ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most arresting moment in the first act of Shakespeare’s Othello occurs when the soldier is asked by the Duke of Venice to respond to the accu-sation that he has ‘beguiled’ Brabantio’s daughter, Desdemona, away from the protection and safety of her father’s house. The soldier is an outwardly confident man, full of pride and bombast, and hugely aware of his celebrity in Venice. He addresses the Duke. ‘Rude am I in my speech’, he says, and then he continues and spins a masterfully persuasive narrative full of lyrical eloquence which the Duke eventually acknowledges would have ensnared his own daughter too. The poised, silver-tongued soldier is vindicated and the play can proceed. What is clearly established in this first act is that Othello is an out-sider both racially and socially. In this thoroughly demarcated Venetian world where Michael Cassio is simply ‘a Florentine’, the ‘old black ram’, although he claims to be descended from ‘men of royal siege’, is regarded as little more than an ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’. For the full length of the first act, what Shakespeare does not allow us to see is that for all Othello’s public success there is at the centre of his personality a kernel of self-doubt, a tight knot of anxiety, which is eventually exploited by his ancient Iago. During this first act the soldier appears to be in control. He plays games, protesting that he is in possession of a clumsy tongue yet his language betrays no hint of rudeness or foreign taint. It is clear that if Othello possesses any self-doubt, or inner discomfort, its origins are not rooted in language. What if he had begun his mellifluous speech with ‘Rude am I in my visage’? Would it have been possible for this self-assured black migrant to Europe to have stood before the Duke of Venice and played fearlessly with notions of identity and belonging that were rooted in race as opposed to language, or would this have been to trespass too close to the source of his well-hidden self-doubt?
