ABSTRACT
On Friday 17 June 1994, Shakespeare became a voice-over for a moment of American cultural history. Reporting that a suicidal O. J. Simpson lay in the back of his Ford Bronco holding a gun to his head, CBS television anchor Dan Rather glossed the flickering image of the vehicle, parked before Simpson’s Brentwood home, by saying that he was reminded of Othello, in which a black man, suspecting his white wife of adultery, kills her and then himself. As though shopping for a good story, Rather had mined the literary archive to imagine an ending that, by courting the obsessive fictions that attach to Othello’s colour, could mask the culture’s racism in Shakespearean suicide and its attendant admission of guilt. 1
