tion,” as Emma Smith has noted.^50 Nor does Othello seem inclined at any
point to explain his presence. To the contrary, under pressure from Iago, he
admits only that he “fetch[es]” his “life and being” from culturally unidenti-
fied “men of royal siege” and that that information, by his own volition, is
“yet to know” ( 1. 2. 21 – 22 , 19 ). Under pressure from the senate, he describes his
telling of “the story of [his] life” ( 1. 3. 129 ) before Brabantio and Desdemona
(and I will return to this crucial exchange). But the story, set in an exotic else-
where, filled with cannibals, Anthropophagi, and men with heads in their
chests, predates Othello’s life in Venice, while the narrated moment of telling
happens once he is already established there, already “oft invited” into Bra-
bantio’s house ( 1. 3. 128 ). The transition that we might otherwise suppose to be
a crucial touchstone, the Moor’s inauguration as a subject of Venice, does not
emerge between these seamlessly conjoined pasts and appears therefore signif-
icantly insignificant to his self-defense and definition. In fact, the cultural
crossing that structures the action is Othello’s move out of, not into, Venice.
As Neill has emphasized, the play’s momentum is “remorselessly one-way,” in-
volving only a “single significant change of place—the voyage from Venice to
Cyprus at the end of the act 1 .”^51 It is explicitly against that unfolding geo-
graphic trajectory, and not an implicit prior dislocation, that the play maps
Othello’s unraveling stability.
In not explaining, not making an issue of, Othello’s entry into Venetian
society, Othellocreates a significant gap in just the place we, and English spec-
tators, might be predisposed to look for signs of crisis. But instead of mystify-
ing Othello’s history or coding his origins as lost, the resulting effect is to wrest
the Moor’s tragedy from just these kinds of master narratives, defined before
the fact by cultural boundaries and biases. If there is no definitive origin for
Othello’s stationing as “Moor of Venice,” for the incursion of the “stranger”
into the “here,” neither is there an historically prior or culturally fixed rationale
that can explain or predict the hostility that erupts around him. Even in this
environment where heated terms of prejudice circulate, the assault against the
Moorish “stranger” is not a foregone conclusion, neither his position nor
Venice’s settled or unsettled by his coming, whenever or however that has oc-
curred. Granted, the play does start in medias res. But its retroactive point of
departure is Othello’s elopement with Desdemona and appointment of Cassio
at lieutenant. These events are neither poised nor posited as boundaries, the
limit case of culture, to define the crux of “plausibility” of what would or
would not be believed about the Moor in Venice, what behaviors would or
would not be tolerated from him there.^52 Rather, they are local conditions, the
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