Europe, Othellostarts with a more radical tactic. The play will end, like Titus
andLust’s Dominion, with the Moor’s alienation. But the tragedy begins with
the assumption that Othello is a “most worthy,” “noble” ( 1. 2. 91 – 92 ), and
“valiant” general ( 1. 3. 48 ), who has “done the state some service” and whose
tragic self-destruction will be a tragedy for that state ( 5. 2. 338 ).^24
Begins—or almost begins. Before we ever meet “the Moor of Venice,” we
are thrust into the calamity that surrounds and, we gradually learn, involves
him on the shadowy and sinister Venetian streets, giving his blackness perti-
nence and putting his heroism on pause. It is through Venice that we must
first read its Moor. Yet reading Venice is not, and was not, a simple process,
its identity not easy to distill. Across early modern English texts and transla-
tions, Venice appears as a multivalent, sometimes contradictory, even mysti-
fied cultural space, its representations constituting what some scholars have
catalogued as “myth.”^25 During the decades immediately preceding Othello,
debates over legislation restricting foreigners in London gave Venice’s reputa-
tion as a place hospitable to “strangers” particular currency. In 1593 , for exam-
ple, John Wolley, a member of Elizabeth’s Privy Council, opposed such
legislation by arguing that “Venice could never have been so rich and famous
but by entertaining of strangers, and by that means have gained all the inter-
course of the world.”^26 Moreover, the sources Shakespeare is most likely to
have consulted—Thomas’s History of Italyand Lewkenor’s Commonwealth
and Government of Venice—do emphasize Venice’s lucrative openness.^27 In
calling up the conflict between the Venetians and the Turks, the play also
points to (even if it simultaneously eclipses) a history which had come to a
head in 1571 , with the Christian defeat of the Turks at Lepanto.^28 That event,
the famed battle of Lepanto, in some ways marked the beginning of the end
of Venetian glory, followed as it was by the loss of Cyprus to the Turks and
the decline of multinational support for Venice. The Christian victory was
nonetheless touted as a high-water mark in Venetian history. In His Majesties
Lepanto, or Heroicall Song( 1603 ), James I himself exalts Venice as a last Chris-
tian refuge, ordained by God, and heroically saved from the “faithlesse” “Ma-
hometists” (and their patron, Satan) by a multinational “Christian Nauie” of
Greeks, Spaniards, Germans, and Italians.^29
Yet while these histories do lie behind and within Othello, producing a
Venice favorably inclined toward its Moorish general, the opening scene pref-
aces that heroic political vision with the much darker social landscape of,
ironically, comedy—and in particular, one of Shakespeare’s darkest, “prob-
lem” comedies, The Merchant of Venice ( 1596 – 97 ), as Michael Neill has
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 161