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othello’s infidelity ‡ 201 than he knows or would like—and more than they know or would like. If there is something they deeply and darkly desire but would never acknowledge (especially not to themselves), something they would never lift a finger to bring about, they get their villain to do it for them. Nothing could humiliate Iago more than to have his special audience of supervisors watch him being reduced to the tool of his victims . He has had to huff and puff in order to keep up with them. The rapidity and ease with which his victims destroyed their relationship makes him all but dispensable relatively early in the play. The villain’s claim to autonomy is thus compromised by the efficiency with which his victims use him to undo themselves. And even Iago’s last defiant stand undoes itself: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know./From this time forth I never will speak word.” Mum’s the model housewife’s word. But there is nothing to demand. Victims and survivors, the dead and the quick, know everything he knows. And yet . . . it was all so easy. There must be so much more to know than he knows. Surely Othello and Desdemona, and maybe Emilia, know things he doesn’t know. He must have done something not only to them but also for them, something they got him to do to and for them. They must have had a use for him . . . They must have used him. How embarrassing. 31. othello’s infidelity In his powerful study of seventeenth-century attitudes toward adultery and adulteration, Michael Neill mentions: a widely circulated explanation for the existence of black peoples (available in both Leo Africanus and Hakluyt), blackness was originally visited upon the offspring of Noah’s son Cham (Ham) as a punishment for adulterous disobedience of his father. In such a context the elopement of Othello and Desdemona, in defiance of her father’s wishes, might resemble a repetition of the ancestral crime, confirmation of the adulterous history written upon the Moor’s face. Thus, Neill continues, “if he sees Desdemona as the fair page defaced by the adulterate slander of whoredom, Othello feels this defacement, 202 ‡ contaminated intimacy in othello at a deeper and more painful level, to be a taint contracted from him: ‘Her name that was as fresh/As Dian’s visage is now begrimed and black/As mine own face.’”1 Neill’s reading gives precedence to the Second Quarto’s “her name” over the Folio’s “my name.” This decision keeps in play the “deeper and more painful level” of Othello’s performance as he watches himself urge Iago to help him do to Desdemona what he tries to believe she is doing to herself and him. But as Janet Adelman observes, whichever variant we select, “the lines point toward the mutuality of contamination : Othello sees his begrimed face as it is reflected in the blackening of Desdemona’s chaste purity by his own desire.”2 This textual indeterminacy is functional. Each variant solicits the other. The interaction between them sustains the conflict in Othello’s language as it oscillates vertiginously between the terror of imminent self-contempt—“what would it mean for me to want her to be a whore if it turns out she isn’t?”—and the victim/revenger’s fury. Othello can neither deal with nor ignore that question. He can’t bring himself to utter the outright lie “she is the cause” or to acknowledge the extent to which he is the cause. He can only say, “it is the cause.” So he continues in bad faith to punish himself by punishing Desdemona and by shifting at the end from one to another conspicuously hollow rationalization. “Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,/Nor set down aught in malice” (5.2.340–41). But extenuation is the name of Othello’s endgame. Iago is a devil who “ensnared my soul and body,” Othello his hapless victim who did “nought . . . in hate, but all in honor,” these were merely “unlucky deeds,” the work of a fool, indeed a double fool, “one that loved not wisely, but too well.” If it is to be reported truly, not set down in malice, what happened is not that Desdemona lost her life but that he lost his pearl, through his own stupidity. “Nothing extenuate.”3 Yet since he speaks and represents himself to himself...

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