ABSTRACT
The agency of Othello's Bianca comes from her being able to move so freely, and her movements allow her to challenge official notions of identity, place, and propriety, as well as to overturn any comfortable linkage of women with the confines of private space. But some of the reasons for Othello's Bianca's wanderings can be shared with those of early modern players, many of them itinerant, whose sensibilities and habits provide a kind of inspiration for the playwright: being homeless made actors at home on Shakespeare's stage. Othello thus finds himself in this room as well, another inhabitant of a place where so many bodies can be crammed together, the opposite of the space that Bianca Minola hoards for herself. Othello's Bianca takes great pains to remind Shakespeare's audience of the limits of such illusions whenever she appears on stage.
