introduction
On Sitting Down to Read OthelloOnce Again
“Speak of meas I am; nothing extenuate, / Nor aught set down in malice”
(Oth. 5. 2. 341 – 42 ).^1 This is the instruction that Shakespeare’s “valiant Moor”
Othello offers to his audience at the end of the play that bears his name
( 1. 3. 48 ). Yet, as this book—and, I will argue, that play—attempt to show, to
speak of Othello, of a “Moor of Venice,” as he is is not as easy or straightfor-
ward as it sounds. Othello himself goes on to supply a number of divergent
images, each with a different cultural edge. He is, he implies, a proper if erring
lover—“one that loved not wisely, but too well,” “one not easily jealous, but
being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme” ( 5. 2. 343 – 45 )—and “one” generic
or “Venetian” enough that he requires no qualification before the representa-
tives of Venice. He is also, however, an “Indian” who “threw a pearl away /
Richer than all his tribe,” and possibly (though less likely) a “Judean”
( 5. 2. 346 – 47 ).^2 His “subdued eyes” become “Arabian trees,” his “tears” their
“medicinable gum” ( 5. 2. 347 – 50 ). All “this,” he orders Lodovico, “set you
down” ( 5. 2. 350 ). But “this” is not all. In addition, Lodovico must “say besides
that in Aleppo once,” Othello “took by th’ throat” “a malignant and a tur-
baned Turk” (who “beat a Venetian and traduced the state”) and “smote him,”
just as Othello now stabs himself with an unnoticed weapon ( 5. 2. 351 – 54 ; em-
phasis added).
As these images mount up, it is hard to tell whether, where, or how to
draw the line between them. Othello’s directive, “set you down this; / And say
besides,” which is meaningfully enjambed in the script, at once breaks and
bridges the figures that come before and after. It teases us with the illusion of
closure and difference—an end to “this” and a start to what “besides”—where