stract, unconditional hate but a certain set of conditions that have preempted
his accusers’ ambitions and desires: not simply a scapegoat, the Moor has
eloped with a prized bride and daughter, and he has chosen Cassio as his lieu-
tenant. In fact, erase Othello’s identity as a Moor, and the play might go on:
Iago might be no happier being bypassed for military preferment by a Venet-
ian general, Roderigo, no happier being displaced in Desdemona’s affections
by a Venetian suitor, and Brabantio, no happier being betrayed by his daugh-
ter’s elopement with a Venetian husband. Brabantio admittedly has warned
Roderigo that “my daughter is not for thee” ( 1. 1. 99 ). He has also made clear
that if there are “charms / By which the property of youth and maidhood /
May be abused,” they need not come from a Moor: Brabantio insists that the
“spells and medicines” which have “corrupted” Desdemona have been
“bought of mountebanks,” an occupation in which Venetians reputedly ex-
celled ( 1. 3. 61 – 62 ).^43
The play, of course, would not go on; Othello’s identity as a Moor is cru-
cial. But as that identity is carried through the prescriptions and presump-
tions of prejudice, it evades and unsettles their score. We are not watching a
discriminatory discourse guaranteed to be effective prove, anticlimatically, ef-
fective; rather, we are watching its obstruction—and not just in the case of
any Moor, but in the case of a Moor who has, in eloping, violated social cus-
tom. Iago will be the first, though not the last, to argue that Othello’s safe-
guard is the Venetian state, which “cannot with safety cast” out the Moor, “for
he’s embarked / With such loud reason to the Cyprus wars” and “another of
his fathom they have none” ( 1. 1. 148 – 49 , 151 ). That the argument is initially
Iago’s should probably give critics who echo it a bit more pause. Be that as
may be, what prevents the immediate alienation of Moor here is not the state
but a set of players with conflicting biases and suspicions, who are signifi-
cantly more preoccupied with defending and securing their own positions
than they are with undoing his. Hence, to encounter the Moor constructed
in Venice’s margins is to confront the contingency of the discourse designed
to do him in. It is to recognize that even within a world where prejudice cir-
culates freely, to be produced against the Moor is to produce and expose the
self.
***If it is therefore not entirely “meet” to be produced against the Moor, as the
opening exchange suggests, against what then is “the Moor of Venice” pro-
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 167