Othelloand the Geography of Persuasion

Abstract

Othello is a revealing commentary on the unstable geographic underpinnings of early modern English theories of persuasion, which vacillate between affirming the authority of the commonplace and recognizing the allure of the novel and the strange. Thomas Rymer attacks the play as a tissue of improbabilities: Rymer's rigidly Aristotelian critique has been dismissed as a willfully insensitive and racist misreading, but his insistence on conflating credibility with racial identity coincides with Othello's own representation of its hero as doubly far‐fetched. Othello's strangeness is both the key to his eloquence and the root of his vulnerability to Iago's skillful deployment of insider knowledge and plausible fictions. The play's racial dynamics thus play out rhetorically: Brabantio's locally‐specific likelihoods may yield to Othello's exotic figures of speech, but Iago's commonplaces triumph in the end. This contest between plausibility and extravagance doesn't merely echo the play's geographic plotting, it points to the inextricability of early modern ideas about eloquence and about place. (C.N.)

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