as from (what is almost the same) who Venice expects him to be in the pres-
ent of the play. Here is a moment within the dramatic fiction, then, that Oth-
ello sets the script, introducing into the play, as part of his own repertoire,
subjects and images that no one else has used, and altering Venice’s cultural
imaginary. Though literally these areEurope’s terms, the play neither situates
nor registers them as such, choosing rather to represent the Moor’s voice as
the Moor’s. Venice, of course, has heard the stories before (which we get only
in outline): Othello embeds his exotics in the recent past as the centerpiece of
his “whole course of love,” as the “mighty magic” which he used to seduce
Desdemona and entertain her father ( 1. 3. 93 ). But instead of appearing as a
completed cross-cultural encounter of Venice withthe Moor, the scene of
telling that Othello recounts exhibits and enacts an ongoing cultural exchange
between Venice andthe Moor—or better put, between the Moor and Venice.
Within it, Othello presents himself and his life story not simply as the medi-
ated object of discourse and desire but also, as essentially, as the mediating
subject. Though Othello does admit responding to Brabantio’s and Desde-
mona’s cues, he simultaneously makes clear that it was not theirdesires that
determinedhisterms, but histerms that determined theirdesires. As Othello
tells it, Brabantio requested an accounting of “battles, sieges, fortunes”
( 1. 3. 130 )—the very kind of martial “feats” that already suit the preoccupations
of the Venetian senate and propel their political investment in the Moor
( 1. 3. 88 ). Yet what Othello narrated instead, he attests, were dangers and disas-
ters, giving his history and himself an adventurous edge and prompting Bra-
bantio to question him “still” ( 1. 3. 129 ). As Othello tells it too, initially “the
house affairs” drew Desdemona’s attention ( 1. 3. 147 ), she hearing his stories
“by parcels,” “not intentively,” until he “took once a pliant hour, and found
good means / To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart / That I would all my
pilgrimage dilate” ( 1. 3. 151 – 55 ). Instead of giving her that “all,” however, he ad-
mits that he often focused rather on “some distressful stroke” and so “be-
guile[d] her of her tears” ( 1. 3. 156 – 57 ). That she “loved [him] for the dangers
[he] had passed” is the end, not the beginning, of the exchange, the effect, not
the origin, of his “witchcraft” ( 1. 3. 167 , 169 ).
In bringing the scene of telling into the Venetian court, then, Othello not
only does nottell his full life story, from his “boyish days / To th’ very moment
that [Brabantio] bade [him] tell it” ( 1. 3. 132 – 33 ); he also makes clear that he has
not told that story before—not, at least, with equal emphasis on all its parts.
The “witchcraft” he confesses and exposes, the “process,” lies rather in self-
consciously shaping a “tale” of dangers and disasters that would and does win
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 177