At points here the slippery pronouns render the distinction between Braban-
tio and Othello—both whose “delight” must be “poisoned,” whose “joy”
must “lose some colour”—almost indecipherable.^41 Color itself, which enters
the play’s vocabulary now for the first time, does not make a difference or clar-
ify the confusion. It is as if coloring in the subject of vexation matters less than
rousing Roderigo against some “him,” who is not Iago and who can be mali-
ciously “made after” in lieu of Iago, the prospect of “his” ruin distracting
Roderigo from the question of Iago’s dubious loyalty.
This impromptu change in venue works: Roderigo turns his attention
from castigating Iago to enraging the father, enabling Iago to move from the
defensive to the offensive. With Brabantio the new linchpin for the undo-
ing of Othello, Iago recasts the Moor through the incendiary metaphors,
“black ram,” “devil,” and so on, that critics have emphasized as an essential
trademark of Iago’s patently racist discourse. Yet it is neither he nor his
stereotyping that fully or finally catalyzes Brabantio’s crucial turn against
Othello. Brabantio’s first response is to reject the “profane wretch” Iago, to
assume that the “villain” has surely “lost [his] wits” ( 1. 1. 114 , 92 ). His second
is to accuse the colluding Roderigo of coming forth “in madness, / Being
full of supper, and distempering draughts” and to dismiss the allegations
that Desdemona might have run into the Moor’s lascivious hands as “mali-
cious bravery” ( 1. 1. 99 – 101 ).
It is, in fact, Roderigo, rather than Iago, who finally gets Brabantio’s goat,
and does so less by incriminating the Moor than by challenging the senator’s
credibility. Like Iago before him, Roderigo is immediately on the defensive, his
assaults against Othello inextricably tangled in his efforts to “answer” Braban-
tio’s charges. Boasting that he can “answer anything” ( 1. 1. 119 ), Roderigo turns
the tables on the father and makes the possibility that he and Iago deserve the
given rebuke contingent exclusively on the possibility (which Roderigo raises
four times in the Folio text) that Brabantio allowed, even approved of, Desde-
mona’s escape. In the Folio version, in fact, Roderigo’s whole “dilation” of the
escapade (which includes his only mention of the Moor) is framed by that in-
criminating conditional.^42 Roderigo “beseech[es]” Brabantio:
If ’t be your pleasure and most wise consent—
As partly I find it is—that your fair daughter,
At this odd-even and dull watch o’ th’ night,
Transported with no worse nor better guard
But with a knave of common hire, a gondolier,Othelloand the Moor of Venice 165