chapter seven
The “stranger of here and everywhere”
Othelloand the Moor of Venice
In the openingscene of Othello, Iago enlists Roderigo in a scheme against
an unnamed “Moor,” and together they convince the mostly unsuspecting
Brabantio that he has been robbed, that his “fair daughter” has fallen into
“the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor” ( 1. 1. 121 , 125 ). At first Brabantio re-
sists their plot, protesting that “this is Venice” and his house, “not
a grange” ( 1. 1. 105 – 6 ). To amplify the urgency of their claims, Roderigo
insists:
Do not believe
That from the sense of all civility
I thus would play and trifle with your reverence.
Your daughter—if you have not given her leave—
I say again hath made a gross revolt,
Tying her duty, beauty, wit, and fortunes
In an extravagant and wheeling stranger,
Of here and everywhere. ( 1. 1. 129 – 36 )Where Brabantio associates the urban setting of Venice with a distinctive se-
curity, Roderigo emphasizes rather the dangerous penetration of the “here” by
the “stranger” of “everywhere.” In a gesture of “gross revolt” whose very dis-
covery disturbs the “sense of all civility,” the daughter has “tied” her home-
grown, patriarchally valued “duty, beauty, wit, and fortunes” to the