Puttenham, as Madhavi Menon has suggested—allows the converse possibil-
ity of familiarizing the unfamiliar, the image of “devouring” making the at-
tentive female audience, Desdemona, more comprehensible than she
otherwise might be.^69 In either case, the image of the cannibal that Othello
brings out of the proper context of his past becomes crucial here to the de-
piction and deciphering of the Venetian present, as both the bridge and the
crux of meaning.
It is perhaps not such a big leap, then, for Othello to set his exotic im-
agery alongside the vocabulary of Christianity which has already emerged as
Venice’s own (in the notable references to hell, damnation, pagans, prayer,
godliness, souls, and such that pervade the opening scenes)—not such a big
leap, that is, for him to figure Desdemona as a discourse cannibal at one mo-
ment and to speak of the “prayers” he drew from her and the stories of “pil-
grimage” she asked from him at another. Nor does it seem such a big leap for
him to put terms of strangeness and wonder in her mouth, when he describes
her as swearing that his story “ ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange / ’Twas piti-
ful, ’twas wondrous pitiful”—or to put those terms next to her alleged wish
that “heaven had made her such a man” ( 1. 3. 160 – 62 ). Othello’s narrative
“process” works to make the strange contiguous with the familiar, the exotic
world of wonders with the Christian “world” of a Venetian woman’s “sighs”
(or, in the quarto, “kisses”) ( 1. 3. 159 ). It is, it seems, plausible to imagine—as
Othello suggests that Desdemona has imagined—the Moor teaching “a friend
that loved her” “how to tell my story,” and that friend using it to woo and win
her ( 1. 3. 164 – 65 ). The story, after all, has no explicit geographic or ethno-
graphic markers to tag it as the Moor’s: while the outlandish catalogue points
most directly to Pory’s Africa, its terms are generic, echoing representations of
such places as Montaigne’s cannibal-laden Brazil.^70 If the exotic images that
Othello calls up first appear remote to Venice, within his testimony they be-
come a fungible part of the Venetian social landscape, their seductiveness fig-
ured not only as translatable to the “here” but also transferable within it.
In positioning Othello as the “stranger of here and everywhere,” of every-
where andhere, the play then presents the Moor as the mediator, not the sign,
of difference. If in Cinthio’s narrative the condition that “there once lived in
Venice a Moor” is a fait accompli that can only be undone, in Shakespeare’s
play it is an active site of improvisation and transformation. For whenever or
however Othello has come to Venice in the first place, under whose auspices
and for what cause, it is not simply the Venetians who dictate the terms of tol-
erance, cross-cultural intersection and embrace, but also the Moor. In bring-
Othelloand the Moor of Venice 179