and against the aggrieved Venetian senator as Moor “of Venice” and to have
the last word on a marriage.
To understand Othello as a representative “of Venice,” grounded by more
than politically indispensable military or mercenary parts, is not however to
deny or eclipse the importance and impact of his difference, his unique and,
for a hero, dramatically unprecedented identity as “stranger” and Moor. It is
rather to rethink what it means to be a “stranger,” to review where and how
we draw the lines around his and Venice’s cultural position, and to reconsider
from whom and what we take our cues. It is to recognize that the exchange
between Venice and the Moor is a mutual exchange, as central to Venice’s
identity as it is to the Moor’s, its shaping influences reciprocal, continual, and
continuous. For at least as much as Venice defines the Moor, Othelloinsists,
the Moor defines Venice—and defines Venice through (not despite) his
“strangeness.”
The signal moment in Othello’s career in—and rewriting of—Venice
comes when he testifies before the court and recounts a “course of love” that
pivots on his telling of his “travailous history” ( 1. 3. 139 ).^61 In that history, as by
now may go without saying, Othello associates himself with a series of “disas-
trous chances,” with “moving accidents by flood and field” and “hair-breadth
scapes in th’ imminent deadly breach,” with capture by “the insolent foe” and
a consequent enslavement and “redemption” ( 1. 3. 134 – 38 ). He sets those “dan-
gers” in an exotic landscape, marked by “antres vast and deserts idle,” “rough
quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,” and peopled with “the
Cannibals that each other eat / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads /
Do grow beneath their shoulders” ( 1. 3. 167 , 140 – 41 , 143 – 45 ). Othello’s words
here directly echo Pory’s sensationalized introduction to Africanus’s Historyas
it promises a story of the “imminent dangers” the Moor confronted and the
“marvels” he survived—including “how many desolate cold mountaines, and
huge, drie, and barren deserts passed he,” “how often was he in hazard to haue
beene captiued, or to haue had his throte cut by the proulingArabians,and wilde
Mores,” “how hardly manie times escaped he the Lyons greedie mouth, and the
deuouring iawes of the Crocodile.” This kind of display is apparently how to
make a travel story sell—one that recurs, for example, in the Hakluyt ac-
counts and in Walter Ralegh’s Discovery of Guiana( 1595 ) (though not as
prominently as the emphasis on it in our criticism might lead us to believe).^62
Within Othello, however, this intertextual transaction has created inter-
pretive problems. For it not only begs the question of where the Moor stands
within the dramatic fiction—whether he speaks through Europe wittingly or
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 175