In commenting upon Beatrice’s description of Claudio as having a “jealous complexion” (2.1.290-92) and Paulina’s association of yellow with Leontes’ jealous “mind” (2.3.106-07), the editors of Much Ado About Nothing  and The Winter’s Tale remind us that the more common color then…