At vero Desdemona illa apud nos a marito occisa, quanquam optime semper causam egit, interfecta tamen magis; cum in lecto decumbens spectantium misericordiam ipso vultu imploraret.—spectator account of production at Oxford University in 1610.1
[But truly that Desdemona was killed among us by her husband, although she always pleaded her case well, for all the more she was slain; when resting on her bed, she called with her very countenance the pity of those watching.]
In “Traveling Cultures,” James Clifford proposes a view of culture based on opposing yet interconnected concepts of dwelling and traveling, “roots” and “routes”; he argues for “a comparative cultural studies approach to specific histories, tactics, everyday practices of dwelling, and traveling: traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling.”2 This chapter explores these interconnected concepts of roots and routes in Othello’s tragic journey. The experience of dwelling in Othello hinges on a contrast between European and non-European housing conditions and on the recovery of racially and culturally-charged attitudes associated with darkness, blackness, and shadows.
In Othello, Shakespeare juxtaposes two ways of life: one European, sedentary, urban, home-centered, represented by Venice and centered on Brabantio’s house; and the other revolves around a space elsewhere, reflecting mobile, non-permanent forms of dwelling—what Othello calls an “unhousèd” condition of lifelong wandering. Shakespeare compares characters who dwell in houses, and those who inhabit mobile, non-permanent, or temporary places. Therefore, one underscores European concepts of home life, household, hospitality; the other relates to ever-shifting, self-erasing images of exotic travel and improbable experiences in far away places.
The image of the dark, empty house looms large in Othello, as does the pervasive nature of darkness, which blurs domestic boundaries, redefines the perception of architectural space, and exposes assumptions about race relations. Therefore, the first part of this chapter will focus on the concept of home; in particular, I will argue that “home” engages three different living arrangements centered on ill-defined vast ancestral African landscapes of Othello’s childhood and youth, Brabantio’s palazzo in Venice, and Othello and Desdemona’s state apartments at the mighty fortress of Cyprus. The second part of the chapter will explore a cluster of images associated with blackness, darkness, and shadows. Throughout the play, Shakespeare weaves narratives connecting and contrasting home spaces and alien spaces elsewhere.
According to Susan Stanford Friedman, Walter Benjamin suggests that the history of narrative situates the storyteller in relation to the spatial “archaic types” of the seaman “who has come from afar” with a story to tell, and the “man who has stayed at home … and knows the local tales and traditions.”3 Friedman concludes: “Home and elsewhere—both spatial locations—are for Benjamin the coconstituents of story, not incidental to it, as narrative tradition has evolved through time and across many societies.”4 Friedman distrusts a narrative poetics that sees space as “‘the description’ that interrupts the flow of temporality or as the ‘setting’ that functions as static background for plot, or as the ‘scene’ in which the narrative events unfold in time.”5 Affirming the centrality of space, she proposes that “Such borders, frontiers, are not the background of narrative, mere description where time unfolds its plot. They are, instead, the generative energy of narrative, the space that contains time.”6 Clifford, Benjamin, and Friedman invite us to rethink our cultural experiences in terms of narratives oscillating between “sites of dwelling and travel.”7 This is precisely where I situate the experience of dwelling and the representation of home in Shakespeare’s Othello.
The power of narrative in Othello has long been recognized. Stephen Greenblatt analyzed the extent to which Iago “construct[s] a narrative into which he inscribes (‘by this hand’) those around him”: “[Iago] does not need a profound or even reasonably accurate understanding of his victims; he would rather deal in probable impossibilities than improbable possibilities.”8 Othello himself fits Benjamin’s paradigm of the storyteller who comes from afar and tells a powerful story. Indeed, he wins Desdemona’s heart, as he puts it, by telling Brabantio and Desdemona “the story of my life / From year to year—the battles, sieges, fortunes / That I have passed” (1.3.129–31). I am not, however, primarily interested in analyzing the functions of these storytellers; rather, like James Clifford, I will focus on roots and routes; and like Friedman, I will argue for space as providing “the generative energy” of the dramatic narrative.
Desdemona entreated Othello to “dilate”9 the “pilgrimage” of his life, which consists of a series of adventures and disasters, which he describes as “disastrous chances,” “accidents by flood and field,” “hairbreadth scapes,” “slavery,” and “remission” [freedom] from slavery (1.3.134–38). From his childhood, Othello has been on the go, never anchored in a home and never supported by family life. Desdemona’s empathy creates an emotional bond that binds them together:
My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of kisses,
She swore in faith ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange;
‘Twas pitiful, ‘twas passing pitiful. (1.3.158–61).
Othello concludes that “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” (1.3.167–8). However, in the Venetian Senate Chamber, Othello sketches only in the most general way that story; it is nothing more than “the story of his telling Desdemona the stories of his life.”10 His story, however, is a marker of his alien status; his blackness, as Virginia Vaughan notes, is “the visual signifier of his Otherness.”11
Nowhere else does Othello volunteer more specific details about his life. The importance of the story becomes apparent, but Shakespeare leaves the characters, alongside the play’s audience, with unanswered questions about Othello’s roots, let alone the routes of Othello’s journey. Perhaps, Claude Lévi-Strauss puts it best when he describes a particularly clumsy, unfriendly building—“a tube of cement” of a hotel in Goiania, Brazil, which he visited in 1937—as “a place of transit not of residence.”12 That is precisely my point: Othello has encountered many places of transit, but has not found a place of residence.
Throughout the play, Shakespeare obscures rather than clarifies Othello’s birthplace. Nothing in the play connects Othello to a precise place, but rather to a large geographical and cultural region. In referring to his origins, Othello relies upon a storehouse of widespread popular images and beliefs about Africa, rather than recollections of identifiable locations. In Shakespeare’s time, a “Moor” was a generic term that did not necessarily identify a specific homeland.13 It could mean a “tawny” or “white” Moor, such as the Prince of Morocco, or the Moorish woman, to whom Lorenzo refers as the “Negro” Lancelot got “with child” (3.5.34–5) in The Merchant of Venice, as well as Muly Mahamet, also from Morocco, and the character, Zareo, “a Moor of Argier,” in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1594?).14 Oftentimes, the word Blackamoor15 appears to label a sub-Saharan African, such as Aaron, who is also simply called “the Moor,” in Titus Andronicus, and who appears as a defiant black man in Henry Peacham’s drawing of a composite scene from Shakespeare’s tragedy.16 “Moor” was also applied to a Moslem from Ethiopia, the Sudan, and even the Indian subcontinent (OED). George Abbot makes a racial distinction between “Moors” and sub-Saharan Africans: “All the people in general to the South, lying within the Zona torrida, are not only blackish like the Moores: but are exceedingly black.”17 Peter Heylyn (1652) describes the Moors as “of a duskish colour, comely of body, stately of gait, implacable in hatred, constant in affection, laborious and treacherous.”18
In Act IV, Iago refers to what we could take as Othello’s homeland, “Mauritania” (4.2.224–5); but even here “Mauritania” refers to a large area spreading across the Sahara, the Sahel, and the Sudan.19 Even Aleppo, where Othello once cut the throat of “a turbaned Turk” who spoke ill of Venice (5.352–4), implies not a homeland for Othello but a well-known trade emporium on the route for such commodities as frankincense and myrrh, along with gum arabic, Othello’s “medicinable gum,” at first harvested in the Middle East but later in West Africa.20 Two major trade routes branched off at Aleppo, the northern land route ultimately leading to central Asia, China and India through the Black Sea and Asia Minor; the southern sea route communicating with the East by the Red Sea. Aleppo gained renewed prominence after 1507, when the Portuguese enforced a blockade of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, therefore diverting the trade to the Northern route.21 Venice, which had competed with Genoa for control of these trade routes, saw its commercial interests curtailed, although it continued to find supplies of spices for sale in Alexandria.22 Another reference in Macbeth (1.2.07) shows Shakespeare’s awareness of the commercial importance of Aleppo, to where, for example, the English ship, the Tiger, owned by Sir Edward Michelbourne, set sail for the East on December 5, 1604; possibly the same ship had “made a voyage to Aleppo in 1583.”23 Therefore, “The indiscriminate mixing of black and Moorish impressions serves to endow Othello with an unstable quality that adds to and may be at the heart of his terrifying strangeness.”24
The Arabian trees Othello refers to were reputed to yield “no gumme but in the darke night.”25 Gum arabic, still used as a thickener and colloidal stabilizer in the pharmaceutical industry and in the manufacture of candy, appears in medieval Arabic toxicology as a powerful antidote.26 As James Webb writes, the trade in gum arabic, originally centered in Arabia and the Nilotic Sudan, shifted by the sixteenth century to the southwestern corner of the Sahara, so much so that by the eighteenth century, it “was the single most important product traded by Europeans who stopped along the ‘gum coast’ of southern Mauritania or traded at the Senegal river.”27 In the play, references to specific locations or commodities—Mauritania, Aleppo, and medicinable gum from Arabian trees—tend to blur the distinction between Africa and the Middle East and emphasize routes, not roots; travcling, not dwelling. As Jerry Brotton contends, Shakespeare combines “ocularity and historiography … to create the fluid geographical movement and exotic topography of Othello.”28
In the literature of the period, Africa conjures up a complex, confused cluster of images associated with landmarks, geographical characteristics, climate, distinctive fauna and flora, and ethnic, linguistic, or cultural diversity, which was in fact poorly understood. Edward Sugden remarks: “The interior of Africa was almost a terra incognita. It was believed to be mainly a huge desert, fertile in uncouth monsters, and rich in gold and gems and spices.”29 A few examples will suffice to illustrate my point. In his Diuersarū nationum habitus (1594), a picture book of typical national costumes, Pietro Bertelli has two images presumably representing typical African dress, but in the process he also represents imaginary African landscapes.30
The first image, “Mulier in Africa,” depicts a barefoot attractive young woman, wearing knee-length flowing robes, a headscarf, anklets, and bracelets. Nothing extraordinary appears in this female figure; but around her, the landscape consists of sand dunes and scraggy desiccated vegetation. In the background, to her left and right, two monsters share the viewer’s attention, one of which is a naked man with a dog’s head; the other is what Pliny called “Umbrella-footed, because when the weather is hot they lie on their backs stretched out on the ground and protect themselves by the shade of their feet.”31
Fig. 2.1 “Mulier in Africa” (African Woman). Pietro Bertelli, Diuersarū nationum habitus (Patauij, 1594, 96). © British Library Board. Shelfmark 810.c.2. By permission of the British Library.
The other image, “Nobilis fœmina in Africa,” portrays an elegantly dressed noblewoman, who wears proper shoes, although a landscape similar to the first one surrounds her. In the background, to the right, stands what seems to be a Plinian “satyr” with “no human characteristic except their shape”; and to the left, a giant specimen of the Blemmyae, who according to Pliny, “are reported as being without heads, their mouths and eyes are attached to their chest.”32 George Abbot, in A briefe description of the whole worlde (1599) remarks that Africa has all sorts of wildlife, “oftentimes new and strange shapes of beasts.” He explains that since the country is “hot and full of wildernesses” and has little water, “the beasts of all sorts are inforced to meete at those few watering places that be, where oftentimes contrarie kinds have conjunction the one with the other: so that ariseth newe kinds of species, which taketh part of both.”33
Likewise, John Lok, who undertook a voyage to Africa in 1554, summarizes widespread misconceptions: the Libyan Garamentes, whose women the males share promiscuously among themselves; the Blemines, who have “their eyes and mouth in their breasts,” the Anthropophagi, who “eat mans’ flesh.”34 A Jesuit priest reports that the African Chibadi “are men attired like women, and behave themselves womanly, ashamed to be called men; are also married to men, and esteeeme that unnatural damnation an honor.”35 Africa displayed a strange ecology marked by heat of the sun, deserts, and strange animals; as a cultural region, Africa contained monstrous creatures, deviant sexual behavior, and gender inversion. Therefore, as Virginia Vaughan demonstrates, “blackness and forbidden sex, blackness and heathenism, blackness and slavery—all were linked in the English mind from the earliest descriptions of African people.”36
Three early modern maps illustrate the confusion about African geography. A Portuguese map, known as the Cantino Planisphere (1502), depicts major geographical landmarks such as the Atlas Mountains in the North, “Serra Lioa” [Sierra Leone], Mountains of the Moon, and the Cape Promontory, as well as Portuguese constructions, such as the Fort of São Jorge da Mina on the Gold Coast. Most of Africa consists of open spaces, including deserts or areas full of wildlife and vegetation.37 Leo Africanus says that on Mount Centopozzi, there is a “hole or drie pit of so great a depth that the bottom thereof can in no wise be seen.”38 This cave apparently becomes Othello’s “anters vast” (Latin antrum, cave).39 Some of these landmarks connect with specific myths. A nation of women warriors supposedly inhabited the Mountains of the Moon. The Portuguese Duarte Barbosa, in 1518, describes a nation of African Amazons.40 The Atlas Mountains were reputed to be extremely high, as George Abbot observes: “This hill is so high that unto those who stoode on the bottome of it, it seemed to touch heaven with his top.”41 In his translation of John Leo Africanus’s A Geographical History of Africa (1600), a possible source for Othello, John Pory includes a map of Africa depicting a continent dotted with place names and landmarks; yet, upon closer inspection, except for place names along the coast, we find nothing but vague references to “Amazones,” “Troglodite,” “Nubia,” “Libia,” “Nigritarum,” and so forth.42 A Chart of the Coasts of Europe (1562) at the British Library shows the interior of Africa as a vast open space, “decorated with elaborate tents.”43
2.2 “Nobilis Foemina in Africa” (African Noblewoman). Pietro Bertelli, Diuersarū nationum habitus (Patauij, 1594, 96). © British Library Board. Shelfmark 810.c.2. By permission of the British Library.
In his address to the reader, John Pory describes Leo Africanus in terms reminiscent of Othello’s life. He marvels at how Leo Africanus could have escaped “so manie thousands of imminent danger,” posing a series of rhetorical questions:
For how many desolate cold mountains, and huge, drie, and barren deserts passed he? How often was he in hazard to haue beene captiued, or to haue had his throte cut by the prouling Arabians, and wilde Mores? And how hardly manie times escaped he the Lyons greedie mouth, and the deuouring iawes of the Crocodile?44
Indeed, Leo Africanus describes the “sandie seas” and the “dangerous heapes of sande,” which are “subiect to the extreme heate of the sunne” (14), snow-capped mountains (16), large swaths of deserts, where travelers have “no other places then tents and wide fields to repose themseues in” (131). He also notes that when the Moslems go to war, “each man carries his wife with him, to the end that she may cheere vp her good man, and giue him encouragement” (159). From his account, Othello would no doubt have recognized these images of Africa, as he might the multi-purpose housing compound in Cape Mesurado, Liberia.
European fantasies about Africa abound in contemporary texts, maps, and art. As Jyotsna Singh writes, “[Othello] is simply a ‘character’ in an imaginary landscape which viewers, then and now, recognize as a semi-fictional creation of colonialist travel narratives—from antiquity through the nineteenth century.”45 Shakespeare makes Desdemona and Othello complicit in these fantasies. When Desdemona tries to counter Emilia’s remark about the extreme nature of Othello’s jealousy, she cannot name Othello’s homeland: “I think the sun where he was born / Drew all such humors from him” (3.4.30–31). The handkerchief, apparently the only artifact connecting Othello to his home, appears in contradictory stories: it is, as he says, a fantastical talisman that “an Egyptian” gave his mother, and “an antique token / My father gave my mother” (5.2.216–17). If “Egyptian,” as I have argued elsewhere, means Gypsy, then the rootlessness lies at the origin of the cloth.46 In the first version, a 200-year-old “sibyl” sewed her “prophetic fury” into the web of the silk spun by hallowed worms, “dyed in mummy” and “conserved of maidens’ hearts” (3.4.69–75). Momentarily incredulous, Desdemona asks, “I’faith? Is’t true?”; to which Othello responds with “Most veritable” (3.4.75; 76), perhaps illustrating a proverb William Camden quotes: “A traueller may lye by authoritie.”47 The Moor in The Merchant of Venice is the “prince” from a known kingdom; and although Titus Andronicus does not explicitly identify Aaron’s homeland, at least he has a “countryman,” whose white son is exchanged with Aaron and Tamora’s child. In comparison to Shakespeare’s other Moors, Othello stands apart, if not starkly alone.
Fig. 2.3 Housing Compound in Cape Mesurado, Liberia. John Green, A new general collection of voyages and travels. London,1745–47. © British Library Board. Shelfmark V 9733. By permission of the British Library.
For Othello, life is a journey, which has taken him along a network of routes leading to “anters vast,” “deserts idle,” “rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven” (1.3.140–41), and to the lands of “cannibals” and of Blemmyae, “whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (143–4).48 Like Othello, Leo Africanus too states that he traveled in a strange geography; but unlike Othello, Africanus makes a bona fide effort to offer a credible travel account, which describes well-known landmarks and retains the flavor of an eyewitness report, as for example when he writes that the Africans from Barbary are “somewhat needie and couetous, being proud and high-minded, and wonderfully addicted to wrath,” for they “will deeply engraue in marble any iniurie be it neuer so small, & will in no wise blot it out of remembrance.” He adds that they are so credulous “that they will beleue matters impossible, which are told them.”49 Othello’s mountains that seem to touch heaven could refer to the proverbially tall Atlas Mountains. Othello seems to rely on hearsay and fantastical myths, and perhaps proves Africanus’s assessment that Moors tend to “beleue matters impossible.” Instead of telling a story about his roots, Othello spins narratives about the fantastical routes along which he has traveled. One wonders if Shakespeare offers ironic commentary on Desdemona’s or any young Venetian woman’s credulity, when the Duke remarks: “I think this tale would win my daughter too” (171).
Even references to Othello’s more recent military record in the service of Venice simply reinforce attention to routes, not roots. Iago, for example, bears witness to the fact that he fought alongside Othello “At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds / Christened and heathen” (1.1.28–9). Othello relies on his well-established record of “services” to the Venetian state to “out-tongue” Brabantio’s complaints (19). So clear and so obvious is that record that the Duke does not hesitate to side with Othello, and dismisses Brabantio’s complaints. Later overcome with fear of losing Desdemona, and losing confidence in his own military abilities, Othello offers an ubi sunt speech, a farewell to arms, revealing the importance of the military profession to his personal identity. With the loss of the “tranquil mind” also vanish “the plumed troops,” “the big wars, / That makes ambition virtue,” “the neighing steed,” the trumpets, the drums, “the fife,” “the royal banner,” the “mortal engines”—all that pertains to “Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war” (3.3.355).
Othello’s travels and military history feed into and reinforce each other, underscoring Othello’s restlessness, mobility, wandering, and displacement; consequently, as Patricia Parker remarks, they direct the audience’s eyes to “exotic worlds beyond the direct reach of vision” and help “chart the crossing in this play of domestic and exotic, ‘civil’ and ‘barbarian.’”50 Roderigo, unkindly, describes Othello as “an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere” (1.1.134–5), punning on Othello’s foreign status, lack of a permanent place of residence, and shifty nature.51 Othello describes his own “unhousèd free condition” (1.2.26), which he says he gave up when he married Desdemona. That former “unhousèd” condition as an exile, slave, traveler, and soldier contrasts with “circumscription and confine” that his new married status requires. Throughout his life, Othello had many places of nonpermanent residence: lodgings, caves, huts, and tents and common makeshift shelters, as Richard Eden describes in his account of West Africa: “certayne lowe cottages made of boughs of trees, plastered with chauke, and covered with straw.”52
Othello’s remembrance of the “tented field” (1.3.85) most immediately evokes his military life, but it brings to mind the tent of nomads and of those “who rely on movement to survive.”53 “Black tents,” the traditional dwellings of nomads, consist of a tent cover, made of animal hair, such as goat hair, poles, and cord. Over the centuries, “black tents,” so called from the blackness of the goat hair used, have served as the primary form of shelter for a variety of ethnic groups extending from the western coast of North Africa to Tibet.54 Faegre notes that “Black-tent dwellers are weavers,” weaving “not only the roofs, walls, and floors of their homes,” but also furnishings such as “wall cloths, spindle bags, carpet bags, and the carpets.”55 In English usage dating from 1297, a “tent” can be defined as “A portable shelter or dwelling of canvas (formerly of skins or cloth), supported by means of a pole or poles, and usually extended and secured by ropes fastened to pegs which are driven into the ground; used by travelers, soldiers, nomads, and others” (OED).56 Faegre points out that nomads and desert dwellers actually spend much time outdoors, shepherding herds, rather than in tents. Further, he writes: “The tent does not erect a clear boundary between inside and outside much as we are used to in our own housing”;57 rather, the tent allows wind, rain, and snow to come in. Nomads, however, prefer these conditions and “are so accustomed to the feel of a flexible cloth roof over their heads that a solid roof constitutes a threat.”58 He adds: “There are many stories of how these nomads cannot at first sleep in a solid house for fear that the roof will fall and crush them.”59
In iconography, tents stand for the impermanent, fleeting nature of life on earth. An emblem, titled “Super terram peregrinans,” in Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna, depicts a large tent and explains its symbolism:
Nor house, nor home, hath wretched man on earth,
Ne ought he claimeth iustly as his owne:
But as a Pilgrim wandring from his birth
In Countries straunge, and Deserts wild vnknowne.60
The emblem shows that earthly house and home are transitory; therefore we should “supply / Our inward wantes” and seek refuge in heavenly things, which “neither Moth, nor Canker shall decaie.” Richard III, in Bosworth Field, seems to have such meaning in mind, when he instructs his followers: “Up with my tent! Here will I lie tonight. / But where tomorrow?” (5.3.7).61
Shakespeare relegates crucial information about Othello’s background and identity to a space elsewhere, a place that Hanna Scolnicov refers to as “theatrical place without.” Scolnicov distinguishes “everyday space”—the theater as an architectural structure—from “theatrical space”—the fictive locations rendered through a theatrical performance. Theatre space “exists independently of, and prior to, any performance”; “theatrical space”—a theatrical illusion, a fictive location—does not have to abide by natural laws and is therefore liberated from “the universal co-ordinates of time and space.”62 Each performance defines its “time-space structure,” within which “its inner logic can function.”63 Scolnicov explains: “The theatrical space has a double nature: as it has visible extension in the theatre, and by extrapolation also beyond it, it is created by the performance; but to the extent that it is predetermined by the text, both in dialogue and stage directions, it is an inbuilt structural dimension of the play itself.”64 Theatrical space therefore encompasses both the visible scenery represented onstage, which Scolnicov calls “theatrical space within,” and the invisible places from which the characters enter and to which they exit, as well as the unrepresented regions and locations to which they refer—the space that Scolnicov terms “theatrical space without.”65
Fig. 2.4 Emblem of a Tent. Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612). STC 19511. Houghton Library, Harvard University.
In Othello, Shakespeare masterfully juxtaposes theatrical space within and theatrical space without. The juxtaposition erodes and undermines domestic stability. Theatrical space within, whether Brabantio’s house, the duke’s council chamber, the fortress at Cyprus, or the bedchamber in Act 5, scene 2, appears to be “real” and “concrete” places; whereas, theatrical space without—namely, the fictive space at the borders, primarily associated with the African landscapes of Othello’s ancestral home and earlier experiences in life—appear as part of vast, expansive, and blurry routes, leading to nameless destinations. As Paul Shepard maintains, “an environment without place names is fearful,” and “landscapes without place names are disorienting.”66 Othello’s domestic life seems caught between stability anchored in his marriage to a Venetian woman and the instability associated with ever-shifting fragmentary experiences of memory.
Architects, developers, and the house dwellers “endow the house with meaning according to their culture’s world view and ethos.”67 Extensive surveys of how people around the world perceive their domestic space reveals that home provides more than a shelter: “it is a world in which a person can create a material environment that embodies what he or she considers significant. In this sense the home becomes the most powerful sign of the self of the inhabitant who dwells within.”68 English travelers in Benin in 1553, for example, recognize the dignified status of the king by the audience room of his house: “the great hall, long and wide, the wals made of earth, the roofe of thin boords, open in sundry places, like unto lovers to let in the aire.”69 When viewed as the center of family life and hospitality and the stage upon which memorable personal events unfold, the house becomes a “home,” which might be defined as a special kind of place to which one properly belongs and in which one’s affections center or where one finds rest, refuge, or satisfaction.70 I submit that the experience of dwelling in Othello seems initially to be the opposite of the African landscapes of Othello’s childhood; yet eventually differences collapse, revealing a disturbing similarity between Venetian and alien spaces of residence. Similitude in this play carries a disturbing and unsettling valence, an ability to join and create geographical, cultural, and racial clusters.71
John Gillies traces disconcerting “patterns of ‘intrusion’ and ‘exorbitance’” and “a glorious—yet unsettling—contradiction,” associated with Venice, in The Merchant of Venice and Othello.72 He cites Lewkenor’s 1599 English translation of Gasparo Contarini’s Commonwealth and Government of Venice to illustrate the paradox that Venice represented: a city that was planted in quagmires and “seated in the middle of the sea,” yet had “palaces … reaching up to the clouds”; a democratic republic that was ruled by aristocrats; and a city that was governed by “unweaponed men in gownes,” and yet was also a military and imperial power.73 In another fascinating paradox, Venice, though a thriving commercial and cultural center, was a city governed by old men, the average age of doges, elected from 1400 to 1600, being 72; therefore, as Dennis Romano notes, the deliberations of Venetian councils, when compared to “the often rash decisions of more youthful Renaissance princes,” tended to be slower and more deliberate.74 Fynes Morison, who was in Italy in 1594, refers to the aging population of Venice: “I have never in any place observed more old men, or so many Senators venerable for their grey haires and aged gravity.”75 Othello, whom Iago calls “an old black ram” and who says “the young affects [are] / In me defunct” (1.3.263–4), might, perhaps, feel at home in the company of such geriatric leaders.76
Early modern maps offer “an idealized portrait of the city floating in the lagoon that protects its liberty and sustains its prestige as a trade emporium.”77 Visitors, such as Thomas Coryat, writing in 1611, comment on the status of Venice as a glorious cosmopolitan center and a magnet attracting visitors, traders, and adventurers from all over the world: “Here you may both see all manner of fashions of attire, and heare all the languages of Christendome, besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Ethnickes.”78 Contarini praises the Venetians for their “humanitie towards straungers”;79 elsewhere, he praises Venice’s welcoming of foreigners: “some forrain men and strangers have been adopted into this number of citizens, eyther in regard of their nobility, or that they had been dutiful towards the state, or else had done unto them some notable service.”80 Both Shylock’s appeals to the city charter to uphold his bond, and Othello’s confidence that his service to the state will be remembered, intimate an orderly and fair political hierarchy and perhaps what Contarini describes as Venice’s “justice as pure and uncorrupted.”81 Obviously, Shakespeare also represents the other side: Venice as a city sharply divided along racial and religious lines. Contarini marvels at the abundance and variety of foreign commodities available for purchase in Venice, or Venetian and European merchandise for export by land and sea to far away regions, as if Venice “were a common and general market to the whole world.”82 The city functioned as a crossroads, where the trade routes intersected, and as a gateway between East and West. Through this intermediary role, Venice “negotiat[ed] the exchange and interchange of men, ideas, and especially goods between Europe and Asia.”83 Francesco Borri contends that the Plea of Rižana, a placitum written between 800 and 810, attests to the early network of connections between Venice’s Latin-speaking elites and other population centers on the Istrian peninsula and along the Northern Adriatic arc.84 In its long history, Venice played an intermediary role, and therefore rightly deserves to be known as the “hinge of Europe.”85
Contemporary writers saw Venice as an architectural wonder and a miracle of human ingenuity. Visitors from Western Europe would have been struck by “a distinctly oriental atmosphere,” the city having absorbed Byzantine, Islamic, and “Moorish architectural and urban characteristics.”86 Deborah Howard writes that architectural historians have long remarked on “the resemblance between the early Venetian palace and the Arabic trading post, or funduk”:
Fig. 2.5 Three views of Venice. Vicenzo Coronelli, 1650–1718. Isolario: descrittione geografico-historica, sacro-profana, antico-moderna, politica, Venice, 1696–1697. Summerfield H27. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.
Fig. 2.6 A view of Venice. Georg Braun, 1540 or 41–1622, and Abraham Hogenberg, fl. 1608–58, Civitates orbis terrarum (Brussels, 1574–1618). Summerfield H9. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.
Both in Venice and in the east the type is characterized by a two-storey, screenlike façade, perforated with arcades, often with corner towers, containing storage and (except in Venice) stabling below, and lodgings above. A central courtyard contained a well or fountain, fed by a cistern beneath.87
Excavations of Fatimid palaces of Cairo even bear resemblance to the palaces of Venetian patrician merchants.88 According to Howard, Venetian manuscript illumination of Ptolemy in Alexandria offers “a delightful instance of the blurring of the boundaries between east and west” in the Venetian-style Gothic palace.89 No wonder, yet again, that Othello seems to have felt so much at home in Brabantio’s palazzo, although, as John Drakakis proposes, Othello also “internalizes” the “‘orientalist’ practices” of Venice and “inherits the lurid substance of Brabantio’s dream.”90
Lewes Lewkenor remarks on the fact that experienced travelers, who had been to “the farthest parts of Asia and Affrica,” spoke of Venice as worthy of “the highest of all admiration” and as one of the “most infinitely remarkable” sites “that they had seen in the whole course of their travels.”91 Venice was and still is known for the beauty of its architecture, including “palaces, monasteries, temples, towers, turrets, & pinacles reaching unto the cloudes”; but the ingenuity and engineering skills of the builders were, as I noted earlier, particularly noteworthy, for the same buildings rise out of “quagmires,” the muddy bottom of a lagoon.92 Thomas Coryat, in his Crudities (1611), explains that the method of laying the foundation requires an extraordinary feat of engineering and technical skills:
For whereas many of them [buildings] are situate in the water, whensoever they lay the foundation of any house they remove the water by certaine devices from the place where they lay the first fundamentall matter. Most commonly they drive long stakes into the ground, without the which they doe aggerere molem, that is, raise certaine heapes of sand, mudde, clay, or some other such matter to repell the water. Then they ramme in great piles of woodde, which they lay very deepe, upon the which they place their bricke or stone, and so frame the other parts of the building.93
Coryat reports that, while in Venice, he heard that the cost of laying the foundations, “contrived with so great labour,” amounts to as much as 30 percent of the total costs of the construction.94 In his Itinerary, Fynes Moryson confirms Coryat’s report: “The foundations are laid of Oake in the waters, and the stone of Istria is much esteemed.”95 The Venetians spared no costs in building and furnishing their houses; as Moryson adds, even “the Pallaces of Gentlemen,” though called “houses” “are and worthily deserve to be called Pallaces, some hundred of them being fit to receive Princes.”96 Such palaces, displaying “Princely magnificence,” built upon costly, sturdy foundations, planted in a boggy lagoon, are, indeed, “monstrously strange,” as Contarini puts it.97
Based on Othello’s account of recent events, Brabantio’s house seems to have represented stability and continuity and to fit almost perfectly the definition of the ideal home. We catch glimpses of what the house used to be like, and of Othello as a frequent dinner guest in Brabantio’s house:
Her father loved me, oft invited me;
Still questioned me the story of my life
From year to year—the battles, sieges, fortunes
That I have passed. (1.3.128–31)
An atmosphere of warm hospitality emerges. As host, Brabantio provides food and drink; whereas Othello, as guest, provides entertainment; namely, narratives about his life. Desdemona takes an interest in his stories, as Othello notes:
This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline;
But still the house affairs would draw her thence;
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse. (1.3.145–50)
As house chores demanded, Desdemona would go in and out of the room, but she remained fascinated by her father’s guest. In a metaphoric inversion, the houseguest provided the food, which Desdemona devoured with “a greedy ear.” Eventually she asked for a private telling of his “pilgrimage” and then encouraged Othello to “woo” her. In its warmth, stability, hospitality, and domestic life, Brabantio’s house may have come as close to a home as anything that Othello had ever experienced. If we take Othello’s life-long perambulations and deracination as an experience in the wilderness, Brabantio’s home seems like a peaceful retreat from the trials, tribulations, deprivation, and temptations of life on the go.
Brabantio’s house may have a sturdy foundation, as construction in a boggy lagoon required, and may have seemed like a welcome refuge; however, ultimately it offers but an illusion of stability. At the beginning of the play, the house, enveloped in thick darkness, seems utterly empty: not because all the residents have moved out and taken away the furnishings, but because one of the dwellers, Desdemona, has already eloped with Othello, leaving behind a yet-to-be discovered empty bedchamber, a broken family, and a deeply hurt and disappointed father. I will discuss later the function of light and darkness in the play; suffice it to say here that the house has not always been so dark or so empty.
Brabantio had opened the house to a stranger, who stole his daughter’s heart, and shattered the apparent atmosphere of domestic harmony and familial happiness. Francesco Sansovini writes of Venetian courtship: “The marriages among the nobility are for the most part always treated of by a third person, the bride neuer suffered so much as to behold her future husband, nor he her, till their marriage dower, and all thinges thereunto appertaining, bee fully agreed vpon and concluded.”98 By inviting Othello into the inner sanctum of his home, Brabantio allows Othello and Desdemona an unusual degree of access to each other, and therefore, ironically, makes possible this most unlikely marriage.
The laws of Venice frowned on biracial marriages, and other marriages of couples coming from different social strata. In the fifteenth century, the Venetian law emphasized patrilineal heredity: “among other things, it denied noble status to the sons of marriages between noblemen and slaves or other women of ‘vile’ status.”99 The Serrata laws (1497–1535) shifted the focus to “a man’s maternal heredity,” leading to the Libro d’oro, the Golden Book registry of noble births, which, as Stanley Chojnacki has uncovered, “fundamentally ‘altered the meaning of nobility in Venice’ by emphasizing the moment of birth rather than political adulthood as the central event in the attainment of noble identity.”100 In 1569, the Libri d’argento or “Silver Books of Citizen Families,” became the register for cittadini to claim citizenship status.101 Consequently, as Dennis Romano writes, “To a degree Venetian men used their female relatives in much the same way as they did their palaces. Women’s bodies served as sites for demonstrations of family wealth and power,” and “helped establish noble identity.”102 These laws help contextualize the possible consequences of Desdemona’s elopement, and also of the Duke’s indifference to Brabantio’s concerns about his only daughter’s strong-willed disregard for her family’s plight. The Duke’s tolerance might be explained as expediency: faced with the need to defend Cyprus and Venetian commercial interests, he needs Othello and is therefore willing to overlook Othello’s action. Brabantio, however, seems fully aware of the consequences of Desdemona’s actions for his family.
At the beginning of the play, the house is under siege; but, before long, the audience realizes that domesticity itself has been under assault from within and from without. Shakespeare suggests that the house fails on the most basic level to safeguard privacy and provide a refuge from the outside world. From Brabantio’s perspective, his house is under frontal attack. Roderigo and Iago raise the alarm with shouts: “Awake! What, ho, Brabantio! Thieves! Thieves! / Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags!” (1.1.78–9). Iago asks questions to heighten Brabantio’s and the audience’s fear: “Signor, is all your family within?” and “Are your doors locked?” He informs the Venetian senator: “Zounds, sir, you’re robbed!” (1.1.85). Burglary, as Heather Dubrow notes, particularly inspired fear and anxiety in the early modern period, and “by and large Shakespeare’s culture punishes burglars especially severely and Shakespeare’s texts represent them especially darkly.”103 Burglars behaved like beasts, violating the laws of nature and of man; they were particularly feared because they operate at night and therefore “violate place in the sense of literally sneaking in where they do not belong.”104 Furthermore, outsiders—rogues, vagabonds, and Gypsies—are associated with “fear of stealth,” secrecy intensifying transgressiveness; consequently, the assizes records suggest that “an outsider was more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced harshly than the neighbor.”105
Roderigo observes that Othello, behaving like a burglar, has violated the privacy of the house and stolen valuable movables, and, even more outrageously seduced Desdemona, who has been carted away “at this odd-even and dull watch o’ th’ night,” by “a common knave, a gondolier” into “the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor” (1.1.120–28). In a state of panic, Brabantio wonders, “How got she out?” (1.1.167), and like Lear, suspects “treason of the blood” (167). He wants to summon his brother (173), and wake up “every house” (178). Iago’s allusions to “Barbary horse” and a “black ram tupping a white ewe” compound to form the startling racist image of “your daughter and Moor are making the beast with two backs” (115–16). References to both domesticated animals and wild animals, such as haggard, guinea hen, and baboon, crop up frequently throughout the play, and such images together connect the Venetian world to the wilderness, suggesting that even a highly civilized and sophisticated place has become something wild and alien. Brabantio concludes that if Othello gets away with stealing Desdemona, then “Bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be” (1.2.99). Anxiety about burglary and fear of the outsider come together. The burglar, as Dubrow remarks, violates and “erodes social boundaries”: “ … the burglar literally transgresses by crossing the threshold of a house.”106 The events at the beginning of the play strike the ominous note that family life, security, and trust all collapse.
When the Senate orders Othello to set sail for Cyprus, for he best knows “the fortitude of the place” (1.3.222), Desdemona’s own “unhousèd” condition becomes apparent. Desdemona has no place to stay during his absence. Even while residing in Venice, Othello does not have a permanent home, as Cassio points out: “You have been hotly called for; / When being not at your lodging to be found, / The Senate hath sent about three several quests / To search you out” (1.2.44–7). “Lodging” suggests temporary quarters, such as one finds in a boarding house, where Othello presumably lived before he married Desdemona. However their decision to elope came about, Othello takes Desdemona from her father’s house and seeks shelter for the night at some other place, as Othello’s statement to Cassio implies: “’Tis well I am found by you. / I will but spend a word here in the house, / And go with you” (1.2.47–9). He will go inside the house, tell Desdemona that the Duke and the senators require his presence, and then proceed to the Senate. The text makes clear that this house provides only temporary accommodation.107 Having defied her father and severed her ties to her family, she cannot return to her father’s house, and Othello has neither bought nor rented a house in Venice; therefore, she has little option but to follow him to Cyprus. Even Jessica and Lorenzo, in The Merchant of Venice, at least have Portia’s house in Belmont, where they take refuge. For all practical purposes, Desdemona has become unhousèd, homeless. Therefore, the move to Cyprus may offer new opportunities for possible happiness, but it leaves behind the shattered foundation of Desdemona’s relationship to her father and, without her presence, his dark and empty house.
In Act II, the principal characters of the play arrive at a port, presumably the fortified town of Famagusta, which came under Turkish attack in 1569 and 1571. Words such as “battlements,” “citadel,” “castle,” and fortification, all associated with Cyprus, underscore that Cyprus is a heavily armed fortress, with strong foundations and fortified walls. Othello and Desdemona move into state apartments in this fortification. References to military storehouses, works, and garrison, presumably located on high ground, provide defense for the “town.” Doubtless this place, to which Othello refers as “home,” does serve as home for him and Desdemona. They settle down here and entertain important guests, such as Lodovico, for dinner in Act IV, scene 1.
Fig. 2.7 A view of Famagusta, Cyprus (detail). Georg Braun, 1540 or 41–1622, and Abraham Hogenberg, fl. 1608–58, Civitates orbis terrarum (Brussels, 1574–1618). Summerfield H9. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.
While the play labels the living quarters of Iago, Emilia, and Cassio as lodgings, Bianca, on the other hand, owns a house, and seems well off. Like Othello and Desdemona, she receives Cassio as a dinner guest, and perhaps under different circumstances might have provided a shelter for abused wives, such as Emilia and Desdemona. We know that Veronica Franco (1546–91), Julia Lombardo, and Modesta Fonte, among the best known Venetian courtesans, were not only patrons of the arts but also benefactors for institutions for the protection of women. Franco, for example, “petitioned the government to establish an institution for impoverished young women who were at risk of slipping into prostitution,” and the state established the Casa dell Soccorso, “a refuge for unmarried women and for wives fleeing unhappy or abusive marriages,”108 an option apparently neither available for nor entertained by Emilia or Desdemona in Cyprus.
As the scene shifts to Cyprus, the storm scatters and destroys the Turkish fleet; therefore, the change of location might promise more permanence, stability, and tranquility than Othello and Desdemona had experienced in Venice. Sent on a military mission, Othello engages in no combat. Ironically, the sea voyage separates Desdemona from Othello and places her under Iago’s guardianship; likewise, the destruction of the Turkish fleet opens the path for Iago to assail Othello’s domestic happiness. Instead of finding an opportunity for conjugal happiness, Othello and Desdemona face new challenges.
Othello, although he takes Desdemona from her father’s house, gives her a castle in Cyprus; yet the castle, like the house, offers but an illusion of stability. In fact, Montano and two gentlemen underscore the fragility of even the sturdiest battlements in Cyprus, let alone the ships on the high seas:
Methinks the wind hath spoke aloud at land;
A fuller blast ne’er shoot our battlements.
If it hath ruffianed so upon the sea,
What ribs of oak, when mountains melt on them,
Can hold the mortise? (5–9).
The Turkish fleet has been segregated and destroyed, and the Venetians have emerged unscathed; but the storm reveals that the “mortise” [joints] of the strongest man-made structures may give way in tempestuous weather, an indication that Othello and Desdemona’s house, or “castle,” in Cyprus cannot withstand the storm that lies ahead. Montano and the gentlemen suggest that a fierce storm can shake a strong foundation and batter even a well-built fortification, a fitting reminder that Iago’s malice could undermine and destroy the foundation of Othello and Desdemona’s marriage.
Turmoil temporarily gives way to calm. When Othello finally arrives in Act II, scene 1, allaying fears that he might have perished at sea, and observes Desdemona, his heart fills with joy: “If after every tempest come such calms, / May the winds blow till they have wakened death!” (2.1.184–5); he adds: “Come, let us to the castle” (200). In scene 2, through the herald, Othello decrees a general double celebration of his nuptial and of the defeat of the Turks, ordering that “every man put himself into triumph; some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to what sport and revels his addition [rank] leads him” (2.2.3–6). A night brawl between the drunken Cassio and Montano interrupts the celebration and disrupts Othello and Desdemona’s honeymoon. By scene 3, Othello and Desdemona have already retired to bed. The play’s attention turns to this inner sanctum of their marriage, where new sources of danger await the newly-married couple.
In ancient times, Cyprus, especially Paphos, was known as the birth place of Aphrodite/Venus, the goddess of love, often referred to as “diva potens Cypri.”109 The drama of the period abounds with references to Cyprus as the land of love, as Aurelia’s speech to her sister in Jonson’s Case Is Altered makes clear: “I thought you’d dwell so long in Cypres isle, / You’d worship Madam Venus at the length.”110 The island was also of military and strategic importance. Venice acquired Cyprus in 1487 and maintained control over the island until 1571, when the Turks conquered it. In Shakespeare’s play, Othello and Desdemona presumably arrive in Cyprus in the middle of that military contest. For Alvin Kernan, Othello’s Cyprus stands between “two reference points”: “out at the far edge are the Turks, barbarism, disorder, and amoral destructive power; closer and more familiar is Venice, The City, order law, and reason.”111 As a frontier, Cyprus “is rather an outpost, weakly defended and far out in the raging ocean, close to the ‘general enemy’ and the immediate object of his attack,” a “‘town of war yet wild’ where the ‘people’s hearts [are] brimful of fear.’”112 Kernan’s analysis oversimplifies the cartography of Shakespeare’s play; but, as John Drakakis aptly notes, Cyprus functions as “a geopolitical frontier where the marriage between ‘Moor’ and ‘Christian’, Venetian and Turk, is to be tested.”113 Kernan’s view fails to account for the extent to which seemingly incompatible modes of dwelling intermingle and modify each other. Fortunatus, in Thomas Dekker’s The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus (1600), reminds us that in Cyprus no one can get sleep or rest in peace: “the great bell of S. Michaels in Cyprus … keeps most rumbling, when men would most sleepe.”114 In Cyprus, the birthplace of the Goddess of Love, no one can sleep in peace, an ominous sign of what awaits Desdemona and Othello during their sojourn on the island.
In Othello, the characters seem to stand on the edge of darkness, and Shakespeare may have borrowed lighting effects, well known to painters, to create illusions of distance. In The Painting of the Ancients (1638), Franciscus Junius writes that the viewer perceives white objects to be nearer, whereas black objects and objects enveloped in darkness to lie further away; therefore, painters make use of light and dark shades to create illusions of depth and of distance because “The white shall always seeme to be nearer, and the blacke further off.” Consequently, painters use shades of black or brown to make something like a well, a ditch, or cave seem “hollow”; he adds, darker shades suggest greater depth: “for whatsoever is extreme blacke, the same worketh in us an apprehension of a bottomlesse deepnesse.115 Renaissance artists were, of course, very much aware of this effect. For example, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610) and his followers, such as Giuseppe de Ribera (1591–1652), known as tenebrosi, employed a characteristic style of extreme contrasts between light and shadows to create dramatically accentuated and intense chiaroscuro effects.116 Members of this school were known to favor “i chiaroscuri intensi, i fondi scuri, i colori cupi” [intense chiaroscuro, dark background, and gloomy colors].117
As is well known, productions in the London public theaters of Shakespeare’s time took place in daylight. However, despite the absence of tools to create “variable lighting,” the plays include numerous night scenes. As Alan Dessen notes, the playwright indicates the illusion of on-stage darkness by stage directions, dialogue, props (tapers, torches, and candles), and costume, “especially the nightgown, to denote night or interrupted sleep.”118 Some scenes require “silence, stealth, even tiptoeing.”119 Other subtle markers of variable lighting conditions were also possible, such as, “for example, if a torch or candle was cited as the only source of light in a given scene, to extinguish that light was to indicate stage darkness.”120 As R.B. Graves remarks, type of lighting utensils determined and signaled indoor or outdoor location: tapers for indoors; torches and lanterns for outdoors.121 I submit that, by using stage conventions of imaginary darkness, Shakespeare in Othello employs tenebrist lighting effects and generates a darkness that blurs boundaries of perception, reconfigures architectural space, and racializes and redefines family life in the play. In fact, Shakespeare conducts a visual experiment with light and darkness. The play often calls for special lighting effects—scenes that are to be staged a lume di notte (by candlelight)—or in a mode that approximates tenebrism—to reveal multiple layers of represented reality, manipulate actual and fictive space, transform architectural space, and to reveal a dynamic interplay of space, vision, and race.122
Shakespeare and Caravaggio were near contemporaries, the playwright being seven years older than the painter. Francine Prose draws attention, in passing, to a similarity between them: “Indeed an intensely Shakespearean spirit—theatrical, compassionate, alternately and simultaneously comic and tragic—suffuses Caravaggio’s art.”123 Shakespeare and Caravaggio have much in common. Dramatic intensity pervades Caravaggio’s paintings, as Prose adds: “For Caravaggio, the lives of saints and martyrs and their dramas of suffering and redemption were played out among real men and women, on earth, in the here and now, and in almost total darkness.”124 Caravaggio found inspiration in public executions, Roman street life, hagiographical narratives, and mystery plays.125 Caravaggio tapped into the “grotesque and the extreme,” as in Boy Bitten by a Lizard or Medusa; or in The Death of the Virgin, in which the Virgin looks “too much like the bloated corpse of a real woman.”126 I will not, however, claim that one artist influenced the other; rather, Caravaggio and Shakespeare, apparently independent of each other, employ similar techniques involving the use of lighting and visual effects. Shakespeare, however, could have read the 1598 English translation of the Italian treatise, A Tracte Containing the artes of curious painting caruinge buildinge, by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, the same treatise that may have influenced Caravaggio.127 Even Milton in an academic exercise considers “Whether Day is better than Night.”128
In his well-known biography of the painter, Howard Hibbard suggests that Caravaggio, “notorious as a painter-assassin,” must be considered “the most important painter of the entire seventeenth century,” although Caravaggio died in 1610 at the age of 39.129 “Caravaggio’s paintings,” adds Hibbard, “speak to us more personally and more poignantly than any others of his time.”130 Caravaggio’s revolutionary method involved accentuating and sharpening the stark contrasts between light and darkness. Earliest commentators, both admirers and detractors, remark on the style. For example, Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (c. 1617–21), states that Caravaggesque tenebrism characteristically employs “lighting from one source only, which beams down without reflections,” as if “in a dark room with one window and the walls painted black,” therefore creating very deep shadows and a “powerful relief.”131 Mancini thinks that this method works well for single figures, but not for narrative compositions, “since it is impossible to put in one room a multitude of people acting out the story, with that light coming in from a single window, having to laugh or cry or pretending to walk while having to stay still in order to be copied.”132 Writing in 1672, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori e architetti moderni, mentions Caravaggio’s ability to “give relief to the forms” by placing the figures in the darkness of a closed room, and by “placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark.”133
Sergio Benedetti suggests that Caravaggio’s painting, Taking of Christ (1602, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), encapsulates Caravaggio’s innovations, including a “background stripped to its essentials,” “reduction of space around the figures,” and an “idealized source of light,” falling from above; this light illuminates Christ and the other figures, contrasting Jesus’ calm and gesture of self-sacrificial resignation to save mankind, Judas’s lack of expression, St John’s terror, and the face of a man holding a lantern, which scholars take to be a self-portrait of Caravaggio.134 Edmund Capon puts it best, when he writes that “the abyss of blackness against which the figures are invariably set lends both mystery and profundity to the occasion.”135 In Saint John the Baptist (c. 1604/5), a painting at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, Caravaggio manipulates lighting to reveal a pensive youthful John the Baptist, whose smooth white body pierces through the shadows, not unlike the figure of Desdemona lying in the nuptial bed in Act V, scene 2.
Fig. 2.8 Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio, Italian (1571–1610). Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, 1604–05. Oil on canvas, 68 x 52 inches (172.7 x 132.1 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 52–25. Photograph by Jamison Miller.
Caravaggio received his training in Milan, an artistic tradition known for “empirical experiments in lighting effects”: “The painters of Lombardy and the Veneto produced numerous examples of this type during the sixteenth century, and nocturnal subjects illuminated by artificial light had been extensively developed in the studio of the Bassano family.”136 Caravaggio may have been acquainted with Trattato dell’arte de Pittura, Scultura, et Architectura, by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600), published in Milan in 1585.137 As mentioned above, Lomazzo’s book was also available in an English translation.138 Even if Shakespeare did not consult this particular treatise, other studies of perspective, light, shadows, and mirrors circulated in Shakespeare’s time, as for example, Salomon de Caus’s La perspective, avec la raison des ombres et miroirs, dedicated to Henry, Prince of Wales, and published in Oxford in 1611. Inigo Jones, influenced by Italian theater design and the visual arts, worked in a variety of projects, including stage design for Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, performed at Whitehall on Twelfth Night, 1605. Certainly, his drawings connect theatrical design to “all the visual arts.”139
Lomazzo covers a variety of subjects including proportions, actions and gestures, color, light and shadows. In the section on gestures, Lomazzo writes that figures who embody “Malice,” for example, must be represented “with hollowe eiebrowes and eager lookes, discouering their venomous stomacke against the truth”; “envie,” he writes, “causeth a man to drawe backe all his limmes [limbs], plucke in, and as it were shadowe his eie-liddes, grinde his teeth, wry his mouth, turne himself with a passionate kinde of lookes, as if he meant to prie into other mens actions, being ever talking of other men.”140 To represent motion, Lomazzo suggests that human figures, anatomically and proportionally drawn, must also be “very painefully lightned and shadowed.”141 He analyzes the nature of primary and secondary light, the use of mirrors for indirect illumination, and special effects. He also analyzes “sciography,” the science of shadows, the study of their causes and effects. He warns painters that if the lighting source comes from above, eyebrows cast shadows over the cheeks; the nose over the chin, and the chin over the breast; therefore, strategically placed mirrors to reflect light would be necessary if “the bodie” is to be “most sweetelie lightned.”142 He adds the advice that “Now the light taken from aboue, is imagined to stand on the one side of the picture.”143 Lomazzo’s treatise helps us contextualize Caravaggio’s and Shakespeare’s own experiments with varying lighting conditions and special visual effects.
Fig. 2.9 Bedchamber. Salomon de Caus, Perspective avec la Raison (London 1611). STC 4868.7. Typ 605.11.264 F. Houghton Library, Harvard University.
In Othello, Shakespeare, to make maximum use of lighting effects and to accentuate the power of darkness and shadows, compresses the action into three crucial nights. The first night, set in Venice, encompasses all of Act I, and represents Brabantio’s discovery of his daughter’s elopement and his accusation against Othello, as well the Venetian council’s preparation to send Othello to defend Cyprus from an impending Ottoman invasion.
The second night, centering on the fall of Cassio in Act II, scenes 2 and 3, takes place in Cyprus, presumably several days later. The third night extends approximately from Lodovico’s arrival from Venice in Act IV, scene 1 to the end of the play. The staging of the events of these three nights calls for special lighting effects, as if to suggest that the characters stand on the edge of darkness. Shakespeare deploys images of night and darkness as powerful symbols. Thomas Nashe, in “Terrors of the Night or A Discourse of Apparitions” (1594), views the night as “the devil’s Black Book, wherein he recordeth all our transgressions.”144 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus reveals an awareness of the effects of shadows: “Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear!” (5.1.21–2). Nashe suspects that the darkness of the night, especially when allied with dreams, disturbs the human mind: “To nothing more aptly can I compare the working of our brains after we have unyoked and gone to bed than to the glimmering and dazzling of a man’s eyes when he comes newly out of the bright sun into the dark shadow.”145
The play, in fact, begins with the powerful image of a house enveloped with thick darkness. Lurking in the shadows, Iago and Roderigo stand in front of Brabantio’s house. Darkness collapses the distinction between outside and inside, safe and unsafe, thief and guest, concealing the elopement yet magnifying and heightening the perception of it. Night draws a mantle of darkness over the entire house and creates intense blackness. Later in the first Act, candles, torches, and tapers create the illusion of stage darkness. Venice is astir with Desdemona’s elopement, the summoning of Othello to the Council chamber, and then the events in the council, which combine both preparation for defending Cyprus and Brabantio’s complaint against Othello. As I have argued above, Desdemona’s elopement intertwines with images of thieves robbing the house, racial fears, animals copulating in the night (“a black ram tupping the white ewe”), loss of security, and danger posed by the vast Ottoman empire. The first Act situates Brabantio’s house against an abyss of darkness.
Fig. 2.10 Venetian Gondolas. Cesare Vecellio, ca. 1521–1601. De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diuerse parti del mondo. Venetia, 1590. Summerfield B1840. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.
The second Act opens in daylight, but a furious storm has raged through the island the previous night, and still darkens the sky above the sea. As discussed above, the dark, stormy, menacing sky will lead to the second night, presented in scenes 2 and 3 of Act II. Upon Desdemona’s landing in Cyprus, Iago immediately introduces the matter of household management, betrayal, and adultery, as he teases Desdemona about the nature of all women:
Come on, come! You are pictures out of doors,
Bells in your parlors, wildcats in your kitchens,
Saints in your injuries, devils begin offended,
Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds (2.1.109–12).
When Desdemona calls him “slanderer,” he replies: “You rise to play, and go to bed to work” (115). When Othello arrives, he and Desdemona retire to their private quarters, and through the Herald, he decrees a general double celebration of his nuptial and of the defeat of the Turks.
We next see Othello and Desdemona in Act II, scene 3, a night scene. The sword fight between the drunken Cassio and Montano stirs Othello and Desdemona to leave their bed and come out into the courtyard of the castle. Othello must deal with a scene of confusion and unpredictable behavior. Two-faced Iago, having gotten Cassio to drink and in trouble, suggests that the fight came out of nowhere. One minute Cassio and Montano were friends, “like bride and groom / Divesting them for bed” (170–71); the next Cassio turns into a “night-brawler” (186). Othello fears that people will question his own ability “to manage private and domestic quarrel” (II.3.205). When Desdemona enters, Othello complains: “Look if my gentle love be not raised up!” (II.3.240); and turning to Desdemona, he states: “All’s well now, sweeting; come away to bed” (II.3.242). Ironically, he points out to her that soldiers expect “to have their balmy slumbers waked with strife” (II.3.148). Iago encourages Cassio to seek Desdemona’s help, which will arouse Othello’s suspicion. The events of the wild night, however, suggest that we stand on the brink of another abyss—Othello’s inner world of tumultuous passions and jealousy,146 which become apparent in Act III, scene 3, leading eventually to his and Iago’s plan to kill Desdemona and Cassio.
The third and last night, beginning with Lodovico’s arrival from Venice, represents another significant moment in Othello and Desdemona’s domestic life focused on the conjugal bed. Desdemona instructs Emilia to “Lay on my bed my wedding sheets” (4.2.105). In the next scene, Emilia reports that she has done as requested: “I have laid those sheets you bade me on the bed” (4.3.21). As she undresses for bed, Desdemona and Emilia talk about home life. Desdemona remembers her mother’s home and servant Barbary, who was in love, but whose lover “proved mad / And did forsake her” (4.3.26–7). Barbary died, singing the willow song about another “poor soul” who lamented her fate under a sycamore tree. Desdemona wonders whether such women exist who betray their husbands; Emilia thinks that there are many, but she thinks that “it is their husbands’ faults / If wives do fall” (4.3.85–6). Desdemona remembers her mother’s house, which had become a site for conjugal strife and tragedy, a reflection of what her home in Cyprus has turned into. Emilia speaks of abusive husbands and revengeful wives, reinforcing the idea of home not as a site of happiness but of violence and tragedy. Darkness connects Othello and Desdemona’s new abode in Cyprus to Brabantio’s house, which they had left behind, shattered and enveloped in darkness.
The text of Othello calls for special lighting effects, including torches, candles, tapers, and light.147 In Act V, scene 2, the 1622 Quarto text reads, “Enter Othello with a light, and Desdemona in her bed.” More frequently, however, Shakespeare sprinkles stage directions through the dialogue. As Brabantio begins to search his house for Desdemona, who has eloped with the Moor, he says:
Strike on the tinder, ho!
Give me a taper! Call up all my people!
This accident is not unlike my dream.
Belief of it oppresses me already.
Light, I say! Light! (1.1.139–41).
Likewise, Cassio, stabbed in the dark by Iago, shouts: “O, help, ho! light! a surgeon!” (5.1.30). A large number of the night scenes are to be staged a lume di notte (lit by candlelight, torches, or tapers). However, the nature of the light seems to change, starting in Act IV, scene 3, as Emilia helps Desdemona undress for bed. Here, as I will argue, the lighting resembles Caravaggio’s own use of lighting effects.
The play signals this switch when Desdemona wonders about the nature of women, vouching that she would not commit adultery: “No, by this heavenly light!” (64); Emilia retorts: “Nor I neither by this heavenly light. / I might do’t as well i’th’dark” (65–6). For a while in Act V, both kinds of lighting—that is, scenes lit by candlelight, and scenes lit by a more heavenly kind of light—continue to be used. One light comes from a physical source—a candle, a taper, a torch; the other serves as a metaphor for a divine kind of light, which reveals the truth. Cassio, having been stabbed in the dark, calls for light and a surgeon. No one can rely on sight, as they hear cries in the night, until Lodovico, Gratiano, and Bianca arrive and bring torches. The flickering light of the torches distorts Bianca’s facial expressions, as Iago notes to Lodovico and Gratiano: “Do you perceive the gastness [ghastly look] of her eye?” (5.1.107). At the same time, Othello, lurking in the shadows, praises Iago for stabbing Cassio and imagines Desdemona’s dark bedroom, which he is about to enter. In his mind’s eye, he can see in the dark: “Strumpet, I come, / Forth of my heart those charms, thine eyes, are blotted. / Thy bed, lust-stained, shall with lust’s blood be spotted” (5.1.34–6).
Michael Neill argues that the “bed” in Othello symbolizes the play’s preoccupation with a sensational, scandalous bi-racial marriage; therefore, a “lurid vision of the bed” looms large in the audience’s imagination throughout the play, until the bed finally appears in Act V. He adds, “The appearance of the bed from within the curtained alcove at the rear of the stage envisioned in the Folio direction signals a moment of quite literal discovery, when the hidden object of the play’s imaginative obsession at last stands revealed.”148 I suggest that Shakespeare carefully manipulates lighting here to reveal two parallel, yet contradictory realities, juxtaposing interior and exterior realities: Desdemona’s innocence and Othello’s grotesque obsession and murderous intent. Shakespeare paints a tableau, reminiscent of Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ and Saint John the Baptist, in the manipulation of lighting effects.
Act V, scene 2 calls for a physical source of light, such as a candle or taper. The stage direction in the 1622 Quarto calls for Othello to enter with “a light.” In his soliloquy, however, Othello refers to another kind of light, to a non-physical, heavenly light that shines on Desdemona as she lies in bed and reveals her skin to be whiter than snow and “smooth as monumental alabaster” (5.2.5). Similarly, Othello states that he will “Put out the light, and then put out the light” (5.2.7), extinguishing the “flaming minister,” the taper or candle lighting the room, as well as the “Promethean heat” of life, the heavenly light that shines in us and give us the breath of life. An account of a production at Oxford University in 1610 makes clear that the staging called for the creation of a tableau149:
At vero Desdemona illa apud nos a marito occisa, quanquam optime semper causam egit, interfecta tamen magis; cum in lecto decumbens spectantium misericordiam ipso vultu imploraret. [But truly that Desdemona was killed among us by her husband, although she always pleaded her case well, for all the more she was slain; when resting on her bed she called with her very countenance the pity of those watching.]150
The conditions, under which this night scene took place, made it possible for the spectators to observe Desdemona’s facial expressions closely. According to the 1610 eyewitness, Desdemona “called with her very countenance the pity of those watching”; likewise, in the text of the play, Desdemona calls attention to Othello’s distorted facial expressions: “And yet I fear you; for you’re fatal then / When your eyes roll so” (5.2.37–8); and she adds, “Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip? / Some bloody passion shakes your very frame” (5.2.43–4). Like Caravaggio, Shakespeare seems fully aware that lighting serves both to reveal and to conceal, as he orchestrates layers of reality, which oscillate between the physical and the metaphorical, the human and the divine, and interior and exterior space. A physical source of light distorts and envelops the figure in shadows; a heavenly kind reveals the truth.
Shakespeare suggests that the bedroom door reinforces two levels of reality: Othello’s isolation from the world and the truth, but out of this confined dark room emerges the truth. The 1999 RSC production of Othello in Stratford, for example, underscored how Othello’s world symbolically shrinks. Several doors in earlier scenes gradually disappeared until only one door remained: the door that Othello closes behind himself as he enters the conjugal bedroom to kill his wife in Act 5, scene 2. Othello approaches the conjugal bed; for the first 22 lines, he seems on the verge of turning his murderous errand into lovemaking. That one door opens, however, to allow other characters to enter. These characters bring more lights and the truth. Nonetheless, a profound sense of emptiness, disturbingly reminiscent of Brabantio’s house in the opening scene, pervades the closing scene.
Othello realizes that he has reached his “journey’s end” (5.2.268), and he asks himself, “Where should Othello go?” (272). He has no place to which to return. All the routes of his life have finally ended in this claustrophobic place. For the first time, we have a sense that we are in a completely enclosed space, isolated from the outside world. The scene has become a tableau: the background is hidden in deep darkness and shadows; a single source of light illuminates Othello’s distorted facial expression, and yet reveals the white, alabaster-like skin of Desdemona and her martyr-like pleading countenance. Shakespeare uses light and shadows to reveal multiple layers of reality.
Using painting techniques, Shakespeare represents two planes of reality: a story of love, jealousy, and passion drops off into the mysterious background of Othello’s past. Shakespeare juxtaposes the concrete, poorly lit indoors to the vast, limitless darkness, which symbolizes Othello’s past, mysterious and exotic life, fantastical experiences. As Gilles Deleuze observes, “Clarity endlessly plunges into obscurity.”151 Deleuze poses a pivotal question: “Does the line of light—or fold of the two levels—pass between the shadows and the dark background being withdrawn from it?”152 Light and shadows intersect in Othello and Desdemona’s bedroom. A tension emerges between physical and experiential space, a tension that eventually breaks apart what Iago describes as “a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and [a] supersubtle Venetian” (1.3.353). Shadows and darkness overpower clarity and, for a while, even the truth of Desdemona’s virtue.
Shakespeare veils Othello’s origins in obscurity and wraps Othello’s life in Venice and Cyprus in thick darkness. Shadows fall. Tragedy unfolds. The Moor, Eleazar, in Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion, refers to tragedy as the “Minion of the night, / Rhamnusias pew-felow” (5.3.48–9), and as a black man, he claims his rightful place: “Mine is the stage, thine is the Tragedy” (60).153 As I have argued elsewhere, in Veronese’s Cena in Casa de Levi (1573; Oil on canvas, Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice), the face of an African emerges from behind a column, as if “in Veronese’s imagination, an African face will emerge wherever shadows are to be found”; likewise, the portrayal of Aaron in Titus Andronicus depends not only on ethnographical fantasies of the age but also on images associated with the color black.154 In fact, popular manuals contained recipes for special effects that could be conducted at home in order to generate shockingly racist and insulting representations of Africans. The 1586 Booke of Prittie Conceits gives these directions: “To make folke seeme blacke: Put oyle oliue into a lampe, and put therein fine powder of ground glasse, & light it, and all those that bee about it will seeme blacke as Egyptians.”155 The work of St Albertus Magnus, widely popular, gives the following directions, in the 1565 translation, bearing the title The Booke of Secretes: “Take a greene frog, and cut of the head of it upon a grene cloth, maket it wette with the Oyle of a buctree or eldertree, and put in the wicke and lighte it in a greene lampe, & see a black man standing, betweene whose handes there shalbe a lampe, and a meruilous thing.”156 Art and these homemade special effects reinforce racial attitudes, and the iconography of tragedy as a creature of darkness.
As such, Othello ironically embodies tragic forces, traditionally associated with female mythological figures: maenads, the female votaries of Dionysus, and the Furies—Megaera (jealous), Tisiphone (blood avenger), and Alecto (unceasing in pursuit)—born of Uranus, when his young son, Kronos, castrated him.157 Gæa, the Earth, incited Kronos and her other sons, to seek revenge on their father for not allowing them to see the light by keeping them concealed in the depths of the earth. As Richard Seaford points out, Furies and maenads share similarities in aggressiveness, kin-slaughtering frenzy, appearance, and “accoutrements” such as “snakes, wands, or torches.”158 The chorus, in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, warns Eteocles, “The Fury of the black goatskin will go out from the house when the gods receive sacrifice from hands” (Melanaigis exeisi domōn Erius hotan ek kherōn theoi thusian dekhōntai).159 The black goatskin evokes darkness as a central theme and obviously connects Dionysus, Dionysus’ maenads, and the Fury: “The designation of the Fury as Melanaigis is facilitated by the Furies’ black appearance and black clothes, which Aeschylus refers to several times in the Oresteia.”160 The Misfortunes of Arthur, a play written by Thomas Hughes and others, and performed on February 28, 1588 by the members of Gray’s Inn before Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich, provides a clear sense of how the Furies were represented on the English stage, as the “First Dumbe Shewe” indicates:
Sounding the musicke, there rose three furies from vnder the stage appareled accordingly with snakes and flames about their blacke haires and garments. The first with a Snake in the right hande and a cup of wine with a Snake athwart the cup in the left hand. The second with a firebrand in the right hande, and a Cupid in the left: The thirde with a whippe in the right hande and a Paegasus in the left.161
The Furies appear in some 33 printed play texts of the period, including Gorboduc (c.1562–65) and A Warning for Fair Women, printed in 1599, and became recognizable stock and emblematic stage figures.162
Evoking the Furies and the maenads, Othello threatens to tear Desdemona “all to pieces” (3.3.431); and later he reiterates: “I will chop her into messes!” (4.1.196). He explicitly conjures the Furies to rise with their “aspics’ tongues”: “Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell!” (3.3.450; 447). Iago, however, apparently not wanting a blood-bath, shapes and moulds the “savage madness” (55) of an Othello intent on dismembering Desdemona as in a maenadic ritual (sparagmos) to a Fury, who does not dismembers but strangles her “in her bed, even the bed that she has contaminated” (4.1.203–204). In the process, Othello attempts to regain his masculinity in casting the ritual strangulation of his wife into the extinguishing of the “Promethean heat,” the breath of life, the fire stolen from Zeus as a gift to humankind. He mistakes Desdemona for Pandora—a woman made out of clay, all-gifted with charms and adornments “coupled however with lies, flattering words, and a crafty mind,” ironically, attributes that fit Iago rather than Desdemona.163
In Hecatommithi, one of the principal sources for Shakespeare’s Othello, Giraldi Cinthio depicts the characters’ experience of home in a memorable way. He explains that Disdemona and the Moor felt a strong mutual bond of love and were united in marriage, although “the Lady’s relatives did all they could to make her take another husband.”164 After a period of marital bliss in Venice, the Moor becomes commandant of the soldiers in Cyprus, where he and his wife settled down in a house. The Corporal, Cassio’s prototype, regularly frequents their house as a dinner guest. Iago’s counterpart, the wicked Ensign, falls in love with Disdemona, who rejects his advances. In turn, the Ensign, imagining that Disdemona loved the Corporal, sets out on a path of revenge against the Corporal and Disdemona. When she comes to the Corporal’s defense, the Ensign suggests to the Moor that “Perhaps Disdemona has good cause to look on him so favorably,” advising the Moor, “if you keep your eyes open you will see for yourself.”165 The Ensign steals the handkerchief from Disdemona and persuades the Moor to use a sand-filled stocking to beat Disdemona to death, and then, since “the house where you are staying is very old, and the ceiling of your room has many cracks in it,” he adds, “when she is dead, we shall make part of the ceiling fall; and we’ll break the Lady’s head, making it seem that a rafter has injured it in falling, and killed her.”166 That is precisely what they do. After her funeral, the Moor searches the empty house for his Disdemona. Filled with regret and kindling his hatred for the Ensign, the Moor can no longer contain his feelings. In the source, “unhousèd” has a much more literal meaning: the ceiling of the house comes tumbling down, as does the Moor’s marriage. The specter of this unhousing haunts Shakespeare’s representation of space in Othello and defines the central character’s identity.
In Shakespeare’s play, Othello neither searches the empty house for his dead wife nor returns to Venice to be punished. Yet Othello seems linked to the house, at first in Iago’s imagination, as the guest turned thief who steals the most precious possession of the house, and then as a noble but extremely jealous exile who robs himself of the home that he and Desdemona tried to build together. Not in a literal but in a figurative sense, Othello’s house tumbles down as he unhouses himself with the help of Iago. His family, home, past experiences, and childhood memories have become a blur of half-remembered, half-forgotten images, full of fundamental contradictions and fantasies. To tragic ends, Iago recognizes that Othello’s emotional realm revolves around Desdemona; their bedroom is Othello’s anchor in the European world.
The destroyer of household also becomes the thick darkness that envelops, penetrates, and transforms the house into something mysterious, exotic, and strange. As we see throughout the play, Shakespeare uses darkness to reduce the space around his characters, while simultaneously implying that the darkness that envelops them breaks the boundaries of space and connects them to a world elsewhere. Michel de Certeau argues that ironically the discourse that attempts to reconstruct the space of the Other also produces “the status of the strange”;167 and, as Syed Mansurul Islam writes, such a discourse in fact offers “the performative enactment of becoming other,”168 which Iago exploits to destructive ends. Othello’s storytelling reinforces his displacement from the European community to which he aspires to belong, and reenacts his Otherness, rooted in racial difference and life experiences in the mysterious terra incognita of his birth and of his travels.169
1 In Vol. 10 of his papers (folios 83–4), William Fulman (1632–1688) transcribes excerpts from Henry Jackson’s Latin correspondence written some 50 years earlier. In these excerpts, Jackson records a performance of Othello, along with Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, at Oxford in September 1610. See Geoffrey Tillotson, “Othello and The Alchemist at Oxford in 1610,” TLS, July 20, 1933: 494, translation mine.
2 James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 36. See Susan Stanford Friedman’s discussion of these concepts in her essay, “Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things” A Companion to Narrative Theory, (eds) James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 194.
3 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, (ed.) H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 84, as quoted in Friedman, 195.
4 Friedman 195.
5 Friedman 192–3.
6 Friedman 203.
7 Clifford 31.
8 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 234.
9 See Patricia Parker, “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation’ in Othello,” in Shakespeare & the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, (eds). (New York and London: Methuen, 1985) 54–74. Parker argues that “Rhetoric in the Renaissance is inextricably embedded in other discourses—of logic and politics, of theology and the ideology of sexual difference” (70).
10 Russ McDonald, “Introduction,” Othello, Complete Pelican Shakespeare, 1395.
11 Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 51.
12 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York and London: Penguin, 1973) 126. Clifford cites and discusses this example in Routes 17.
13 OED defines the term as follows: “Originally: a native or inhabitant of ancient Mauretania, a region of North Africa corresponding to parts of present-day Morocco and Algeria. Later usually: a member of a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent inhabiting north-western Africa (now mainly present-day Mauritania), who in the eighth century conquered Spain.” In his edition, Russ McDonald discusses the vagueness and complexity of the term (Complete Pelican Shakespeare, 1393–4).
14 See also the anonymous The Famous History of the A Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley in The Stukeley Plays, (ed.) Charles Edelman (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005).
15 “A black-skinned African, an Ethiopian, a Negro; any very dark-skinned person” (OED).
16 In Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Virginia Mason Vaughan discusses the representation of blackness from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century. See especially her discussion of Peacham’s drawing (48–9).
17 Abbot, sig. C7.
18 Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie in four bookes (London, 1652), in Edward H. Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925) 351.
19 See George Abbot, A brief description of the whole worlde (London, 1599), sig. C6–C7.
20 Gus W. Van Beek, “Frankincense and Myrrh,” The Biblical Archaeologist 23.3 (1960): 70–95; and “The Trade in Gum Arabic,” in James L. Webb, Jr., Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahen, 1600–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) 97–131. See also Peter Stallybrass, “Marginal England: The View from Aleppo,” in Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll, (ed.) Lena Cowen Orlin (Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006) 27–39.
21 A.H. Lybyer, “The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental Trade,” The English Historical Review 30.120 (1915): 577, 584, 588.
22 Lybyer 584. For a fascinating study of the rivalry between Genoa and Venice, see George L. Gorse, “Christopher Columbus and Andrea Doria: The Two Worlds of Renaissance Genoa,” Mediterranean Studies 16 (2007): 120–42. Venice set its sight on the Eastern Mediterranean; whereas Genoa, through Andrea Doria and Christopher Columbus, looked beyond the Mediterranean basin, across the Atlantic.
23 Edward Alleyn Loomis, “Master of the Tiger,” Shakespeare Quarterly 7.4 (1956): 457; and Henry Neill Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1950) 302–3.
24 Edward Pechter, Othello and Interpretive Traditions (Iowa City, IA:: University of Iowa Press, 1999) 35; also quoted in Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness, 94.
25 Robert Greene, Greenes Mourning Garment: Given Him by Repentance at the Funerals of Love (London, 1616), sig. C2.
26 Martin Levey, “Medieval Arabic Toxicology: The Book on Poisons of ibn Wahshīya and Its Relation to Early Indian and Greek Texts,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 56.7 (1966): 1–130. Gum arabic had and still has multiple uses in the candy and pharmaceutical industries, the manufacture of dentures, and as a thickener and colloidal stabilizer (OED). The anonymous A very proper treatise, wherein is breefely set forth the art of limming (London, 1583) contains a recipe for making “gum water to temper colours withal” (Fol. 4).
27 James L.A. Webb, Jr., “The Trade in Gum Arabic: Prelude to French Conquest in Senegal,” The Journal of African History 26.2–3 (1985): 149. For a discussion of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century trade routes in West Africa, see Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 5–54.
28 Jerry Brotton, “Tragedy and Geography,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Tragedies, vol. 1, (eds) Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) 232.
29 Sugden 5.
30 These images are available in the British Library copy (Shelfmark 810.c.2) of Pietro Bertelli, Diuersarū nationum habitus, centum, et quattuor iconibus in œre incisis diligenter expressi, item ordines duo processionum … opera P. Bertellii (Patauij, 1594, 96). A similar book does not contain these illustrations: Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diuerse parti del mondo libri dve, fatti da Cesare Vecellio, & con discorsi da lui dichiarati (Venice, 1590).
31 For convenience, I am quoting from Pliny, the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, trans. John F. Healy (Harmondsworth, UK, and New York: Penguin, 1991) 78, but a 1601 translation, by Philemon Holland, was available to Shakespeare: The historie of the world (London, 1601), STC 20029.
32 Pliny 57–8.
33 Abbot, sig. C8r-v.
34 Richard Hakluyt, The principal navigations, voyages, traffiques & discoveries of the English nation (Glasgow, J. MacLehose and sons, 1903–05), 6: 168–70.
35 Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus posthumus, or, Purchas his Pilgrimes: contayning a history of the world in sea voyages and lande travells by Englishmen and others (Glasgow: J. MacLehose and Sons, 1905–07) 9: 260.
36 Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History, 54.
37 The map is named after Alberto Cantino, a spy for the Duke of Ferrara, who smuggled the map out of Portugal, and it is now at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, Italy. Digital copies of the map are readily available on the Internet. See R.A. Skelton, Explorers’ Maps: Chapter in the Cartographic Record of Geographical Discovery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), esp. Chapter 2; and, for a discussion of other caricatures of Africans, consult Jean Michel Massing, “The Image of Africa and the Iconography of Lip-plated Africans in Pierre Desceliers’s World Map of 1550,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, (eds) T.F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 48–69.
38 John Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa, trans. By John Pory (London, 1600); rpt. The History and Description of Africa, 3 vols., (ed.) Robert Brown (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896), 2: 555.
39 Etymology is from the OED.
40 Duarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa: An Account of the Countries Bordering the Indian Ocean and Their Inhabitants, trans. Mansel Longworth Dames (London: Hakluyt Society, 1918) 1: 12. See my discussion of this matter in Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters, 13–14.
41 Abbot, sig. C6v.
42 See Lois Whitney, “Did Shakespeare know Leo Africanus?,” PMLA 37 (1922): 470–88; and Edward Berry, “Othello’s Alienation,” SEL 30.2 (1990): 315–33.
43 British Library MS Add. 9810, Chart of the Coasts of Europe, dated October 10, 1562, by Giacopo Veschonte. The interior of Africa would remain largely unexplored well into the nineteenth century, as Jean Michel Massing points out in “The Image of Africa,” in Earle and Lowe, (eds), Black Africans, 55.
44 Pory, “To the Reader,” in Leo Africanus, I: 6.
45 Jyotsna Singh, “Othello’s Identity, Postcolonial Theory and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello,” Othello: Contemporary Critical Essays, (ed.) Lena Cowen Orlin (Houndsmills; New York: Palgrave, 2004) 172. See also Philip D. Collington, “Othello the Liar,” in The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England, (eds) Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008) 197. Collington argues that Othello often “lapses into boundless rhetorical flights” (197). Of particular interest here is Ania Loomba’s discussion of contemporary beliefs about Blacks and Muslims in “Othello and the Racial Question,” Chapter 4 of her book, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 91–111. Other important studies of race in the period include Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); and Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). In Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Josiah Blackmore offers a fascinating overview of the Portuguese experience in and with Africa. His chapter on “Africa and the Imagination” is of particular interest.
46 Sousa, Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters, 140–46.
47 William Camden, Remaines concerning Brittaine (London, 1629) 261. Desdemona seems to become gradually more credulous about whatever Othello says.
48 See William Shakespeare, Othello, (ed.) Michael Neill, Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 223n.
49 Africanus, I: 85.
50 Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello and Bringing to Light,” in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, (eds), Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) 94.
51 I have addressed this matter in a pedagogical essay on Othello, in “Unhoused in Othello,” Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello, (eds) Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2005) 133–40, revised and adapted for this chapter, and republished by permission of MLA.
52 Richard Eden and Richard Willes, (eds), The History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (London, 1577), Fol. 337r-v, qtd. in Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Before Othello: Elizabethan Representation of Sub-Saharan Africans,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 54.1 (1997): 19–44.
53 Robert L. Freeden, et al., Nomads of the World (New York: National Geographic Society, 1971) 10.
54 Torvald Faegre, Tents: Architecture of the Nomads (New York: Anchor Books, 1977) 10. Faegre writes: “The Bedouin tent is the most widespread of black-tent designs and the most refined for desert use” (18).
55 Faegre 10.
56 The most comprehensive study of the black tent, so called from the color associated with goat hair used in its manufacture, is C.G. Feilberg, La Tente Noire (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseets Skrifter, 1994).
57 Faegre 7.
58 Faegre 7.
59 Faegre 7.
60 Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), fol. 196.
61 The OED cites an example from Fynes Moryson (Itinerary, II.82): “The weather grew so extreme, as it blew downe all our Tents, and tore them in pieces.”
62 Hanna Scolnicov, “Theatre Space, Theatrical Space, and the Theatrical Space Without,” The Theatrical Space, (ed.) James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 11–12.
63 Scolnicov 11.
64 Scolnicov 15.
65 Scolnicov 13.
66 Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991) 41, 43. For a discussion of this phenomenon in The Tempest, see my essay, “Alien Habitats in The Tempest,” Patrick M. Murphy, (ed.), The Tempest: Critical Essays (New York and London: Routledge, 2001): 448–9.
67 Robert M. Rakoff, “Ideology in Everyday Life: The Meaning of the House,” Politics and Society 7 (1977): 85. See Sousa, “Unhoused in Othello,” 133–4.
68 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 123.
69 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 5:149.
70 This definition paraphrases and combines several Oxford English Dictionary definitions, as I did in my essay, “Unhoused in Othello” (134).
71 In The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), Michel Foucault argues that, in the Renaissance, knowledge was organized along a “semantic web of resemblance”: convenientia, or adjacency, “a hinge between two things,” through which “a resemblance appears”; aemulatio, a resemblance, as in a mirror image, freed from “the law of place,” and requiring no contact between two things; “analogy,” a form of “resemblances across space,” yet still requiring adjacency, bonds, and joints; and “sympathy,” a bond requiring no predetermined path and capable of traversing vast distances (17–25). The Latin word convenientia signified “meeting together, agreement, accord, harmony, conformity, suitableness, fitness” (OED). The OED defines sympathy as: “A (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence one another (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other.” In his translation of Plutarch’s Moralia (London, 1603), Philemon Holland offers a glossary of “obscure words,” in which he defines “sympathie” as “a fellow feeling, as is betweene the head and stomache in our bodies: also the agreement and natural amitie in divers senselesse things, as between iron and the load-stone” (sig. Aaaaaav). Ian Maclean, in “Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian Counterblast,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59.1 (1998), deems this episteme “unreliable,” since Foucault assumes that these forms of similitude come from the same field, rather than from “the spheres of grammar, rhetoric or moral philosophy, dialectics, and natural philosophy or medicine” (153). Foucault also relies on Platonic theories, and—more to the point—he inexplicably excludes from consideration a large body of Aristotelian texts and commentaries.
72 John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 122–3.
73 Paraphrased from Gillies, 122. The quotations, cited by Gillies, are from Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, trans. Lewes Lewknor (London, 1599).
74 Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980) 37–43, 124–41; and Dennis Romano, “City-State and Empire,” Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance: Venice and the Veneto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 9.
75 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1907) 1: 164–5.
76 In reality, however, Othello shows anxiety about old age, and, as Philip D. Collington argues, Othello, like Shakespeare’s other old men, Lear and Prospero, employs “sexualized and misogynous language” “to conceal affective states ranging from insecurity and fear to bitterness and rage” (188). See Collington’s article, “Sans Wife: Sexual Anxiety and the Old Man in Shakespeare,” in Erin Campbell, (ed.), Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006) 185–207.
77 Bronwen Wilson, “Venice, Print, and the Early Modern Icon,” Urban History 33.1 (2006): 46.
78 Thomas Coryat, Coryats crudities (London, 1611), quoted in Gillies 124.
79 Contarini sig. A2-A2v.
80 Contarini sig. D1v.
81 Contarini sig. A2v.
82 Cantarini sig. B.
83 Romano, “City-State and Empire,” 11.
84 Francesco Borri, “‘Neighbors and Relatives’: The Plea of Rižana as a Source for Northern Adriatic Elites,” Mediterranean Studies 17 (2008): 1–26.
85 William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081–1797 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), qtd. in Romano, “City-State and Empire,” 11.
86 Deborah Howard, “Venice and Islam in the Middle Ages: Some Observations on the Question of Architectural Influence,” Architectural History 34 (1991): 59. See also, Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), esp. chapter 8, “Theaters of the World,” 217–51.
87 Howard, “Venice and Islam,” 68–9.
88 Howard, “Venice and Islam,” 69.
89 Howard, “Venice and Islam,” 69.
90 John Drakakis, “Shakespeare and Venice,” in Michele Marrapodi, (ed.), Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare & His Contemporaries (Aldershot, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007) 185. Drakakis is, of course, referring to Brabantio’s line, “This accident is not unlike my dream” (1.1.140).
91 Preface “To the Reader” (sig. A1v–A2).
92 Contarini sig. A2v–A3.
93 Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611; Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905) 1: 308.
94 Coryat 1: 308.
95 Moryson 193.
96 Moryson 193.
97 Contarini sig. A2v.
98 Contarini sig. Ccv.
99 Romano 9. Romano’s conclusions are based on a study by Stanley Chojnacki, “Social Identity in Renaissance Venice: The Second Serrata,” Renaissance Studies 8.4 (1994): 341–58.
100 Chojnacki 271, as quoted and paraphrased by Romano 16.
101 Romano 16–17.
102 Romano 17. In “Family Jewels: The Gendered Marking of Medici Women in Court Portraits of the Late Renaissance,” Mediterranean Studies 17 (2008): 148–82, Heather L. Sale Holian argues that, for the Medici, jewels and other “priceless objects of personal adornment functioned as dynastic markers, ‘branding’ or ‘marking’ the female wearer as Medici, and as such are therefore comparable to the bold proprietary claims performed by the family’s ubiquitous coat-of-arms displayed on Medici-owned villas, palaces, works of art, and even family pets” (148).
103 Dubrow 23.
104 Dubrow 30–31.
105 Dubrow 29.
106 Dubrow 32.
107 In Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), Emily C. Bartels argues that “in a world where everyone seems to have a place to be, the Moor is no exception, appearing no less (if also no more) embedded on the homefront than his Venetian, Florentine, or Cypriot peers” (172). Bartels is arguing for Othello’s “embeddedness in Venice on more than just military grounds” (173). My point differs substantially from hers, in that I am arguing for Othello’s “unhousèd” condition, not his “embeddedness.”
108 Romano, 17–18, refers to Margaret F. Rosenthal’s study, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
109 Sugden 142.
110 Sugden lists many of these references (143).
111 Alvin Kernan, “Othello: An Introduction,” Shakespeare: The Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays, (ed.) Alfred Harbage (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964): 77–8.
112 Kernan 77–8.
113 Drakakis, “Shakespeare and Venice,” 183.
114 Thomas Dekker, The pleasant comedie of old Fortunatus (London, 1600), sig. A4. STC 6517.
115 Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients (London, 1638), 276. STC 7302. See “How to Draw Distance,” in David Park, The Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1997) 130–36.
116 The OED traces the English usage of tenebroso to an article by W.M. Rossetti in 1886, although the term can be documented in much earlier usage in Italian and Spanish.
117 Salvatore Battaglia, Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 2001).
118 Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions, 70.
119 Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions, 71.
120 Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions, 72.
121 R.B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999) 205–207.
122 In “Caravaggio Reloaded: Neo-Baroque Poetics,” Angela Ndalianis notes the ways in which “The neo-baroque articulates the spatial, the visual and the sensorial,” especially “its delight in spectacles that playfully immerse the viewer in multiple layers of representational realities” (73). Her article appears in Caravaggio & His World: Darkness & Light (Sydney, N.S.W.: Art Gallery of New South Wales; Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003), 72–7. Caravaggio, for her, represents “strategically orchestrated levels of reality.” Caracci devises, in her words, an open and limitless two dimensional space. Likewise, Caravaggio wants to collapse “the frame that separates illusion from reality, fictive space from actual space.” I think that these ideas are particularly helpful in trying to analyze Shakespeare’s own experiments with lighting and special effects in Othello. In “Othello and Perception,” James Hirsh argues that “Othello dramatizes the processes by which people perceive one another and their situations,” and that the play dramatizes “a change in Othello’s perception of Desdemona,” as well as “playgoers’ perception of Othello” (Orlin, New Casebooks: Othello, 135). My focus here is, rather, on lighting effects and Shakespeare’s manipulation of lights, darkness, and shadows to create a uniquely Caravaggesque effect.
123 Francine Prose, Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) 16–17.
124 Prose 29.
125 Sergio Benedetti, “Darkness and Light,” Caravaggio & His World: Darkness & Light (Sydney, N.S.W.: Art Gallery of New South Wales; Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003) 28–32, 32.
126 Prose 50, 102.
127 The study of perspective, including Lomazzo’s book, had an influence on English landscape painters, and Shakespeare uses linear and aerial perspective. See James Turner, “Landscape and the ‘Art Prospective’ in England, 1584–1660,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 291–2.
128 Donald Lemen Clark, “Ancient Rhetoric and English Renaissance Literature,” Shakespeare Quarterly 2.3 (1951): 200. I am grateful to Professor Richard Hardin, University of Kansas, for bringing this example to my attention.
129 Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (New York: Harper & Row, 1983) vii.
130 Hibbard vii.
131 The passage has been translated by Hibbard, 350. All translations, unless indicated otherwise, are by Hibbard.
132 Hibbard 350.
133 Hibbard 363–64.
134 Benedetti, “Darkness and Light,” 32.
135 Edmund Capon, “Why Caravaggio?” in Darkness & Light, 14–15, 15.
136 Benedetti, “Darkness and Light,” 28–32, 30. Benedetti writes: “Other artists such as Savoldo, Romanino and Antonio Campi had executed works on similar themes, and Giovan Paolo Lomazzo had even published a theoretical treatise on the subject” (30).
137 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte de la pittura, scultura, et architectura (Milan, 1585), available at Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas (Shelfmark: Summerfield C 29). On Caravaggio’s possible acquaintance with Lomazzo’s treatise, see Benedetti, 30; Hibbard, Caravaggio, 42; and John Varriano, Caravaggio: The Art of Realism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2006) 118.
138 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A tracte containing the artes of curious paintinge caruinge buildinge, trans. Richard Haydocke (Oxford, 1598), STC 16698. I am grateful to Margaux DeRoux, University of Kansas, for bringing to my attention Alison Thorne’s discussion of Lomazzo’s influence in England, through Haydocke’s translation, especially the “commerce between verbal and visual modes of expression.” See Thorne’s Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 2000) 58–9; 103.
139 Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) 1: xiv.
140 Lomazzo fol. 26–7.
141 Lomazzo Book 2, fol. 5.
142 Lomazzo fol. 170.
143 Lomazzo fol. 170.
144 Thomas Nashe, “Terrors of the Night or A Discourse of Apparitions,” in Pierce Penniless, (ed.) Stanley Wells (London: Edward Arnold, 1964) 146.
145 Nashe 153.
146 On Othello’s change from “self-contained man” to his wife’s murderer, see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 117–18. Paster argues that the transformation can be attributed to “such environmental factors as geohumoralism and the passions becoming increasingly associated with black skin” (117). See also Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 132.
147 See 1.1.139–40; 1.1.157–8, stage direction; 1.2.1, stage direction; 1.2.154, etc.
148 For a fascinating study of the bedroom scene, see Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare’s Middle Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays, (ed.) David Young (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993) 133.
149 In her introduction to her collection of essays, Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006), Genevieve Warwick remarks that the tableaux vivants, used in medieval mystery plays, survived well into the early modern period, and even evolved into the “oratorio sacro favored by Filippo Neri,” which “conjoined music to the reading of sacred texts” (19). This tradition of tableaux vivants “formed part of Caravaggio’s visual inheritance” (19).
150 Geoffrey Tillotson, “Othello and The Alchemist at Oxford in 1610,” TLS, July 20, 1933: 494.
151 Deleuze 32.
152 Deleuze 32.
153 Thomas Dekker, Lust’s Dominion, in Fredson Bowers, (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961).
154 Sousa, Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters, 100–101.
155 Anonymous, The Booke of Pittie Conceits, STC 3351 (London, c. 1586), sig. A2V. Other editions include STC 3352 (1599), 3353 (1612), 3354 (1626).
156 St Albertus Magnus, The Booke of Secretes (London, c. 1565), sig. K4. There were also the proverbial Cimmerians of the ancient world: “People inhabiting the furthest part of Europe, not farre from the fennes called Paludes Meotidis, aboute the sea Bosphorus Cimmerius, Northeast from Græcia. Plinie and other affirme, that by the farre distaunce of the sunne from it, that country is alway verie darke: wherof happened this prouerbe. Cimmerijs tenebris atrior, Blacker than the darkenesse of Cimmeria: applyed to much darkenesse, dulnesse of witte, or lacke of wisedome”—Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (London, 1565); and as an adjective: “Of or belonging to the legendary Cimmerii. Hence, proverbially used as a qualification of dense darkness, gloom, or night, or of things or persons shrouded in thick darkness” (OED).
157 The Columbia Encyclopedia, fifth edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 1028; Oskar Seyffert, A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 664; Linda Woodbridge, The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) 22; and Robert S. Miola, “Othello Furens,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41.1 (1990): 49–64. Miola argues that Seneca’s Hercules Furens supplies “a mythic archetype that enables Shakespeare to transform the loose melodrama of Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi into compelling tragedy” (51).
158 Seaford, “Dionysus as Destroyer of the Household,” 140.
159 Seaford, “Dionysus as Destroyer of the Household,” 141.
160 Seaford, “Dionysus as Destroyer of the Household,” 141. Othello contains three references to goats, obvious symbols of lechery, but goats were, of course, associated with Dionysus.
161 Thomas Hughes et al., The Misfortunes of Arthur, (ed.) Harvey Carson Brumbine (Berlin: Verlag Von Emil Felber, 1900), 115. See also E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 3: 348–9. According to Chambers, seven collaborators worked on the text of the play.
162 For a complete list, consult Thomas L. Berger, William C. Bradford, and Sidney L. Sondergard, An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama Printed Plays, 1500–1660, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 48. In A Warning for Fair Women, (ed.) Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), the Furies accompany the personified figure of Tragedy, which enters “with a bowle of bloud in her hand” (Dumb Show I, stage direction, l. 771).
163 Seyffert 520.
164 Geoffrey Bullough, (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1973), 7: 242.
165 Bullough 7: 244.
166 Bullough 7: 250.
167 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986) 67.
168 Syed Mansurul Islam, The Ethics of Travel from Marco Polo to Kafka (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) vii.
169 Russ McDonald writes: “Othello is a man of extremes, an African prince who has spent his life in ‘the tented field’, without a permanent home” (1394).
