THE RING AND THE HANDKERCHIEF
THE RING AND THE JEW
In the third story of the first day Boccaccio tells how Melchisedech, a rich
Alexandrian Jew, is asked by Sultan Saladin to adjudicate the competing claims
of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Melchisedech evades the question by telling
the fable of a ring that had been passed by the father of a family to the worthiest
son through many generations until a father with three equally worthy sons was
unable to make a choice, had two replicas made that were indistinguishable from
the original, and bequeathed to each son a ring that he thought was the true one.
After the father’s death, each son claimed his heritage, but “when they discovered the rings were so much alike that they could not recognize the true one,
they put aside the question of who the true heir was and left it undecided, as it is
to this day.”1
The famous parable is the chief source and center piece of Lessing’s play
about tolerance, Nathan der Weise. When Nathan tells the story he follows Boccaccio in most respects but he attributes to Boccaccio’s “most beautiful and precious” ring a “secret power:”
Der Stein war ein
Opal, der hundert schöne Farben spielte,
Und hatte die geheime Kraft, vor Gott
Und Menschen angenehm zu machen, wer
In dieser Zuversicht ihn trug.
(3.7.397-401)
The stone it held,
An opal, shed a hundred colors fair,
And had the magic power that he who wore it,
Trusting its strength, was loved of God and men. 2
The judge makes this secret power the basis of his ruling: the bearer of the true
The Ring and the Handkerchief 2
ring is obviously the man who is most “amiable” in the eyes of God and his fellow men: the magic of the ring, like Calvinist predestination, becomes an incentive for good behavior.
Nathan’s ring owes something to the “magic in the web” of the handkerchief, which according to Othello an Egyptian charmer gave to his mother claiming that while she kept it “’Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father
/Entirely to her love” (3.4.58-60).3 In an eighteenth-century setting, the words
“angenehm” and “amiable” play very much in the same social and erotic register. What appears at first blush as a casual echo turns out on closer inspection to
be a systematic reversal. Othello’s loss of faith in Desdemona is marked by the
construction of an idolatrous reality. Lessing returns precisely to this destructive
moment of mystification when he invents the Solomonic ruling that at once
mystifies and demystifies Boccaccio’s ring.4
Does Lessing’s glance at Shakespeare succeed because a memory of the
ring is already part of the handkerchief? I will argue in the following pages that
Boccaccio’s parable, remembered by Shakespeare as that story about a ring and a
Jew, is the literary Urquelle for a compositional program that Shakespeare realized first in The Merchant of Venice and to which he returned several years later
in Othello. 5 Formally, this program is marked by an extraordinary interest in
contrapuntal variation, which manifests itself both in the interweaving of
multiple sources in The Merchant of Venice and in the construction of the
Venetian tragedy as a reversal of its comic precursor. This dense contrapuntal
labor develops a theme of “faith and difference” with a characteristic shifting
between the registers of religious zeal and sexual jealousy. Little of this is found
in the Italian novellas that provide the plots for Shakespeare’s Venetian plays,
but it is the deep theme of Boccaccio’s ring parable and its cognates. Boccaccio’s
parable with its ethos of skeptical tolerance sets the agenda for Shakespeare’s
Venetian plays as bitter-sweet and despairing meditations on zeal and jealousy
as perennial threats to a civil society.6
The young Shakespeare almost certainly encountered Boccaccio’s parable
in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, first published in 1567 and revised in
1575.7 It was the most widely read anthology of modern literature in its day,
and the parable of the ring was one of the likeliest stories to be read first because
it was one of the shortest.8 Thus we are on safe ground in saying that Shake-
The Ring and the Handkerchief 3
speare at some point in his youth read Boccaccio’s parable, and it is not a great
leap to assume that he filed it in his memory as that story about a ring and a
Jew.9 Many years later, the success of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta probably stimulated discussion in Shakespeare’s company about doing a play about a Jew.10
With this model of a play about ethnic and religious difference in an exotic
Mediterranean setting, I imagine the playwright doing some “research” and
remembering bibliographical advice from Painter’s preface, where he boasts of
the “commendable and well approued” authors to be found in his work and
adds that he has “ioyned many other, gathered oute of Boccatio, Bandello, Ser
Giouanni Fiorentino, Straparole, and other Italian and French Authours.”11 Turning to Boccaccio, Shakespeare would in the first five stories of the Decameron
have encountered two old friends, the ring parable (1.3) and the anecdote about
the Marchioness of Monteferrato (1.5). He would also have found a very remarkable story of the friendship between a Christian and a Jewish merchant, which
breathes a similar ethos of skeptical tolerance but portrays it in a more satirical
vein (1.2). This story of a Christian who, while seeking to convert his Jewish
friend refrains from any compulsion but succeeds unexpectedly, is so unlike The
Merchant of Venice in its portrayal of an interfaith friendship and so like it in its
exposure of the gap between Christian ideals and practice that one is tempted to
think of it as a potential source e contrario.12
At some further point in his reading, Shakespeare turned to Ser Giovanni’s Pecorone, where the horizon of expectations defined by Boccaccio’s stories of
difference aroused Shakespeare’s interest in the story of Giannetto’s triple attempt to win the lady of Belmont. This story not only has a Jew in it but a ring as
well. There is no connection between the ring and the Jew in the story, but I think
that he chose it at least in part because of a strong pre-existing association of ring
and Jew in his memory.
COMPOSITIONAL COUNTERPOINT IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
In this speculative reconstruction, Boccaccio’s parable is the ultimate,
Marlowe’s play the proximate, cause of The Merchant of Venice , and Ser Giovanni’s novella provided the narrative frame for the drama and became something like a material cause. There is no way of proving this hypothesis in all its
detail, but the traces of evidence suggest that something like it happened.13 Boc-
The Ring and the Handkerchief 4
caccio’s stories of difference, and the ring parable in particular, helped to shape
the hermeneutical horizon for a play that, in sharp contrast to its obvious narrative source, engages questions of faith and difference with remarkable intensity
and complexity.
There are other important sources. The Plutarchan Portia of “The Life of
Brutus” lends much more than her name to her eudaemonic Venetian daughter.14
The motif of the three caskets serves to replace the triple attempt by a single
suitor with separate attempts by three suitors. And the old Leir play casts a large
shadow over The Merchant of Venice, which is more than casually a play about
“good” and “bad” daughters. 15
The compositional choices that weave these sources together are governed
by a contrapuntal impulse that accounts for the peculiar opalescence and unresolved dissonances of The Merchant of Venice. The intertextual histories of Portia
and Shylock are especially instructive. Ser Giovanni’s Lady of Belmont is a capricious and rapacious widow, a barely disguised version of Circe. An odd scenic
resemblance between her story and Portia’s description of herself as harlot rather
than wife in the bedroom scene in “The Life of Brutus” prompted the question:
“What if I make a Portia of this harlot?”16 As a result, the Lady of Belmont undergoes a sea change and resurfaces as the most decorous of women, defining
herself in strict compliance with the roles of daughter and wife. She is fully deserving of the praise that she is “nothing undervalued/ to Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia” (1.1.165-66). Or so it seems, for the contrapuntal inversion does not
erase the original theme. Bassanio, who says more than he understands in his
first description of the lady of Belmont, identifies her as both Portia and Medea—
and makes her the paradigm of historical decorum and mythical monstrosity at
once.
A comparable inversion governs the transformation of Barabas into Shylock. Strip Marlowe’s Jew of his stage costume, and you find a post-Machiavellian new man, entrepreneurial, risk-tolerant, and possessed of remarkable manipulative and improvisational energy.17 Shylock completely lacks this energy,
belongs to an old order, and is defined through rigid adherence to a religious
and tribal ethos. Shakespeare’s revision of Marlowe’s aggressive villain into a
figure of pathos and reaction is accompanied by a similar revision of the fatherdaughter relationship. When Barabas says that he has “one sole Daughter” and
The Ring and the Handkerchief 5
holds her “as dear / As Agamemnon did his Iphigen,” we are prepared for the
course of events in which the father will sacrifice his daughter to his interests
(1.1.137-8). In the Jessica plot Shakespeare turns to a type of story that has a builtin bias against the older generation.18 In describing the consequences of Jessica’s
elopement, Shakespeare stays within generic conventions when he amuses the
audience with Shylock’s miserly pain at learning about his daughter’s extravagance in Genoa. But he suddenly turns the tables on his audience in Shylock’s
anguished response to the loss of the turquoise ring.19 The old association of ring
and Jew from Boccaccio’s parable generates the play’s most haunting contrapuntal inversion. For a moment the father reveals a depth of value, loyalty, and experience from which the daughter is radically excluded.
Shylock as a revised Barabas is, like Portia, a peculiar palimpsest, and a
strategic opacity clouds his critical actions. When does he decide to exact his revenge on Antonio? Before his first conversation with Antonio he says: “If I can
catch him once upon the hip / I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him,” but
at the end of their conversation he offers the bond “in a merry sport” (1.3.44-45,
144). It was entirely within the resources of Shakespeare’s stagecraft to design a
villain laying and springing a trap, but that is not the course he chose. The withdrawal of manipulative agency from Shylock is apparent from the very first moment when he is drawn reluctantly into the action, just as later he accepts the
fateful dinner invitation against his will and better judgment. He may or may not
have laid a trap, but it is sprung on him by Jessica’s elopement, and in the pursuit of his revenge he does not show any of the crazed virtuosity or theatrical
panache that distinguishes Titus Andronicus, with whom he has otherwise much
in common.
The contrapuntal impulse that is apparent in Shakespeare’s source work
can also be observed in the interweaving of the multiple plot strands into the peculiar shuttle structure of the play. A simultaneous assertion and erasure of difference is the most distinct feature of this intratextual counterpoint, and it manifests itself most powerfully in the two pillars of the play, the bond scene (1.3) and
the trial scene (4.1). In these scenes, we watch Antonio and Shylock locked into
an internecine relationship based on irreconcilable values and beliefs, “separate
spheres” with a vengeance. But the more vehemently the Christian and the Jew
assert their difference, the more powerfully the movement of the plot undercuts
The Ring and the Handkerchief 6
their claim. Because Antonio loses Bassanio, Shylock loses Jessica. Antonio’s
spiteful treatment of Shylock is certainly a form of zealous contempt for the Jew.
But Shylock provides the funds that guarantee Antonio’s loss, and Antonio displaces onto Shylock the rage and jealousy that he dare not acknowledge and
hides from others — and perhaps himself — by his mask of sad generosity. In
the same way, Shylock’s ancient grudge is fed by the betrayal of Jessica. Thus
Antonio and Shylock play precisely symmetrical roles in each other’s psychosexual economies. Shylock’s grief and rage express openly what is hidden by Antonio’s sadness, but each is the cause of the other’s erotic loss. Their zeal is fueled
by their jealousy.20
This identity is nowhere more apparent than in the forced conversion of
Shylock. This moment is painful to modern readers, who sometimes explain
away their discomfort as an inappropriate response to the values of a different
age. Forced or expedient conversion, however, was as problematic then as it is
now, however common it may have been. Boccaccio’s story of the Jewish and
Christian merchant bears early witness. More exclaimed against it in the Utopia,
and its critique by Robert Wilson in The Three Ladies of London is doubly important precisely because it is so obviously not the work of a great or penetrating
mind.21 It was a contested topic and deeply rooted in the everyday experience of
Europeans in an age that burned martyrs at the stake and produced the royal bon
mot that “Paris is worth a mass.” Launcelot Gobbo mimics the ways of his betters
in his comic psychomachia with its cynical theory of conversion.
Shylock’s conversion is the result of quite distinct and not necessarily conventional choices on the playwright’s part. Ser Giovanni’s Jew, when he is told
that “he who lays snares for others is caught himself,” “seeing that he could not
do what he had wished, took his bond and tore it in pieces in a rage.”22 That
could be the end of the matter in The Merchant of Venice, but Portia twists the
knife by invoking a law that turns Shylock from a loser in a civil suit into the defendant in a criminal suit. Patrician in his forbearance, the Duke is not eager to
press the case, and it is left to Antonio to introduce yet another complication
when he proposes “to quit the fine for one half of his goods” (4.1.378) provided
Shylock become a Christian and on his death leave all his possessions to Lorenzo
and Jessica. Because the call for conversion does not come from the Duke, it is
not an officially required move. What looks like generosity is sheer torture, is
The Ring and the Handkerchief 7
distinctly marked as the last moment in the internecine struggle of Shylock and
Antonio, and shows us an Antonio who is as deeply mired in vindictive abjection
as Shylock.
The simultaneous assertion and erasure of difference also seems to be the
point of the elaborate arabesques of foreign courtship that Shakespeare weaves
around the bond scene. The xenophobic médisance with which Portia dismisses
her mostly transalpine suitors, the multicultural anxiety with which she lingers
sympathetically over young Falconbridge of England, with his clothes from here
and there and his manners from everywhere, and the faintly ludicrous protestations of the exotic and noble Morocco— these are Shakespearean inventions that
do not grow directly out of any of the sources. They establish Venice as something of a cosmopolitan melting pot, but Portia will marry the hometown boy,
who first met her in the company of the Marquis of Montferrat (1.2.111), a descendant presumably of the Marquise who fended off the king of France with her
witty demonstration that all women are the same. And sameness is the point of
one of the play’s most openly ideological moments, Shylock’s powerful claim for
a common humanity (3.1.54-68).
That claim, however, is oddly reductive and grounds sameness in division
and revenge. The trial scene shows Antonio and Shylock united in their loss and
forever divided in hatred and abjection. The last act of the comedy mitigates, but
does not overcome this division. The thoughtless lovers who preside over it invoke mythological scenes of broken faith that they barely understand. There is a
quarrel over a ring that threatens to get out of hand. And the play ends with
Gratiano’s farcical but ominous vow to guard Nerissa’s ring. The lines allude to
a coarse cousin to Boccaccio’s parable of the ring that must be cherished even
though its truth is always in doubt.23 Nerissa’s ring and Boccaccio’s parable define the space of the play, but the ethos of skeptical tolerance celebrated in the
one is always seen as threatened by the fears embodied in the other, and although The Merchant of Venice is a play that comes down on the side of tolerance
and generosity it does so with a strong sense of the difficulty, precariousness,
and inevitable losses of those positions.
The Ring and the Handkerchief 8
FROM THE MERCHANT TO THE MOOR OF VENICE
The Merchant of Venice play tells the story of a daughter who in an act of
conspicuous obedience marries within her tribe and lives happily ever after,
while in Othello we see the disaster that befalls a daughter who in an act of conspicuous disobedience to her father marries out of her tribe.24 A similarly precise
counterpoint governs the appearance of villainy. In the comedy there was an exotic villain who on closer inspection turned into something else. In Othello, the
exotic figure enters with an aura of nobility that progressively clouds over, while
the villain is completely “unmarked.”25
The Merchant of Venice is certainly not the only play to which Othello
stands in a systematic counterpoint. It repeats the plot of slander and jealousy in
Much Ado About Nothing. And if one speculates on what difficulties Othello
would have with Hamlet’s revenge, or how long it would take Hamlet to see
through Iago, one is struck by the virtuosity or sadistic pedantry with which
Shakespeare’s dramaturgical counterpoint creates mismatches of character and
situation. Nonetheless, it seems right to say that a particularly dense web links
the Venetian plays. It is not enough to say that in dramatizing Cinthio’s novella,
Shakespeare remembered this and that from the earlier play, even if one takes a
generous view of “this and that.” The source work that produced The Merchant of
Venice retained considerable energy beyond the completion of that play, captured Cinthio’s novella in its orbit, and shaped the structure of the tragedy both
through allusive reversals and through less visible compositional choices.
I will focus on three ways in which Othello continues the compositional
program of The Merchant of Venice. Most obviously, the Venetian act of the
tragedy is a return to Venice that regulars in the audience would have been expected to recognize as an effect and perhaps as a signal. Less visible is the
structure of the whole action as a version of the triple attempt by Giannetto to
possess the Lady of Belmont. Finally, the confusion of zeal and jealousy returns
in the tragedy with a vengeance.
The Ring and the Handkerchief 9
Venice Revisited
Cinthios’s narrative says very little about the Venetian phase of Disdemona and her husband:
There was once in Venice a Moor, a very gallant man,
who, because he was personally valiant and had given proof in
warfare of great prudence and skillful energy, was very dear to
the Signoria, who in rewarding virtuous actions ever advance
the interests of the Republic. It happened that a virtuous Lady of
wondrous beauty called Disdemona, impelled not by female
appetite but by the Moor’s good qualities, fell in love with him,
and he, vanquished by the Lady’s beauty and noble mind,
likewise was enamoured of her. So propitious was their mutual
love that, although the Lady’s relatives did all they could to
make her take another husband, they were united in marriage
and lived together in such concord and tranquillity while they
remained in Venice, that never a word passed between them that
was not loving. 26
Shakespeare turns Cinthio’s Disdemona into an antitype of Portia, a single
daughter with a solicitous father and many suitors. Desdemona “shunned the
wealthy curlèd darlings of our nation” (1.2.68-9) and did not “affect many proposèd matches / Of her own clime, complexion, and degree” (3.3.234-5). Three of
her suitors are singled out: Othello, the foolish Roderigo, and Cassio. The lineup of these three men with Portia’s suitors is striking and extends to the phonetic
relationship of the names. Aragon, whom the test reveals as a fool, returns as the
“sick fool” Roderigo, who is never in the competition, which is between the
“local” suitor Bassanio/Cassio and the exotic suitor Morocco/Othello.27
Morocco and Othello stand to one another as sketch and portrait. Othello
is above all a voice. The distinctive tones of this voice appear first in the highflown rhetoric of Morocco and are just as vulnerable to Iago’s scathing characterization of Othello’s speech as “bombast circumstance horribly stuffed with epithets of war” (1.1.13-14). But Morocco also presages the destiny of Othello.
While Aragon finds a fool’s head in his casket, Morocco sees a “carrion death,”
and there is a whiff of necrophilia about the manner in which his imagination
dwells on Portia as a figure in a coffin (2.7.49-53). “Fare you well; your suit is
The Ring and the Handkerchief 10
cold,” the scroll tells him, and Morocco confirms it with “Cold indeed, and
labour lost. / Then farewell heat, and welcome frost” (2.7.73-75). There is a line
that leads from this scene to the oddly statuary quality of the murder of Desdemona and finds its most haunting expression in Othello’s desolate “Cold, cold,
my girl” (5.2.282).
Whereas Portia professes to have no say in the choice of her husband —
although she helps the process along at the margins — Desdemona not only insists on her own choice but defies paternal authority in the most flagrant manner:
she elopes.28 The elopement is Shakespeare’s choice and is part of a casuistic
strategy of creating female figures that are paradoxical embodiments of obedience and authority. “So is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a
dead father,” Portia complains (1.2. 23-24), but this supersubtle Venetian never
challenges authority head on. Instead she practices (the show of) obedience and
delights in gender crossings, but although she imagines herself as a bragging
swordster she chooses the safer instrument of the pen when opportunity comes.
Desdemona elopes from the least heavy of Shakespearean fathers, and she
elopes apparently as a matter of first rather than last resort. The situation Shakespeare chose and defined through a set of differences from the source narrative
and his other plays is characterized by the strong tendency to remove excuses
from the daughter and stress the collision of an impetuous will with the weakness of self-limiting constitutional authority. 29 There is something Antigonesque
about Desdemona, and it manifests herself in her opening words, whose artful
plainness Lynda Boose has well analyzed.30 It is impossible not to be moved by
the dignity and nobility with which Desdemona describes her “divided duty,”
but one might also be exasperated by the self-righteous zeal with which she
courts disaster by using language to sharpen conflict and precipitate rupture.31
Shakespeare makes his Venetian daughters choose very different ways of being
in the world. Portia controls her world by submitting to its traditions. Desdemona on a single occasion displays the daring of individual choice unmediated
by the wisdom or authority of social custom, only to become the most obedient
of wives.
An elopement, however high-minded, is still an elopement, and that may
be one reason why Shakespeare never shows the noble Desdemona in the act itself. Another reason is that he had done it already in the case of Jessica. Othello
The Ring and the Handkerchief 11
therefore dramatizes “elopement discovered” and shows what had been told in
the earlier play. There Solanio reports on the notable uproar, and Salerio chimes
in by quoting “all the boys in Venice” who taunt Shylock with the obscene cry
“His stones, his daughter, and his ducats!”(2.8.12-24). In Othello this memory
becomes a scenario written by Iago:
Call up her father,
Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets; incense her kinsmen,
And, though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies.
(1.1.67-71)
Iago’s cry “Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags” (1.1.80) in
fact describes Jessica’s elopement more accurately than Desdemona’s, and the
triple rhythm of his exclamation harks back to the boys of Venice.32 Brabantio’s
“This accident is not unlike my dream” (1.1.144) recalls Shylock’s more elaborate
dream of money bags. The most striking and repugnant echo, however, does not
come directly from the elopement scene. Iago’s “an old black ram is tupping
your white ewe” (1.1.89 ) recalls Shylock’s “woolly breeders” in the “work of
generation” (1.2.82-83).33
The elopement scene leads to the courtroom scene, for which The Merchant
of Venice likewise provides a template for contrapuntal elaboration. It is not difficult to imagine the same actors taking the parts of the Duke, Antonio/Brabantio,
Shylock/Othello, and Portia/Desdemona. The casting draws attention to a
shared scenic grammar and its inversions. The courtroom scene pits a stranger
against the social structure but offers him the protection of the law. In one play,
the scene resolves the conflict; in the other it sets the stage. In one play, the
stranger loses; in the other he appears to win. On both occasions, the critical turn
is achieved by the entrance of the female character and her eloquent declaration.
The Triple Attempt on the Lady of Belmont
Leslie Fiedler has called Othello a “one-act comedy followed by a tragedy
in four acts.” The comedy is The Merchant of Venice turned “upside down;” the
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tragedy largely develops the materials of the new source.34 But while it is true
that the most obvious echoes of The Merchant appear in the opening act of the
tragedy, the division of the play into a (largely) Merchant of Venice and a (largely)
Cinthio section does not hold up, and it is more productive to think of the allusive cluster in the Venetian act as a strategically placed challenge to think of the
play as a whole as a “repetition” of The Merchant of Venice.
In addition to thinking of a one-act comedy followed by a tragedy in four
acts one might also think of the play as unfolding in three movements. Three
times in the play a brawl erupts, and on each occasion the brawl is closely related
to the ways in which Othello and Desdemona do or do not make love. This organization of the events on stage has no roots in Cinthio but takes us back to Giannetto’s triple attempt to possess the Lady of Belmont. Twice she offers him a cup
with drugged wine, which he drinks and falls asleep, but on the third attempt he
heeds the advice of a chambermaid, does not drink from the cup his Circe offers
him, and masters her:
Giannetto went to bed, and finding himself brisk and in
good spirits he thought it a thousand years till the lady came to
him. He said to himself, ‘I have tricked her; this time the case is
altered!’ And to entice her soon to bed, he began to snore as if
asleep. At which, ‘This is excellent!’ said the lady, and, quickly
undressing, she got into bed with Giannetto, who lost not time,
but as soon as she was in, turned towards her, embraced her,
and saying, ‘Now I have what I have desired so long!’ bestowed
on her the bliss of holy matrimony, and all night long she did not
leave his arms.35
In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare abandoned this structure in favor of
the three suitors, but he apparently wanted to put his Bassanio through some of
Giannetto’s trials and therefore invented a scene in which the consummation of
Portia’s and Bassanio’s marriage is deferred. There is nothing like that in the
novella, where Giannetto and the lady revel for many days until Giannetto remembers the due date of the bond.
The motif of the interrupted wedding night travels from The Merchant of
Venice to Othello. Letters call Bassanio back to Venice, and letters call Othello
The Ring and the Handkerchief 13
away from Venice. “Come away! / For you shall hence upon your wedding day”
Portia exclaims” (3.2.310-11), and to make the resemblance more perfect, both
wives follow their husbands.36 In the further elaboration of the motif in Othello
Shakespeare returns directly to Giannetto’s story. In Cinthio’s account the voyage to Cyprus is explicitly marked as a non-event: “with a sea of the utmost tranquillity [they] arrived safely in Cyprus.”37 Shakespeare makes a big fuss about
this voyage, and some of the details come from Giannetto’s story, which has
much to say about the hero’s separation from his fleet, his difficult entry into the
port of the lady of Belmont, the rapt attention of the townspeople as they watch
his repeated arrivals, and the universal festivities following his arrival.
For a playwright as drenched in Ovid as Shakespeare, Cyprus was the island of Venus, the place where Pygmalion’s statue came alive and Adonis died.
There is no explicit allusion in Othello to Cyprus as the seat of Venus, but its
mythological resonance suffuses Cassio’s prayer for the safe arrival of Othello.
The prayer transforms the wishes of the townspeople for Giannetto’s success into
a fervent celebration of a hieros gamos:
Great Jove, Othello guard,
And swell his sail with thine own powerful breath,
That he may bless this bay with his tall ship,
Make love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms,
Give renewed fire to our extincted spirits,
And bring all Cyprus comfort.
(2.1.78-83)
Cyprus turns out to be the place of a very hostile Venus. It is also Circe’s
island and therefore must have a cup, which travels via The Merchant of Venice
and ends up in the hands of Cassio rather than Othello. The last of Portia’s first
batch of suitors is the drunkard nephew of the Duke of Saxony about whom she
says: “When he is best, he is a little worse than a man, and when he is worst, he is
little better than a beast” (1.2.88-89). Portia proposes to “set a deep glass of Rhenish wine on the contrary casket” (1.2.96). She learned this trick from the Lady of
Belmont. In Othello, the drinking scene with its review of Danish, Dutch, English,
and German boozers waves distantly at the crowd of transalpine suitors, but
Portia’s words are echoed more precisely in Cassio’s elaborate exegesis of drunkenness as metamorphosis: “To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and
The Ring and the Handkerchief 14
presently a beast! O strange! Every inordinate cup is unbless’d, and the ingredient is a devil” (2.3.305-08).
Cassio’s drinking interrupts the second attempt of Othello to consummate
his marriage and proves the derivation of Othello’s failure to get to bed from the
sleepyhead lover of the Italian novella. On his third attempt, Othello succeeds in
a Liebestod that proceeds as a ghoulish conflation of elements from Giannetto’s
story with the rape of Lucrece. A nightmare counterpoint turns Giannetto’s story
of sleep and success into a sequence of consummation deferred, imagined, interrupted, and finally perverted, but never celebrated or remembered.38
The Ring and the Handkerchief
John Keegan has argued that for much of history “real” war has been a
much more circumscribed, dilatory, and indecisive a business than Clausewitz’s
“true” war.39 True war in that sense is a limiting case that tells an ultimate truth
about, but also radically distorts, the phenomena it defines or describes. Given
the ancient association of Mars and Venus, it is very tempting to speak of “real”
and “true” sex. Real sex on such a view is an endless skirmishing and soldiering
that seeks partial victories but avoids decisive engagements. The endogamous
comedy of The Merchant of Venice with its lubricities and opalescence belongs to
the world of real sex. It shuttles endlessly between Venice and Belmont and delights in the ambiguities of its site that has love and money inscribed in its very
name. The voyage to Cyprus transforms these oscillations into the singular and
disastrous removal from one place to the other. Cyprus becomes the garrison of
Venus, where beyond the trappings of an exogamous marriage we witness the
scandal of “true” sex, i.e. that it involves another. To that scandal there is only
one solution, monstrous and perfect at once: “kill what I love — a savage jealousy /That sometime savours nobly” (Twelfth Night 5.1.117-18). For Desdemona,
this sense of “true” is “unnatural: “That death’s unnatural that kills for loving”
(5.1.42)
To call Othello a tragedy about “true” sex in a Clausewitzian sense is to
draw attention to questions of truth that haunt Othello. Whereas in The Merchant
of Venice religious quarrels are fueled by erotic losses, in Othello the domestic
sexual drama insistently pushes beyond a psychology of jealousy into areas of
The Ring and the Handkerchief 15
faith and epistemology. The reception history of the play bears witness to this
pressure in the countless interpretations that see Iago and Desdemona as demonic and angelic forces, with Othello as a saved or damned creature depending
on the critic’s theology. Such readings are not easily brushed aside. After all, the
triangle of Desdemona, Othello, and Iago precisely mirrors the construct of the
explicitly theological and voyeurist drama of Una, the Red Crosse Knight, and
Archimago. Moreover, Shakespeare’s characters talk a language of heaven and
hell with a devotion that cannot be explained as mere Elizabethan parlance.40
Nonetheless, a Christian reading of the play engages the problem at the
wrong level. The play does not inquire into the “truth about,” but asks questions
“about the truth about,” and this second-order concern appears most plainly in
the fact that the game of verbal iteration is played not only with the substantive
word “honest” but with the methodological word “think.” The focus shifts from
what to think or believe to how to think or believe and how to act on belief. The
Renaissance had a deep and subtle understanding of the mirrorings of love, and
in such a culture jealousy is a Janus-faced theme that permits explorations in
many directions at once.
As a tragedy of “true” sex, Othello is at the same time a play about the
pathology of belief in a disenchanted world where lost faith returns in the
equally destructive forms of corrosive cynicism and zealous idolatry. And while
other plays that bear closely on Othello (Much Ado, Hamlet) pursue very similar
agendas, it is remarkable that The Merchant of Venice sets the frame for the scenes
in Othello that pursue the pathology of belief most explicitly, the handkerchief
scenes and Othello’s emphatic self-definition as a convert to Christianity.41
The handkerchief scenes in Othello unmistakably recompose Cinthio’s narrative in the light of the ring business in The Merchant of Venice. In Cinthio, the
ensign steals the handkerchief from Desdemona after creating a diversion. The
Moor later sees the handkerchief as it is copied by the Bianca character. In Othello, Desdemona responds to Othello’s statement that he has a headache by offering to tie the handkerchief around his forehead. With a sullen gesture he brushes
it aside so that it drops to the ground, and he orders Desdemona to follow him.
She obeys, and Emilia picks up the handkerchief. The symbolism is apparent.
Othello performs the act that he will later articulate in the image of the base Indian/Judaean throwing away a pearl “richer than all his tribe.” Desdemona on
The Ring and the Handkerchief 16
the other hand quite literally follows Othello rather than the handkerchief. The
stage business is informed by the ethos of the ring story with its paradoxical reversals of holding on to or letting go of token or thing. And Bianca’s angry return
of the handkerchief to Cassio makes it function like a ring in a system of exchange.
In The Merchant the ethos of the ring motif does not manifest itself without
struggle. The rhyming repetitions of the word “ring” by Bassanio and Portia in a
spirit of quasi-magical incantation appear to mystify the ring and threaten a
permanent war of the sexes, until in a final turn fixity and quarrel are resolved,
at least for the time being. The revision of that scene in Othello dramatizes a
catastrophic fall into idolatry. Cinthio’s handkerchief was “embroidered most
delicately in the Moorish fashion,” but it is otherwise a token without any magic
properties.42 Under the spell of Othello’s incantatory language it turns into a
magic object that embodies and causes false belief.43 Its origin in Egypt and the
emphasis on its family history point to memories of Boccaccio’s ring. Desdemona’s handkerchief joins Leah’s turquoise as a contrapuntal version of the
heirloom in Boccaccio’s story.44
The counterpoint of zeal and jealousy that holds together Shakespeare’s
Venetian plays has an appropriate finale in the correspondences between the exits of the dominant characters.45 Conversion and coercion live in troubled proximity in the final moments of Othello and Shylock, and Shakespeare’s fashioning
of the Moor’s death strikes me as a variation on Shylock’s exit, although there
are no explicit verbal or scenic links. 46 “How not to be a Christian” is written
with large letters over both scenes.
A character’s exit provides the dramatist with the opportunity to capture
in a final image his mode of being in the world. In the cases of Shylock and
Othello, their final moments capture their fundamental orientation toward an
alien culture. Shylock first appears in the play as a ghetto Jew. Exclusion and selfsegregation work together to create routine hostility as a ground of uneasy coexistence: “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so
following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you”(1.3.3335). Shylock’s acceptance of the dinner invitation therefore is a profoundly consequential and symbolic event. Jessica betrays him because at a critical moment
he leaves his house, but he leaves his house because he himself has betrayed his
The Ring and the Handkerchief 17
religion. Parodic and serious at once, Shylock’s decision is a tragic error: he
leaves the house of Israel. For much of the play Shylock therefore is not only an
outsider in Venice; he is also an outsider in Jerusalem. And the figure of grief and
rage reduced to stimulus response in the taunting of his tribesmen is neither
Christian nor Jewish.
From this perspective it is instructive to look at the ambivalence of Shylock’s response to the attempt to force conversion on him. Shakespeare could
have dramatized the angry departure of the Jew in the source narrative—something like Malvolio’s “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” (Twelfth Night
5.1.374). He could also have made Shylock sign the deed of gift that Portia
orders the clerk to draw up. He does neither and instead gives to Shylock the
quiet and opaque lines:
I pray you give me leave to go from hence.
I am not well. Send the deed after me,
And I will sign it. (4.1.392-84)
These lines can be followed up in a variety of ways, but the most plausible
scenario is that Shylock will go home and die.47 The playwright who showed his
Jew in one betrayal of his religion, does not show him in another: Shylock does
not sign, and the dramatization of his exit is compatible with, although it does
not compel, the reading that in his final moments he returns to the home he had
so disastrously left.
Shakespeare’s initial portrayal of Othello as the fancy stranger is clearly a
contrapuntal variation on the ghetto Jew. When Othello begins his defence with
the words “Her father loved me, oft invited me,”(1.3.127), we hear the dinner
invitation from The Merchant: Antonio/ Shylock and Brabantio/Othello play
through the closely allied xenophobic and xenophilic sides of a cosmopolitan society. And just as the senators look with sympathy and admiration on the exotic
stranger, so Othello ardently espouses the political and religious values of his
chosen city. Othello is technically a mercenary. Cinthio speaks of his “great prudence and skillful energy” in warfare and describes him as dear to the Signoria
who “in rewarding virtuous actions ever advance the interests of the Republic.”48
Shakespeare could have left it at that, but he portrays his Othello as a man whose
past clearly is not Christian but who now serves the city out of conviction.
The Ring and the Handkerchief 18
The problematical nature of this conviction becomes manifest in the extraordinary moment when Othello demonstrates his loyalty as a Venetian and
Christian subject by killing himself in the form of an abject and infidel other. The
divided response over the ages to this gesture of self-restoration is evidence of its
design as a hard case. Shakespeare, who pinned an elopement on the unquestionably noble Desdemona, could not have chosen a more paradoxical act to raise
the question of Othello’s final rehabilitation. Suicide notoriously divides pagan
and Christian Rome. Shakespeare’s Roman suicides are justified on a “when in
Rome…” basis. But Macbeth will not “play the Roman fool” (5.10.1), and madness or despair surround all of Shakespeare’s non-Roman suicides. Othello’s suicide has a Roman flavor to it, notably in its mode of apologia and in its definition
of Othello’s self in relation to the Venetian state. But with the “circumcisèd dog”
religious difference comes rushing in (5.2.364). Othello the good Christian kills
an infidel who represents Othello’s own apostasy. “For he was great of heart,”
Cassio comments (5.2.371). But this appeal to an ancient framework of interpretation, where suicide can be a sign of courage and magnanimity, does not resolve
the difficulties the playwright deliberately courts by having his protagonist
commit suicide to prove his Christianity.49 A forced and obsessive aura surrounds the act; the zealous convert is the same in his life as in his death.
Portia
I have read The Merchant of Venice and Othello as variations spun contrapuntally out of an early encounter with Boccaccio’s parable remembered as that
story about a ring and a Jew. The case remains speculative and circumstantial,
but the framing of Shakespeare between Boccaccio and Lessing has at least the
heuristic value of positing as a normative center for both plays an ethos of skeptical tolerance that receives two cheers in The Merchant of Venice and whose disastrous loss is lamented in Othello.
Let us return for a final moment to Shakespeare’s decision to civilize the
Circe of the source narrative by turning her into Portia. The Plutarchan figure
raises the question of her status as harlot or wife and develops the ideal of marital conversation on a basis of a philosophical androgyny that softens the brutality
of men and strengthens the weakness of women.50 That is the creed of humanist
education; we catch a slightly mocking echo of it in the Venetian Portia’s de-
The Ring and the Handkerchief 19
scription of herself as “an unlesson’d girl, unschool’d, unpractic’d,” but eager to
learn (3.2.159).The Plutarchan figure confirms the authority of her eloquence and
learning by stabbing herself in the thigh. In this gesture of contradictory validation, she proves the true wife of the “gentle” Brutus, who has inscribed into his
name a nature from which no amount of philosophy can free him and to which
he returns in the act for which history remembers him. Progressive and regressive elements are paradoxically linked in Plutarch’s belated and “supersubtle”
Romans. And Portia in the end lapses into grief, sickness, and madness: she ends
by suicide, swallowing burning coals in a bizarre contrapasso of her utopian and
transgressive eloquence.
The Venetian Portia masters the paradoxes of civilization with greater
sprezzatura than her strained Roman ancestor. She is more chaste but also more
cruel than the cheerful Lady of Belmont, who robbed her suitors only of their
money. Portia robs them of considerably more, and it is only a step from her to
the daughter of Antiochus, whose castle walls were decorated with the heads of
failed suitors. But while Portia may only be a step away from such monstrous violence, it is a step she does not take, and she prevents others from taking it. She
is the mistress of violence, and those who dislike her for many good reasons
should ask whom they would rather entrust with her dangerous charge.
On the other hand, the choice of Portia’s name with its invocation of
Plutarch’s labile Utopia suggests that Othello is always already a part of The
Merchant of Venice. It does not take much for Portia’s eloquent question about
harlot or wife to turn against her in the abusive rhetoric about Desdemona as
wife and whore. That does not turn Othello into the “truth” about The Merchant of
Venice, for the “truth” of that turn to the “truth” is itself at stake. Othello’s turn
from the ring to the handkerchief, far from exposing the deficiency of, or giving
the lie to, the ethos of Boccaccio’s parable presents an object lesson in the failure
to practice it. Thus the play becomes a very peculiar cautionary tale: those who
need to heed its lesson the most are by definition excluded from “getting it.”51
Perhaps it is better to think of the tragedy as a piece of apotropaic magic, trying
to ward off its horrors by the very power with which it invokes them.
The Ring and the Handkerchief 20
1This
skeptical version may not be the original form of the story. In Gesta Romanorum (no. 89), there is a variant in which two older brothers seek to cheat the
youngest brother out of his inheritance by presenting fake copies of the ring. But
the fake copies lack the power of the true ring to heal sickness. The story is
allegorized as the competition between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, with only
the true ring possessing the saving power of faith. Gesta Romanorum, ed.
Hermann Oesterley (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1872), pp. 416-17.
2Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970), vol. I. The translation is quoted from G. E.
Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm and Other Plays and Writings, ed.
Peter Demetz, The German Library (New York: Continuum, 1991) vol. XII.
3 Shakespeare is quoted from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edd.
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
4Lessing’s
association of The Merchant of Venice with Othello goes back earlier
than Nathan der Weise to his comedy Minna von Barnhelm, a play that uses a
number of narrative and thematic elements from Shakespeare’ s comedy, including the ring motif, and whose heroine uses the example of Othello for a
withering feminist critique of the code of honor : “O, über die wilden,
unbiegsamen Männer, die nur immer ihr stieres Auge auf das Gespenst der Ehre
heften” (4.6) and “O über die Blinden, die nicht sehen wollen” (5.12) (“O these
savage and inflexible men whose eyes do nothing but stare at the ghost of
honor.” “O these blind men who do not want to see”). See Judith Aikin, “The
Merchant and the Moor of Venice in Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm,” Michigan
Germanic Studies , 15 (1989), 171-89. Lessing deserves a place of honor among the
“Emilia critics,” to use Carol Thomas Neely’s helpful taxonomy in Broken
Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 108.
5Donald Foster argues that The Merchant underwent revision in 1599 (private
communication). E. A. J. Honigman, on the strength of the Hamlet quarto, argues
that a version of Othello existed before 1602: “The first quarto of Hamlet and the
date of Othello,” RES, 44 (1993), 211-220. If both are right, revision of one play
may well have spurred interest in the other.
6The must searching discussions of Shakespeare’s Venetian agenda are by Allan
Bloom in Shakespeare's Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964), Leslie Fiedler in
The Stranger in Shakespeare.(New York: Stein and Day, 1972), and Graham Bradshaw in Shakespeare’s Skepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 2231. There is also a methodologically interesting essay by William H. Matchett,
which is governed by an interest in the compositional process and focuses on
some verbal clusters that recur in the two plays as well as in The Two Gentlemen of
Verona, “Shylock, Iago, and Sir Thomas More: With Some Further Discussion of
Shakespeare's Imagination,” PMLA 92 (1977), 217-30.
The Ring and the Handkerchief 21
7Painter
was born under Henry VIII, grew up under Edward and Mary, and
found his niche as a somewhat corrupt clerk of the ordinance in Elizabeth’s
reign. We need not credit him with particular depth of understanding to assume
that he knew something about the religious and political violence that shook the
Europe of his generation, and he may have decided to include Boccaccio’s ring
parable in his anthology because his response to it was not unlike Lessing’s.
8Of Shakespeare’s 28 dramatic and narrative works that do not have Holinshed
as their major source, five tell stories found in Painter (Romeo and Juliet, Rape of
Lucrece, All’s Well, Timon, and Coriolanus). Painter’s translation of Boccaccio’s
story of “Mistresse Helena of Florence” (3.9) is usually cited as the source for All’s Well. There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare consulted Painter for the
other plays, but it is plausible that his early acquaintance with these stories
through Painter had something to do with his eventual choice of subjects.
9In The Palace of Pleasure Shakespeare also came across Boccaccio’s anecdote
about the clever way in which the Marchioness of Monteferrato warded off the
unwelcome advances of the King of France by serving him a banquet in which
every dish included chicken. When he inquired whether there was nothing else
in the region, she replied that indeed there was but that the women were the
same as everywhere else. He got the point, which, like that of the ring story,
turns on imagined difference.
10I see this reconstruction as a sketch of an intertextual history and ignore such
events as the Lopez scandal. It is plausible enough that this scandal had something to do with the revival of Marlowe’s play and with Shakespeare’s interest in
doing a comparable play. But that does not alter the weight of the claim: No Jew
of Malta, no Merchant of Venice.
William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, edited by Joseph Jacobs (London: David
Nutt, 1890). I,4.
11
12Giannotto
seeks to convert Abraham, who resists. At length, Abraham agrees to
give his friend’s religion a chance, but before making up his mind he insists on
traveling to Rome to observe the clergy. Giannotto is afraid that this experiment
will never produce a conversion, and indeed during his stay at Rome Abraham
sees at first hand the corruption of the clergy. But he returns to his friend and becomes a convert because he has become convinced of the power and wisdom of a
Holy Spirit capable of resisting the combined efforts of the clergy to corrupt and
destroy it.
13A
skeptical reader might protest the futility of specifying the manner in which
Shakespeare read stories that were a part of the common culture. On the other
hand, my specifications hardly go beyond spelling out the constraints imposed
by the publication history of the texts. An English reader between 1575 and 1595
The Ring and the Handkerchief 22
was very likely to encounter Boccaccio’s stories first in Painter, was likely to read
the ring parable and anecdote about the Marchioness of Monteferrato because of
their shortness, was likely, if he read Boccaccio in Italian, to begin at the beginning and encounter therefore the “old friends” and their interesting neighbor,
the story about the Jewish and Christian merchant friends.
14John Velz, “‘Nothing Undervalued to Cato's Daughter’: Plutarch’s Porcia in the
Shakespeare Canon,” Drama in the Renaissance. Comparative and Critical Essays,
edd. Clifford Davidson, C. J. Gianakaris, John H. Stroupe (New York: AMS Press,
1986), 150-62.
15Martin Mueller, “From Leir to Lear,” Philological Quarterly, forthcoming.
16Martin Mueller, “Plutarch’s ‘Life of Brutus’ and The Play of its Repetitions in
Shakespearean Drama,” Renaissance Drama 22 (1991), 66.
17The use of the first singular possessive pronoun defines him: in his second sentence Barabas refers to “my Spanish Oyles and Wines of Greece” (1.1.5), and the
phrase “mine Argosie from/at Alexandria” is repeated twice to be echoed and
confirmed in the response “thine argosy from Alexandria” (1.1.44, 72, 85). The
Latin tag he remembers from his school days, Ego mihimet sum semper proximus,
assumes a new twist and grandeur as it rings in the age of possessive individualism (1.1.189). Compare this with Shylock’s contemptous dismissal of the entrepreneurial world of commerce and discovery as “ventures…squandered
abroad” (1.3.20-21).
18In Story 14 from the fifteenth-century Italian collection Novelino by Masuccio a
young man arranges the elopement of a woman from the house of her miserly father by smuggling a servant into the house. The woman and the servant escape
with a lot of money (Bullough 1.497-505). The details are close to the conspiracy
of Jessica and Launcelot Gobbo, but stories of elopement from rich and oppressive fathers are fairly common.
19 On the meaning of the stone, se Teresa McNally, “Shylock’s Turquoise Ring
and Judaic Tradition,” Notes and Queries, 237 (1992), 320-22.
20Given that the father-daughter relationship is always represented by a man and
a boy actor and given further the highly eroticized androgyny of the boy actor
on the Elizabethan stage, it is tempting to think of father and daughter conflicts
as a screen on to which to project the anguish of the abandoned lover of young
men. The lover and the father are bound to lose the beloved, and the beloved is
bound to be a “traitor.” The escape from treason is a lapse into monstrosity: witness the “perfect” union of father and daughter in Pericles. The structural relationship of boy love and father-daughter incest is an important theme in the
Orpheus book of Metamorphoses, in which his invention of boy love after the loss
of Eurydice and his death at the hands of Thracian maenads serve as the frame
for the stories of Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Pygmalion, the incest of his
son Cinyras with his daughter Myrrha, and the birth of Adonis, the offspring of
their union. Myrrha is the emotional center of this book, and father-daughter in-
The Ring and the Handkerchief 23
cest is quite literally figured as a love that dare not speak its name (10.393ff.).
The centrality of this part of the Metamorphoses for the Shakespearean canon requires no comment. Shylock’s grief and rage thus express openly what is hidden
by Antonio’s “sadness.” The strong pressure of the old Leir play on the plot of
The Merchant of Venice may have its roots in this association.
21On More and forced conversion, see Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 186. The relevant
excerpts from The Three Ladies of London are found in Geoffrey Bullough, ed.,
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1957-75), I, 481-82.
22Bullough, 1.474.
23The story appears in Poggi, Ariosto, Rabelais, and various jestbooks. Ariosto’s
satire on women is a convenient source.
24Shakespeare might well agree with Dr. Johnson’s measured observation that
the marriage of Desdemona and Othello illustrates the “imprudent generosity of
disproportionate marriages,” but it would be hazardous to construe the sequence of The Merchant of Venice and Othello as his “Advice to Daughters.” His
other plays offer little support for the notion that women can avoid their husbands’ jealousy by obeying their fathers or marrying within their tribe. Hero and
Hermione are most properly and endogamously betrothed or married but become victims nonetheless. That is Sicily, one might say, but Ford in The Merry
Wives of Windsor appears perfectly capable of killing his wife.
25That is a dramaturgical innovation for Shakespeare, marked by Hamlet’s discovery “that one may smile and smile and be a villain” ( 1.5.109). All of Shakespeare’s early villains are, to use the language of Much Ado, “deformed,” exotic
figures like Tamora, Aaron, or Shylock, cripples like Richard, or bastards like
Don John.
26Bullough,
7.242.
27Cassio
is a suitor by extension: he was a go-between, is perceived as a rival, and
presumably would not mind being a suitor.
28Ann Jennalie Cook, “The Design of Desdemona: Doubt Raised and Resolved,”
Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980), 187-96, stresses the “scandal inherent” in any
elopement for an Elizabethan audience and adds that whereas in other plays
“Shakespeare is very careful to structure the events preceding the marriage so
that it will not appear as an act of rank disobedience,” he “offers no such extenuation for Desdemona” (p. 189).
29Page
in Merry Wives not only keeps his daughter’s lover away from the house
but wants her to marry the repulsive Caius. In telling Roderigo “not to haunt
about my doors” Brabantio is keeping an unwelcome suitor away from his
The Ring and the Handkerchief 24
daughter. Capulet professes to respect his daughter’s wishes but does not do so
in practice. Egeus has to be finally overruled by Theseus. Anne Page and Hermia
do not run away as a first resort.
30 L. E. Boose. “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare.” PMLA 97 (1982), 332.
If Desdemona’s rhetoric sounds like Cordelia, it is not only because Shakespeare
was already at work on Lear, but because, like Portia, she is one of the daughters
of Leir and as such defined by the moment of the daughter’s “profession.”
31Martha Nussbaum in her reading of Antigone stresses that Antigone is right to
resist Kreon but at fault in choosing a conflict enhancing mode of resistance. The
Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 63-67.
32Shakespeare may have thought of such phrases as a trick of The Jew of Malta,
where they are common: “So they spare me, my daughter, and my wealth”
(1.1.153); “You have my goods, my money, and my wealth”(1.2.138); “The gold,
the pearls, and jewels, which he hid” (2.1.23); “My gold, my fortune, my felicity”(2.1.48).
33The case is clinched by a line in Titus Andronicus. Aaron in his tryst with Tamora, explaining why his thoughts are turning from Venus to vengeance, refers
to “my fleece of woolly hair” (2.3.34). This is the only other occurrence of the
word “woolly” in Shakespeare. Aaron and Othello, in short, are “woolly breeders,” and the sheep passages that link Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice,
and Othello add up to Shakespeare’s cacophonous variations on “Ba Ba Black
Sheep.”
34The
Stranger in Shakespeare, p. 139, 141.
1.470.
36 “You must therefore be content to slubber the gloss of your new fortunes with
this more stubborn and boisterous expedition” the Duke says to Othello (1.3.22527). The only other occurrence of “slubber” comes in advice Antonio gives to
Bassanio and establishes clearly that the business of the Turk and the business of
the bond are related in the playwright’s mind as events that slubber the business
of love: “Slubber not business for my sake, Bassanio, / But stay the very riping of
the time; / And for the Jew’s bond which he hath of me, / Let it not enter in
your mind of love” (2.8.39-42).
35Bullough,
37Bullough,
7.243.
38Shakespeare’s
use of Giannetto’s tale lends strong support to the argument developed by T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines, “Othello's Unconsummated
Marriage,” Essays in Criticism 33 (1983), 1-18. Graham Bradshaw has supported
the argument from a different perspective in “Obeying the Time in Othello: A
Myth and the Mess It Made,” English Studies, 73 (1992), 223-228. I am much less
The Ring and the Handkerchief 25
confident than Bradshaw in thinking that much follows from resolving this question one way or another. Bradshaw may well be right in criticizing Greenblatt’s
reading of the play for a distorted view of Christian sexual ethics, but it is not the
case that “Greenblatt’s reading altogether depends upon his assumption that
Othello ‘took’ Desdemona’s ‘virginity’(p. 225): the basic reading is quite compatible, perhaps even more compatible, with the assumption of an unconsummated
marriage.
39John
Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993) pp. 16ff.
and passim.
40Norman
Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free
Press, 1967), pp. 62-63.
41Stephen
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), p.245.
42Bullough,
7.246.
43On
the ritual and folkloristic background of the handkerchief see Lynda E.
Boose, “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love’,” English
Literary Renaissance, 5 (1973), 360-74. Paul Cantor writes suggestively about the
fate of the handkerchief as “a magic token, a unique survivor from an antique
pagan world” and its desacralization and transformation into a commodity, a
fate that Othello as a “heroic survivor from the ancient world” vainly seeks to
avoid,” “The Erring Barbarian among the Supersubtle Venetians,” Southwest Review, 75 (1990), 306.
Othello dwells on the history of the handkerchief not only in his reproach to
Desdemona (3.4.55-6) but in his justification of his murder (5.2.216-17). There is
an inconsistency in the two accounts: an Egyptian witch gives it to the mother in
the first account; his father gives it in the second. Magic governs the first account,
an appeal to family history as a guarantor of truth the second. Clearly the motif
of descent mattered to Shakespeare.
44
45The
dominance and complex revision of Shylock is apparent from his multiple
refractions in Othello. Matchett has argued that Shylock and Iago are associated
in Shakespeare’s mind primarily as Venetian villains, but this is not quite true. It
is correct that Shylock’s phrase of hatred (“on the hip”) reappears in Iago’s
mouth and that the use of the word “tribe” links them. But Shylock’s human
rights speech is adopted by Emilia as a women’s rights attack on the double
standard, as was pointed out long ago by Fred M. Smith, “Shylock on the
The Ring and the Handkerchief 26
Rights of Jews and Emilia on the Rights of Women,” West Virginia University
Bulletin: Philological Papers , 5 (1947), 32-32. Shylock also reappears as the distraught father and shares the structural role of the stranger.
46Cinthio’s
Moor comes to a wretched but unremarkable end at the hand of Disdemona’s relatives.
47The deaths of Falstaff (Henry V 2.1.88, 124) and Brabantio (5.2.204-05) from a
broken heart provide some textual support for speculations about the off-stage
future of the rejected Shylock
48Bullough, 7.242.
49Joan Ozark Holmer looks at Othello’s suicide in the context of the representation of Judas’ suicide in the mystery cycles and quotes an interesting passage
from Erasmus’ Enchiridion, in which the topos of “hate the sin, not the sinner” is
figured as “let hym kylle the turke not the man,” “Othello’s Threnos: ‘Arabian
Trees’ and ‘Indian’ versus ‘Judaean’,” Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980), 161.
50 For a fuller elaboration of these points, see Mueller, “Plutarch’s ‘Life of
Brutus’,” 48-53.
51Stanley Cavell, “Epistemology and Tragedy: A Reading of Othello,” Daedalus
108 (1979), p. 42.