English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire

SIX: Othello's Spanish Spirits: Or, Un-sainting James

c h a p t e r s i x Othello’s Spanish Spirits Or, Un-sainting James Santiago of Spain, Killed my Moors, Scattered my company, Broke my standard. —Poem of Alfonso XI, c. 1344 Wyat. Who can Disgest a Spaniard, that’s a true Englishman? Soldier. Would he might choake that disgests him. —The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat. With the Coronation of Queen Mary, and the coming in of King Philip, c. 1602 It was said of Venice during the sixteenth century, “If you are curious to see men from every part of the earth, each dressed his own different way, go to St. Mark’s square or the Rialto and you will find all manner of persons.”1 Even as Shakespeare was turning his dramatic eye toward the commercial republic, “when Antwerp and many other ‘world markets’ were suffering from political disruptions, when Jewish refugees drew to Venice trade from the Levant and Balkans, and when the boom of its textile industries reached new heights,” cosmopolitan Venetian merchants were operating “in Sweden and, extensively, Othello’s Spanish Spirits 169 in Poland,” and extending their sphere of traffic so far from the Mediterranean as to be “trading in gems and fabrics in Indian cities.”2 In an address to Doge Andrea Gritti, the poet, playwright, and satirist Pietro Aretino, who had taken sanctuary in the city after being forced to flee Rome for having directed one too many witticisms at papal excess, evoked the city-state’s international reputation in this way: “Venice opens her arms to all whom others shun. She lifts up all whom others abase. She welcomes those whom others persecute. She cheers the mourner in his grief and defends the despised and the destitute with charity and love. And so I bow to Venice with good reason. She is a living reproach to Rome.”3 Doubtless Aretino’s encomium exaggerates, for, its legendary freedoms notwithstanding, Venice was no totally open society. Strictures were placed on the behavior of outsiders, who were often kept under surveillance within its territories. But as the diarist Girolamo Priuli confirmed, Venice’s self-image and international prestige were very much linked to its storied liberality. The city of Saint Mark “was open to foreigners,” wrote Priuli, “and all could come and go everywhere without any obstacle.”4 “Venice,” as Garry Wills observes, even “allowed certain foreigners (forestieri) to become cittadini, giving them higher rank than native popolani.”5 Recognitions such as these—about the international character of Venice and the breadth of that city-state’s reach as a global center of trade and industry—failed until quite recently to register in discussions of Shakespeare’s Venetian tragedy. By constructing Venice as a homogeneous society in relation to which “the Moor” represents a singular other, a stranger or an outsider,6 traditional criticism declined to view The Tragedy of Othello in the cosmopolitan setting it granted Shakespeare’s Comical History of the Merchant of Venice— where trade and profit “Consisteth of all nations.”7 I argue in this final chapter that Shakespeare represents in Othello a culture so marked by external relationships and connections that it resembles a multiethnic metropolis far more than any insular whole.8 When we extend Venice’s vaunted openness to Othello, we see quite clearly that Shakespeare’s second Venetian play raises the specter of Spain in order to mediate an uneasy local/global relationship through the “humorous” invocation of a “spirit” known throughout Europe since medieval times—a spirit not natively English , but one that entered England, as it did the rest of pre-Reformation Europe, during its long contact with the culture of Iberia.9 My appeal to the longue durée notwithstanding, I will resort at times to a narrative of actors and events. But I do so in order to bring into relief 170 chapter six the selective nature of our cultural (and disciplinary) memory with regard to the play. As the poets, playwrights, and historians of the various nations of early modern Europe held a common store of exemplary tales to be invoked or reworked—much in the way they mobilized scriptural or classical precedents—as occasion demanded (their principal figures often named in order that they might metonymically represent their respective “races”), so the redeployment of these histories can help us observe the ways in which these emerging national cultures felt...