who serve, without serving their turns upon, their masters ( 1. 1. 19 , 45 ). In
order to insure his own good faith (which is, of course, highly questionable),
Iago even dangles the act of hating—“if ever I did dream..., abhor me,”
“despise me if I do not”—before Roderigo, like a rotten carrot on a stick, as
possible retribution ( 1. 1. 4 – 5 , 7 ).
Although the Moor is not the only target here, he soon becomes the focus
of these tirades. By the time the three are through, they have figured the Moor
as a “thick-lips” ( 1. 1. 66 ), “an old black ram,” “a Barbary horse,” and “the devil”
( 1. 1. 88 , 111 , 91 ) and have accused him of “tupping” Brabantio’s “white ewe”
and making that by now well-known “beast with two backs” ( 1. 1. 89 , 116 ).^33
Brabantio will clean up the language before he gets to court; he will decide
that there are (more speakable) “charms / By which the property of youth and
maidhood / May be abused” ( 1. 1. 170 – 72 ), and he will insist that the Moor,
whom Desdemona otherwise “feared to look on,” must therefore have en-
chanted her ( 1. 3. 99 ).^34 Even so, the idea of blackness perforates the edges of
the “black” arts. And not only does the senator protest the elopement offi-
cially; Othello is consequently called to account. Before the act ends, the
Moor stands in front of the full senate, defending himself by delivering “a
round, unvarnished tale” of his “whole course of love” ( 1. 3. 91 – 92 ). Even if the
state’s need to “straight employ [him] / Against the general enemy Ottoman”
dictates an easy exoneration, he nonetheless faces a “formal legal hearing” that
more than one scholar has declared a bizarre, somewhat counterintuitive
starting point for a Shakespearean tragedy ( 1. 3. 49 – 50 ).^35 No wonder Giuseppe
Verdi omitted Shakespeare’s initial act entirely in order to open his Otello
( 1887 ) on a note of untarnished heroism: Otello first takes the stage as an anx-
iously awaited war hero in Cyprus, where he can be greeted unequivocally
with a resounding chorus of “Evviva Otello!” and “Vittoria!”.^36 No wonder
either that critics tend to read Othello’s position in Venice as uniquely cir-
cumscribed, compromised, and uncertain, his place a place of difference,
dislocation, and dispute. It is not they (any longer) who cannot tolerate a
black and Moorish hero, but, it seems, Venice itself.
And yet, hating the Moor is neither as credible nor as contagious a condi-
tion in Othelloas is hating the Jew in The Merchant. Even on the dark, comedic
streets of Othello’s Venice, terms of prejudice and alienation appear hard to
stand by, if not hard to come by.^37 At the same time that the opening scene
gives disturbing voice to what will become reiterated staples of racism, it also
emphasizes the unsteadiness of that voice, the improvised edges of its articula-
tions, and the uncertainty of its hold. At every turn, Iago’s project of turning
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 163