precise and particular obstacles that obstruct Iago’s and Roderigo’s frustrated
ambitions, that coincide just before the drama begins (when those frustrations
peak) and that inspire Iago, who has been serving the Moor, to initiate a plot
against him now and only now. By reaching backward only this far, into the
almost present past, the play emphasizes the contingency of, and the contin-
gencies that are, the passion and the cue for what follows, even when what fol-
lows feeds on prejudice. What is at stake and on display throughout the play,
after all, is not how Othello has come to be “the Moor of Venice” but how that
established identity comes notto be. And that is a matter that emerges within
the radically uncoded present, not an implicit and coded past.
To pick up Othello’s story, then, in the volatile environment where the
play insists we must, to view Venice’s relation to the Moorish stranger in the
here and now of Venice, is to recognize that the terms of that relation derive
not only from the Venetians but also, as significantly, from the Moor.^53 If the
opening scene prompts us to read the Moor through Venice, once Othello ap-
pears the play prompts us, reciprocally, to read Venice through the Moor, pro-
posing and endorsing him as representative of the Venetian state. Othello, by
his own admission, has lived in Venice for the past nine months. The play
does not label his social status—does not indicate whether he is a citizen, say,
a denizen, or a resident alien—any more than it delineates the original ratio-
nale or foundation for that status. It does, however, suggestively assign Oth-
ello a notable degree of domestic leverage that emerges apart from (and is
almost at odds with) his military service. We are used to understanding Oth-
ello’s move from Venice, where he is anchored by his “occupation,” to Cyprus,
where he is undone by the disturbing erotics of marriage and the irrepressible
(though interruptible) pressure of the marriage bed, as a shift from the polit-
ical to the domestic ( 3. 3. 359 ).^54 Yet in Venice Othello’s first actions happen in
the proximity of a residence, a “lodging” and, what seems the same place, a
“house” ( 1. 2. 45 , 48 ), that gives him a domestic bearing. Throughout, the play
grounds its tacitly “Venetian” characters through just these kinds of sites. Bra-
bantio’s “house” is obviously pivotal to the opening scene. But the play is also
filled with an unusual number of unseen abodes. Iago arranges to meet
Roderigo “at my lodging” in Venice ( 1. 3. 366 ) and to plant Desdemona’s hand-
kerchief “in Cassio’s lodging” in Cyprus ( 3. 3. 323 ), while Bianca intercepts Cas-
sio in Cyprus while she is going to his “lodging” and he, coming to her
“house” ( 3. 4. 166 – 67 ). It may well be true, as Emma Smith suggests, that
Shakespeare distinguishes “lodgings” as less permanent than the “houses”
here, though in Othello’s case the two seem to merge.^55 But whatever the
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 171