SOURCE: Moisan, Thomas. “Relating Things to the State: ‘The State’ and the Subject of Othello.” In Othello: New Critical Essays, edited by Philip C. Kolin, pp. 189-202. New York: Routledge, 2002.

[In the following essay, Moisan considers the role of the Venetian state in shaping the characters and tragic outcome of Othello.]

Yea and some forrain men and strangers haue beene adopted into this number of citizens, eyther in regard of their great nobility, or that they had beene dutifull towardes the state, or els had done unto them some notable seruice.

(Contareni, 18)

Men in Great Place, are thrice Seruants: Seruants of the Soueraigne or State; Seruants of Fame; and Seruants of Businesse. So as they haue no Freedome; neither in their Persons; nor in their Actions; nor in their Times.

(Bacon, “Of Great Place,” 42)

From “honest” to “dilate,” from “what's the matter?” to “My husband?” Othello has been shown to be home to a number of aurally and thematically resonant expressions, expressions that ramify in significance even as they impress themselves reiteratively upon the ear, contributing to what G. B. Shaw, writing of Othello, termed “the splendor of its word music” (135).¹ One is reminded of such expressions by the collocation whose occurrence, and recurrence, draw the attention of this essay, namely, “the state.” On the face of it, to be sure, the interpretative possibilities annunciated by “the state” seem modest. Lacking the ironic power that builds in the numerous variations we hear on the word “honest,” and less susceptible to the revealing paranoumasic dissonances that Patricia Parker has heard in “delate” and “dilate,” references to “the state” seem to be what their contexts suggest: collectively an ellipsis for Venice the city-state, metonyms for the Venetian polity, for Venice in its governing authority and power. Indeed, context would seem to render it difficult to hear in the phrase a reference to “state” as “condition”; we do not hear anyone complain that there is something rotten in, or with, the state of Venice. Nor is the word “state” paired off against its etymological and phonological kin, “estate,” which does not occur in the play. Instead, with the long vowel of its iamb giving it insinuatingly easy entree to the rhythms and sound of both prose and verse,² references to “the state” make the domain and claims of public affairs audible and rather talismanic presences in the opening act of the play and in its closing minutes: the claims of “the state” set the geographical agenda of the play; the recollection of service done “the state” brings the play to its “bloody period”; the intent to “relate” what has happened to “the state” brings the play to its smoothly rhyming close.

“The state” occurs more frequently in Othello than in Hamlet, with its princely protagonist and “statist” preoccupations; it occurs more often than in Shakespeare's earlier “Venetian” play, The Merchant of Venice, where a spate of references to “the state” clustered in the “trial” scene intones what Venice is legally exacted to permit and what it is legally permitted to exact (4.1.222, 312, 354, 365, 371, 373; also, 3.2.278; 3.3.29).³ Indeed, references to “the state” occur more frequently in Othello than in any other of Shakespeare's plays except Coriolanus, a coincidence that would seem anomalous. For, however one assesses the various topical political readings that have been offered for Coriolanus, Coriolanus is still a play whose fable centrally concerns “the state,” something that would seem less self-evidently true about Othello. In Coriolanus “the state” of Rome is part of the focal agon of the play, making Coriolanus and undoing him quite, its presence sustained and citations of it evenly distributed over the five acts of the play; in Othello, on the other hand, the role of “the state” and the Venice it represents seem thematically relegated to the margins they help spatially and aurally to define, the public sphere they evoke in acts 1 and 5 muted in and displaced by the domestic and claustrophobically private action of acts 2, 3, and 4. In short, “the state” seems integral to the subject of Coriolanus, but not to that of Othello.

Or so at least we might infer from Verdi and his librettist, Boito, who, locating the operatic center of the play in, in fact, the heavily domestic and claustrophobically private action on Cyprus, effectively mute references to “the state” by excising Shakespeare's entire first act along with Venice and “the state.” In doing so, however, Verdi and Boito are only subtracting what Shakespeare appears to have added, at least if we follow Geoffrey Bullough's lead in taking as the principal source for Othello Cinthio's story of the “Moorish Captain.” In Cinthio Shakespeare would have found references to the Signoria (Bullough, 242; 252)—which he absorbs (1.2.17)—but not to “the state.” What difference does the addition of “the state” make? Most obviously, the presence of “the state,” with its foreign strategic concerns and its debate over whether it is Rhodes or Cyprus that is likely to be in danger, brings into the discourse of the play the threat of the Turk, “the angrie Turke” whom “of all others,” Richard Knolles wrote (1603) “that understanding and provident State” of Venice “most dread” (Bullough, 262). How potent was the fear of “turning Turk” or forced conversion to the infidel for an early modern English audience has been interrogated recently by Daniel J. Vitkus (“Turning Turk in Othello”), and it may have had an especial immediacy for the original audience of Othello, who, as Virginia Mason Vaughan has suggested, were likely to have known about the fall of the historical Cyprus to the Turk some years before the play, and might have seen in the ruination of Venice's chosen general an admonition for the Christian West (34). Less obvious, perhaps, is the effect the presence of “the state” has upon the definition of the general himself. At the very least, to make Othello the most significant servant of the mysterium of Venetian power invests Othello and his story with a tragic gravitas that his counterpart in Cinthio's fiction—a fiction that evokes those steamy “enchantments of Circe” Roger Ascham derides in Italian novelle (67-68)—simply does not have. The repeated reference to Venice in act 1 as “the state” elevates Othello from mere employee of the city to savior of the nation—or at least part of its commercial empire—someone so vital that “the state” “[c]annot,” as Iago remarks, “with safety cast him” (1.1.148).

Yet references to “the state” do more than provide a courtesy upgrade to this tragedy without a crowned head. Rather, in what is to follow I would suggest that “the state” and Othello are tied to each other in a relationship both mutually exploitative and mutually revealing, one that leads Othello to define himself by his reading of “the state,” and that makes “the state” an interested participant in Othello's tragedy. Moreover, even as a number of recent analyses have invaluably drawn our attention to the culturally charged images in the play of disclosure, to the darknesses that whet the obsession within the play with “ocular proof” (Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins; Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello, Issues of Death, 141-67; and Arthur L. Little, Jr.), a consideration of the role of “the state” complicates our appreciation, not simply of the discursive in the play, but of the sense in which the play draws attention to discourse, and to its medial and ultimately repressive relationship with the visual. It is for “the state” that certain accounts get delivered; it is with the intent of “relating” things to “the state” that the stage is cleared and the sight blocked off of “the tragic loading” of the bed. Indeed, though Richard Helgerson's caution against reading the early modern notion of “state” through anything even as little removed in time as a Hobbesian lens (295) makes us cautious in treating “the state” as an abstraction of political theory, still, the discursive interaction of protagonist and “state” in Othello, with “the state” vetting discourse and Othello shaping discourse on “cue,” evokes the relationship of two powerful institutions whose negotiation was an ineluctable reality of Shakespeare's existence: the state—or the crown with which the state was identified—and the theater.

But what is “the state” in Othello, and would a contemporary audience have heard in the term anything but a transparent marker for Venice? Though it is unlikely that the audience would have felt invited to ponder the term as an abstraction, surely even an early Jacobean audience was not unfamiliar with efforts to describe the workings of “the state,” or its equally familiar—if less prosodically commodious—synonym, “the commonweal.” “Amongst many the great and deepe deuices of worldly wisedome, for the maintenance and preseruing of human societies (the ground and stay of mans earthly blisse) the fairest, firmest, and the best, was the framing and forming of Commonweales …” So Knolles alliteratively opines at the outset of a work he produced not long after his The Generall Historie of the Turkes, his translation (1606) of Jean Bodin's The Six Bookes of a Commonweale (“To the Reader,” iv). Still, in Othello the reiterated appearances of “the state” have the effect of underscoring Venice in the exercise of its governing power and leaving unstated anything that would suggest that large complex organism Bodin and Knolles thought of as the “commonweal”; when, after all, Othello refers to “the state” as anything but “the state” or Venice he chooses a transliteration for the Venetian version of an executive council, “the signiory” (1.2.17).

And, to be sure, in this case any hint of mystery and abstraction that builds in the repetition of “the state” may well have reminded the audience how little they understood Venice itself. After all, as editors have observed, it is not clear that the playwright himself had fully mastered the technicalities of various Venetian governmental offices (Saunders, 64; n. 1.2.14; Honigmann 128, n. 1.2.13-14)—perhaps a reason in itself for referring to matters of state as often as possible by the umbrella term … “the state”! Nor if, as has been frequently suggested, the playwright looked at Lewis Lewkenor's translation of Gasparo Contareni's The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice (1599), would he have found the picture it presented of the intricate formulation of the Venetian system of government uniformly lucid, either in the model of government produced, or in the means that produced it.⁴ “Shakespeare saw Venice as part of his world,” E. A. J. Honigmann has observed, “but not so Cyprus” (11), a valid distinction if on no other grounds than that by the time of the play Cyprus had succumbed to Ottoman invasion, while Venice was still at least in the Christian orb. And the sense that Venice, for all its celebrated, or notorious, opulence was nonetheless culturally familiar has been helpful to a reading of the play that would parse it in culturally oppositional terms, with Othello the “outsider” and “extravagant and wheeling stranger” and Venice, or “the state,” the establishment, indeed, a reading to which Brabantio, Roderigo, and Iago all in various ways find it convenient to subscribe: “This is Venice; / My house is not a grange” (1.1.105-106). Still, a glance at the commentary Lewkenor provided at the outset of his translation suggests that for this Englishman at least, unblushing purveyor, as Vaughan has noted, of the myth of Venice (17), “the state” of Venice was best appreciated as an exciting, “culturally broadening” conundrum. From the preface “To the Reader” to Lewkenor's translation of Contareni it is Venice itself that emerges as the “extravagant and wheeling stranger.” Recalling that Homer especially praises Ulysses for the breadth of his travels, for the fact that “Multorum mores vidit & urbes” (Ad), Lewkenor—who might have agreed with the Duke that Othello's adventurous “tale would win my daughter too”—offers a paean to the difference that is Venice in which two notes predominate: the “strangeness” of everything connected with Venice—its history, its government, its prosperity, its physical situation; “wonder” at having observed these things. Venice, the veritably floating signifier? Lewkenor signifies the intensity of his wonder at the thought by employing as an adverb of “otherness” a word we hear repeatedly in Othello to suggest moral hideousness: “what euer hath the worlde brought forth more monstrously strange, then that so great & glorious a Citie should be seated in the middle of the sea. … ?” (A3v).⁵

Not, of course, that “the state” remains an abstraction throughout the play, and, indeed, it is in its selective moments of demystification that “the state” and the Venice it represents come to be drawn into the play as actors, at least as proximate occasions, in the circumstances that shape Othello's tragedy. In no scene are the officers and workings of “the state” rendered more humanly recognizable than in the momentous council scene (1.3), and particularly in the first forty-five lines, where we come upon the Duke and two senators attempting to puzzle out the sense of conflicting reports they have received on the Turks' intentions (1-43), a scene that seems especially demystified when compared with the description of the Great Council of three thousand described by Lewkenor, that body which deliberates so efficiently, and with so divine a peaceableness, and so without all tumult and confusion,” Lewkenor gushes, “that it rather seemeth to bee an assembly of Angels, then of men” (A2d). Decidedly more sublunary, the effort of the three officers of “the state” at disambiguation puts “the state” in the business of reading signs and thus gives “the state” something in common with numerous enigma-pondering characters throughout the play, with the notable difference that the Duke and his colleagues actually manage to reason their way to a correct answer.⁶ Nor is it the only time in the play at which “the state” turns out to refer to personages or collectivities. In an instance we noted earlier, Iago, who has already displayed a knack for demystifying august Venetian institutions—parrying Brabantio's charge, “Thou art a villain,” with “you are a Senator” (1.1.117)—and can always be relied upon to “demystify” anyone or, in this case, thing by attributing to it a recognizably humanly self-serving motivation, and follows hard upon Roderigo's hendyadic invocation of “the state” as some abstract guarantor of justice—“the justice of the state” (91.1.139) to predict, correctly, that “the state” will find Othello too valuable to “cast him” (1.1.147). Brabantio, anxious to assert his importance at a moment when that importance seems to have been disregarded, makes the state a fraternity to which he belongs, certain that the Duke or any of his “brothers of the state” would feel his grievance (1.2.96). And in its most impersonated form, “the state” “becomes a “they,” when Othello reminds those about to lead him away that he had “done the state some service, and they know't” (5.2.354).

Still, when read in the diverse contexts in which it is cited, “the state” as an entity appears something of a chimera, less a thing or concept with definable terms than a rhetorical inflection. We encounter it as an affiliative tag-on that enables Brabantio both to flash his influence and ground his personal outrage and complaint in a presumption of socio-political empathy: “The Duke himself, / Or any of my brothers of the state, / Cannot but feel this wrong as 'twere their own” (1.2.95-7). We hear it invoked to justify why something is to be done, not done, or done later; a piece of allusion and illusion central to praeteritive devices of which Iago is only the most malevolent, not the sole, practitioner. “What if I do obey?” asks Othello, of course rhetorically, when Brabantio orders him to prison. “How may the Duke be therewith satisfied, / Whose messengers are here about my side / Upon some present business of the state / To bring me to him?” (1.2.87-91). And having enabled Othello to elude detention at the beginning of the play, the discourse of “the state” serves Othello at the end as well in the literally breathtaking praeterition with which Othello takes his leave, putting his “bloody period” to a lively demonstration of the sort of service to “the state” that he had begun this nineteen-line, “word or two” speech by reminding the assembled emissaries of the state that he would not continue to remind them of: “I have done the state some service, and they know't—No more of that” (5.2.339-40). “The state” occupies the final rhyme and image of the play, but its concluding centrality as the authority offstage to which Lodovico will “[t]his heavy act with heavy heart relate,” not to mention the nature of the report it is likely to receive, are complicated by the image onstage of the tragically loaded bed, the “object” which “poisons sight,” and which Lodovico orders to be “hid.” In the final piece of praeterition perpetrated in the play “the state” is kept in shadow: the audience is invited to pass over what it has seen and is not likely to forget; to look forward to a report it will never hear to an entity it cannot see; instead of enjoying a privileged position as the repository of what has happened, “the state” is relegated to an alternative realm of report, a realm and report rendered necessarily more shadowy in the degree to which they are to be denied the fullness of sight, a realm and report associated through the words of Lodovico with suggestions of repression and censorship.

Shadowy as the representation of “the state” may be, things still get done in its name; indeed, it is an insight of the play into the paradox of Venetian power, and perhaps the power of states in general, that we never discern the power of Venetian authority so much as when we do not see it. When, for example, Lodovico exercises his authority to announce to Othello after his murder of Desdemona has been discovered that “Your power and your command is taken off, / And Cassio rules in Cyprus” (5.2.331-32), we may initially feel that we are in the presence of Venetian justice, until we recall that what sound like penalties meted out to Othello for his crime are performative statements of administrative actions that “the state” had already taken, news of which, it is supposed, Lodovico had brought to Othello in the letter from Venice (4.1.225). Since Othello had only arrived in Cyprus in act 2, clearly “the state” had wasted no time, or, rather, operated offstage and by its own “dilatory” time to remove the Moor once, presumably, it had somehow ascertained that the military threat to Cyprus had passed. Othello's transgression only allowed “the state” to give a punitive articulation and formality to actions intended to be muted in the silences of the epistolary form.

Yet as the visit of Lodovico to Cyprus can by itself only hint, the nature of “the state” in Othello is most fully on display in the complexities of its relationship with its “all in all sufficient” general. That Shakespeare seems to have conned the notion that aliens were permitted, even encouraged, to contribute their talents and services, artisanal, commercial, or military, to the Venetian state is evident, and A. D. Nuttall makes a useful observation when he declares that for Shakespeare Venetian tolerance, indeed, use of the exotically different would merely have been a reflection in its political culture of the exoticism and difference that defined Venice's physical environment. “Venice,” Nuttall remarks, listing just a bit towards the coloratura, “is for Shakespeare an anthropological laboratory. Itself nowhere, suspended between sea and sky, it receives and utilizes all kinds of people” (141).

That Shakespeare was aware that the Venetian state received “all kinds of people,” at least as business traders, was clear in The Merchant of Venice (3.3.27). His sense—and his character Othello's sense—of how Venice utilized “strangers” could only have been complicated by exposure to Contareni, who at once celebrates the welcome aliens received, while giving clues of the limits the Venetian state placed on its inclusiveness, particularly in its relationship with aliens it retained to address its military affairs. In Lewkenor's translation of Contareni one finds, for example, an accounting of the special legal processes instituted to expedite suits brought by “strangers,” with the ostensibly benign rationale that they “should not be molested and lingred off with long delayes, but quickly come to an ende of their suites” (105). Implicit, of course, in the very attention paid to the benign and genuinely more than just treatment of “strangers,” is the fact that aliens normally remain aliens and outside the citizenship reserved for “Venetians,” natives of “the state,” and far from all of those. One thinks of the norm when Contareni duly notes a significant exception, an exception for merit, one that echoes memorably in Othello's parting apologia—even in its association, by proximity, of “the state” with a plural pronoun. It happens, Contareni observes, that “some forrain men and strangers haue beene adopted into this number of citizens, eyther in regard of their great nobility, or that they had beene dutifull towardes the state, or else had done vnto them some notable seruice” (18). “[S]ome notable seruice,” naturally, could refer to the deeds done by those mercenary generals who tend to Venice's military foreign policy, by the likes of Othello and, perhaps, the as yet unidentified Marcus Luccicos, for whom the Duke sends along with “the valiant Moor” (1.3.45-8). Yet a scan of Contareni's comments on the attitude of “the state” towards affairs and personages military reveals an ambivalence that would render any mercenary general's hold on public esteem precarious. With an early modern nod to the policy of preparedness, leaders are encouraged to cultivate “the offices of warre,” but only “for the cause of peace” (9), while a historical aside reminds the reader that the founders of “the state” “alwaies with greater regard and reckoning applyed their minds to the maintenance of peace then to glorie of warres” (15). So much for “the plumed troop, and the big wars / That make ambition virtue” (3.3349-50); to thrive in Venice Othello's occupation might indeed be gone, or rather, the cast of mind that could find “content” (348) in battle might well be distrusted. That distrust surfaces, as it were, in a Venetian law that gives ancient Roman practice a nautical twist and prohibits any returning “Generall, Legate, or Captaine of a nauie” from bringing his war gallies into the city of Venice, and obliges him to disband at a point about a hundred miles away from Venice. And though, as Honigmann reminds us (7), Lewkenor's translation mentions that the “Captaine Generall” of the Venetian army is always a “straunger,” the text adds the significant qualification that the “Captaine Generall” “hath no authority to doe or deliberate any thing without the aduice of the Legates,” the political officers “who neuer stirre from the side of the Captaine Generall” (132). In Othello this anti-militarism attributed to the Venetian state goes unvoiced, conveniently displaced by the threat posed by the Turk, not to Venice itself, but to a colonial and commercial vital interest, and a threat not unacknowledged. Yet the cultural anxieties that, as Emily Bartels has shown, a Western audience was likely to have brought towards a Moorish protagonist may only have been reinforced by the peculiar symbiosis of Venice and its military factotums. Read in this context, the determination arrived at offstage by “the state” to have Othello replaced for unspecified reasons by Cassio—a change that seems all the more peremptory to an audience that has not been given any reason to believe that a substantial amount of time has elapsed in the play—seems merely to give dramatic emphasis to the uncertain position of the warrior and the stranger in Venice recorded in Contareni and Lewkenor.

That Othello reflects the uncertainty of the soldier's and stranger's position in the Venetian state helps, of course, to define the vulnerability that is his undoing with Iago in act 3. My concern here, however, is not to revisit the psychic dynamics of that scene, and ask why Othello falls or falls so rapidly in it, but to consider the role “the state” has in shaping the vulnerable self that Othello exhibits in the play, in the beginning and at the end. We observed above that Othello's memorable protest, at “the end,” that “I have done the state some service—and they know it” recalls closely the section in Lewkenor's translation that describes how “forrain men and strangers” can attain citizenship by “Notable seruise,” by merit and deeds. The recollection is worth noting because Othello's outcry very much sounds like the protest of injured merit, or of merit unrecognized, or, rather, of someone who believes that “the state” about to cart him away would be susceptible to arguments from merit—“and they know it.” The particular line Othello employs here to buy time with which to dictate his statement and do away with himself is interesting. For one thing, we had not been acutely aware that Othello was suffering the pangs of injured or unrecognized merit, and the circumstances seem hardly propitious for raising questions of merit. On the other hand, however, the tack Othello takes here reminds us of Othello's first appearance in the play, when Othello dismisses the concerns Iago so helpfully raises about the harm the enraged Brabantio may do, on the grounds that “[My services which I have done the signiory / Shall outongue his complaints” (1.2.18-19). Michael Neill has referred to the “civil self” of Othello from which Iago strips away the fabric to expose the “dark” secrets Iago “has taught the audience to expect“(Issues of Death, 167). In Othello's comment to Iago in this first appearance we get a hint of what the fabric of that “civil self” may consist. Othello stakes his survival and advancement on the very Venetian notion of a meritocracy; that is, he defines himself according to what he believes “the state” will recognize and reward. In doing so, however, he chooses to suppress another part of himself, or, indeed, another version of himself, that part “’Tis yet to know,” the lineage of “royal siege,” of which, in the first piece of praeterition in which he engages in the play, he at once brags while claiming he will not brag of it until bragging is in vogue (1.2.19-23). Praeterition it is, but it is a piece of praeterition that ultimately gets nullified, in that that other self Othello claims he will suppress for awhile actually stays suppressed. “Men in Great Fortunes”, Bacon claims in the essay that provides one of the epigraphs to this essay, “are strangers to themselves” (42). Othello has not defined himself by his fortune, but he follows the path Bacon sees men “Of Great Place,” who are enslaved to “the state,” following to self-alienation. Small wonder that in his final speech, just when he has ensured himself a captive audience and can say anything he might want to say about himself, his sense of subjectivity should lead him to reenact an episode from his vita and subsume, indeed, extinguish himself in deeds done for “the state.”

Still, as Othello tells Iago, it is not exactly his deeds that Othello claims will redeem him with “the state,” but the ability of his deeds to “outongue” Brabantio's complaints. At a glance one might take this to be Othello's appeal to meritocracy and a deprecation of rhetoric, an assertion that his deeds “speak for themselves,” or that “actions speak louder than words.” Yet as the scene in the council meeting unfolds, “outongue” proves, of course, to be less metaphoric, or closer to personification than one at first supposes. For rather like “the state” itself, Othello's deeds in the play exist as rhetorical fodder, allusions to accomplishments designed to make points for or about Othello. It is not, we know, Othello's deeds as such that lead the Duke to “think” that “this tale would win my daughter too” (1.3.171), or even the tale itself, but a metatale, Othello's telling of how he had been accustomed to telling it, or as James Calderwood has described it, “a voice telling about himself telling about himself” (294). In approving that voice, “the state” does more than vet the rhetoric in which Othello fashions himself; rather, “the state” helps to define that self as rhetorical.

And well might “the state” claim some authority at judging rhetoric, since “the state” itself proves attentive to rhetoric, if ultimately transparent at its use, when it serves its interests. Nowhere is this more on display than in the council scene, where Shakespeare gives “the state” its fullest personification in the play and gives most audible voice to the celebrations of Venice's deliberative wisdom he might have found in Contareni and Lewkenor. That “the state” has interests is dramatically underscored when its spokesmen come to perceive those interests to be threatened, when in rapid succession the Duke and the senators deduce the threat to Cyprus only to hear Brabantio bring charges of witchcraft against their best hope at resisting that threat. “We are very sorry for't,” the response of “All” to Brabantio's accusations (1.3.73) is heartfelt, even though the sentiment it embodies probably transcends fraternal regard for the injury suffered by their “brother of the state,” Brabantio. And, indeed, it is a measure of their moral sense, or at least of their desire to live up to the moral reputation of the Venetian state, that its representatives on stage should feel an ethical dilemma at the possibility that defending Cyprus and avenging Brabantio might not be compatible goals, a dilemma that is made all the more embarrassing by the firm pledge of judicial severity the Duke issues—“yea, though our proper son / Stood in your action” (1.3.69-70)—immediately before he learns who the accused is. When “the state” is spared the necessity of condemning its military champion, it is, of course, still left with the dilemma of reconciling itself, and Brabantio, to the marriage of the fair skinned-Desdemona and the dark-skinned Moor. Wooed by Othello's own rhetoric and bound by Venice's reputation of toleration towards strangers, especially strangers that are to help it defend its possessions against the Turk, “the state” in the cloying balm of the Duke's rhymed couplets, employs a trope to deny the seemingly undeniable fact of skin color, in the process endorsing the sort of color-coded metaphysics that, as Neill has demonstrated, ultimately enables Othello to demonize Desdemona by demonizing himself (Issues of Death, 144-44):

If virtue no delighted beauty lack,
Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

(1.3.289-90)

What the Duke so fecklessly does here, Lodovico will much more effectively do later, in fact ending the play in the process. That is, both align the authority of “the state” and rhetorical discourse to deny nothing less than the evidence of sight: the Duke formally bolsters the authority of his rank with the authority of rhymed couplets to claim that black can really be white; Lodovico, as we have noted before, forcibly averts everyone's glance from the sight-poisoning bed and diverts attention to a narrative to come, the narrative to be “related.” In the process, the invention of “the state,” its extrapolation on Shakespeare's putative source in Cinthio, provides a vehicle by means of which Othello appears to tame the narrative it has staged, devising strategies of domestication, familiarization, and ultimately recuperation while calling attention to the ways in which that narrative ultimately eludes control. Indeed, we get a hint of this in the scene in the council meeting when the Duke first calls for and then blesses Othello's account of how he used to account for his past and its adventures. Again, what wins Othello sympathy in this speech, before Desdemona arrives to exonerate him formally, is as much the performance of the speech as its content, its collection of wild and unfamiliar things and experiences harnessed within Othello's recognizably and sonorously attractive delivery. The Duke's prompt, “Say it, Othello” (1.3.126), or what Honigmann calls an unusual turn of phrase” (143, n.1.3.128), does not so much command Othello to speak as cue him to perform, and exemplifies both the way in which “the state” domesticates Othello's “extravagant strangeness” and part of the “service” through which Othello ingratiates himself with “the state.”⁷ In “Othello Furens” Robert S. Miola has charted a number of instances in which Othello's language is suffused with recollections of Seneca's Hercules Furens, a possible source of the argot that Iago claims is laden with “bumbast circumstance / Horribly stuff'd with epithites of war” (1.1.13-14). Invested with a familiarly theatrically wild, heroic language that, much to Iago's stated chagrin, is part of the winning persona Othello wears in “the state,” Othello and “the state” demonstrate the terms of their peculiar, mutually cultivating, mutually exploitative relationship. Indeed, that moment so central to Othello's need for ocular proof, the scenario Iago stages with Cassio for Othello's benefit (4.1.103-68), only demonstrates the way in which the imposition of a conventional dramatic form can hide sight and misinform, since Othello becomes enraged, less at what he sees than by the words he thinks he hears, the script from familiar plays he is imaginatively writing into what he sees before him, with Cassio a swaggering stage Roman: “Do [you] triumph, Roman? Do you triumph?” (4.1.118).

Finally, Lodovico's determination at the end of the play to hide the bed and what it reveals and his announcement of his intention to “relate” what had happened to “the state” enlist “the state” in a recuperative strategy that attempts to rewrite what has happened in familiarly, manageably, and conventionally tragic terms, terms that exempt us from having to pose or cope with the harder questions the events onstage force. To Iago, now conveniently demonized as “O Spartan dog” (5.2.361), incomprehensibly evil but, then, beyond the need to comprehend because undeniably inhuman, is shifted all of the responsibility for “the tragic loading of this bed; / This is thy work” (5.2.363-64). Simultaneously Othello emerges as a tragic icon and victim: his suicide provides a theatrically familiar demonstration that “he was great of heart” (5.2.361), and spares “the state” the burden of having to learn from his own testimony “the nature of [his] fault.” In the degree to which the recuperative strategy doesn't work, leaving in our sight the bed and the questions it provokes, underscoring as a strategy of denial the narrative Lodovico will present to “the state,” and affiliating “the state” itself with the agency of censor, Othello presents as an undomesticatable form drama itself.

Notes

1. See Granville-Barker, 130; Moisan; Parker, “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘dilation’ and ‘delation’ in Othello, 54-74, Shakespeare from the Margins 229-72; Shaw.

2. So “the state” slips seems to slip formulaically into the rhythm of an editorial gloss by Kittredge on the name Marcus Luccicos, who Kittredge surmises is “[d]oubtless some foreigner in the service of the Venetian state” (16, n.1.3.44).

3. Unless otherwise stated, references to Shakespeare's text are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). References to “the state” are not affected by the notorious variations between Folio and Quarto.

4. So, for example, we have Contareni's account of Venice's “great counsell”—the Duke's voting powers on which Shakespeare has been said to have misrepresented—wherein “the shew of a popular estate” is seasoned, somehow, by just enough of “entermixture of the gouernment of the nobility” to ensure a meritocracy, a salutary hybridity that draws the marginal gloss, “The commonwealth of Venice is neither a popular estate, nor an Olygarchy, but a wel tempered gouernment betweene both” (33-4).

5. Kenneth Muir (187) has detected resemblances between Lewkenor's language and the language of the play in the Council Scene (.3), including the parallel between the modesty topos with which Othello prefaces his defense against Brabantio's accusation (1.3. 81-2)

6. Vaughan (20-21) cites speculation, or as she dubs it, “wild surmise,” that the representation of the deliberations of the Venetian Senate in 1.3 could have had a topical significance and coincided with a visit by Venetian ambassadors to the English court around the time when Othello was first performed.

7. Indeed, as the play unfolds, Othello's standing with “the state” continues to be, in modern bureaucratic parlance, “performance based,” but his “performance” is measured by criteria other than his military prowess, which, after all, becomes moot once nature intervenes to destroy the Turkish fleet. When Lodovico's arrival in Cyprus triggers Othello's outburst against Desdemona, Lodovico's indignant question, “Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate / Call all in all sufficient” (4.1.264-5), suggests that “the state” reserves the right to define “sufficiency” by a number of criteria, including the decorum of one's public behavior. When Lodovico rebukes Othello for striking Desdemona by invoking Venice as an arbiter, “this would not be believ'd in Venice” (4.1.242), “the state” emerges as much as an aesthetic and theatrical critic as a moral censor.

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