ity that things—and husbands—change, that there are more things in heaven
and earth than have been dreamt of in her philosophy.
Like Othello, Desdemona will see the insidious truth behind the tragedy
too late to alter the outcome, to contain, curtail, or even counteract the alien-
ation between them. Such is the process of tragedy. But to the end, Othello
insists on the compatibility of his domain and hers, the far-reaching world of
“wonder” and the domestic space of marriage, using the intersection to con-
struct meaning in Venice. When he makes a final account of himself and his
“unlucky deeds,” he puts his own voice into the mouth of Venice, dictating
the terms that Lodovico should relate, and not “extenuate.” Improvising a
self-image, as I have discussed in the Introduction, Othello moves through a
progressive series of possibilities, starting with an unfathomable self “that
loved not wisely, but too well,” “not easily jealous, but being wrought, / Per-
plexed in the extreme.” What is especially remarkable here is that he uses
exotic figures as the means to clarify this confused domestic impression. “The
base Indian” (or Judean) who “threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe”
and the one “whose subdued eyes, / Albeit unusèd to the melting mood, /
Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees / Their medicinable gum” become the
naturalizing precedents for the lover’s consternation, his conflicted position as
one who loved “not wisely” and “too well,” who was “not easily jealous” but
apparently easily perplexed. Within the familiar form of the blazon, the exotic
displaces and replaces the domestic as the vehicle of sense, ameliorating the
perplexities of a love that can be “wrought.”
What results is an inclusive, unbounded cultural vision, in which the im-
ages and icons of everywhere fill in the symbolic economy of the here. To be
sure, at the very end Othello resorts to the established opposition between the
Venetians and the Turks, raising the specter of stereotype—of “a malignant
and a turbaned Turk” who “beat a Venetian and traduced the state.” Yet sig-
nificantly, he sets that drama in “Aleppo”—a “gateway” city in Turkey that was
to the desert trades what Venice was to the sea—reminding his audience that
what happens there also happens here.^82 What he produces, ultimately, is a
sort of cultural amalgam of a Moor who gestures with an Indian/Judean hand,
cries Arabian tears, impersonates a Turk, and kills himself—with a “sword of
Spain”—as that Turk, just as the Turk killed a Venetian ( 5. 2. 252 ), making it
hard to know where the Moor begins and these other subjects end.^83 Appro-
priately, layered on top is a cross-cultural and intracultural kiss between not
merely a Moor and a Venetian, but also a Venetian husband and wife.
Othello, the Moor of Venice, dies. Venice will literally inherit from him:
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 187