APPENDIX TWO
OTHELLO

Othello's situation resembles that of Bradamante at the Tower of Tristan or, in the scene derived from Ariosto, Britomart at the beginning of the Book of Friendship. All three experience the subtle rules of a binding social order. Seeking not to smash but to outwit local custom, the female warriors manipulate time by the way they alternatively assume the rights of women or strong war-riots as they win jousts and beauty contests. Similarly, we first see Othello, another outsider, manipulating time.

For example, Othello postpones Brabantio's objections to his marriage with the excuse that the duke needs him for affairs of state. But Othello's unnatural, unreasonable passion foils his attempt to master customs, despite his control of time. The "castle" (Othello 2.1.201) to which Othello brings Desdemona in Cyprus, and where eventually he kills her, belongs to a world of ways to which Othello falls victim.

Iago's snares consist of social conventions, as when he exploits Cassio's exchanges of courtesies with Emilia and Desdemona on their arrival in Cyprus or when he uses the "custom" of drinking to expose Cassio to Othello's suspicion (Othello 2.3.35).^[1] Although Othello declares to the rulers of Venice that the "tyrant custom" can habituate him to harsh physical conditions, he mentally refuses to "make a life of jealousy" when Iago infects his thoughts (Othello 1.3.220; 3.3.176). (He can habituate his body but not his mind.) Othello's downfall begins when he returns from "walking on the works" of Cyprus (Othello 3.2.3). When he reenters the castle, Iago captures him in his web of suspicion by using what Othello calls "tricks of custom" (Othello 3.3.122).

Iago's tricks of custom, of course, are more extensive than those hesitations of speech that a dishonest man might counterfeit but which in an honest man are "close dilations, working from the heart" (Othello 3.3.123). They include the meaning of Desdemona's handkerchief, which, Lynda Boose writes, "may well lie hidden in rituals and customs."^[2] Boose identifies the handkerchief with Desdemona's stained wedding sheets, and more recent critics have continued to regard it, if not so literally, as a symbol of female power, which waxes and wanes. The handkerchief that passed from a female sibyl to a female "charmer" to Othello's mother to Desdemona at first represents the ability of women to subdue the wandering eros of men. Othello says his mother was told that if she lost it, his father's "spirits should hunt / After new fancies" (Othello 3.4.62-63). Carol Neely Thomas argues that Othello later reinterprets the handkerchief, reversing its meaning, when he says it is an "antique token / My father gave my mother" (Othello 5.2.216-217): it becomes "his love token—a pledge of his love and possession of Desdemona and of her sexual fidelity."^[3] She rightly chastises earlier critics who failed to note that Othello changed stories. But what matters most is not the new sexual symbolism of the handkerchief but Othello's narrative shift. The woven handkerchief represents woven fictions, as Othello, the victim (but perhaps student) of what Greenblatt calls "Iago's constant recourse to narrative,"^[4] reveals his own ability to tell a tale: in this case, a ghost story.

It may be that Othello believes in the power of the handkerchief to control passion, in which case he illustrates his own ghost fear. He may or may not expect Desdemona to believe it. In any case, the handkerchief represents Othello's ancestral past, male or female, and Othello tells its tale of origins to frighten Desdemona. By seeking to instill or arouse ghost fear in the girl who begins the play by defying her father, Othello now maintains one of the customs—that set of male-oriented, socially determined practices such as bureaucratic promotion, mockery of social others, jealous possession of females—of what Marguerite Waller has called "the club" to which Iago and now, tragically, Othello belong.^[5] Othello's search for acceptance dramatically illustrates that moment of the custom of the castle topos where the powerful warrior finds himself or herself upholding the foul ways of systems he or she opposes, or would oppose if not morally bewildered.