ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an explanation for the classic frustration of commentators on Othello who look futilely for explicit signs of Christian Providence in the play. Early modern English commonplaces about Venice find scant confirmation in William Shakespeare’s Venetian plays: The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Early modern doctrines of Protestant predestination clarify more fully than other ideologies do the contemporary nature of personal tragedy in Shakespeare’s Othello. Othello abounds in Catholic allusions, a phenomenon consistent with the tragedy’s setting in a Roman Catholic republican city-state. The spiritual bleakness of Othello partly derives from the complete absence of any allusions to the existence of such a Providence friendly to human wishes, human desires.