would be believed in Venice, his “occupation” “gone,” the play does not col-
lapse his identity as a stranger into the idea of estrangement or halt the play
of cultural exchange that has been so crucial to his story ( 3. 3. 359 ). To the con-
trary, as Othello attempts to negotiate the treacheries of a spoiled wife and
marriage, he continues to bring the “everywhere” into the “here” as a potent
touchstone of meaning. Iago will attempt to turn the “world” against the
Moor, exclaiming “O monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world”
when Othello challenges his honesty ( 3. 3. 379 ). Yet the world remains
Othello’s oyster: he himself swears “by the world” to verify and validate his
questionable ambivalence, his concurrent but incompatible beliefs that Des-
demona is “honest” and that she is not, that Iago is “just” and that he is not
( 3. 3. 385 – 87 ). To justify the otherwise unfathomable desire for revenge that
newly consumes and transforms him, Othello maps it onto a Mediterranean
geography as the “icy current and compulsive course” of “the Pontic Sea,”
which “ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on / To the Propontic and the
Hellespont” ( 3. 3. 453 – 56 ).
These passing references may do little more than expose “the world” as a
clarifying vehicle of the Moor’s self-reflection at a moment when Iago would
make it, and Othello, “monstrous.” But Othello’s re-presentation of the fate-
ful handkerchief instances his ability to transform the society he inhabits.
Adding a newly exotic edge to the already overdetermined meanings of that
prop, he brings its “magic” home in a way that not only authorizes his posi-
tion but shapes Desdemona’s as well, naturalizing the present even as he ex-
oticizes the past. In a speech that has become a well-known signpost of his
“prehistory,” contiguous with the life story he invokes at court, Othello de-
picts the handkerchief as a gift given to his mother by an Egyptian “charmer,”
woven by a sibyl, and containing “magic” in its “web” ( 3. 4. 56 , 68 ).^80 Embed-
ded within this exotic history is a heavy legacy of marital faith, loading the
token with the power, in its presence, to sign the husband’s love and, in its ab-
sence, to lay in the wife’s lap a marriage-breaking “perdition” ( 3. 4. 66 ).^81
Though Iago first turns the prop into crucial proof, Othello reappropriates
the token for himself to mediate a battle of marital wills—to arbitrate, within
a vexed exchange with Desdemona, what is most relevant, “most veritable,”
“possible,” and “true” ( 3. 4. 67 , 74 – 75 ). While he means to call his wife to task
for losing the handkerchief by asking her to produce it, she enters the ex-
change with a potentially explosive agenda of her own. Having just ordered a
clown to “enquire” Cassio “out” and “bid him come hither,” she has presump-
tively arranged the reconciliation with Othello ( 3. 4. 13 , 17 ). Hence, while Oth-
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 185