members that her “mother had a maid called Barbary” and that Barbary sang
a “ ‘Song of Willow’ ” that “expressed her fortune” ( 4. 3. 24 , 26 – 27 ). Desde-
mona takes on Barbary’s voice and story as her own, the class differences
notwithstanding, presenting—and becoming—a woman who “was in love”
with one who “proved mad, / And did forsake her” ( 4. 3. 25 – 26 ). Barbary’s iden-
tity as lover overshadows her cultural or racial features to the point that her
unspecified identity, as or as not Moorish, matters less to Desdemona than the
maid’s resemblance to herself. At this moment, the signs of the Moor—along
with the “process” propelled by the particular Moor, Othello—appear so
deeply embedded in the Venetian domestic terrain that they cannot be sepa-
rated out, “Barbary” naming a figure who may or may not be a Moor. Desde-
mona’s history, thus, takes the idea of cultural exchange to another level,
pressing it beyond the bounds of character, geography, and history, raising the
possibility that before there was in Venice a Moor, there was a maid called
Barbary, “the name of the Moor” written indelibly and indistinguishably onto
the body of Venice.
To look to “the Moor of Venice,” then, is to see a “world” in progress, a
process of cross-cultural exchange that not only opens out but also opens in,
to the improvised interiors of domestic life. That world extends, significantly,
beyond character and culture and even beyond the play. For indeed, the Flo-
rentine Claudio has already lived a comic version of the Moor’s tragedy in
Much Ado, vying for Hero of Messina against the malicious plots of the bas-
tard of Aragon, Don John. In addition, King Leontes of Sicilia will replay
Othello’s trauma of doubt in double time in The Winter’s Tale, directing his
outrageous suspicions against his Bohemian rival and his Moscovite queen. In
these plays too, the cultural will compete with the domestic as the crux of so-
cial disaster: the prolix gender-bashing of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado
outvoices the understated but residual culture wars between Aragon, Messina,
and Florence, setting the tone (and volume) for that unfortunate story; like-
wise, the queen Hermione’s pregnancy in The Winter’s Taleovershadows her
foreign heritage as the starting point of both identity and crisis. To set these
plays against Othellois to see that the Moor’s story is never exclusively his
own—or, rather, is his own, if we understand that story as insistent on the ex-
travagant interplay of cultures here and everywhere, within the domestic as
across the strange. Even though these plays include characters and discourses
that would close such cultural crossings down, that interplay provides the
modus operandi of their own dramatic inventions. There can be no greater
irony in Othellothan that the figure of Iago is himself fashioned on a Moor
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 189