“extravagant”—that is, wandering or vagrant—stranger.^1 Yet if his presence
betrays the disruptive influx of the “everywhere,” Roderigo’s depiction associ-
ates him also with the “here.” This—a society that includes an extravagant
and wheeling stranger—is, it seems, Venice too.
These lines appear in the First Folio, not in the 1622 quarto, the earliest
extant script, and critics are unsure whether the passage, including lines 120
to 136 , is an addition or revision, or, what may be more likely, a remnant from
an earlier original, from which both quarto and Folio might have been sepa-
rately drawn.^2 Yet Roderigo’s depiction of the Venetian stranger brings up an
issue underscored by the play’s title, which in its first and then preeminent in-
carnation was simply “the Moor of Venice.”^3 Barbara Everett has postulated
that Shakespeare was “compelled” to build a play from its source, Giovanni
Battista Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi( 1566 ), by the very idea behind
this “race-title,” compelled, that is, “by the random premise of Cinthio’s
opening phrase, ‘Fu già in Venezia un Moro’, ‘There was in Venice a Moor.’ ”^4
For critics, by and large, the presence of a Moor inVenice, not to mention the
concept of a Moor ofVenice, has seemed a curious anomaly which provokes
the dramatic crisis. From A. C. Bradley on, the Moor’s position as an outsider
within Venetian society has provided an obvious answer to what is arguably
Othello’s central question: why is the Moor vulnerable to Iago’s lies?^5 Our un-
derstandings of what it means to be an “outsider” have become increasingly
attuned to historical, political, and racial nuances and to the double-edged
complications of hybridity, mimicry, and representational indeterminacy, as I
have suggested in my Introduction. Still, critics tend to follow Iago’s cues, en-
dorsing the assumption that because Othello is a Moor, he inhabits a uniquely
“precarious” position within Venice: a “cultural stranger,” who has lost “his
own origins,” he appears in these readings as literally and figuratively out of
place, catastrophically “unable to grasp” “Venetian codes of social and sexual
conduct.”^6
But is the Moor necessarily out of place in Venice? Cinthio’s opening
premise does seem somewhat “random,” since the cultural identity of the
Moor has little impact on the crisis. The Moor and his new wife Disdemona
live in uninterrupted “tranquillità” in Venice until a routine changing of the
guard dictates that he head to Cyprus to become the “Capitano de soldati”
there.^7 In Cinthio’s story there are no Turks and no imminent Turkish threat
to propel Venice’s embrace of the Moor. An experienced military commander,
he is held very dear (“molto caro”) by the Signoria under ordinary, not extraor-
dinary, circumstances ( 377 ). Trouble begins only when the scene shifts to
156 chapter seven