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Chapter 4 The Tragedy of the Handkerchief: Female Paraphernalia and the Properties of Jealousy in Othello [T]he Moral, sure, of this Fable is very instructive This may be a warning to all good Wives, that they look well to their Linnen. —Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693) What good may redounde unto others, by reading of this discourse of other Countries?... Here rich men may learne to be thankefull to God, not onelyfor their libertie andfreedome of their Conscienceand persons; but of their goods also: when they shall read, how in other contries no man is master of his owne. —William Biddolph, The Travels of certaine Englishmen into Africa ... (1609) The seventeenth-century critic Thomas Rymer has exasperated generations of Shakespeareanswith his suggestion that Desdemona's downfall in Othello results from nothing more than her negligence as a keeper of household stuff: "Why was not this call'd the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?" he asks, foregrounding what is in his view the tragedy's inappropriate preoccupation with a mere "trifle."1 Yet it may be that Rymer's assertion has been so provocative because there is an undeniable grain of truth in his claim that the play manifests an obsessive concern with the whereabouts of a hankie ("So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief!")2 —even if it requires that we read against the grain of his critique to uncover it. In the present context, Rymer usefully identifies a common ideological thread linking Othelloy Shakespeare's closest foray into the genre of domestic tragedy, to his earlier domestic comedies, and more particularly to their concern with women's management of household property.3 The play's resemblance to The Merry Wives in this respect is particularly striking: both plays turn on a jealous husband's "uncharitable suspicions" (to recall Cleaver's phrase) regarding his wife's supposed sexual infidelity,suspicions that are based, Rymer reminds us, on the misconstrued evidence of misplaced "Linnen[s]."4 Whereas The Taming 112 Chapter 4 of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor deploy a range of comedic devices to dispel anxieties surrounding the wife's emerging role as a keeper of household stuff, however, The Tragedy of Othello allows these anxieties to blossom by playing out the dire (and in Rymer's view "improbable")5 consequences of Desdemona's having allowed her handkerchief to "drop by negligence" (3. 3.315). The improbability of the resulting tragedy, according to Rymer,derives initially from the unlikelihood of Desdemona's desire to marry a "Blackamoor "6 ("With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or Small-coal Wench: Shake-spear, would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord"), secondly, from Othello's overvaluation of the handkerchief ("the Handkerchief is so remote a trifle, no Booby,on this side Mauritania^ could make any consequence from it"), and thirdly, from his disproportionate response to its displacement ("Desdemona dropt her Handkerchief; therefore she must be stifTd").7 Rymer's "Moral" is purposefully reductive because his aim is to deflate the play's overvaluation of unworthy subjects (and objects) of tragedy. Yethis identification of the problem of valuation in OthellOy characterized on the one hand by what he terms the play's "gross rate of trifling" (that is, its estimation of trifles at an inflated or "gross rate")8 and on the other by its undervaluation of what Rymer himself deems valuable, nevertheless represents an astute observation about the poetics of jealousy at work within the play,in which the modalities of overvaluation and undervaluation are inextricably linked: Othello's jealousy causes him to overestimate the value of the handkerchief "More than indeed belonged to such a trifle" (5. 2. 226) and consequently to underestimate his wife's true worth, like "the base Indian" (in the Quarto text) or "the base Judean" (in the Folio) who "threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe" (5. 2. 345-46). A great deal of editorial ink has been spilled (some five pages in the Variorum edition) over the textual problem posed by the famous Indian/ Judean crux in Othello's final speech.9 Rather than attempting to adjudicate between these two arguments, I would like instead to invite scrutiny of the racializing discourses of under- and overvaluation that run through both: "the thought of an ignorant Indians casting away a pearl [is] very natural in itself" (Alexander Pope); "even at this day the various tribes of...

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