Othello’s Black Handkerchief

Abstract

I O N of Othello boasts a striking image: a single, white handkerchief suspended in mid-air, tilted at a downward angle against a smoky gray background. 1 T h e cover art insists on the centrality of the play's controversial piece of fabric and asserts as "ocular proof" (3.3.361)what everyone seems to know or take for granted-that the handkerchief is white. 2 Among critics, this presumption of whiteness has been the rule, with the discussion of the white handkerchief centering on Desdemona, her sexuality, questions of virginity, and marriage as in Lynda Boose's influential analysis: Shakespeare "insistently created for his audience a highly visual picture of a square piece of white linen spotted with strawberry-red fruit." 3 She continues, " W h a t Shakespeare was representing was a visually recognizable reduction of Othello and Desdemona's wedding-bed sheets, the visual proof of their consummated marriage."4 Pursuing this reading of the white handkerchief as bed linen in miniature, Edward A. Snow claims that the "'spotted'" handkerchief "is potent as visible proof of Desdemona's adultery largely because it subconsciously evokes for Othello the blood-stained sheets of the wedding-bed and his wife's loss of virginity Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2012 Shakespeare Association of America conference in one of two Othello seminars and at the 2011 Annual Shakespeare Colloquium at Fairleigh Dickinson University organized by Harry Keyishian, I thank all the participants for their generous feedback, especially Lena Cowen Orlin, who directed the SAA seminar, and June Schlueter.1 E. A.J. Honigmann, ed., Othello, 3rd ed.

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