SOURCE: “‘The Moor of Venice,’ or The Italian on the Renaissance English Stage,” in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether, Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 193-209.

[In the following essay, Hendricks explores the importance of Venice as the play's setting, and proposes that Venice is “a crucial yet often critically neglected racial persona in Othello.”]

A number of critics have read Othello principally with an eye toward illuminating the moral sense of the problematic racial and sexual politics engendered not only by the play's depiction of what is viewed as an interracial marriage but also by Othello's sensationalized murder of his wife, Desdemona.¹ The obstacle facing all such critical readings, as Michael Neill astutely points out, is that the play itself conspicuously denies us (even as it denies Othello) an opportunity to enact “the funeral dignities that usually serve to put a form of [moral] order upon such spectacles of ruins,” creating an “ending [that is] perhaps the most shocking in Shakespearean tragedy” (383-412). Neill concludes that it is the final tragic scene, where “white” Desdemona is murdered and her husband/murderer, “black” Othello, violently avenges her murder—“I took by th’throat the circumcised dog / And smote him thus” (5.2.351-52)²—which most “articulate[s] the [racial] anxiety evident almost everywhere in the play's history—a sense of scandal that informs the textual strategies of editors and theatrical productions as much as it does the disturbed reactions of audiences and critics” (384).

Feminist scholars have made clear that this “scandal” actually begins long before this most “unnatural” ending to the marriage of Othello and Desdemona. For example, Patricia Parker sees the “simultaneously eroticized and epistemological impulse to open up to show” the “‘fantasies’ of race and gender” in Othello as an anxiety-ridden linkage of female sexuality and the exotic narratives of “African or New World discovery” (92), while Janet Adelman argues that the “whole of his exchange with Desdemona demonstrates Othello's terrible conflict between his intense desire for fusion with the woman he idealizes as the nurturant source of his being and his equally intense conviction that her participation in sexuality has contaminated her and thus contaminated the perfection that he has vested in her” (66-67). What has become obvious in these recent studies of Othello, as Valerie Traub contends, is that “Othello's anxiety is culturally and psychosexually overdetermined by erotic, gender, and racial anxieties, including … the fear of chaos [usually] associate[d] with sexual activity.”³ In what follows, I wish to reconsider the possibilities of reading the racial and sexual anxieties latent in Shakespeare's Othello. The focus of my discussion is not so much the personal relationships represented in the play as it is the cultural assumptions which may be coincident with the notion of race in Othello; in particular, I want to argue the possibility that the social site of Shakespeare's tragedy, Venice, is a much more significant player in the construction of early modern English racialist ideology than critics have hitherto illuminated. Simply stated, my purpose is to show that Venice is a crucial yet often critically neglected racial persona in Othello.⁴

My reading builds upon and diverges from studies that examine Shakespeare's use of Italian city-states, in particular Venice, in his dramatic works—a usage which, according to these critics, highlights an Elizabethan “fascination” with Italian culture.⁵ In the case of Venice, this fascination is rooted in, as David C. McPherson terms it, the “myth of Venice,” wherein the city is perceived as a state whose wealth, political stability, justice, and civility set it above all others (27). This image, of course, has its origins in early modern Italian political theories whose principal goal was to conceptualize a model civil society that “was to be paradigmatic for [Italian] civic humanism” (Pocock 271). In these theories Venice is represented as an uncorrupted, tranquil, and stable state; in fact, “Venice appears, both physically and politically, ‘rather framed by the hands of the immortal Gods, than any way by the arte, industry or inuention of men.’”⁶ Ultimately, as J. G. A. Pocock has shown, this “myth of Venice (at its most mythical) was to lie in the assertion that the Venetian commonwealth was an immortally serene, because perfectly balanced, combination of the three elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy” (102).

It is my contention that this myth inheres in Shakespeare's Othello and exercises a “compulsive force on the imagination,” of both the characters within the play and the audience watching events unfold. But, because it is a mythology, “framed by the hands, … arte, industry, [and] invention of men,” the ideal of Venice is also a paradox which ultimately subverts its illusion of perfection by drawing attention not only to the dichotomies (pure/impure, black/white) it constructs but also to the interiority that the myth and its dichotomies seek to conceal (Pocock 102). In other words, while the myth extols an image of Venice as the idealized feminine body, beautiful, desirable, and virginal, it also vicariously projects an image of Venice as the imperfect body—corruptive, desiring, and easily violated. If, as Patricia Parker argues, “the gaze is a vicarious gaze, a substitution of narrative” (89), then our attempt to discern how this paradox works racially must make use of this vicarious perspective.

“THE CUNNING WHORE OF VENICE”

Lewes Lewkenor's 1599 translation of Gasparo Contarini's De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum (along with Thomas Coryat's Crudities) did much to circulate this particular variant of the “myth of Venice” in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In his dedication to the reader, Lewkenor writes that visitors to Venice, at least those “of a grauer humor,”

would dilate of the greatnes of their Empire, the grauitie of their prince, the maiesty of their Senate, the vnuiolablenes of their lawes, their zeale in religion, and lastly their moderation, and equitie, wherewith they gouerne such subiected prouinces as are vnder their dominion, binding them therby in a faster bond of obedience then all the cytadels, garrisons, or whatsoeuer other tyrannicall inuentions could euer haue brought them vnto. (A2)

Lewkenor uses the dedication to set the context for his dilation of the greatness of Venice and to encourage his readers to gaze upon the book as if it were the city itself. Characterized as a “pure and vntouched virgine, free from the taste or violence of any forraine enforcement,” Venice is laid open for the “admiration” and entertainment of the book's English readers. Though not often viewed as a narrative of discovery, Lewkenor's text might well be included in that genre, as it has in common with other narratives of discovery what Patricia Parker calls “the language of opening, uncovering or bringing to light … what had been secret, closed or hid” from the majority of the English reading public whose travels were limited to environs of London (87).

Of course, Venice is neither Africa nor the “New World,” and Lewkenor's dedication to the reader of The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice is intended merely to set the stage for his translation of a work of political philosophy. Even so, the edition circulates conflicting images of the republic known as La Serenissima. In contrast to Lewkenor's praise of Venice's “unblemished” status, the commendatory poems written in praise of Lewkenor's endeavor convey a somewhat different vision of Venice. For example, one poem compares Venice to the “antique” cities of Babel, “fallen” “with the weight of their own furquedry.” In another poem, though her “virgins state ambition nere could blot,” the “swarmes” from “forrein nation[s]” prompt the writer to proclaim Venice's “ruinous case” which, of course, is reflected in the city's “painted face.” Ironically, what is intended to honor the celebrated myth of Venetian stability and invulnerability, Lewkenor's dedication and the commendatory poems, actually draws attention to what stands behind the myth—Venice's notoriety as a site of illicit sexuality, dangerous passions, violence, and extraordinary cunning.

Thomas Coryat's Crudities exhibits a similar ambivalence toward Venice. In the account of his travel to Italy in 1608, Coryat begins with a description of Venice as “the fairest Lady,” a “noble citie” (311). After a rather detailed description of the magnificence of Venice's architecture, Coryat interrupts his narrative to warn his readers to be wary of the city's gondoliers, who are “the most vicious and licentious varlets about all the City” (311). Coryat's warning is typical of his tendency to juxtapose an image of Venice as “this thrice worthie city … yea the richest Paragon” with an image of Venice as a city whose blatant acceptance of sexuality (the seeming valorization of the courtesans and the touted infidelity of Venetian wives) and violence denotes the “Virgin's” corruptibility. Coryat's maneuver serves strategically, as Ann Rosalind Jones suggests, as both a lure and an admonition: “Coryat writes with a double agenda: to thrill his readers and to protect their morals, to sell his book with the promise of titillation and to dignify it by setting his ethical seriousness as an Englishman against the variety of ‘Ethnicke’ types he encounters” (104). Jones rightly observes that the Venice “of English [writers such as Coryat] from the 1580s on was not a geographer's record but a fantasy setting for dramas of passion, Machiavellian politics, and revenge—a landscape of the mind” (110). For Coryat and others, within this “landscape of the mind” it is the “interplay of pleasure and danger” (Jones 102) posed by Venice's gendered and Janus-like status within European culture that must be castigated and the city reclaimed as the paradigm of cultural perfection.⁷ And it is this gendered “interplay” that Shakespeare distills in Othello, coupling the metaphoric blackness of Venice's reputation as a site of feminine sexual corruption and the literalness of Moorish Othello's black skin with the unstained honor of the Venetian military commander Othello and the symbolic whiteness of an uncorrupted Venice. Shakespeare's Othello joins these other early modern English texts in presenting a perspective of Venice that satisfies the desire to see encompassed in one racialized body, even if vicariously, both the virgin and the whore. And that body belongs, of course, to a woman.

“DESDEMONA'S CHOICE”

From the play's inception, when Brabantio reprimands Iago for his indecent language and both Roderigo and Iago for their disruption of Brabantio's peace—“What, tell'st thou me of robbing? this is Venice, my house is not a grange” (1.1.105-106)—the paradoxical “myth of Venice” is instantiated as a paradigm for reading the play's presumed sexual and racial deviances. Brabantio's words obviously are intended to correct what he perceives to be a misperception on the part of Iago, namely that there are no farm animals in his house. Significantly, Brabantio's rebuke conjures images of the Venice, La Serenissima, extolled in Lewkenor's translation, as the tone of Brabantio's declaration suggests that such a crime could never take place in Venice, and, more important, that Roderigo's and Iago's accusations of a barnyard theft would not have been brought surreptitiously to the victim's door in the middle of the night. Brabantio's reprimand indicates that he is a man possessed of the judicious gravity praised in Lewkenor's preface: a man whose “moderation and equitie” will lead him to behave rationally when confronted by what appears to be the irrational pranks of a spurned suitor.

Once he understands the implication of Iago's salacious words, however, Brabantio begins to exhibit the stereotypical irrationality which came to be a metaphoric staple of Jacobean dramatic depictions of Italians. Governed by his fury, Brabantio accuses Othello of sorcery or witchcraft even before the marriage is confirmed by the couple: “is there not charms, / By which the property of youth and maidhood, / May be abused? Have you not read, Roderigo, / Of such a thing?” (1.1.171-74) When we consider Brabantio's grave “This is Venice,” the sight of the rational “senator's” descent into illogic is somewhat surprising as he attempts to explain what he perceives to be unexplainable:

My daughter, O my daughter, …
She is abus’d, stol’n from me and corrupted,
By spells and medicines, bought of mountebanks,
For nature so preposterously to err,
(Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense,)
Sans witchcraft could not.

(1.3.60-64)

Brabantio's “My daughter, O my daughter” poignantly recalls Solanio's account of Shylock's pained cry at Jessica's elopement with Lorenzo—“My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!—” and Shylock's own descent into irrationality (MV 2.8.15). Given Desdemona's position as only child and heir to Brabantio's estate, a situation analogous to Jessica's in The Merchant of Venice, it is not without significance that Shakespeare alludes to this earlier work in depicting a father's reaction to the news that his daughter has married without his approval and apparently to someone outside his ethnic community.

Shakespeare draws one other parallel between Brabantio and Shylock, in that both men seek to exploit the strict terms of Venetian law to extract justice from their perceived enemies. When he finally confronts Othello, Brabantio tells the general, “I therefore apprehend and do attach thee” (1.2.77).⁸ In this moment, the rational Venetian has displaced the irrational father who has roused his “kindred” to pursue the couple. Once he has Othello in custody, Brabantio is confident that he will be able to prove Othello guilty of witchcraft and that the Venetian legal institution will prove “pure and uncorrupted” as it evaluates the truth of his accusation. And, not unexpectedly, when Venetian law appears, in the persona of the Duke, it reaffirms Brabantio's faith in its exactitude:

Whoe’er he be, that in this foul proceeding
Hath thus beguil’d your daughter of herself,
And you of her, the bloody book of law
You shall yourself read, in the bitter letter,
After its own sense, though our proper son
Stood in your action

(1.3.65-69)

No matter the cost, Brabantio is being guaranteed that the “penal Lawes [will be] most unpardonably executed” (Pocock 325).

Whatever Brabantio's cause, when Othello is named the guilty party, the senators who have accompanied the Duke respond to Brabantio's accusation in a rather cryptic fashion: “We are very sorry for’t” (1.3.73). This comment can, of course, be interpreted in one of two ways. First, it can be seen as an expression of regret that Othello's service will be lost to Venice, given the political tensions that exist between Venetians and Turks. Or it can be read as an expression of compassion for Brabantio and the loss of his daughter in the manner he has described. I would propose that the former reading (regret at the loss of Othello's service to Venice) is the more likely intent behind the senators' words. When Othello and Brabantio first come into the presence of the Duke and senators, one senator refers to Othello as “the valiant Moor.” More telling of the esteem Othello has in Venice is the Duke's reaction after hearing Othello's narrative, when the Duke exhorts Brabantio to “Take up this mangled matter at the best; / Men do their broken weapons rather use, / Than their bare hands” (1.3.172-74). Brabantio's refusal to comply with the Duke's admonition is, as Lynda Boose argues, a refusal to “act out,” to ritualize the symbolic transfer of his daughter to her husband not because Othello is necessarily unworthy but because the selection of Desdemona's husband was not Brabantio's: that right had been usurped by his daughter (“Father and Daughter” 327).

Desdemona's choice of a husband has been the object of critical gaze ever since Thomas Rymer first questioned Shakespeare's use of a “Blackamoor” as the tragic protagonist in Othello: whether in M. R. Ridley's introduction to the Arden edition of Othello, where Ridley writes, “It is the very essence of the play that Desdemona in marrying Othello—a man to whom her ‘natural’ reaction should (her father holds) have been fear, not delight—has done something peculiarly startling” (liii), or in Stanley Cavell's careful explanation that, in choosing Othello, Desdemona has “overlooked his blackness in favor of his inner brilliance”: in effect, “that she saw his visage as he sees it, that she understands his blackness as he understands it, as the expression (or in his word, his manifestation) of his mind” (129).

Complicating these, and other, critical attempts to explain Desdemona's choice is the fact that Shakespeare's play presents a world whose very social codes are frequently contradictory and conflicting, thus enabling Desdemona to act as she does. On one level, Venice is a place where the contagious rhetoric of racialism can easily destroy lives and careers, as Iago's manipulation so aptly illustrates. Yet it seems that early modern Venice is also a society where a man such as Othello can achieve success and fame to such a degree that a duke is moved to declare, “I think this tale would win my daughter too” (1.3.171). Othello's status and position, that is, his “honours and valiant parts” (1.3.253), prove as desirable to Desdemona as the narratives for which “She gave … a world of sighs” (1.3.159) and …” lov’d [Othello] for the dangers [he] had pass’d” (1.3.167).

Though a Moor, Othello is perceived as a valuable member of Venetian society and his action as nothing more than “a mischief that is past and gone” [emphasis mine] (1.3.204). Emily Bartels rightfully argues that Othello's acceptance includes Iago, who “even as he attempts to prove Othello the outsider, … represents him as an authorizing insider.”⁹ As Lewkenor's translation of Contarini work documents and J. G. A. Pocock's study substantiates, Venice was often cited by early modern political theorists as a state to be commended for its successful handling of its imperial aims through the hiring of foreign nationals to provide its military force and to police the city. This long-standing practice, plus the city's mercantile zeal, created a cosmopolitan environment where “one sees in this city an infinite number of men from different parts of the world” (McPherson 30). Furthermore, according to Lewkenor, it was apparently not unusual for “forreyn mercenarie souldiers” to be “enabled, with the title of citizens & gentlemen of Venice” (S2).

Brabantio's cultivation and acceptance of Othello, therefore, may very well reflect this custom, so that when Othello explains that Desdemona's “father lov’d me, oft invited me” (1.3.128), we are reminded that it was Brabantio himself, as a senator, who first acknowledged Othello an “insider.”¹⁰ It is the senator Brabantio, and thus by extension Venice, who sets up contradictory notions about racial identity and social place within Venetian society. Desdemona's marital choice, therefore, may very well enact not only adherence to assumptions about appropriate spouses (Othello is, by birth, a prince, by merit a general, and through patronage wealthy) but, in addition, the transference of the daughter's love for her father to another Venetian father figure and not an “outsider.” Thus we may want to ask not why Othello drew her love but what is it in the man that her father loved that moves a woman “So opposite to marriage, that she shunn’d / The wealthy curled darlings of our nation …” (1.2.67-68) to set aside her reluctance to marriage and elope? And, whether Brabantio's reaction to the marriage, and Othello, is linked not to Othello's physical appearance but to that “thing … to fear, not to delight” in (1.2.71)—an incestuous desire for his daughter? If we view Desdemona's choice as being consistent with Shakespeare's characterization of her, of Othello, of Desdemona's willingness to perform her symbolic role in the ritual expression of marriage, and the myth of Venice, then perhaps it is Brabantio who continually refuses to participate in the ritual by subverting the activities which would require that he allow himself to be dispossessed of his daughter, that he permit another Venetian to sexually claim the one female body that he himself cannot sexually possess.¹¹

Thus Brabantio's earlier rebuke of Iago becomes an ironic echo when Brabantio employs not only the language of theft to accuse Othello, “O thou foul thief,” but also the language often associated with witchcraft, “chains of magic” and “foul charms,” in an effort to destabilize the ritualized exchange of the female body that marks the institution of marriage. And Brabantio's charges, like his censure of Iago, allude to the complex and often contradictory social attitudes in Venice which allow for an Othello and a Desdemona but which also demand that they adhere to the customs and laws which govern that society.

Jacques Lacan has argued that “In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted from stage, to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it—that is what we call the gaze” (73). I have been arguing that throughout Othello, this “something” is Venice, and I wish to conclude by looking briefly at the paradox that Shakespeare's play reveals Venice to be.

THE VENETIAN MOOR, OR THE ITALIAN ON THE ENGLISH STATE

One of the disturbing things about Othello, despite centuries of ideological intervention, is the play's ability to disrupt any attempt to make uneven the level playing field Shakespeare has created in his tragedy. This dilemma is further exacerbated by the crudely psychosexual dimensions engendered by Iago's rhetoric in the very first scene of the play:

Zounds, sir, you are robb’d, for shame put on your gown,
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. …

(1.1.86-89)

Iago's words neatly transform what is an act of elopement into an imagined cuckoldry; that is, in the double reference to Brabantio's nakedness (he lacks both property and his “gown”), Iago sets the stage for a further shaming of Brabantio by subtly naming what is lost as if it were a wife (“half your soul”) and luridly localizing this pseudo-wife in a pornographic fantasy. And though this fantasy is momentarily displaced by the intrusion (in the person of Othello) of Lewkenor's Venice, its affective power to create and sustain its image of perversion is not altered one whit.

Ironically, Iago's thematization of an imagined (and bestial) cuckoldry insinuates itself not only in Brabantio's imagination but in his later replacement of that anxiety onto Othello: “Look to her, Moor, have a quick eye to see: / She has deceiv’d her father, may do thee” (1.3.292-93). Predictably, Othello reenacts the violent passions that drove Brabantio to repudiate Desdemona, once again bringing to the surface the male anxiety about female sexuality (despite Desdemona's married state), considered the hallmark of “corrupt” Venice, that initiates the “tragedy of Othello.” However, Othello's complete displacement of Brabantio can occur only when, I would argue, he takes to its ultimate, punitive conclusion (by killing Desdemona) Brabantio's disowning of his daughter.¹² In effect, it is the Venetian Othello who must see to it that Venice's “penal Lawes [are] most unpardonably executed” when the virgin is shown to be a whore.¹³

Representations of early modern Venice were always gendered feminine: it was a city “so beautiful, so renowned, so glorious a Virgin” and, at the same time, a “‘Circe's court,’ teeming with ‘wanton and dallying’ Calypsos and Sirens.”¹⁴ This allusion to the seductive women who delayed Ulysses' return to Ithaca finds its parallel in Desdemona's “supersubtle” seduction of the warrior Othello: “she thank’d me, / And bade me, if I had a friend that lov’d her, / I should but teach him how to tell my story, / And that would woo her” (1.3.163-66). Like Venice, Desdemona has the appearance of purity (and discretion) even as she boldly lays herself open to Othello's suit. Even so, when Iago calls into question Desdemona's virtue, Othello iterates his faith in his wife—“For she had eyes, and chose me” (3.3.193)—even as he leaves open the possibility of her infidelity: “No Iago, / I’ll see before I doubt, when I doubt, prove, / And on the proof, there is no more but this: / Away at once with love or jealousy” (3.3.194-96).

Othello's insistence on “proof,” of course, becomes the opening that Iago needs to “abuse Othello's ear” (1.3.393). It is not insignificant that both Othello and Desdemona initially are swayed by what is heard rather than what is seen. From its inception, the play luridly juxtaposes rumor and storytelling, on the one hand, and an emphasis on seeing, on the other. Brabantio must see for himself the truth of Roderigo's and Iago's report of Desdemona's elopement. Othello will not question Desdemona's virtue until he sees proof; but once rumor “abuses” his ear, Othello, as did Brabantio, begins the process of “bringing to light” the blackness of his Venetian wife.¹⁵ If the first act of the play serves to displace Othello's blackness into his Venetian identity, then the remaining acts serve to dilate Desdemona's.

Iago is the first to constitute Desdemona black when, in response to her question “what wouldst thou write of me, if thou shouldst / praise me” (2.1.118), he reiterates a familiar trope of femininity:

If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit;
The one's for use, the other using it. …
If she be black, and thereto have a wit,
She’ll find a white, that shall her blackness hit.

(2.1.129-33)

Lines 132-33, not surprisingly, find their close interpretive echo in the adage “wash the Ethiop white.” If Desdemona is “black” and possesses a “wit,” Iago's advice to her is to seek that which will transform her, her opposite. Iago ends his “praise” of Desdemona by railing against even fair women, terming them “wight[s]” who “suckle fools, and chronicle small beer” (2.1.160).

This exchange, for all its seeming irreverence, finds its dramatic replay in act 4, scene 2. After a mournful lament for his “affliction,” Othello turns his fury to Desdemona: “Turn thy complexion there; / Patience, thy young and rose-lipp’d cherubin, / I here look grim as hell” (4.2.63-65). Othello then goes on to say,

O thou black weed, why art so lovely fair?
Thou smel'st so sweet, that the sense aches at thee,
Would thou hads’t ne’er been born!

(4.2.69-71)

Othello's language enacts the familiar Petrarchan opposition of fair/dark, yet it also perverts that rhetoric with its reluctance to further denigrate the object which it initially constitutes as undesirable (see Hall, esp. 178-79). More important, this semantic instantiation of Desdemona's desirability registers the allure traditionally associated with Venice, and which prompts Othello later to name Desdemona that which no Englishman who has read Coryat would have failed to understand, “that cunning whore of Venice.”

Once again, despite the domesticity of this bedroom scene, it is Venice which becomes the object of our gaze as both the symbolic virgin that the warrior Othello defends and the corrupted bride he has wed.¹⁶ In an emotionally charged accusation to Desdemona, Othello declares, “I took you for that cunning whore of Venice / That married with Othello” (4.2.91). Othello's words become a distorted projection of Brabantio's caution that the mask of virginity hid a corruption. It is Venice itself which suffers the “dilation” of its exterior to reveal the blackness inside. Othello's search for “proof” must begin “in” Venice, and thus with himself. What is revealed is the sameness of the interior and exterior: the Moor without is the Venetian within, and the Venetian within is the Moor without. And, in a remarkable mimicry of Brabantio's incredulity over Desdemona's willing participation in the marriage, Othello stages himself as the innocent seduced by the wiles of the Venetian whore—aided and abetted by the plot's initial and careful delineation of Othello as a Venetian. We see mirrored in Othello's rage that of Brabantio. Though born a Moor, in his irrationality Othello is very much a Venetian. And in an ironic though not surprising twist of fact, both the father and the husband, whose violations of the rites of marriage set into motion the tragic events of Shakespeare's tragedy, die as a result of their attempts to defend the illusion of perfection that is the myth of Venice.

“I TOOK BY TH’ THROAT THE CIRCUMCISED DOG”

At the conclusion of Othello, Shakespeare leaves us with a disturbing dramatic tableau: the corpses of Othello, Desdemona, and Emilia upon the bed which has occupied (most likely) center stage for much of the final act; a (for once) silent Iago; and the Venetian lords as witnesses to this final tragic event. Just before he commits suicide, Othello says,

And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian, and traduc’d the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him thus.

(5.2.353-57)

This speech has often been read as, symbolically, a racialized confirmation of Othello's awareness of himself as an outsider—a Moor. But if my argument is valid, then such a reading is highly questionable and may point to the deployment of the “racial anxiety” that Michael Neill suggests is “everywhere” in the play's critical and cultural history rather than in Shakespeare's representation of Othello's self-consciousness.

I would argue that what Othello does is to draw upon the myth of Venice to re-create not just a racial image but also a political one where Venetian law is exact, swift, and inviolate—whether one is a Turk or, in the case of Othello, a Venetian. More important, as the symbol of Venetian law on Cyprus, it is Othello who must stand in for the Duke and affirm the “bloody book of law” against those who have violated that very law. It is Venetian Othello who judges and executes the Turk who assaulted a Venetian, and it’s this same Othello who must judge and execute the murderer of another Venetian, Desdemona. The race of this judge cannot, therefore, be viewed in terms of his color but as identical to that of the Duke in whose stead Othello carries out Venetian law.

It seems imperative, therefore, not to overlook the complex history that the concept and the word race may project in early modern English discourses and its implications for interpretations of Othello. In a world where women were often described as a “race,” where the word race signified aristocratic or noble lineage, where race was often used as synonymous with nation, to argue that issues of race in Othello are easily reducible to one matrix—color—is a problematic misreading of an emerging taxonomic shift in the process of classifying human beings. In early modern Venice and England, where racial and social identities are formulated as much in genealogy as in ethnicity or geography, in gender as in color, the “illusion of perfection” cannot sustain itself as its own discourse points to the almost yet not quite invisible fractures that inevitably occur in the process of mythologizing “race.” And it is this paradox which must be recognized in Othello rather than, as Jack D’Amico suggests, the idea that “Shakespeare revealed how a man could be destroyed when he accepts a perspective that deprives him of his humanity, … Othello is debased by a role that he adopts and acts out on the Venetian-Elizabethan stage” (177). Ignoring, for the moment, the problematic collapsing of Venice and England, I want to call into question the implicit assumption that there is English identification with the Venetians as a homogeneous racial group. As I have suggested elsewhere, “the contours of race may not be as fixed, as transcendental, as universal as critical practices and postmodern social discourses seem to infer” (“Managing the Barbarian” 183). English writers, Shakespeare included, pointedly distinguished within the European community just as they did without (perhaps even more so given their more extensive knowledge of nations within Europe). One has only to recall Portia's mockery of her French, German, Scottish, and English suitors, or Shakespeare's depiction of the Welsh and French in Merry Wives of Windsor to know that D’Amico's “Venetian-Elizabethan” elides the powerful sense of national consciousness that encodes itself in the dramatic representation of other cultures (see Howard).

It seems to me that we might derive a better understanding of Shakespeare's tragedy if we recognize that the “lustful” Moor is the “whorish” Venetian. Behind Desdemona stands the duplicitous Venice, behind Iago the cunning “Machiavel,” and behind Othello the irrationality of Italian masculinity. What sets into motion the tragic events in Shakespeare's tragedy, and what makes Othello an ideological quagmire, is the Venetian ambivalence that accepts Othello as a well-born, honorable, successful military commander and courtier even as it insists that he remain an outsider, an alien who must resort to sorcery or witchcraft to become a part of the world he inhabits already. In the end, our interpretive and critical imperative, in addition to tracing the overdetermined markings formalized by the racialist rhetoric figured by the references to the color of Othello, should be one of exploring the multifaceted and often subtly nuanced discourse of race that aligns color, gender, geography as it sees fit. In this vein, we might also want to pose another query that Shakespeare's tragedy seems to invoke and which has bearing for our understanding of racial discourse in early modern English contexts. Who, symbolically, comes to be racialized as the “cunning whore” of Venice capable of causing nature to err from itself? The answer, not surprisingly, is all in how one defines the concept of race.

Notes

1. See Newman; Boose, “Othello's Handkerchief”; and Little. For a useful summary of critical responses to the play, see Neill, “Unproper Beds,” particularly 391-95.

2. All Othello quotations are from the Arden edition, ed. M. R. Ridley.

3. Traub 36. See also Boose, “Othello's Handkerchief”; and Neill, “Changing Places.”

4. Most references to Venice note either the city's significance in the Mediterranean political economy, its idealization as a model republic, or its exoticization as an international cultural site. See, for example, McPherson, esp. 27-50; Parker 95-96; Bartels; D’Amico 177; Cantor 296-319; and Braxton. In most other discussions of Shakespeare's tragedy, as I will argue, Venice appears to implicitly “stand in” for England.

5. See, for example, Levith, Partridge, McWilliam, Lievsay, Hale, and McPherson.

6. This panegyric appears in Lewes Lewkenor's 1599 translation of the Italian version of Gasparo Contarini's De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum. Qtd. in Pocock 320.

7. Here I am referring to Stephanie Jed's brilliant argument in Chaste Thinking.

8. See Ruggerio, who argues that “in the Renaissance, ideally, the honor dynamic, with its threat of vendetta, was supposed to limit the level of violence in society. One did not cross the honor of another, one did not do violence to another, because that would require vendetta, that is violence and dishonor in return. Thus ideally, violence was avoided without formal institutions or additional violence within a community or group simply by maintaining a balance of honor.” However, as Ruggerio further adds, if an individual “did not have the power to pursue vendetta, the support of threatened violence fell away, one's honor became problematic, and violent passions became easier to indulge, especially for the powerful.”

9. Bartels 450. While Bartels's argument makes less of Othello's color than other critical essays, her reading succeeds in “making more” of the Moor-Venetian dichotomy than it makes of the racial ideology the play fashions. For similar discussions see Berry; D’Amico 177-96; Cantor; and Braxton.

10. Bartels cogently makes this argument in “Making More of the Moor” 435.

11. Garner argues that Shakespeare “keeps Desdemona off a pedestal and shows her to have a full range of human feelings and capacities. Yet he is careful not to allow her to fail in feeling or propriety” (238).

12. Snow notes that when Iago manipulates Othello's husbandly anxiety about Desdemona's chastity, Othello “comes to see Cassio in his place” as Brabantio came to see Othello in his (Brabantio's). What also needs to be explored is the continual replay of the incestuous undertones created by Iago's words to Brabantio. See esp. 395.

13. It is not my intent to prove or disprove Desdemona's guilt or innocence, but to “dilate” her significance to Shakespeare's handling of the myth of Venice.

14. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, quoted in Jones 102.

15. I am indebted to Parker's “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello and Bringing to Light” for this analysis. What I would add to Parker's cogent discussion on the “visual” necessity of “bringing to light” that which is secret is the way aurality serves as a prefigurement to such dilation.

16. I am indebted to Adelman's excellent discussion in Suffocating Mothers for this idea.

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