the excessively loving, the “easily jealous” and the “extremely perplexed,” the
Turk and the non-Turk.
In the final moments, the play itself leaves its own “bloody period,” the
response to the Moor’s “unlucky deeds,” somewhat open-ended ( 5. 2. 356 , 340 ).
Othello closes his performance with a literal kiss of death. But if the wheel
comes full circle appropriately on the lover, who first kissed then killed his
wife, Lodovico, Gratiano, and Cassio are left struggling to put closure on a
tragedy which, along with “all that’s spoke,” is inexorably but, to us, unfath-
omably “marred” ( 5. 2. 356 ). How exactly has Othello’s self-destruction
“marred” what has been spoken? The Venetians can readily codify, blame, and
sentence Iago, the “hellish villain” and “Spartan dog, / More fell than anguish,
hunger, or the sea” ( 5. 2. 360 – 61 , 368 ). But in the case of Othello, their censure
is mixed with certain, ultimately immeasurable degrees of sympathy.
Lodovico directs Gratiano to “keep the house / And seize upon the fortunes of
the Moor” ( 5. 2. 365 – 66 ). If the categorical reference to “the Moor” demeans or
alienates Othello (and for me, the assumption that “the Moor” is automati-
cally discriminatory is an “if ”), Lodovico’s insistence that the Moor’s posses-
sions “succeed on” Gratiano, Brabantio’s brother, simultaneously underscores
Othello’s propertied place within a Venetian family ( 5. 2. 367 ). The Moor’s for-
tune is not simply randomly “seized,” though the word carries the force of
usurpation; it is legitimately inherited—an outcome that Brabantio’s other-
wise dramatically incidental death makes room for. Lodovico will “straight
aboard, and to the state / This heavy act with heavy heart relate” ( 5. 2. 370 – 71 ).
As he projects his own “heavy” condition onto the fatal act, one thing is clear:
even in the face of Othello’s prompts, speaking of the Moor as he is will have
to wait.
So what is Othello’s, or Shakespeare’s, problem? Or what, we might bet-
ter ask, is ours? As critics who have seen and read Othellothrough and
through, who have looked long and hard beyond the play and its perfor-
mances to a broad history of dramatic and nondramatic representations of
Moors, we’d like to assume that we have the advantage, at least over the char-
acters, whose views are circumscribed and whose capacity to view is always
only a fiction. “What [we] know, [we] know,” to borrow dangerously from
Iago ( 5. 2. 301 )—and we hope that we can know enough to speak of both Oth-
ello and “the Moor” as they are. Yet from the time that Eldred Jones initiated
a serious discussion of “Othello’s countrymen” in 1965 , promoting “Africans”
as an important subject on the English Renaissance stage and “the idea of
Africa” as an important part of England’s global consciousness, we have not
introduction 3