These requests suggest the Moor as someone who is “to be found” when the
state comes calling.^57 But rhetorically Othello turns that “finding” into a self-
generated event. Echoing the very words, “I must be found,” he has used to
counter Iago’s attempted incursions on his agency, he proclaims “ ’tis well I am
found by you,” as if the “I” is the acting subject, being found an action verb
( 1. 2. 47 ). In effect, he is not wrong; “search him out” as they will, the court’s
envoys can only discover him when he puts himself forward.
While surrounded by those who would “find him out” in every sense of
the word, Othello manages to step outside the public gaze, into a figurative if
not literal room of his own. In an ostensibly eccentric dramatic gesture, he in-
terrupts the progress to court in order to “but spend a word here in the house”
( 1. 2. 48 )—probably, still, his “lodging”—and then disappears off stage, into
that interior. Although we assume that the “word” is with Desdemona, nei-
ther we nor the characters are privy to it, and Shakespeare seems to go out of
his way to emphasize that we cannot see within. Here as not in other cases,
the loaded “house” appears invulnerable to penetration, especially to the kind
of voyeuristic pleasure and incrimination that Iago has used to transform Bra-
bantio’s “guardage” into a “grange” and will use to transform Othello’s and
Desdemona’s conjugal bed in Cyprus into a site and cipher of a dangerously
unbounded eroticism ( 1. 2. 70 ).^58 Left out on Venice’s streets with nothing to
do but wait, Cassio (perhaps like us) wonders “what makes [Othello] here”
( 1. 2. 49 ). Iago tries to supplement the scene with a lurid fantasy, declaring that
Othello “hath boarded a land-carrack” and will be “made for ever” “if it prove
a lawful prize,” but these insinuations fall flat ( 1. 2. 50 – 51 ). Faced with Cassio’s
apparent confusion, Iago resorts to an untainted matter of fact: “he’s married”
( 1. 2. 52 ). And although he is poised to explain to whom (“Marry, to—” ), Oth-
ello emerges and interrupts his discourse before Desdemona’s name can be
spoken or marred, as it will be so readily in Cyprus ( 1. 2. 53 ). This, indeed, is
not Cyprus, where it takes some time for Othello’s ships for find their “foot-
ing” and where, in the meantime, Othello and Desdemona become the sub-
jects of a polymorphically perverse erotic banter that may well seed the
catastrophe to come ( 2. 1. 76 ). This, rather, is Venice and Othello’s house, not
a grange.
If these details seem incidental to the action, superfluous to the plot, they
are crucial in establishing Othello’s embeddedness in Venice on more than
just military grounds. For whether his “lodging” is permanent or transient,
whether or not his “house” is in any sense a home, his movement in and
around the site(s) translates as a domestic “footing” that, though it comes
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 173