(Aaron), who is fashioned on a Jew (Barabas) who resembles a Turk
(Ithamore). Do what he can to hate one Moor, Iago necessarily “follows” an-
other, his self-defining, self-abnegating hypothesis “were I the Moor” appear-
ing truer than he knows (1.1.58, 57).
Ultimately, at its core Othellois a domestic tragedy, and in the end, we
cannot really tell where Venice’s story stops and the Moor’s story begins, so
seamless and boundless is the cross-cultural exchange that Shakespeare stages.
Though Iago would have us know what we know and read the world through
stereotypes, “the great world” itself, even in its most exotic expressions, pro-
vides the vehicle for breaking such fictions down, for reimagining as a dy-
namic and unscripted interaction the relation between Venice and the Moor,
the domestic and the strange, the here and the everywhere. Try as Iago might
to teach us otherwise, to speak of Othello as he is at any point in the play is
not to speak categorically of “the Moor,” invoking a modern politics of iden-
tity that does not quite apply. Nor is it to speak simply through a Venice
which would or would not believe—or believe in—him. It is rather, crucially,
to speak of a “Moor of Venice” who, even as and when he falls, shapes the so-
ciety he inhabits from the histories of the world. To tell his story is to ac-
knowledge his part in the telling—to recognize that what we know and how
we know come, in part, from him.
190 chapter seven