[In the following essay, Yachnin interprets Othello as a theatrical evocation of the violent potentiality of wonder, embodied in Desdemona's fetishized handkerchief.]

A specter is haunting new historicism—the specter of the aesthetic: the attributes of beauty and sublimity, the realm of wonderful objects and feelings of awe. From Louis Montrose's evocation of the uncanny connections between Simon Forman's dream of Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to Stephen Greenblatt's book, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, we can discern an investment in wonder among those whom we might have expected to be more attuned to the political dimensions of literature.¹ Of course, materialist criticism is entitled to examine the forms of wonder, since wonder is as much involved in the socio-political realm as is gender, rank, or race. But it is not merely a cool-headed interest in wonder that we find in new historicism; on the contrary, it is an undertaking to arouse amazement in the reader. For some practitioners, the attempt to awe their readers has to do with the cachet associated with the mystifying style of postmodernist French theory, but for lucid writers such as Montrose and Greenblatt, the attempt to arouse wonder has its roots in other ground. That ground is Shakespeare.

My focus is the operations of wonder in Shakespeare's playhouse, but I also will examine the differences between Renaissance versions of theatrical wonder and later forms in Shakespeare as literature. These versions are linked by their relationship with subjectivity, possession, and the nature of the object, but are produced in different ways and toward different ends—theatrical wonder is largely visual, processive, and collective; literary and critical wonder is “visionary,” possessive, and directed toward the individual as individual. Roughly speaking, it is the difference between an outing to the circus and a morning in church; we tend to misinterpret the earthly pleasures of the former in light of the heavenly raptures of the latter.

Othello is an illuminating text for the purposes of my discussion because it is both wonderful in itself and critical of how “magical” properties can seduce the eye and mind. By analyzing Othello's attempts to fetishize theatrical properties, we can begin to understand the fetishistic investments made by present-day readers and critics. This is not to suggest that the play is magically prescient. Rather its fictions of possession and wonder imply the conditions of its production and make the contradictions in that production visible as ideology. Pierre Machery tells us that “the book revolves around this myth [i.e., that the book is uncannily alive]; but in the process of its formation the book takes a stand regarding this myth, exposing it. This does not mean that the book is able to become its own criticism: it gives an implicit critique of its ideological content, if only because it resists being incorporated into the flow of ideology in order to give a determinate representation of it.”² So while Shakespeare is the source of the specter haunting recent Shakespeare criticism, his play's “implicit critique of its ideological content” might nevertheless provide something like an exorcism.

Shakespeare's attempts to reconfigure playgoing as conversional wonder have meshed with the emergence of the aesthetic as a major cultural formation; however, it is unlikely that his drama in fact transformed the experiences of Renaissance playgoers.³ They, no doubt, continued to expect recreation rather than re-creation. In Othello, Shakespeare maneuvers to make wonder out of the material he has to work with, which, among other things such as language and costume, includes the fabric of the handkerchief and the body of the boy actor who plays Desdemona. These two objects are constructed so as to enhance the cultural status of the play by raising it above the commercialism and materiality of actual play production. But if we can deploy a strategic resistance to the play's sublimity (a resistance that came more easily to the original audiences), then the ordinariness of these “wonders” and the particular ways in which they are presented will allow us critical insight into the mystifications of Shakespeare and Shakespeare criticism.

To move toward a historical understanding of Shakespearean wonder, let us begin by considering two exemplary views—Northrop Frye's idea of The Tempest as a play where wonder leads to self-knowledge and Greenblatt's troubled but similar account of the effects of wonder. Of course, new historicism arose in opposition to approaches such as Frye's, but humanist and antihumanist forms of criticism share some surprisingly similar assumptions about the relationship between the literary text and the subject. Here is Frye, writing in 1959:

[T]he play is an illusion like the dream, and yet a focus of reality more intense than life affords. The action of The Tempest moves from … reality to realization. What seems at first illusory, the magic and music, becomes real, and the Realpolitik of Antonio and Sebastian becomes illusion. … When the Court Party first came to the island “no man was his own”; they had not found their “proper selves.” Through the mirages of Ariel, the mops and mows of the other spirits, the vanities of Prospero's art, and the fevers of madness, reality grows up in them from inside, in response to the fertilizing influence of illusion.⁴

Greenblatt in 1991 sees wonder as “the central figure in the initial European response to the New World”—“something like the ‘startle reflex’ one can observe in infants.” Although his model of personhood is far more corporealized than Frye's, he nevertheless sees wonder as ineluctably inward:

Someone witnesses something amazing, but what most matters takes place not “out there” or along the receptive surfaces of the body where the self encounters the world, but deep within, at the vital, emotional center of the witness. This inward response cannot be marginalized or denied, any more than a constriction of the heart in terror can be denied; wonder is absolutely exigent, a primary or radical passion. … The experience of wonder seems to resist recuperation, containment, ideological incorporation; it sits strangely apart from everything that gives coherence to Léry's universe [Jean de Léry, whose History of a Voyage (1585) Greenblatt is discussing here], apart and yet utterly compelling.⁵

Although connected with the violent harrowing of the self central to Christian visionary experience, Frye and Greenblatt generally understand wonder in terms of a modern idea of personhood, where wonder provokes what Frye calls “realization,” the emptying out of the world and the concomitant expansion of the self. This view differs from Shakespeare's; Shakespeare usually shows how wonder violates or nullifies the self rather than how it precipitates the self's expansive fulfilment. We remember Horatio “harrow[ed] … with fear and wonder” (Hamlet, 1.1.45) or Cleomenes reduced to nothing by “the ear-deaf'ning voice o' th' oracle” (Winter's Tale, 3.1.9).⁶ For Frye and Greenblatt, in contrast, our ability to grasp an authentic selfhood has to do centrally with possessing and with being possessed by a fetishized text. “The Tempest,” Frye says, “is a play not simply to be read or seen or even studied, but possessed.”⁷ At the beginning of Marvelous Possessions, Greenblatt too declares his investments in the marvels of narrative: “I remain possessed by stories and obsessed with their complex uses.”⁸

To be sure, the idea of being possessed by theatrical spectacle was current in the Renaissance. In his Apology for Actors (1612), Thomas Heywood, reiterating Shakespeare's emphasis on the invasive power of spectacle, praises theatre's capacity to re-fashion the members of the audience: “so bewitching a thing is lively and well-spirited action that it hath power to new mold the hearts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.”⁹ But among eyewitness accounts of the drama, there are far fewer indications of the formative power ascribed to it by Heywood. We remember that the actors normally performed in the cold light of day and did not have the scenic resources of the court masque. Thomas Platter, in 1599, writes of the “marvelous” dancing that followed a performance of Julius Caesar; about the play he notes only that it was “very well acted.”¹⁰ In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recounts disapprovingly the tawdry spectacle Shakespeare's company made of the history of Henry VIII: “The King's Players had a new play called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage … sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.”¹¹ So while there were marvels in the theatre, they were usually greeted as something akin to mere showiness.

In accord with these views of theatrical spectacle, playgoers seem not usually to have been possessed by wonder.¹² The antitheatricalist writer and sometime dramatist Stephen Gosson writes scathingly about the fun audience-members have at the playhouse:

In our assemblies at plays in London, you shall see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by women. Such care for their garments that they should not be trod on, such eyes to their laps that no chips light in them, such pillows to their backs that they take no hurt … such tickling, such toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning them home when the sports are ended that it is a right comedy to mark their behavior.¹³

Indeed, a considerable part of the thrill of playgoing had little to do with the plays themselves, but was involved instead with the erotic and social gratifications of seeing and being seen by other spectators. In 1613, Henry Parrot satirizes the practices of self-display characteristic of a theatre described by one antitheatricalist as “Venus' palace”:¹⁴

When young Rogero goes to see a play,
His pleasure is you place him on the stage,
The better to demonstrate his array,
And how he sits attended by his page,
          That only serves to fill those pipes with smoke,
          For which he pawned hath his riding cloak.(15)

In view of the mirthful and eroticized atmosphere of Renaissance playhouses, it seems clear that the emphasis upon the conversional marvelousness of Shakespeare's plays must have been consequent upon their transformation into literature, a process that began in earnest only after Shakespeare's death. In the 1623 First Folio, Jonson lauds Shakespeare as “the wonder of our stage,” but promotes his “book” as an embodiment of genius that makes an irresistible claim on all those who “have wits to read, and praise to give.”¹⁶ In the Second Folio (1632), Milton expresses similar “wonder and astonishment” at Shakespeare's “Delphic lines.” In Milton's account, Shakespeare's astonishing book transforms the reader into a “livelong monument”—“thou our fancy of itself bereaving, / Dost make us marble with too much conceiving.”¹⁷ In commendatory verses prefixed to Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare (1640)—twenty-four years after the playwright's death—Leonard Digges is able to remember “how the audience, / Were ravished, with what wonder they went hence,” but invites the reader to look upon the “wit-fraught book, … whose worth / Like old-coined gold, … / Shall pass true current to succeeding age.”¹⁸ These tributes suggest that Shakespearean wonder, from the outset, was an experience which, while it might be imagined as the rapture of audience—members possessed by a bewitching spectacle, in fact belonged to readers who owned the text. “[Y]ou will stand for your privileges … to read, and censure,” urge John Heminge and Henry Condell, the actors responsible for the publication of the First Folio. “Do so, but buy it first … whatever you do, buy.”¹⁹

But while there are differences, there is also a historical line to be traced from the spectacles performed in Shakespeare's playhouse to the visionary wonders of the First Folio to the retailing of literary wonder in recent criticism. These versions of the marvelous are related to the broader development of what Georg Lukács calls “reified consciousness,” the idea that persons become objects to themselves because of their traffic in fetishized commodities—goods onto which are projected the realities of human labor and relations, and for whose commodified value real persons exchange their own worth. In “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Lukács develops an analysis of the alienating effects of commodity fetishism: “The essence of commodity-structure … is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.” “The commodity character of the commodity, the abstract, quantitative mode of calculability shows itself here in its purest form: the reified mind necessarily sees it as the form in which its own authentic immediacy becomes manifest.”²⁰

When the commodity in question is literary wonder, and when such wonder is a possession that possesses and is the form in which the reader's mind finds its own “authentic immediacy,” readerly investments will be both profound and unstable. A text like Othello will be to the engrossed reader as Desdemona is to her husband—an object whose capacity to arouse wonder in the beholder is seen to underwrite the beholder's selfhood. Kenneth Burke explains Othello's stake in Desdemona as “ownership in the profoundest sense of ownership, the property of human affections, as fetishistically localized in the object of possession, while the possessor is himself possessed by his very engrossment.”²¹ We want to bear in mind the differences between the spectacular marvels staged in the culturally lowbrow Shakespearean theatre and the visionary wonder produced in the highbrow province of Shakespeare as literature. We also should remember that a performance—unlike a book—cannot be owned. But we also want to consider the possibility that reading Shakespeare for his profound insights into the meaning of life, or writing about Shakespeare in ways calculated to arouse wonder in our readers, might constitute particular institutional transformations of spectacular, commercial theatricality.

In Shakespeare's London, Othello's handkerchief would have been marketable goods, a square of embroidered cloth in a nation whose primary industry was the production of textiles, a stage property in a theatre whose largest operating expense was the purchase of costumes and draperies. Othello's mystification of the handkerchief within the play is of a piece with Renaissance Londoners' investments, both financial and psychological, in what even Caliban recognizes as “trash”—the “glistering apparel” (Tempest, 4.1. 224, 193 [stage direction]) that advertised individuals' high social status in the real world and whose visual appeal in the theatre helped to make Shakespeare's drama so popular. The play's stake in the handkerchief registers the theatre's participation in English society's fetishized trade in textiles.

In the world of the play, all the characters except Othello view the handkerchief as marketable goods; he defines it as a magical talisman. The effect of this definitional contest is twofold. One, the handkerchief emerges as wondrous—an object of great emotional and sexual energy. The napkin's enhancement serves the institutional project of valorizing drama over against the theatre's degraded world of work and its trade in playtexts and textiles. Two, the intensity of Othello's investments in this square of cloth works to reveal the fetish character of commodities in general. Although everyone except Othello thinks of the handkerchief as an ordinary object, they fetishize it too. They turn it into a commodity, in Marx's sense: a thing that becomes “mysterious … simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour.”²² To understand the particular mystery the fetishized handkerchief evokes, however, we need to expand the field of labor and exchange to include the “work” of sex. That is necessary because the characters' projections of themselves onto the handkerchief run along lines determined by sex and gender. Moreover, to take sex and gender into account is to recognize their importance in the development of modern aesthetic fetishism. In this view, the art-object is the feminine beloved of the masculine owner—“a non-alienated object, one quite the reverse of a commodity, which like the ‘auratic’ phenomenon of a Walter Benjamin returns our tender gaze and whispers that it was created for us alone.”²³

For most of the characters, the handkerchief is reproducible, exchangeable, and has a certain cash value. Furthermore, although it circulates widely, everyone recognizes it as private property. Because it is private property, Emilia, Cassio, and Bianca all speak about making copies of it. In this regard, is it even clear that Emilia plans to keep it after having found it? She says, “My wayward husband hath a hundred times / Woo'd me to steal it … I'll have the work ta'en out, / And give 't Iago” (3.3.292-96). Does she intend to give Iago the original or the copy? Does she perhaps prefer robbing the handkerchief of its singularity to stealing the thing itself from Desdemona? For Desdemona, the handkerchief balances between the everyday and the sacred, becoming a hugely valued love token that is nonetheless commensurable with monetary value. “Where should I lose the handkerchief?” she asks, “Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse / Full of crusadoes” (3.4.23,25-26).

Cassio and Emilia each intend to have the handkerchief copied because they recognize it as property that will be wanted by its owner. The strawberry-spotted handkerchief bears the print of the owner's possessive desire for it as a singular object, even though it is not necessarily unique, but potentially only the first of a series. It could be reproduced endlessly for an endless number of owners. This contradiction is paralleled by Iago's jealous ownership of his wife. She bears the imprint of his possessive desire for her as a unique prize even though he discounts her, with a sexual quibble, as “a common thing”: “You have a thing for me? It is a common thing” (3.3.302).

The handkerchief's properties are continuous with the properties of love. Were Desdemona an object like the handkerchief, Othello could possess her, but so could anyone else, and in any case she would then be a “common thing” like the handkerchief, certainly not the inimitable treasure for which Othello happily sacrifices his “unhoused free condition” (1.2.26). If she is not an object to Othello, then she is a subject—which is to say she is an object to herself. As self-possessed, she is free to give herself away to another. If she is her own private property, as Peter Stallybrass points out, then her defining attribute—her honor—becomes as detachable as her handkerchief:²⁴

IAGO:
But if I give my wife a handkerchief—
OTHELLO:
What then?
IAGO:
Why then 'tis hers, my lord, and being hers,
She may, I think, bestow 't on any man.
OTHELLO:
She is protectress of her honor too;
May she give that?

[4.1.10-15]

No possible permutation is able to unburden heterosexual love of the contradictions involved in the patriarchal ownership of women, who are also required to be owners of themselves.

The handkerchief figures possessive male desire for the female “common thing” in ways that legitimize jealousy in terms of the “phantom objectivity” of the gender system. The operation of this system seems invisible to the characters, and its effects cut across gender lines. Bianca returns the handkerchief to Cassio, refusing to “take out the work” since she thinks it was given to him by another woman. This other woman is a “hobby-horse,” while Cassio is allowed the agential attributes of desire and deceitfulness:

What did you mean by that same handkerchief you gave me even now? I was a fine fool to take it. I must take out the work? A likely piece of work, that you should find it in your chamber, and know not who left it there! This is some minx's token, and I must take out the work? There, give it your hobby-horse.

[4.1.148-54]

Given the invisible influence that the handkerchief wields in its travels through the play, the claims Othello makes about both its sacred, feminine origins and its magical power to bind husband to wife through male desire seem not to belong to an enchanted world entirely foreign to Venetian civility, but rather to constitute a somewhat outlandish explanation of the handkerchief's actual operations. The play opens to analysis the fetish character of the handkerchief with regard to all the characters who touch it. It does so through Othello's explanation of its quasi-magical powers, but more so by the way Othello convinces himself into accepting it as “ocular proof” (3.3.360) against his wife (since it falls to the stage in his presence and as a result of his action some 150 lines before Iago reports having seen Cassio wipe his beard with it). Othello uses the handkerchief to prove something against Desdemona that the desirable thingness of the handkerchief has already inscribed as inevitable in heterosexual relations—the “destiny unshunnable” (3.3.275) of being made a cuckold. It is the fate of every man to invest his all in the vexed figure of Woman, she who is unique because she is a rare object and “common” because she is a subject. On this account, the vexing constitution of Othello's selfhood on the basis of heterosexual mutuality is no different from anyone else's—it is only that his terminology is strangely revealing.

But Othello's terms constitute more than an exotic account of the ordinary. In Othello's telling, the handkerchief is a different kind of thing—a wonder that possesses a particular history and a charismatic hold on its owner. Desdemona is reframed as just such a wonderful object. If she were like the handkerchief that Othello imagines, then he could possess her wholly yet she would become neither the “common thing” of marketplace exchanges nor the free trader of her own honor. Not, of course, that the handkerchief ever becomes convincingly magical. It is rather that its movements in the play suggest that there could be “magic in the web of it” (3.4.69). The handkerchief is held in hand after hand, but its significance is never grasped by any one possessor. Its power to generate an unseen network of connections over the heads of every character except Iago lends it a certain marvelousness. Even Iago cannot quite get hold of it. He is just lucky: it is surprising that Cassio is unacquainted with Othello's first and most valued gift to Desdemona, especially since Cassio went “a-wooing” with Othello “from first to last” (3.3.71,96). “Sure,” Desdemona says, “there's some wonder in this handkerchief” (3.4.101). For the play's original spectators and for us, there is indeed some wonder since, as Douglas Bruster comments, “uncanniness arises as the result of an extended social order” that is apparent in the handkerchief but not visible to the characters.²⁵

So while the play opens to examination the operations of commodity fetishism, it also works to fetishize the handkerchief in the wonderful terms of Egyptian charmers, sibylline prophetic fury, and “mummy … / Conserved of maidens' hearts” (3.4.74-75). In order to understand the theatre's apparent need to redescribe its most important material resource, we do not need to follow Richard Wilson's spirited attack either on Shakespeare's theatre as “part of the apparatus of the English nation-state” or on Shakespeare as a proto-capitalist enemy of the artisanal class of clothworkers.²⁶ But perhaps we do need to consider that costumes in the commercial theatre, while expensive and often gorgeous, were also redolent of the theatre's participation in trade and manual labor. Some costumes could project the somewhat grubby aura that went with being aristocratic cast-offs, but those costumes had themselves passed through the pawnbrokers and the second-hand dealers' shops; and other costumes and all the rest of the cloth used in performances constituted at one level “ocular proof” of the theatre's material and class connections with the increasingly hard-pressed and riotous clothworkers. In this view, the play endeavors to “take out the work” from textiles in order to purge theatre of the manual labor that made theatre possible, aligning drama thereby with the ethos of courtliness that itself was an important factor in the theatre's commercial success.

In 1610, Henry Jackson, member of Corpus Christi College, witnessed a performance of Othello at Oxford. “They also had tragedies,” he wrote,

which they acted with propriety and fitness. In which [tragedies], not only through speaking but also through acting certain things, they moved [the audience] to tears. But truly the celebrated Desdemona, slain in our presence by her husband, although she pleaded her case very effectively throughout, yet moved [us] more after she was dead, when, lying on her bed, she entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance.²⁷

Jackson was a serious and religious young man, and Oxford probably provided a more attentive audience than the Globe or even Blackfriars.²⁸ Yet his response to the boy actor, while deeply engaged, is equivalent to neither Frye's “realization” nor Greenblatt's “radical passion.” In Jackson's account, the audience's response mirrors the shift within the play from the language-based relationship between the lovers at the outset to Othello's subsequent attempt to gain visual mastery over Desdemona. At first they woo each other through story-telling, hinting, and speaking (1.3.128-70); under Iago's instruction, however, Othello learns to “[w]ear” his eyes so as to be ever on the watch for signs of his wife's infidelity (3.3.198). As a consequence of this shift from an aural to an ocular axis of relationship, Desdemona is transformed into a spectacle of duplicity within Othello's theatre of the gaze. In similar fashion, the Oxford spectators are moved by the speaking and acting of the actors, but are more affected by the sight of the countenance of the dead Desdemona. Importantly, however, the audience resists the conversion of Desdemona into the iconic figure of purity exemplified by Othello's comparison of his wife to “such another world / Of one entire and perfect chrysolite” (5.2.144-45) or by A. C. Bradley's classic description—“her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute.”²⁹ On stage at Oxford, not even death can transform her into the figure of “monumental alablaster” (5.2.5) envisioned by the text and by critics such as Bradley. Instead the murdered Desdemona remains like a speaking subject: her face “entreated the pity of the spectators” (“spectantium misericordiam ipso vultu imploraret”).

Plays such as Othello, King Lear, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest work fetishistically to transform the bodies of the boy actors into sights of wonder. It is not surprising that Shakespeare and his theatre should use the actors in this way. The body as show-piece is simply more impressive than any other spectacular object—with the possible exceptions of the costly machines being developed by Inigo Jones for court masques or the fireworks or cannon-fire displays like the one that caused the destruction of the Globe in 1613. Yet however well woman-as-fetish works within the playtexts or in the context of the modern formation of aesthetic fetishism, it seems unlikely that the early modern audience would have agreed, for example, with Ferdinand's proprietary, already jealous awe at his first sight of Miranda: “My prime request, / … is (O you wonder!) / If you be a maid, or no?” (Tempest, 1.2.426-28).

Finally, let us consider the relationship between the handkerchief and Desdemona as well as the idea that the play's infusion of charisma into the body of Desdemona operates in relation to the Renaissance difference between movable property and land.³⁰ That Desdemona's body replaces the handkerchief (not to mention Othello's blackness) as an object of wonder makes good sense because bodies are more evocative than textiles, but what I want to suggest is that the play trades the handkerchief for Desdemona's body. To understand the wonder of Desdemona as the profit accruing from a sequence of exchanges within the spectacular economy of the play is to begin to grasp the production of woman-as-fetish and understand the Shakespearean fetish as continuous with ordinary life rather than as something sacred set over the ordinary.

Desdemona's amazing value is the culmination of a series of trades involving land, cash and movables, women, and status. Roderigo, very much like a number of young, landed gentlemen in Jacobean city comedy, converts his land into money in order to buy jewels in order to win the love of a woman, a treasure, who will bring him high status. But while Roderigo believes that Desdemona will confer greater sexual and social status than his land, the play, like so many city comedies, suggests the ideal that landedness is the only true basis of high status. Land is different from commodities because, in this somewhat nostalgic view, land possesses the possessor, who must live on it in order to administer and preserve it. In medieval law, all land belongs in principle inalienably to the king; general unease with the system by which land becomes virtually as exchangeable as other commodities finds expression in John of Gaunt's lament for the shameful binding of the sacred “earth of majesty, … / This other Eden” within “inky blots, and rotten parchment” (Richard II, 2.1.41-42,64).³¹ In the early seventeenth century, furthermore, the duties of landholders to their property and tenants was an acute social issue. The landed gentry flocked to London, leaving the rural population without governance, judicial supervision, or “hospitality”; some members of the gentry even lost their inherited estates while pursuing status in the spendthrift circles around the court.³² Roderigo speaks for this group when he promises to invest everything he owns in the chase after Desdemona: “I am chang'd. … I'll sell all my land” (1.3.380,382). Since land itself has become a commodity like all others, Desdemona, “full of most bless'd condition” (2.1.249-50), takes its place (as the possession that possesses) in the conferring of social status and personal worth.

So Desdemona is not merely a treasure, but the treasure of land. With wicked irony, Iago says, “[Othello] to-night hath boarded a land carract. / If it prove a lawful prize, he's made for ever” (1.2.50-51). Desdemona is as solid and valuable as land, Iago insinuates, but she is also movable and leaky like a boat. That irony infects Othello. Only by killing Desdemona can he be cured of it. Only at the end can he settle into a view of Desdemona as the permanent, possessing possession that land ideally was for the Jacobeans. This construction of Desdemona is intensely tragic for Othello. That she is Othello's homeland means that her murder renders his personhood irredeemably homeless:

          Where should Othello go?
Now—how dost thou look now? O ill-starr'd wench,
Pale as thy smock! when we shall meet at compt,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it.

[5.2.271-75]

From the shattered viewpoint of Othello's impending damnation, Desdemona's body shines out wonderfully as the promised land forever out of reach. We should perhaps bear in mind Othello's scattered, destroyed personhood when we—following, indeed, the play's hint—undertake to transvalue Othello, making it into “a play not simply to be read or seen or even studied, but possessed.”³³ We might also remember Othello's fate when we attempt to exchange the moving sight of Desdemona's body for a “magical property,” a visionary possession of Desdemona in which we try to find manifested our own “authentic immediacy.”

The eighteenth-century writer and lawyer Arthur Murphy once imagined himself at Parnassus. He saw that the land had been divided by Apollo among the great writers of the classical and modern canons. Among these figures he found Shakespeare:

The great Shakespeare sat upon a cliff, looking abroad through all creation. His possessions were very near as extensive as Homer's, but in some places, had not received sufficient culture. But even there spontaneous flowers shot up, and in the unweeded garden, which grows to seed, you might cull lavender, myrtle, and wild thyme. … Even Milton was looking for flowers to transplant into his own Paradise.³⁴

Murphy's quaint description of Shakespeare as land and as landholder may remind us of the fetishistic investments readers and critics make when they attempt to inhabit and be inhabited by a text such as Othello. Like the wandering Court Party on Prospero's Island or the wonder-struck conquistadors in the New World, we attempt to stake a claim to territories that seem able to restore us to ourselves. Instead of possessing and being possessed by Othello, however, we might do better to prize it for the multiplicity of its uses. As a useful rather than a sacred object, Othello would be, among other things, a work of literature, a script for actors, a text of some historical importance, and, by virtue of its implicit critique of ideology, a parable about the violence of wonderful representation.

Notes

1. Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 2 (1983): 61-94; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

2. Pierre Machery, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1989), 64.

3. On the emergence of the aesthetic, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); on the conditions of production of conversional wonder in Shakespeare, see my “The Politics of Theatrical Mirth: A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Mad World, My Masters, and Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 51-66.

4. Northrop Frye, “Introduction” to The Tempest, in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 1370.

5. Greenblatt, Possessions, 14.

6. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Subsequent references will be included parenthetically in the text.

7. Frye, “Introduction,” 1372.

8. Greenblatt, Possessions, 1.

9. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London 1612; facsimile reprint New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941), B4.

10. Thomas Platter, quoted in the Riverside Shakespeare, 1839. The Riverside prints both the original German text and the translation used here.

11. Sir Henry Wotton, quoted in the Riverside Shakespeare, 1842.

12. See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 44-48.

13. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (London, 1579; facsimile reprint New York: Garland, 1973), C1v.

14. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583; facsimile reprint Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1972), L7v.

15. Henry Parrot, Laquei ridiculosi: or Springes for Woodcocks (London, 1613), C6v.

16. Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 264.

17. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957), 63-64.

18. Leonard Digges, commendatory poem prefixed to “Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent.” (1640), quoted in the Riverside Shakespeare, 1846.

19. John Heminge and Henry Condell, “To the great Variety of Readers,” facsimile reprint in the Riverside Shakespeare, 63.

20. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 83 and 93.

21. Kenneth Burke, “Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method,” Hudson Review 4 (1951): 166-67.

22. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 83.

23. Eagleton, Ideology, 78.

24. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 137.

25. Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 84.

26. Richard Wilson, “‘A Mingled Yarn’: Shakespeare and the Cloth Workers,” Literature and History 12 (1986): 169.

27. The original Latin text, along with the translation used here, is quoted in the Riverside Shakespeare, 1852; note that since the Riverside encloses the entire translation in brackets, its own internal editorial additions are enclosed in parentheses.

28. See Dictionary of National Biography, entry on Henry Jackson, for an account of his character and career.

29. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (1904; reprint London: Macmillan, 1964), 145.

30. On woman as land, see Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories.”

31. See Kenelm Edward Digby, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Real Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875).

32. See Felicity Heal, “The Crown, the Gentry and London: The Enforcement of Proclamation, 1596-1640,” in Law and Government under the Tudors, ed. Claire Cross et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 211-26.

33. Frye, “Introduction,” 1372.

34. Arthur Murphy, Gray's-Inn Journal (London, 1786), quoted in Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), epigraph.