(such as conquest) to explain the Moor’s presence in Venice. Nor is there a
geographic antecedent that surfaces as a contrasting home. Iago declares the
Moor a “Barbary horse” as a means of proving him an unnatural husband for
the Venetian Desdemona. In Act Four, he catalyzes in Roderigo an anxiety
that, unless Cassio is killed and his assumption of Othello’s post halted, Oth-
ello will naturally return—with his prized wife—“into Mauretania,” where
the Moorish stranger belongs ( 4. 2. 224 ). Yet these associations are Iago’s.
Roderigo otherwise expects the Moor to “return again to Venice” ( 4. 2. 223 ).
Though Shakespeare’s Moor is not, like Cinthio’s, a Barbarian, Shakespeare
starts with Cinthio’s premise that there lives in Venice a Moor.
That premise in and of itself is not the source of crisis or controversy,
though in filling in the gaps of Othello’s history we risk making it so. To start
with the question of how Othello has come to be in Venice is already to start
with a conclusion, to produce his presence as an unstated but implicit prob-
lem. It is to single out the Moor as a subject whose position in Venice needs
to be explained as, say, the Florentine Cassio’s does not. It is to decide in ad-
vance that the “stranger” “of everywhere” could not also be at home “here,”
even though characters such as Iago and Roderigo, whose names are haunted
by Spanish “spirits,” are.^48 Within this framework, the drama would seem to
operate counterintuitively, through an inverted teleology, a predetermined
and overdetermined outcome taking precedence over improvisation and sus-
pense. For if the driving problem is the Moor’s already installed but inevitably
unwelcome presence, then Iago’s assaults against him function as the pre-
dictableend, the capstone, of hostilities and anxieties arising within an un-
staged backstory, rather than as the disruptive beginningof an unpredictable
and evolving sequence of events. Any evidence that the Moor fits in, that he
knows Venice sometimes better than Venice knows itself, therefore presents as
a symptom of assimilation, compromise, or co-optation, “an embrace and
perpetual reiteration of the norms of another culture.”^49 When he then falls
for and from Iago’s fictions, the wheel comes full circle: Othello’s alienation,
in effect, proves his alienation, an inability to read Venice’s “country disposi-
tion” that we have assigned him from the outset ( 3. 3. 204 ). It is as if long be-
fore Iago attempts to punish his audiences with their knowledge (“what you
know, you know”), we are caught in the terms of our own interrogations, and
we risk turning what we presume to know—that the Moor is out of place
“here”—into all we need to know ( 5. 2. 301 ).
Importantly, within Shakespeare’s dramatic fiction, no one questions how
Othello came to be in Venice, where his “acceptance” “goes without explana-
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 169