Uncertain Identity in a Changing World

Focus on Othello

"For Renaissance intellectuals and for the literary characters they created, there was almost literally no firm ground to stand on as they moved through life in an increasingly complex and uncertain world." - Introduction, The Renaissance in Europe, p. 2466

"Shakespeare . . . tests and explores the very notion of identity: how do individuals' histories and imaginations affect who they are? How does Othello's eventful life—as a soldier, former slave, black Christian convert, instrument of war, object of imaginative wonder, and perpetual outsider in his adopted home of Venice—influence who he is? And how do his stories about his exotic past transform the ways in which his audiences perceive him and conceive of their own lives? - Introduction, William Shakespeare, p 2855

Charles W. Cope, Othello Relating His Adventures

Multiple versions of the self in Othello

Telling stories: Who is Othello?

Charles Cope's Othello Relating His Adventures illustrates a scene that is not in fact dramatized in Shakespeare's Othello, but Cope nevertheless has succeeded in singling out an important element that the play does emphasize. For Othello seems constantly to feel the need to create narratives to explain himself and his concerns. From the very opening of the play, we notice how rarely we hear him named: he is "the Moor," a non-Venetian, an outsider—in other words, an entity not easily understood. As Othello and others tell stories that give us glimpses into his past, which should add to our understanding of the man and his background, we discover instead multiple versions of his nature and character. We learn that Othello has noble blood (1.2.21–22) and that he has been a slave (1.3.136); we hear of his imperturbability (4.1.254–58) even as we see him lose all self-control. We even hear contradictory tales about the origins of the fateful handkerchief.

Etchings of two famous nineteenth-century actors show the two sides of Othello. Gustavus Vaughn Brooke, who debuted as Othello in 1848, is shown here in an almost saintly pose.
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Brooke was often contrasted with Tomasso Salvini, an Italian-born actor, who preferred to emphasize a more exotic and "primitive" image.
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Telling stories: Whose handkerchief?

Examining the unfolding of apparently inconsistent information about this handkerchief exemplifies the way Shakespeare's play confounds the effort to define individual identity. When Desdemona fails to produce it, Othello tells her that an Egyptian sorceress gave it to his mother and describes its magical properties at length (3.4.51–71); yet after he has killed Desdemona, Othello tries to justify his act by noting that he had seen Cassio with her handkerchief, "an antique token / My father gave my mother" (5.2.223–24). The first version imputes to the handkerchief powers that set the female above the male; the second, traditional patriarchal control. It is a "napkin" when we first hear of it, "too little" to bind Othello's aching head (3.3.290)—and it is Othello himself who drops it where it can be picked up by Emilia, who, like Iago, also calls it a napkin (3.3.294; 325). To the contemptuous Iago, the handkerchief is moreover a "trifle" (326), a piece of cloth stripped of any intrinsic worth. Cassio, however, a connoisseur of fine things, admires the embroidery and asks Bianca to copy it before he will be called upon to return it to its unknown owner (3.4.181–83). The handkerchief next becomes confused with Desdemona's honor in Iago's insidiously timed reminder to Othello that it has been lost (4.1.16–22). Iago, having handled the handkerchief in the previous act, has prepared the ground for this confusion when he innocently asks Othello whether he has not "sometimes seen a handkerchief / Spotted with strawberries" in Desdemona's hand (3.3.439–40). That the audience too has seen a white cloth with red blotches on it lends dramatic credence to the conflation of "honor" and "handkerchief," given the symbolic status of blood-stained nuptial sheets that pronounce the bride's premarital virginity. Or would some spectators have interpreted the sight of a red-spotted cloth passed quickly from one hand to another on the stage as a napkin clotted with menstrual blood, and thus perceived it as a mark of womanly shame?

Desdemona with the handkerchief
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Desdemona without the handkerchief. Scene from Verdi's Othello: Placido Domingo and Katia Ricciarelli
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Interpreting stories: Allegory and the Moor

If so much can be made of the various identities the text confers upon this "trifle," how much more complex must it be to determine the truth about a human being. Faced with evidence as inconclusive as that on which Othello precipitously acts, as members of the audience, each of us has the responsibility of deciding what to believe about the hero and his exotic past.

Evaluating Othello's personal story involves much more than may at first be obvious, for Shakespeare's play is more than a domestic tragedy. The geopolitical crisis at the heart of the plot alerts us to the allegorical significance of Othello's exotic connections. Othello, the Moor of Venice, defends Venice from a Muslim onslaught. He has left behind his complicated past to champion a city that was one of Europe's bulwarks against the Ottoman Turks. Venice stands as a symbol of Christian civilization. We grasp this early in the play when Brabanzio rebukes Roderigo and his unrecognized companion for breaching the civic peace: "This is Venice. / My house is not a grange" (1.1.107–08). If we accept this characterization of Venetian civility, we may understand why Othello has become a Christian and defended the city with such devotion. As the play proceeds, however, another, less favorable image of Venice emerges. Othello becomes so suspicious of Desdemona so quickly partly because of the notoriety of the Venetian courtesans, "cunning whore[s]" (4.2.93) who give the lie to the image of republican virtue that Othello thinks he serves.

Three illustrations: Venice, a place of surpassing beauty, is captured here in two idealizing images by Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto, famed for his glamorous paintings of an intrinsically beautiful city.

View of the interior of St. Mark's cathedral, painted around 1760
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View of St. Mark's Square
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Here is a view of the other Venice, famed for masquerades, carnivals, crowds, and disreputable behavior.
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These questions come to a head in the final scene of the play, when Othello tries to sort out the blame for the murder of his wife, an act that he had thought a sacrifice (5.2.70). In his own person, he becomes both savior and culprit, enacting two contradictory roles in the remarkable moment when he relives a moment of past heroism and inflicts the appropriate punishment on himself:

Set you down this,
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th' throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus. (5.2.360–65)