ing the world to Venice and Venice to the world, he propels an interactive
process that knows no cultural bounds. Othello, of course, will fall; his life as
“Moor of Venice” will unravel. But what makes his transformation so tragic
to the dramatic fiction and so crucial to his nemesis within it is the fact that,
as a subject of Venice, the Moor must be followed, he as much as anyone set-
ting the stage and story—ultimately making it impossible for a figure such as
Iago, who would draw an indelible line between “an erring barbarian and a
super-subtle Venetian,” to be who he is ( 1. 3. 348 – 49 ).
***If Othello actively shapes the society that he inhabits, how is it that he falls so
easily into Iago’s fictions, readily imagining and ingesting the “green-eyed
monster” in Iago’s thought ( 3. 3. 169 ), deciding that he himself is “abused” and
his wife “false” before even calling for (not to mention, seeing) “ocular proof ”
of her unfaith ( 3. 3. 270 , 281 , 362 )? What does it mean that, with relatively lit-
tle prodding, “the Moor of Venice” will take it upon himself to kill his Venet-
ian wife for a “cause” that is as specious as it is unspeakable ( 5. 2. 1 )? How are
we to understand the Moor’s tragic undoing, the “heavy act[s]” that Lodovico
must take home and “relate” to Venice ( 5. 2. 371 )? At the end of the play, the
Othello standing before his Venetian peers is a “rash and most unfortunate
man,” outed by the dead body of his murdered wife ( 5. 2. 281 ). As the specta-
tors on stage confront the “strange truth” of how this “monstrous act” came
to be, even Othello admits that “this act shows horrible and grim” ( 5. 2. 187 ,
201 ). Despite his eloquent attempts to explain himself nonetheless as an
“honourable murderer” who did “naught” “in hate, but all in honour,” who
“loved not wisely, but too well,” the oxymorons ultimately give way, leaving
him no recourse but to kill himself as if he were a Turk ( 5. 2. 292 – 93 ). To speak
of Othello as he is at the end of the play is to speak of things that, it seems,
would not be believed in Venice—that would, according to Lodovico and
Gratiano, “poison sight” and lead a Venetian senator such as Brabantio to “do
a desperate turn,” were he not already dead ( 5. 2. 363 , 205 ).
As we ourselves try to make sense of Othello’s “desperate turn,” it might
be tempting to read his deterioration as the defeat of the cultural exchange
that the Moor initiates in Venice and the triumph of the racial and cultural
discriminations that Iago would install there instead. We could read Othello’s
tragedy, as critics have, as an unfortunate but inevitable fall into type or
stereotype and to interpret the accidents that determine the fate of this par-
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