English audiences saw Othello’s command of Venice as shocking reliance on a stranger
Evidence
- The syntax and the ambiguous genitive leave productively undecided whether Othello would here be admitting to being married to “Venice the whore” or to Desdemona, “the whore ofVenice.” The city’s morality (and its embodiment in the female population) had after all already provided lago with a crucial element in his deceit of Othello: “I know our country disposition well-/In Venice they do let God see the pranks/They dare not show their husbands” (3.3.204-6). Otherwise put, the city did have a “reputation for sexual licentiousness” (Honigmann, “Introduction,” n). Daniel Vitkus, though emphasizing another image, the “conventional comparison of Venice with virginity,” still points out that the perception at the time was of “the Turk cuckolding the impotent Venetian patriarchs or raping the Venetian virgin.” Hence, it is because of the “desperate lack of manly leadership” that Othello is “given charge.” To English audiences, Vitkus continues, such reliance on a stranger “would have been almost as shocking as the elopement and miscegenation permitted by the Venetian state” (Vitkus, “Turning Turk,” 163-64; cf. also Virginia Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History, esp. r6 and 33). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1100
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to how Shakespeare’s Venice appears in The Merchant of Venice as a site of ‘battle between civilization and unreason’ (mentioned later in this same chapter), and to Said’s Orientalism treatment of Western representations of Eastern strangers.