To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor—
If this be known to you, and your allowance,
We then have done you bold and saucy wrongs.
Butif you know not this, my manners tell me
We have your wrong rebuke. ( 1. 1. 119 – 29 ; emphasis added)In the 1622 quarto (which, as I have noted, does not include these lines),
Roderigo does not even mention the Moor. Rather, he simply dares the father
to see if his daughter “be in her chamber or your house,” and taunts him, if he
finds her there, to “let loose on me the justice of the state / For thus deluding
you” ( 1. 1. 136 – 39 ). Either way, in either version, it is a lose/lose situation for Bra-
bantio: if he is not culpable for supporting his daughter’s transgression, he is
guilty of falsely accusing the interlopers of “bold and saucy wrongs.” It is in the
face of this assault on his own integrity, and not (simply) an assault against the
Moor, that Brabantio takes action, calls up “all [his] people,” and declares “this
accident” “not unlike my dream” ( 1. 1. 140 – 41 ). Even if we do not read his sub-
sequent vilification of Othello partly as self-defensive displacement activity, it
is no small point that Brabantio chooses to marshal (that is, fabricate) his own
evidence against the Moor for the court, as if to compensate for the otherwise
unsupportable stereotypes within Iago’s and Roderigo’s scripts. Nor is it a small
point that as he does so, Iago sneaks off, acknowledging that it is neither “meet,
nor wholesome to [his] place / To be produced.../Against the Moor”
( 1. 1. 144 – 46 ).
Othello’s initial appearance is thus framed by and within a social world
distinguished by its nasty penchant for prejudice. Yet the effect is neither to
stabilize nor to privilege the resulting discriminations as terms that automat-
ically determine and delimit the Moor’s place in Venice. To the contrary, it is
to contextualize those discriminations within a volatile social exchange which
determinestheirplace in Venice. For while prejudice circulates in Othelloas
freely as it does in The Merchant, in the opening scene of Othello(and in what
follows), its discursive terms neither fully nor finally circumscribe, prescribe,
or prevail. Even in this world of “calculating cruelty,” accident trumps ideol-
ogy, variables trump values, contingencies trump codes. Almost anyone can
be a target of derision on Venice’s streets—a Florentine, an “ensign,” an un-
welcome suitor, a gondolier, a betrayed father, a senator, a revolting daughter,
as well as a Moor ( 1. 1. 32 ). And while categorical features of culture, class, and
color provide the terms for derogation, those terms may not necessarily define
the cause. Indeed, what motivates the attacks against Othello is not an ab-
166 chapter seven