“tradition” that emerges in the last quarter of the century and extends through
Othello—that is, if we consider the insistence, say, in Titus Andronicusand
Lust’s Dominionthat cultural boundaries are fluid, cross-cultural relations
improvised, and the Moor’s place in Europe neither predetermined nor
precluded—not only does the presence of the Moor inVenice seem less per-
plexing as an abstract idea; the possibility of a Moor ofVenice seems more vi-
able and variable as a starting point of definition.^13 To be sure, in Othello, Iago
does everything in his power to turn Othello into a disenfranchised
“stranger,” to alienate him not only from himself, but also from the military
and domestic anchors that give him, and Venice, definition. In the process, as
critics have adeptly shown, Iago repeatedly reconfigures the meaning of “race”
and emphasizes the incriminating transparency of blackness to negatively
color what the Moor perceives and how he is perceived.^14 Yet what gives Iago’s
corrosive—we would say “racist”—discourse both its challenge and its edge,
and what contributes crucially to the drama’s defining tension, is the all too
likely prospect that a Moor inVenice could be as well a Moor ofVenice.
***Historically, Othellohas been at the center of controversy in a way that the
other plays I have been considering have not, not simply because it has long
been the most popular (dare I say, the best?) play of the lot and so the most
discussed, but also because its Moor is the tragic hero. Within the Shake-
spearean canon, Othellostands beside such plays as Hamlet,Measure for Mea-
sure,Macbeth, and King Learas part of Shakespeare’s sustained attempt to
scrutinize, even revolutionize, the notion of the subject, to explore and expose
the uncertain, unnerving parameters of an individuated interior, in Iago’s
words, the “native act and figure of [the] heart” ( 1. 1. 62 ), and, if Stephen
Greenblatt is right, to pave the way for Freud.^15 The original Othello, Richard
Burbage, helped bring down to earth the “hyperbolic” acting style popular-
ized by Marlowe’s superstar, Edward Alleyn (who also played the histrionic
Muly Mahamet), ushering in a kind of “personation” that allowed for a closer
identification between the audience and the actors.^16 Yet even before Thomas
Rymer declared Shakespeare’s dramatics “barbarous,” his ennobling of a
“Black-a-moor” outrageous, or John Quincy Adams puzzled over “what in-
duced the Poet to take a negro for an example of jealousy,” the Moor’s appear-
ance presented a unique complication.^17 For however Burbage was made
up or costumed (possibly in a “wiry wig”) and however his skin color was
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 159