duced? If at the outset the inflammatory language of stereotype seems only
partially, questionably tenable on Venice’s streets, how do we enter and read
the relation between the Venetians and the Moor? How do we come to terms
with identity amid difference, improvisation amid prejudice, culture and
crossed cultures amid social chaos, contradiction, and crisis? How, given the
complex, constantly compromising world of Venice, can we speak of
“the Moor” Othello as he is?
Suppose we return to the issue of origins, to the question of how “the
Moor of Venice” has come to be the Moor “of Venice.” In 1533 , a population
of Moors came to Venice as refugees from Tunis, when that city was besieged
and overrun by the Turks, though Shakespeare may or may not have been
aware of this history or its residual effects on Venice’s population.^44 Notably
too, Venetian merchants routinely made voyages to North African ports such
as Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers, though it is not clear that these ventures resulted
in any kind of permanent immigration.^45 In any case, nine critics out of ten
would readily endorse the assumption that the Venetian court has hired Oth-
ello from the outside (most likely, North Africa) to be a mercenary soldier.^46
Given what we know, and suspect Shakespeare knew, about Venice’s long-
standing policy of staffing its ground forces and its highest military offices
with “strangers,” that is probably the most cogent explanation we can posit.
Othello himself declares to his “very noble and approved good masters” of the
Venetian court that from the time his “arms” “had seven years’ pith” until
some nine months ago, “they have used / Their dearest action in the tented
field” across “this great world” ( 1. 3. 78 , 84 – 87 ).
But in even the most persuasive arguments, which admit their specula-
tive edges, any such conclusion relies, must rely, on inference. Elizabeth Han-
son, for one, acknowledges that “the mercenary foundation of Othello’s
position” is “largely subtextual, hinted at only in Iago’s and Roderigo’s out-
bursts of nativist resentment” and that Othello’s mercenary status has been
“mystified through transactions occurring before the play begins” and
“merge[d] into assimilation.”^47 There are other models, as we have seen. Titus
actually stages the transaction that brings Aaron, a prisoner of war, to Rome,
presenting the Moor’s “incorporation” there as an inevitable aftereffect of the
conquest of the Goths, however blurry and open-ended both conquest and its
consequences prove to be. In Lust’s Dominion, Eleazar claims a Barbarian her-
itage and a conquered past, pointing to a specific moment when his father’s
empire was destroyed and he himself absorbed by Spain. In Othello, by con-
trast, there is neither a term (such as “incorporation”) nor an historical event
168 chapter seven