at his death Gratiano will “keep the house / And seize upon the fortunes of the
Moor,” since as Brabantio’s brother, he is also Othello’s uncle-in-law and
heir.^84 Yet the legacy Othello leaves—the open-ended cultural exchange he
embodies and propels—extends tellingly beyond his own particular “for-
tunes.” Though we cannot, and need not, credit Othello specifically with
making all the difference, by the end of the play the world seems to be every-
where in Venice. Emilia imagines, at one point, “a lady in Venice” walking
“barefoot to Palestine” for “a touch of [Lodovico’s] nether lip” ( 4. 3. 34 – 35 ),
and, at another, “every honest hand” whipping “rascals naked through the
world, / Even from the east to th’ west” ( 4. 2. 142 – 44 ), the exotic landscape car-
rying in each case the currency and transparency of cliché. Yet if these refer-
ences map the world out there, Shakespeare also brings the outlandish tropes
and props of “all the world” into the everyday. Emilia, for example, objects to
husbands who “pour our treasures into foreign laps,” which could themselves
be Venetian ( 4. 3. 83 ), while, in passing, Desdemona weighs her “purse full of ”
Portuguese “crusadoes” against the handkerchief as the object she would
rather have lost ( 3. 4. 23 – 24 ), as if the two are comparable as signs and safe-
guards of love. Moreover, within a conversation that seems a curious detour
from the plot, Desdemona asks Emilia whether she would “abuse” her hus-
band “for all the world” ( 4. 3. 59 ). In response, Emilia fills in the seemingly va-
cant figure of speech, objecting that the world is a “huge thing” and “a great
price / For a small vice” ( 4. 3. 64 – 65 ). Augmenting her point, she sets that
“world” (for which she would trade her body) against trivial items (for which
she would not trade)—“a joint-ring,” “measures of lawn,” “gowns, petticoats,”
“caps,” or “any petty exhibition”—using “all the whole world” as synecdoche
to suggest a contrasting, though unspecified, materiality ( 4. 3. 68 – 70 ). To have
“the world”—which isto be had—is to have something that could make a
husband a “monarch” and could change the moral landscape: if you had “the
world for your labour,” she insists, “you might quickly make...right” any
“wrong” you had done within it, within “your own world” ( 4. 3. 71 , 75 – 77 ). If
her intent is to unsettle Desdemona’s sexual naïveté, the effect is to establish
“the world” as a plausible measure of what women could—and should—“play
for” ( 4. 3. 80 ).
Desdemona may not herself play “for the world,” though she seems to
have married into it. But she too claims that world—and with it, the Moor—
as a part of her own heritage and identity. Her speculations about the worldly
limits of female fidelity are preceded and prompted by her contemplation of
her own strangely deteriorating marriage. To comprehend that crisis, she re-
188 chapter seven