the Moor,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett Sullivan et
al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 ), 140 – 51.
58. The pivotal reading here is Neill’s in Putting History to the Question, 237 – 68 , cited
above (note 54 ).
59. See, for example, Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 103 , who argues
that “because Othello is needed in order to combat the Turks, the Senate”—though not
Brabantio—“is willing to regard him as ‘more fair than black.’ ”
60. Though this characteristic is not necessarily unique to drama, it is essential to it.
61. See Neill’s note (to 1. 3. 139 ) on the choice of “travailous”—which, Neill argues, “is
exactly the kind of slightly pompous, recherché phrase that Othello favours”—over the
Folio’s “trauellours.”
62. On the functions of the exotic in these kinds of discourses, see Greenblatt, Mar-
velous Possessions; Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European
Travel Writing, 400 – 1600 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988 ); and Peter Mason,
Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other(London: Routledge, 1990 ).
63. See also my discussion in “Othello on Trial,” in Orlin, ed., 148 – 70 , 152 – 57
especially.
64. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning, 237. See Habib’s treatment of Othello as a
silenced “subaltern,” 135 – 46 , and note 6 above, for work which advances a similar argu-
ment. The European edge of this passage was apparently amplified in the 1997 “photo-neg-
ative” production staged by the Washington Shakespeare Company, with Patrick Stewart
voicing the exotic references as “a sardonic challenge to the (black) Venetian Senate” (Neill,
ed., 67 ); see Neill, ed., 66 – 67.
65. Compare Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, who argues that Othello
“consolidates his own position in Venice by establishing his distance from cannibals and
monsters whom he has overcome” ( 107 ).
66. On European discourse on the Caribbean, in which these figures take shape, see
Hulme, Colonial Encounters; and Hulme and Neil L.Whitehead, eds.,Wild Majesty: En-
counters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day: An Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992 ). The spectacle of humans eating human flesh may always, in its shock value,
trump the particulars of that flesh; do we remember, after all, who ate whom in 1972 , when
a Uruguayan plane crashed in the Andes, leaving the survivors to eat the dead—or even
that it was a Uruguayan plane, in the Andes, in 1972? The story is documented, com-
pellingly, in Piers Paul Read, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors ( 1974 ; New York: Qual-
ity Paperback Book Club, 2000 ).
67. A crucial source is Newman, Fashioning Femininity, esp. 71 – 93.
68. Quintilian, Institutio Oratio, as cited in Menon, Wanton Words, 13. For fuller dis-
cussion of the workings of metaphor, particularly as it impacts on sexuality, see Menon,
5 – 34.
69. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie( 1585 ), cited in Menon, 20.
70. See Michel de Montaigne’s essay on “the Caniballes.” Other instances can be
found in Mandeville’s Travels( 1499 ), Hakluyt’s Navigations, English translations of classical
cosmographies such as Pliny’s Naturall History ( 1587 ), and Ralegh’s Discovery of Guiana.
224 notes to pages 173–179