tution, that drive the play, see Hanson, “Brothers of the State: Othello, Bureaucracy and
Epistemological Crisis,” in Orlin, ed., 125 – 47.
40. I am grateful to the students in my Othelloseminar at Rutgers University, in fall
of 2003 , whose impromptu performance of this conversation helped me realize how disso-
ciated Roderigo and Iago are from each other here.
41. Compare Sanders, ed., whose suggestion that “all” of these pronouns “refer to
Othello,” nonetheless registers the notable linguistic confusion; note to 1. 1. 69.
42. I borrow the concept of dilation from Patricia Parker, “Shakespeare and Rhetoric:
‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation’ in Othello,” in Shakespeare & the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia
Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985 ), 54 – 74 , 56.
43. Taking his cues from Ben Jonson’s Volpone, McPherson contends that Venetians
were “the most famous of all mountebanks” ( 75 ).
44. McPherson, 75. See also Frederick C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic(Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973 ), 350. In 1540 , after the Turks had come and
gone, the king of Tunis himself took refuge elsewhere in Italy, in Sicily and Naples;
Braudel, 772.
45. Braudel, 468.
46. See, for example, Hanson, “Brothers of the State”; Margo Hendricks, “ ‘The
Moor of Venice,’ or the Italian on the English Renaissance Stage,” in Shakespearean Tragedy
and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996), 193–209, esp. 199–200; and Vaughan, Othello, 35 – 50. On the
legibility of military power and place in the play, see Julia Genster, “Lieutenancy, Standing
in, and Othello,” in Barthelemy, ed., 216 – 37 , esp. 216 ; and Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s
Military World(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956 ).
47. Hanson, “Brothers of the State,” 133 ; emphasis added.
48. See Eric Griffin, “Un-sainting James: Or, Othelloand the ‘Spanish Spirits’ of
Shakespeare’s Globe,” Representations 62 ( 1998 ): 58 – 99 ; see also Everett.
49. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning, 245.
50. Emma Smith, 41. Smith’s deeply informed reading of both the play and its con-
texts has been particularly useful to my own interrogations.
51. Neill, Putting History to the Question, 208.
52. See Alan Sinfield, “Cultural Materialism, Othelloand the Politics of Plausibility,”
in Orlin, ed., 49 – 77 , on the ways “plausibility” guides our interpretations.
53. For an early model of taking cues from certain characters, compare Carol Thomas
Neely, “Women and Men in Othello: ‘What should such a fool / Do with so good a
woman?,’ ” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift
Lenz et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980 ), 211 – 39.
54. On the ways that bed is kept before our attention, see Neill, Putting History to the
Question, 237 – 68.
55. Emma Smith, 58 – 61.
56. At first it is not clear whether Iago is pointing to Brabantio or Roderigo, both who
speak “scurvy and provoking terms / Against [Othello’s] honour” ( 1. 2. 7 – 8 ).
57. I have emphasized this point, which I mean to complicate here, in “Othelloand
notes to pages 164–173 223