Race and the Spectacle of the Monstrous in Othello

James R. Aubrey

Whoever believed in the Ethiopians before actually seeing them? Pliny EAR the end of The Tempest, Antonio jests that the A monster Caliban "is a plain fish, and no doubt marketable." As an earlier remark in the play makes clear, however, Caliban would be valuable not only in a fishmarket but also as an exotic creature for display at court, "a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat's leather, "i When Shakespeare was writing Othello, his attraction to Cinthio's narrative about a black Moor in Venice may likewise have been a playwright's recognition that Othello's skin color would give him a "marketable," spectacular charge on the stage, as a character whose appearance marked him as Other, as having originated somewhere beyond the boundaries of the familiar. Although blacks had appeared on stage in earlier English plays, such roles were still extraordinary in 1604, when Othello was probably first performed.^ The opening scene of the play further exoticizes Othello with its references to him not by name but as "the Moor," and as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger" (I.i.58 and I.i.37): Blacks were outsiders in a more profound sense as well, at this time, for they were associated in the popular imagination with monsters, so that the play's numerous j

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references to monstrosity would have resonated with Othello's racial characterisfics to establish his extreme difference from typical Europeans. Whether some biographical Shakespeare actually considered such ideas "marketable" is not a quesfion I can answer, but I will show that Othello's character is constructed in a v/ay that would have engaged such popular associations of blacks with monsters and thereby would have intensified audience responses to early performances. From the thirteenth century, monstrous races were increasingly reported to be living in Africa rather than in Asia, as Rudolf Wittkower notes.3 Other crifics have suggested that the English in the early 1600s sfill thought of blacks much as they thought of monsters, as strange creatures from outside the boundaries of the known world. Michael Neill touches the issue when he discusses linkage between blackness and moral monstrosity.^ Emily C. Bartels locates Othello's power as a character partly in the audience's percepfion of his racial difference, on the basis of which people "demonize an Other as a means of securing the self."5 Karen Newman asserts that there is a cultural associafion of blacks with monsters: by virtue of his color, "Othello is a monster in the Renaissance sense of the word."6 Although precise atdtudes in the early seventeenlii century are not recoverable, documents from that time can enable us to understand more about what constituted this "Renaissance sense" of Othello's monstrousness. The most useful evidence is, of course, contemporaneous with Othello. An example is the pamphlet translated in 1605 by Edward Gresham, who summarizes the contents in an arresting title: Strange fearful & true news, which happened at Carlstadt, in the kingdom of Croatia. Declaring how the sun did shine like blood nine days together, and how two armies were seen in the Air, the one encountering the other. And how also a Woman was delivered of three prodigious sons, which Prophesied many strange & fearful things, which should shortly come to pass. Whether or not Gresham's London bookseller believed the report to be true, he evidently believed that there was a paying readership for such "news" and sold it with a cover illustration just as sensational

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as the contents. The cover visually represents the battle in the air and the three "prodigious sons," described inside as follows: "The first of these Prodigious Children had four heads, which spoke and uttered strange things. The second Child was black like a Moor, and the third Child like unto Death." Depicted as fully grown and articulate, these newly-born "children" prophesy eventual defeat of the Turks and a time of dearth "both here and in other places." Devout buyers no doubt took the pamphlet seriously; others probably bought it for the kind of textual pleasures available today from supermarket tabloids. The predicted conflict in Croatia may seem ironic to historians of the late twentieth century, but of more historical interest is the cover's use of black skin as a sign of monstrosity, indeed, as the child's only monstrous characteristic. Social anthropologists would say that this idea, that blacks and monsters are related, if not equated, on some level of the popular imagination, constituted part of early modem London's "habitus," what Pierre Bourdieu defines as "a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at
every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions," or

more simply, "a socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures."7 If there was a social disposition in 1604-1605 to regard blacks and monsters as similar manifestations of the Other, as Strange News implies that there was, such a disposition would have affected both the generation and the reception of Othello at that historical moment. Indeed, as parts of the same habitus, each text simultaneously reflected and reinforced that very mental linkage. Strange News and Othello are by no means the only documents of the late-sixteenth or early-seventeenth century to connect blacks and monsters. In 1569 Histoires Prodigeuses was translated as Certain Secret Wonders of Nature, in which Pierre Boiastuau rehearsed various explanations for "monstrous childbearing" including "the influence of the stars," the "superabundance or default and corruption of the seed and womb," or "an ardent and obstinate imagination, which the Woman hath, whilst she conceives the child." Boiastuau illustrates this last cause both verbally and visually, first with two anecdotes: Damascenus a grave author doth assure this to be true, that being present with Charles, the iiv.

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Emperor and king of Bohemia, there was brought to him a maid, rough and covered with hair like a bear, the which the mother had brought forth in so hideous and deformed a shape, by having too muchregardto the picture of S[aint] John clothed with a beast's skin, the which was tied or made fast continually during her conception at her bed's feet. By the like means Hippocrates saved a princess accused of adultery, for that she was delivered of a child black like an Ethiopian, her husband being of a fair and white complexion, which by the persuasion of Hippocrates, was absolved and pardoned, for that the child was like unto a [picture of a] Moor, accustomably tied at her bed.8 If the firsf child had been fhe offspring of hirsufe parents, or if fhe second child had been fhe offspring of an adulferous, inferracial union, fhey would not have been considered monsfers. Boiasfuau considers fhem fo be monstrous because of fhe "unnafural" infervenfion by fhe female imagination during the process of conception. Whefher or nof Shakespeare read Boiasfuau, he would have recognized in fhis folk-theory of feratogenesis a consisfency wifh fhe Biblical sfory he cifes in The Merchant of Venice, fhe sfory of Jacob's intervenfion fo produce parti-colored lambs by placing sfriped wands in front of ewes while fhey mate (I.iii.75-85). Boiasfuau's confemporary Ambroise Par, in his freafise Of Monsters and Prodigies, recounfs a sfory fhat is similar fo Boiasfuau's buf which reverses fhe colors, as a whife child is bom fo black parenfs: We have read in Heliodorus that Persiana, Queen of Ethiopia, by her husband Hidustes, being also an Ethiope, had a daughter of a white complexion, because in the embraces of her husband, by which she proved with child, she earnestly fixed her eye and mind upon the picture of the fair Andromeda standing opposite to her. Here, foo, if is nof fhe color buf fhe exfraordinary process by which fhe child's skin color is determined fhaf gives fhis child l:he sfafus of monsfer, fhe facf fhaf ifs "formafion is confrary to fhe general

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rule and to what is usual"as Aristotle once defined monstrosiThe illustrations in both Par and Boiastuau, however, unlike the verbal texts, suggest that black skin alone could constitute a sign of monstrosity. Regardless of who the illustrators may have been, or whether the second copied the first, both chose to depict as a monsteralong with the hairy girlthe black child born to white parents rather than the white one bom to black parents. The illustrators must on some level have recognized that for a white audience of readers, the representation of a white child-monster would appear "normal" rather than "monstrous" until one had read the accompanying narratives. The illustrators' artistic decision to show only the black child points to the existence of a deep cultural centrism, linked with what would come to be known as racial identity, centrism of a kind which is likely also to have shaped audience responses to the still extraordinary sight of a black person seen on the streetor represented on the stage of a predominantly white culture such as France or England. It is hard to imagine that Shakespeare is not deliberately exploiting such Anglo-centrism in the way he prepares an audience for Othello's entrance. In the first scene, lago awakens Brabantio with the cry that "an old black ram/Is tupping your white ewe" (I.i.89-90)an image of Othello and Desdemona intended to horrify her father. lago next represents their sexual union as "your daughter cover'd with a Barbary horse" (I.i.112). Desdemona's imagined mating with an African animal is the kind of act which Par describes among the causes of monsters, a "copulation with beasts" that leads to "the confusion of seed of diverse kinds" (25.982). Reminding her father that Othello and Desdemona may be generating monsters, lago further baits Brabantio, "you'll have your nephews neigh to you," then reinforces the idea with a final image of Othello and Desdemona during sexual intercourse with the conventional figure of "the beast with two backs" (I.i.112-118). The first scene of the play thus prepares an audience verbally for the entrance of some "thing" that is not-human; that this "Barbary horse" will turn out to be more human than lagowho initially seems to be the audience's kinsmanis an irony that can prove as unsettling as Gulliver's discovery that Houyhnhnms behave like people and the creatures that look like himself behave like animals.

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In scene 2, the metaphors applied to Othello take on more sodal and political overtones. Brabantio addresses Othello as a "foul thief whose enchantment of his daughter has led her to flee from "the wealthy curled darlings of our nation" to "the sooty bosom/Of such a thing as thou" (I.ii.62-72). Although the word "thing" is in accord with Iago's earlier beauty-and-beast metaphors, Brabantio seems to see Othello's offense as more political than personal, a transgression of the boundaries of acceptable beliavior in Venetian culture because Othello's "sooty" color marks him as ineligible to compete legitimately for Desdemona with the white males of "our nation." Anthropologist Robin Fox has observed that "[glroups speaking the same language and being alike in other ways might well exchange wives among themselves^but the connubium stopped at the boundaries of the language, territory, or colour, or whatever marked 'us' off from 'them.'"" A marriage bel:ween an African black and a Venetian white would have seemed clearly beyond the bounds of acceptable exogamy to Shakespeare's audienceespecially to the white, aristocratic males, whose marital options in England Lawrence Stone has described as "ver)' limited" in social and geographical range and reflecting "a very high degree of sodal and economic endogamy.''^^ Even without the language depicting Othello as less than human, then, Desdemona's unauthorized choice of husband would itself have seemed socially and politically "monstrous." Persons watching the play would not yet appreciate Othello's virtues when he appears at court in scene 3, so his self-justification must persuade a theater audience as well as the Duke of Venice. To indicate how he captivated Desdemona, Othello mentions two exotic races he has told her about: "The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders" (I.iii.l46147). Desdemona evidently has responded to his exotic stories with awe:
She swore in faith 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange, 'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful. She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd That heaven had made her such a man.

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Desdemona's response to the "wondrous" and "strange" narratives is confused with her response to the wonderful stranger who narrates them; as she puts it, the tales themselves "woo her" (I.iii.l68). Shakespeare gives Othello's wooing additional credibility by including exofic but recognizable travel lore such as the anthropophagi, which Montaigne had recently written about in his essay "Of Cannibals." The headless monsters were formerly described by Pliny as "some people without necks, having their eyes in their shoulders," in ancient India; but they also had been described in the more recent, 1582 edifion of Mandeville's Travels, where they were illustrated, and in Hakluyt's expanded Voyages published between 1598 and 1600, where Sir Walter Raleigh was said to have been assured that headless monsters could be found just two rivers away from the place he was visiting in Guiana.i3 If the existence of this monstrous race was commonly thought to have been validated by recent travelers to remote places, then surely theatergoersthe auditors of Othello's auditorswould, like Desdemona, have found the teller as exotic as his tales. Of course, Othello's most obvious difference is his skin color, a sign of his African origin. Pliny once remarked, "Whoever believed in the Ethiopians before actually seeing them?" (511), and black Africans seem not to have lost their associafions with such marvels by 1581, when Stephen Bateman in his Doom Warning All Men to the Judgment turned first to Africa in his catalogue of monsters whose existence tesfifies to God's continuing punishment of man. Bateman's catalogue includes Negritae, with lips that hang down to their breasts, who are labeled in the margin as "Black Monsters," and what seems to be something of a catch-all: Ethiopes a people in the west part of Ethiopia: also there are of those black men, that have four eyes: and it is said that in Eripia be found very comely bodied men, notwithstanding they are long necked, and mouthed as a crane, the other part of the head like a man: also sundry strange and deformed men and women there are, which we omit... .I* However suspect such reports may have become by the late sixteenth century, they sfill were being published and read. Even if

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Othello was not considered to be a Bateman-esque "black monster" himself, as an African he might have been assumed to know first hand about monstrous races. There seems to have been further confusion over, or failure to distinguish between, traditional races of monsters in far-(3ff lands and the occasional birth closer to home of a monstrous, imiividual child. Readers could find discussion of both kinds of monster in James Rueff s treafise The Expert Midwife, translated into English in 1637, whose chapter "Of Unperfect Children, Also of Monstrous Births" contains both a descripfion of a terribly deformed, yet human child bom in Oxford in 1551, and a description of a beast with a man's head, a beast's tail, and dogs' heads at its elbows and knees followed by a description of a mythical creature v^rith two wings and one foot. Rueff notes that such misshapen offspring must be manifestations of God's will but that "through the insight of our reason, we may perceive also the detestable sin of Sodomy." Rueff's assumption that particular births of monsters indicate breeding between humans and animals suggests that he considers even animal-like monsters to be individual cases rather than offspring of monstrous races, but he goes on to mention Pliny's "reports of living creatures in Africa that have such various forms and shapes."i5 Even Rueff seems unwilling to let go completely of the older explanations of monsters that associates them, like Blacks, with Africa. Anthropologists have noticed a relation between attitudes toward such outsiders and stories of monsters. Claude Lvi Strauss refers to the Gobineau hypothesis as a way of accounting for the proliferation of fantastic beings in a culture as less the resvtlt of rich imaginafion than of "the inability of fellow-citizens to conceive of strangers in the same way as themselves."^ Othello as "blackamoor" is visibly marked as a member of a culture different from that of everyone else on the stage or in the audience; he may havie seemed as fantastic as the monsters associated with him. There is another kind of historical evidence on which to base an inference that theatergoers would have felt a thrill of disturbed awe at the sight of Othello: the fact that a black person would still have been an unusual sight to most English theatergoers. The exact size of the black population in England at tlie turn of the seventeenth century is uncertain, and historians are reluctant

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even fo guess, buf there is no doubt that their numbers had been growing over fhe forfy years since fhe first West Africans had been infroduced fo London in 1563.17 Ruth Cowhig has wriffen thaf "fhere were several hundreds of black people living in the households of fhe arisfocracy and landed genfry, or working in London faverns," so she imagines fhaf "fhe sight of black people musf have been familiar fo Londoners."! Even if mosf Londoners had seen blacks, however, fhe appearance on sfage of a black person who spoke and felf musf sfill have seemed remarkable. And even if blacks were visible on the streets, they may nof have been accepfed as "familiar." Parish records from Barking for 1 Ocfober 1599 show two blacks living in the parish of All Hallows: "'Clare a Negra af Widdow S[fokes?]" and "M[a]ry a Negra af Richard Wood.'" W. E. Miller used fhis in 1961 as evidence fhaf fhere were blacks in London in 1599, a poinf no longer in doubf; what is more interesting is fhaf the two blacks are furfher described nof as inhabifanfs buf as '"Straunger's in the parish."!' This word may be merely an expression of parochialism, a reference fo fhe facf fhaf fhey were nof locally bom, buf fhe ferm also suggesfs fhaf fhey were fhoughf of in terms of fheir "ofherness." The 1601 draff of a royal proclamafion furfher indicafes fhe exfenf fo which blacks in England were thought of as "sfrangers" at the turn of fhe sevenfeenfh cenfury. Endorsed by Queen Elizabefh, fhe documenf authorizes fhe fransporfafion fo Spain or Porfugal of any "Negroes and blackamoors . . . wifhin fhe realm of England." She jusfifies fhis acfion parfly in ferms of fhe precedenf of prisoner exchanges, fhe fradifion thaf a capfive may be enslaved by fhe vicfor in warfare. A second jusfificafion is a percepfion of social unresf. Bofh fhese argumenfs are based on an assumpfion of cultural centrism and racial difference:
Whereas the Queen's majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects, greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great number of Negroes and blackamoors which [as she is informed] are carried into this realm since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain; who are fostered and powered here, to the great annoyance of her own liege people that

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which co[vet?] the relief which these people consume, as also for that the most of them are infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel: hath given a special commandment that the said kind of people shall be with all speed avoided and discharged out of this her majesty's realms.^o

The proclamation goes on to license Casper van Senden, a merchant who had rescued eighty-nine English subjects detained by Spain and Portugal, to take "such Negroes and blackamoors to be transported as aforesaid as he shall find within the realm of England." Van Senden is not authorized to use force, but if any persons "possessed of any such blackamoors . . . refuse to deliver them," the proclamation authorizes him to "advise and persuade them by all good means to satisfy her majesty's pleasure therein" and to report the names of anyone who refuses to cooperate. The proclamafion indicates that a black person can only be a servant, "possessed" by a master who should hand over the possession. Blacks are a "kind of people," different not only in color but also by virtue of their religionrather, their lack of Christian religionwhich makes them "infidels." The concern expressed in the proclamafion is perhaps over their probable lack of political as well as religious fidelity, for the comment about infidels follows close upon a description of the English people as Elizabeth's "liege," or loyal subjects. And political concerns seem to be what have led at least some people to feel annoyed that blacks are "powered" as well as "fostered" at the expense of the English. The black population is said to be "great," but the document includes a parenthefical "as she is informed," perhaps indicafing some doubt in ElizabelJi's mind over the claimed growth in size of the black population. Or, the absence of a numerical estimate could be a deliberate omission, if the approximate number was small enough to have reduced the force of the argument that deportation of blacks would significantly ease the shortages of food. The proclamafion perhaps exaggerates the problems in order to further the financial interests of van Senden, who had been petifioning for this kind of support for more than four years.21 Nevertheless, the arguments were evidently thought plausible enough by the count that the power of the monarchy was invoked

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to formally delineate a social boundary based on skin color and even to bring the power of the state to bear on racially-marked strangers in what amounted to a kind of cultural exorcism. Given the presence of such an attitude among the English toward blacks as unwelcome intruders, the character of Othello as both different from Venetians but powerful within that culture must have contained a particularly powerful social charge for those who originally watched Othello. A perception of African blacks as "not English" would further have reinforced the idea that Africa is an exotic, mysterious world. In 1600 that world was of sufficient interest that John Leo's A Geographical History of Africa was translated into English and published in London. Leo was a Moor from Morocco who had converted to Christianity, according to John Pory's introduction.22 His book had first been published in Italian around 1526.23 Leo did not offer just one more traveler's rehearsal of sights mixed with legends but an ethnographer's report, sometimes describing particular details from particular kingdoms in a given geographical area, sometimes drawing inferences from the observations, and sometimes making moral judgments. Leo's. "General Description" notes that there are five "principal nations" in that part of the world, the Cafri, the Abyssins, the Egyptians, the Arabians, and "the Africans or Moors, properly so called; which last are of two kinds, namely white or tawny Moors, and Negroes or black Moors."24 Members of these groups can be found in various regions, he goes on to point out, but later, in Book Seven, he states that "the fifteen kingdoms of the land of the Negroes known to us, are all situated upon the river of Niger, and upon other rivers which fall thereunto" (285). In his description of these kingdoms, Leo is not inclined to offer sweeping judgments, but in his General Description he offers some statements about the vices of the people of Africa which would have reinforced English fears and stereotypes of blacks, attitudes implicit in phrases such as Ben Jonson's "quick Negro"25 or Shakespeare's "lascivious moor" (I.i.126):
The Negroes [compared to the 'lewd' and 'brutish' inhabitants of Libya] likewise lead a beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexterity of wit, and of all arts. Yea they so behave themselves, as if they had continually

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lived in a forest among wild beasts. They have great swarms of harlots among them; whereupon a man may easily conjecture their manner of living. (42)

Perhaps John Leo's tone of abhorrence is a sop to European readers, or perhaps the Western-educated Leo was feeling an urge to scrawl in the margin, "Exterminate all the brutes!" as Conrad's Kurtz would do in his report on dark Africa. In any case Leo's History of Africa tended to reinforce the European view of black moors as 'beasts," and it was probably known to Shakespeare, as it certainly was to Jonson.26 The book's London publication at the turn of the seventeenth century is one more event that helped to consfitute the London habitus from which Othello emerged and into which it was received. Much as associations of monsters and blacks would have affected how a playgoer regarded Othello in the first act of the play, ideas about how monsters were conceived, carried, and delivered inform many other passages in the play and would further have shaped responses to characters on stage. The language of monstrous childbearing appears requently in the play, often in the tradifion of prodigious births hinting at some ominous event to come. At the end of the first act of Othello, lago appeals to Roderigo to plot with him against the Moor:
[L]et us be conjunctive in our revenge against him; if thou canst cuckold him, thou does thyself a pleasure, and me a sport. There are many events in the womb of time, which will be deliver'd.
(I.iii.369-372)

Iago's descripfion of time as a womb from which events will issue gives him a role something like that of Edward Gresham, the doomsday pamphleteer who warned that the monstrous births in Strange News portended future calamities. lago is a more cheerful prophet, perhaps because he sees himself less as human victim than as divine ordinator of the supernatural events: "I have't. It is engender'd. Hell and night/Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light" (I.iii.404-405). The emphasis is on the "I havi! 't." lago, not God or the devil, is engendering, or conceiving the offspring.

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"Hell and night" are cast in the lesser role of midwives, as enabling rather than causadve agents. Iago's metaphor is noteworthy for its implied equivalence between an idea and a birth, a concept and a conceptiona metaphor that will recur. The idea that the brain gives birth to thoughts as the body gives birth to childrenor monsterswas well-embedded in the culture of early modern England. Other examples of the metaphor include the dedication of Shakespeare's sonnets to "their only begetter" and the complaint of Sidney's Astrophil that he feels "great with child to speake," as well as Thomas Underdowne's compliment to Edward DeVere: "in your Honour is, I think, expressed the right pattern of a Noble Gentleman, which in my head I have conceived."^7 In Othello the metaphor is used deliberately, almost literally, so that the comparison becomes explicit between mental conception and physical birth, lago plays with the metaphor in Act II, when Desdemona asks him to compose some lines of praise; he describes how his invention is taxing his brain, then announces: "But my Muse labours,/And thus she is deliver'd" (II.i.127-128). As the comparison is extended with reference to Iago's plot, however, playgoers are reminded of the metaphor's basis in ideas about biological generation, and they may also recall Iago's reference at the end of Act I to the impending "birth" as "monstrous"; as the metaphor becomes conscious, it helps to convey the morally monstrous nature of Iago's "conception." In Act III, lago transfers the monstrous concepfion, which includes the idea of Desdemona's infidelity, from his own mind to Othello's. Othello comments in an aside that lago seems to echo Othello's own doubts about Cassio, "[a]s if there were some monster in his thought,/ Too hideous to be shown" (III.iii.111-112). He then says to lago that there must be some reason lago has looked concerned as they were discussing Cassio:
[Thou] didst contract and purse thy brow together. As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain Some horrible conceit.... [Thou] weigh'st thy words, before thou giv'st them breath. Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more; For such things in a false disloyal knave Are tricks of custom, but in a man that's just They're close dilations, working from the heart That passion cannot rule. (I.iii.118-129)

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The firsf lines, abouf a "horrible conceif," seem an obvious confinuafion of the metaphorical language of generafion fhaf has previously represenfed Iago's fhoughfs as some hideous progeny awaifing birfh, confined in fhe womb of his brain. The confracfing and pursing of Iago's brow are sympfoms of mefaphorical labor fo bring forfh fhe offspring, fo presenf fhe idea fo Ofhellowho is afraid fo see if. The descripfion of Iago's pausing before giving breafh fo his words may also be a confinuafion of fhe birfh imagery, as well as a liferal declarafion fhaf lago fhinks before he speaks; alfhough fhe "sfops" Ofhello refers fo are whaf he senses to be Iago's hesifafions, fhat is, stoppages of fhe breafh fhaf gives voice fo his thoughts, fhey also resemble fhe breafhing of a prospecfive mofher in labor. Indeed, fhis paffern of references fo childbirfh provides a jusfificafion for fhe Folio reading of "dilations" insfead of fhe Firsf Quarto's "denofemenfs," since dilafions (of fhe cervix) could be one more reference fo fhe birfh process, whose inelucfabilify "passion cannof rule." All fhese images of childbirfh help to consfifufe an undersfanding fhaf lago is carrying a monsfrous idea as a mofher mighf carry a deformed child in her womb. In subsequent lines of fhe play, however, lago does nof give birth fo his monsfrous thoughts but, somehow, fransfers the metaphorical pregnancy to Othello. Perhaps fhe mefaphor breaks down, here, since pregnancy could not (unfil fhe lafe fwenfiefh cenfury) be moved from one womb fo anofher. Elizabefh Sacks has fried fo explain the process of fransfer as mefaphorical "theft," first by showing fhaf wombs were somefimes compared fo purses in fhe seventeenth cenfury, then by suggesting fhat Ofhello somehow, "psychosexually," has sfolen Iago's "purse" of "frashy fhoughfs."28 The pregnancy is nof necessarily shiffed from lago fo Ofhello, however, if one fhinks of fhis menfal concepfion, like physical concepfion, as a process requiring fwo partners. The idea thaf Desdemona has been unfaifhful is generafed by verbal infercourse befv/een parfners, analogous fo sexual infercourse with lago as male and Ofhello as female, impregnafed fhrough his ear. The concepfion process can be undersfood in terms of Arisfofle's theories abouf fhe Generation of Animals, currenf well info fhe eighfeenfh cenfury, according fo which male seed is nof simply deposited in the female, nor does if join wifh female seed in fhe womb, buf if shapes fhe female seed. Arisfofle describes fhe process wifh a comparison fo carpenfry.

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where the arfisan forms wood into a shape but does not join himself with the material; "the acfive partner is not situated within the thing which is being formed" (113). As Thomas Laquer has summarized this way of understanding generafion, "conception is for the male to have an idea, an artisfic or artisanal conception, in the brain-uterus of the female."29 Aristotle's theory would also allow the play's metaphorical impregnafion of one male by another male to seem less strained, for in this tradifional view of human generafion, neither mind and body nor gender and sex were so clearly distinguished as they have since come to be. In Othello, then, the possibility that Desdemona has been unfaithful is the idea acfively imparted by lago, like a formafive male seed, into the brain-uterus of Othello, whose tractable character provides the passive material to be shaped. Then, like a pregnant woman with a seemingly irrational desire for something, Othello insists that Desdemona show him the misplaced handkerchief decorated with strawberriesthe fruit commonly associated with maternal cravings, the frustrafion of which could supposedly result in "strawberry marks" on children.3o Othello's "maternal" imaginafion thus deforms the gestafing conception of possible infidelity into the "green-eyed monster" of jealousy he had been warned to beware (III.iii.170-172). Although the metaphorical language is not perfectly consistent, this underlying idea that a monstrous birth is impending confinues to inform the play. Later in Act III, Othello refers to cuckoldry as a matter of destiny: "Even then this forked plague is fated to us/When we do quicken" (III.iii.282-283). The audience hears a statement capable of another consfrucfion than Othello's intended fatalism, however, for he will be plagued when he suspects that he is a cuckold, when the green-eyed monster will "quicken" in the womb of his own brain. A few lines later Othello says, "I have a pain upon my forehead here" (III.iii.290)as the monstrous thought kicks in its mental womb, perhaps, or as Othello feels a mental contracfion that anficipafes the birth of the idea. In the next scene, Emilia repeats the comparison of jealousy to "a monster/Begot upon itself, born on itself," to which Desdemona replies, "Heaven keep that monster from Othello's mind!" (in.iv.161-163). Anyone attending to the play has heard enough auditory images to know that Othello already is bearing that very monster of a concepfion, as he announces to Desdemona in Act V:

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. . . confess thee freely of thy sin: For to deny each article with oath Cannot remove, nor choke the strong conception. That I do groan withal. Thou art to die. (V.ii.56.59) For Othello to contemplate the murder is for his mental womb to labor painfully to give birth to its deformed "child"; his monstrous conception will issue forth as horrifying action. Othello has always been one of Shakespeare's most moving dramas, but it moves its audiences in different ways as their mentalifies differ. A part of its effect when first performed in the early seventeenth-century England would have resided in the confused mixture of powerful ideas about monsters and about blacks circulafing in the culture that was produdng Shakespeare and Othello, as that culture was in turn being reproduced by them. Metropolitan State College of Denver

Notes Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, 3"^ Edition (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1980), V.i.269 (Act V, scene 1, line 269), and II.ii.70-71. Subsequent citations to Shakespeare's work are from this edition. 2See Othello's Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama, by Eldred D. Jones (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 40-50, and M. R. Ridley, Introduction, Othello, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1958),
XV.

3"Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters," by Rudolf Wittkower, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 5 (1942): 197. "Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello," by Michael Neill, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 409. 5"Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Fienaissance Refashionings of Race," by Emily C. Bartels, Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 454.

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*'"And wash the Ethiop white': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello" in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, by Karen Newman, edited by E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 153. '^Outline of a Theory of Practice, by Pierre Bourdieu, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16 (1972; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 76, 82-83. Certain Secret Wonders of Nature, by Pierre Boiastuau, translated by Edward Fenton (London, 1589), 13-14. Ambroise Par in Works, translated by Thomas Johnson (London 1634), 25. lOAristotle, Generation of Animals, translated by A. L. Peck (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), 439. "Ki'ns/iip and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective, by Robin Fox (1967; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 178. i^r/ze Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800, by Lawrence Stone (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 60. ^matural History, by Pliny, translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 2:521; The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, by John Mandeville, translated by C. W. R. D. Mosely (1582; New York: Penguin, 1983), 137; Voyages and Discoveries: The Principal Navigations Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, by Richard Hakluyt, edited by Jack Beeching (1598-1600; New York: Penguin, 1972), 402. "T/ie Doom Warning All Men to the Judgment, by Stephen Bateman (London, 1581), 6-7. i5T/ie Expert Midwife, or an Excellent and Most Necessary Treatise of the Generation and Birth of Man, by James Rueff, translated by E. Griffin (London 1637), 157-158. Elementary Structures of Kinship, by Claude Lvi Strauss (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 46. Black Presence: A Documentary History of the Negro in England, 1555-1860, by James Walvin (London: Orbach and Chambers, 1971), 8,12. i8"Blacks in English Drama and the Role of Shakespeare's Othello," by Ruth Cowhig in The Black Presence in English Literature, edited by David Dabydeen (Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1985), 5, 7. ""Negroes in Elizabethan London," by W. E. Miller, Notes and Queries 206 (1961): 138. 20"Licensing Casper van Senden to Deport Negroes [draft]," Proclamation 804.5 (1601), in Tudor Royal Proclamations, edited by Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 3:221. 2iSee "Blacks in English Drama and the Role of Shakespeare's Othello," by Ruth Cowhig, 1-25. 22/4 Geographical History of Africa, Written in Arabic and Italian by John

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Leo a Moor, Born in Granada and Brought Up in Barbary, translated by John Pory

(London, 1600), np.

United States, by Winthrop D. Jordan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 18.
2M Geographical History of Africa, 6

^Volpone, by Benjonson, edited by Alvin Kernan (New Haven: Yale University Press), 3.7.232.
^(Othello's Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama, by

Eldred D. Jones, 21. 27For a discussion of Shakespeare as the begetter of the sonnets, see "Master W. H., R.LP," by Donald W. Foster, PMLA 102 (1987), 42-54; The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, by Philip Sidney, edited by William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 165; "Epistle Dedicatory, to the Right Honorable Edward DeVere," by Thomas Underdowne, An Ethiopian Historie (London, no date [1569]), np.
^Shakespeare's Images of Pregnancy, by Elizabeth Sacks (London:

MacMillan, 1980), 71.

Laquer (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), 42. 300thello IILiii.439; see Joseph Andrews, by Henry Fielding,, edited by Homer Goldberg (New York: Norton, 1987), 176.