1 - Doubleness

Summary

Reading Othello involves the immediate engagement with a paradox. When it was first published in 1622, the play was titled The Tragedy of Othello, with the prominent subtitle The Moor of Venice. This publication, known as the quarto text, sometimes abbreviated in critical discussions to Q1 (‘quarto’ refers to the size of book, made from paper folded twice to make four leaves, and therefore measuring about 22616 cm), uses the double title on the title page and as a running title across the headers to each page, thus keeping both parts of the double title in view throughout the play (Fig. 1). Again in the collected First Folio, or F text, of Shakespeare's plays published a year later in 1623 (‘folio’ also refers to the book size, this time a prestigious format in which the paper was folded only once to make a book of about 45632 cm), Othello is the only play to have a split or double title running across verso and recto leaves.

Both the fact of the play's double title and the syntax of its subtitle stress doubleness, and it is the preposition ‘of’ that particularly activates Othello's central paradox. A Moor – literally a black man from North Africa – cannot ever be ‘of’ Venice. We need only look at the title of an earlier Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice, where it is crucial to the plot that the eponymous character Antonio, unlike his Jewish adversary Shylock, is a Venetian, ‘of Venice’, to see how different these two uses of ‘of’ are. In fact the preposition ‘of ’ has two ambiguous meanings in the early modern period. One, waning sense is ‘from, away from, out of’ (OED I.1.), and suggests the idea of expulsion retained in the modern spelling ‘off ‘. This disconnective sense, in which ‘of ’ indicates separation or distance from, is being replaced by a contradictory meaning stressing affiliation, ‘indicating the thing, or person whence anything originates, comes, is acquired or sought’ (OED III), with a particular stress on ‘racial or local origin’ (9). Thus the historical meanings of ‘of ’ register the sense in which Othello both belongs to and is rejected by the Venice he simultaneously serves and threatens. He is both ‘of’ and ‘off ’ Venice.