1. Iago first seizes on Cassio as fit for his purpose because the Florentine's "manners" (Othello 2.1.98) make him familiar with women; the situation prefigures Leontes' suspicion of his wife's conversation with Polixenes in The Winter's Tale . That the social custom of drinking undoes Cassio echoes Plato's Laws (I.639), where convivial drinking is regarded as an important social custom.

2. Lynda E. Boose, "Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,'" English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360-374, 361.

3. Carol Neely Thomas, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (1985; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 129.

4. For the weaving of fictions, see Catherine Bates, "Weaving and Writing in Othello," Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994): 51-60, 51, citing Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 236-237.

5. Marguerite Waller, "Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference It Makes," Diacritics 17 (1987): 2-20, 18.