"O blood, blood, blood": Violence and Identity in Shakespeare's "Othello"

Author(s): Jennifer Feather

Source: Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England , 2013, Vol. 26 (2013), pp. 240-263
Published by: Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp DBA Associated University Presses

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24322748

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 "O blood, blood, blood": Violence and
Identity in Shakespeare's Othello
Jennifer Feather

At the moment when Othello finally becomes fully convinced of Desde

mona's infidelity, he cries out "O blood, blood, blood."1 Because early mod
ern writers participate in a collective cultural attempt to stabilize existing
categories of difference by attaching them to fixed biological characteristics,
one might be tempted to understand the visceral and seemingly unsophisti
cated nature of this utterance as a sign of Othello's atavistic descent into mur
derous rage, his barbarous nature emerging from beneath his heroic self
presentation.2 Understanding the word "blood" in this light evokes the entire
apparatus of biological determinism that develops over the course of the early
modern period in which "blood" dictates rank, culture, and identity itself.3
However, focusing on the burgeoning language of biological determinism ob
scures the persistent centrality of violence, also implicit in the word "blood,"
in early modern constructions of self that continue to rely on humoral ideas
of bodily fluidity.4 This single word encapsulates the tensions between these
two modes of self-understanding—one that sees blood as stable and another
that understands it as constantly in flux. Not simply a marker of barbarism,
blood and the violence it connotes is a flexible form of self-fashioning that
Othello uses to repair his understanding of the world shattered by Desdemo
na's purported infidelity and to negotiate this tension between stability and
fluidity.
Recent critics have persuasively shown the implication of the play in a bur
geoning racialism that focuses on skin color as a measure of moral worth.5
However, this system of difference is not yet fully instantiated and competes
with a much different understand of biology that threatens the biological sta
bility often associated with the notion of blood. As Jean Feerick explains,
while the early modern understanding of the word "race" relies primarily on
notions of bloodlines, the physiological fluid itself is seen as in constant flux
and danger of degeneration. Thus, "Early modern racial ideologies ... articu
late with compelling force what modern racial ideologies seek to bury: the
ever-present prospect of racial reversibility."6 Ian Smith similarly notes the
instability present in early modern racial ideologies and understands skin

240

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 O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD" 241

color as a means of stabilizing categories of difference, encapsulated in th

notion of barbarism, that are based on varying degrees of linguistic facility
To be a barbarian is by definition to be one who is lacking the ability to us
language and is hence, bestial. Smith attributes focus on the "apparent bio
physical fixity of color" as a means to buttress classical tropes of barbarism
"whose inherent weakness is linguistic adaptation."7 Othello, whose lingui
tic facility wins over Desdemona and secures his defense before the Duke, i
a prime example of the sort of linguistic adaptation that makes barbarism a
unstable category of difference. In this reading, Othello returns to a barba
rous state under pressure: lacking other means of persuasion he resorts to
wanton violence and savage cruelty. Smith's reading, by opposing civilized
rhetoric and barbarous violence, presumes that the play and Elizabethan cul
ture more broadly work ultimately to stabilize modes of ascribing differenc
and the identities on which they are based. This fixity in turn serves as th
foundation for humanist ideas of selfhood as individual and autonomous.
Shakespeare's play, however, dramatizes the tension between a social system
that values stability and one that relies on flexibility, valorizing one as much
as the other.
Because "blood" is implicated equally but distinctly in both the stabilizing
force of biological determinism and the fluid nature of humoral physiology,
this single word both highlights and embodies the tension between these two
systems of difference—one that sees flexibility as dangerous and another that
acknowledges and negotiates fluidity. Surely, Othello's cry is one of anguish
that signals the breakdown of the previously firm foundations of his sense of
himself, assiduously constructed through linguistic performance. However,
even as this cry is a recognition of Desdemona's infidelity and the extreme
cognitive dissonance it causes, understood in terms of chivalric violence, it is
also solution to the very set of problems posed by Desdemona's infidelity.
In fact, precisely because blood is implicated in multiple overlapping and
competing understandings of corporeal and social order, chivalric violence
serves a reparative function at the heart of the play. Rather than understand
ing the play as ultimately marginalizing chivalric virtue at the expense of a
burgeoning valorization of mercantile skills, this article demonstrates how
Othello deftly uses the chivalric codes of combat to repair the damage done
by Iago.
Many readers have refuted the racial essentialism of the play but fail to
account for the importance of violence in these constructions of difference
and the consequent understanding of self in the play. For modern readers,
embedded in a culture that easily, almost instinctually, understands "blood"
as the bearer of both inherited difference and racial essence, the violent con
notations of the word all but disappear. However, I would argue that Othello's
anguished cry suffers from a surfeit rather than a dearth of meaning, bringing
to the surface not Othello's essential savagery but the centrality of violence

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242 JENNIFER FEATHER

in early modern structures of meaning. If modern readers have difficulty sep

arating "blood" as a signifier of lineage from "blood" as a signifier of race
in an early modern context separating lineal claims and bloodshed poses
many if not more difficulties. Whereas in modern understandings of the term
"blood" automatically signifies inheritance in both a familial and rac
sense, the echo of "blood" as "bloodshed" is almost inescapable in the
texts. Othello's attempts to restore the integrity of social identity and cor
real person implied by his notion of "blood" draw on chivalric notions of
combat, and thus make manifest the violent connection between word an
deed absolutely central to the Venetian social order. Othello's cry, then,
not primarily an expression of his essential savagery but of the way that
intends to utilize bodily damage to restore his own and Desdemona's inte
rity.
Not only do early modern medical texts, including Robert Burton's Anat
omy of Melancholy and Thomas Geminus's reproduction of Vesalius's Epit
ome present blood as central to the healthy functioning of both body and
state, they emphasize both its unifying properties and its ability to connect
body and soul as sources of identity. These unifying properties reveal how
the multiple meanings of the term connect to one another. "Blood," whether
it is understood as "vital spirit," "bloodshed," "the seat of emotion," or "lin
eage," represents the physical grounding of social identity. This physical
grounding relies not, as modern notions of race do, on a sense of biological
fixity, but on relationships between word and deed created through violence.
The term "blood" bears the weight of these multiple meanings throughout
the play.8 Desdemona's supposed infidelity questions the collocation of na
ture, will, and social status implicit in the early modern understanding of
blood, disturbing the relationship between these terms that is created through
constitutive forms of bodily damage. Though "blood" as it is used to de
scribe Desdemona's betrayal is the source of unbearable psychic dissonance
for Othello, blood in the sense of "bloodshed" is also the solution to that
problem. In response to her purported betrayal, Othello re-imagines his sense
of integrity, basing it on the ability of violent acts to connect word and deed.
Examining the use of the word "blood" throughout the play, as I propose to
do here, reveals that the play's central issues—namely race, sexuality, and
violence—are encapsulated in this one polysemous utterance that reveals a
conception of identity rooted in violent action rather than fixed bodily es
sence. What Othello makes manifest in murdering Desdemona is not the fun
damental racialism of Elizabethan society that assumes he must be savage
and thus, prone to impulsive violence, but its reliance on violence to connect
word and deed, meaning and reality. His resort to violence is neither a re
pressed racial essence surfacing nor a simple reversion to chivalric values.
Rather, it is a compromise between two social systems. By exploring how
Othello's conception of the body informs our understanding of the violent

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 O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD" 243

action in the play, I will begin to elucidate the delicate balance early mod
thinkers negotiate between these social systems and its relationship to a
temporary discourse of the body.

The conception of the body with which Othello begins, and which he at
tempts to repair in the final acts of the play, bears upon his conception of
self. Over the course of the play, Iago introduces a new epistemology that
fundamentally relies on a fixed corporeality to determine individual identity
and bears much in common with modern conceptions of race that figure race
as a biological essence expressed in behavior, rather than as an essence cre
ated by that behavior.9 It is this conception of self that enables Iago infa
mously to claim "I am not what I am" (1.1.64), invoking an individual
essence from which his outward performance deviates. Many critics see the
play as participating in the emergence of such an idea of self and difference
in which biological essence is relatively fixed, limiting the control that an
individual has over her self-presentation."1 Readings of the play that see
Othello as participating in the increasing resort to biological fixity as dictat
ing racial difference see Othello's bloody acts as sign of his barbaric essence
emerging. However, this narrative elides the type of thinking with which
Othello begins that relies on combat to unify corporeal and social ideas of
self.
Othello begins with a conception of self rooted equally in chivalric combat
and humoral ideas of the body. These ideas see the body, self, and environ
ment as consisting of a fluid set of humors that mutually influence one an
other. In such a conception, violence is not the mere violation of an inviolable
individuality but a means of ensuring harmony between body, self, and social
position. Othello sees his heroic acts as creating this sort of integrity, invok
ing an idea of body and self that bears much in common with early modern
ideas of race that critics such as Mary Floyd Wilson and Daniel Vitkus, using
geo-humoral theory and narratives of conversion respectively, argue was not
nearly as stable as modern ideas of biological fixity would suggest.11 How
ever, once he has been confronted with blood's instability in the form of Des
demona's infidelity, he resorts to racialist thinking that relies on biological
stability in his search for "ocular proof." His fundamentally violent response
is simultaneously a product of his desire for essence and appearance to be in
line and also for essence to be visible in performed acts, rather than hidden
deep in a man's physical being, demonstrating the uneasy coexistence of
these two competing ideas of self.
Having been confronted with an epistemology that sees selfhood as dic
tated by an internal essence, an epistemology that critics, such as Kim Hall,

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244 JENNIFER FEATHER

see in the kind of racialist thinking operating throughout the play, O

attempts to restore his conception of self, which sees acts rather than e
as determinative. He does not simply wish to make interior essence v
but to create his idea of himself in unifying acts of prowess. This res
then, is not violent simply because he only knows how to act in a vio
fashion, either because of his race or because of his chivalric identity
rather because of the ways that violence specifically is able to restore
ness to his fractured identity. His identity as a warrior, like his identit
Moor, is not significant because of its predisposition to violence but b
of its insistence on both physical and mental integrity. Thus, rather
seeing Othello's violence as a consequence of his essential biology,
because he is a soldier or a black man, I see his use of violence as stem
from its unique ability to make essence and performance one and the
as they were for Othello prior to Iago's manipulations.12
Othello relies on violence to repair his fractured sense of self, just
relies on martial prowess to unify his own identity when he is quest
before the Duke, conceiving of blood as unifying social and individua
tity. If his uttering of the word "blood" prefigures the violence again
demona, it also represents the restoration of her integrity in those ac
reduce this conception to simple biological determinism, as the readin
sees Othello's acts as atavism does, collapses the rich set of early mod
associations with the term "blood," obscuring the idea of identity at w
the play. In fact, racialism—the notion that Othello posseses a racial es
that might conflict with his social performance—is precisely the pr
His use of violence, rather than being a regression into barbarism, is a
tive measure intended to restore the unified conception of identity im
in the early modern understanding of "blood."

II

Starting with Desdemona's betrayal of her father, which undermine

stability of "blood" as a source of identity, the characters in the play
tently struggle with competing conceptions of identity and difference
lo's anguished cry encapsulates these struggles in a single repeated w
"blood." The twenty-one other uses of the word "blood" in the play
manifest the stakes implicit in how one understands this one term. Br
initially calls upon the multifaceted notion of blood in the first scenes
play to describe Desdemona's marriage to "the Moor" as a disruption
corporeal and spiritual integrity. He presents Desdemona's chastity as a
of integrity that cannot be shattered except by force. This force is con
of in terms of "some mixtures powerful o'er the blood I... I that [Ot
wrought upon her" (1.3.105-7). Taking her physical and spiritual integ

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 "O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD" 245

a fact, Brabantio uses it as incontrovertible evidence that a crime has been

committed, that coercion was necessary to get Desdemona to concede t
marry Othello. He pleads before the Duke that "It is a judgment maimed an
most imperfect / That will confess perfection so could err / Against all rule
of nature" (11. 99-101). Because her perfection is a certainty, her actions
must have been coerced to have deviated so far from the rules of nature. Her
integrity should be inviolable and can only have been breached by force. Thi
integrity encompasses her entire individual and social being. Brabantio won
ders that,

A maiden never bold

Of Spirit so still and quiet that her motion
Blushed at herself; and she, in spite of nature,
Of years, of country, credit, everything,
To fall in love with what she feared to look on?
(II. 95-99)

He understands her nature, age, national origin, and reputation—in short ev

erything about her—as functioning in complete harmony. In presenting her
abduction as an assault against her blood, Brabantio suggests that her blood
is the seat of this unified identity.
This notion of subjective harmony is in line with one of the most prominent
early modern conceptions of the way that blood functions, represented by the
works of Thomas Geminus and Robert Burton, among others.13 According to
Thomas Geminus's English version of Andreas Vesalius's anatomy, the
blood as it is decocted in the heart is "spirite, more clearer, bryghter, and
subtyller, then is any corporall thynge, compounded of the foure Elementes,
for it is a thynge that is a meane betwene the bodye and the soule, and there
fore the Philosophers lyken it rather to a heauenlye thynge then to a bodelye
thynge."14 In this context, blood is that which unites the body and conveys
the identity of the soul. This conception persists into the seventeenth century
when the physician George Thomson described blood as "the immediate in
strument of the soul . . . sweetly uniting all the parts of the Body for the
conspiration of the good of the whole."15 He, thus, conceives of the blood as
the basis for both a psychological and a corporeal identity that unifies and
pervades the entire individual. He sees no distinction between what later
thinkers would understand as the psychological, what he calls the soul, and
what will become the physiological. The blood is an "immediate" instru
ment, admitting little distinction between its material and immaterial quali
ties. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton describes blood, saying
that is "a hot, sweet, temperate, red humour . . . whose office is to nourish
the whole body, giving it strength and colour. . .. And from it spirits are first
begotten in the heart, which afterwards by the arteries are communicated to

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246 JENNIFER FEATHER

other parts."16 As in Thomson's description, Burton conceives of blood a

dispersed throughout the body, a conception all the more powerful for
inclusion in a work directed not at trained anatomists but at those who mig
be unfamiliar with certain physiological terms.17 Furthermore, Burton
scribes the blood as the source of "Spirit... a most subtle vapour, which i
expressed from the blood, and the instrument of the soul, to perform all
actions; a common tie or medium betwixt body and soul."18 As Burton d
scribes it, the blood offers a physiological basis for the soul and all its a
tions, unifying psychological and physiological sources of identity that la
writers understand as distinct.19
Brabantio understands the violation of Desdemona as perpetrated again
her "blood" in this comprehensive sense. The "mixtures powerful" act sp
cifically not only against her physical body but against her blood. Othel
then, has attacked her entire identity, both social and physical, conceived
corporeally as her blood. This conception of the crime simultaneously figu
it as a violent assault against her person—Othello has wrought somethin
upon her—and as a property crime that violates the "natural," patriarch
economy—the rules of nature have been transgressed. Bringing into relief the
almost imperceptible slippage between these two crimes, Brabantio argu
before the Duke that he has been the victim of theft. When a senator asks
Brabantio if his daughter is dead, Brabantio responds:

Ay, to me:
She is abused, stolen from me and corrupted
By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks,
for nature so preposterously to err.
(11. 60-63)

He not only responds to the senator's question affirmatively, claiming that

she is dead, but goes further to say she has been stolen and abused, envi
sioning the crime simultaneously as a physical assault and as a theft. In fact,
the slide from assault, a violation of Desdemona's bodily person, and theft, a
violation of patriarchal order, naturalizes the patriarchal order, connecting it
to a physical reality. Thus, "blood" for Brabantio unifies identity situating
Desdemona's gender, rank, and person in biological fixity. The resort to the
unifying of properties of blood offers to Brabantio a possible explanation for
what otherwise would appear inexiplicable—the unstable erring of "nature"
presumed in Desdemona's marriage to Othello.
Only if the abuse Desdemona suffers is clearly psychological as well as
physical can Brabantio restore his conception of the relationship between De
sdemona's character and her behavior. This idea is consistent with the same
medical texts that understand blood as uniting body and soul in one undiffer
entiated whole. These texts also conceive of medicines as having both physi

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 "O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD" 247

ological and psychological functions. For instance, Burton proposes a lo

series of remedies for melancholy that include not only "Philosophical
Divine precepts, [and] other men's examples" but also, though he wa
against their improper use, medicines and simples.2" Thus, the crime in
bantio's mind must be perpetrated against Desdemona's otherwise st
blood as representative of her bodily but also her spiritual identity. Furt
more, in representing the crime as a theft, Brabantio figures it as an at
against Desdemona's social identity and the communal order to which it
longs. The theft is a transgression of the patriarchal order that is natural
by treating it as an assault that attacks her person and her social positi
embodied in her blood.
Whether Brabantio presents the case as a physical assault or a social and
psychological attack, the crime remains a sexual one. Infamously, Iago's call
to arms warns Brabantio that "an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe!"
(1.1.87-98). In Iago's crass admonition, the crime is understood as a problem
of miscegenation, of a mixing of bloodlines.21 Characters repeatedly associ
ate blood with sexual passion, as when Iago suggest that Desdemona's feel
ings for Othello will fade when "the blood is made dull with the act of sport"
(2.1.225). Brabantio makes no distinction between theft, assault, and misce
genation. Invoking the supple language of early modern physiology, he in
stinctually calls the crime "a treason of the blood" (1.1.167)—a phrase that
draws together these multiple perceptions of the crime. He imagines Othel
lo's action as an assault perpetrated against both the physical and social per
son of Desdemona located in her blood. It is both a violent attack and a theft.
Moreover, it encompasses the sexual violation of Desdemona and the pur
ported conjuring that enabled it. Sexual violation involves miscegenation and
hence a distortion of nature just as the "mixtures powerful o'er the blood"
changed Desdemona's fundamental identity causing her "perfection so to err
against all rules of nature." Both are treasonous in an early modern sense—
that is, they transgress the natural order in which Desdemona would fear to
look upon so spirited an individual as Othello. Brabantio resorts to this for
mulation of a crime perpetrated against her blood, treating theft, assault, and
sexual congress as one crime, and thereby naturalizes the relationship be
tween Desdemona's body, behavior, and social identity.
However, the phrase "treason of the blood" also tempts one to a more sin
ister reading. Though Brabantio suggests that in fact treason has been com
mitted against Desdemona's blood—that is against her social and physical
person—one could just as easily read the phrase as suggesting that her blood
has committed treason, usurping the governing power of her otherwise stable
perfection. Early modern treatments of the blood as often usurping reason
would tend to support this reading. In certain respects, Brabantio's focus on
the supposed "mixtures powerful" that have tainted her blood subtly suggests
this reading, but subsequent uses of the term "blood," notably by Iago, offer

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248 JENNIFER FEATHER

an even more persuasive context for it. Iago suggests that love is "a l
the blood and a permission of the will" (1.3.335-36), envisioning blood
the identity it conveys as subservient to the will. In the context of s
formulation, Desdemona's blood has behaved treasonously, usurpin
governing power of the will.
This understanding of treason is readily available in the early mode
imaginary that saw an analogy between the king's rule over the com
wealth, a man's governance of his household, and the governing funct
reason over the individual.22 Again, texts such as Burton's support su
reading. In his preface "Democritus to the Reader," Burton writes:

As in human bodies (saith [Boterus]) there be divers alterations proceeding

humours, so there be many diseases in a commonwealth, which do as dive
happen from several distempers, as you may easily perceive by their part
symptoms. . . . But whereas you shall see many discontents . . . rebellions
tions, mutinies, contentions, idleness, riot, epicurism . . . that kingdom, tha
try, must needs be discontent, melancholy, hath a sick body.23

Following Boterus, Burton directly compares the physiological sickne

melancholy, with its imbalanced humors, to a seditious nation. Thus,
mona's body is both a kingdom suffering under a treasonous usurpatio
physically ill, having its humors out of balance. The phrase "treason o
blood" encapsulates not only the perception of the crime as both a phy
assault and a theft but also the perception of it as a violent overthrow
governing power of reason and hence, of the social order. Thus, "blo
comes to imply not just individual identity but social order. Brabantio'
cation of the "mixtures powerful o'er the blood" restores his shattere
of the social order by relocating Desdemona's identity in her corpore
son, naturalizing the ideas of culture and rank that her transgression distu

Ill

This multiplicity of meanings that hovers around every use of the term re
lies as much on the naturalizing power of violence that connects theft and
assault as it does on biological determinism. Understood in this context,
Othello's cry "O, blood, blood, blood" is far more than a desperate and inar
ticulate expression of pain. Rather, it is an astute encapsulation of the full
import of Desdemona's supposed betrayal as well as its solution. As such, it
suggests the important role that violence rather than biological determinism
in terms of either lineage or race plays in securing both individual identity
and social order. Othello is as invested in patriarchy as Brabantio is but sees
that patriarchy as relying on valorous acts of combat rather than on sexual

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 O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD 249

purity and emerging ideas of biological difference. "Blood" for Othello does
not merely connote biological determinisim but rather implies the process b
which matter, or in modern terms biology, becomes identity through combat.
Desdemona's supposed infidelity disturbs the notion of identity fixed in vio
lent acts that her father and Othello espouse. Having used Desdemona's infi
delity to unravel Othello's sense of himself, Iago offers an essentialis
epistemology much like the one to which Brabantio resorts, as the solution
to the disruption her infidelity poses. However, Othello ultimately rejects this
solution to corporeal instability and returns to acts of bodily damage to stab
lize his sense of himself.
The language of blood as "wrought upon" tends to highlight the instability
that Desdemona's sexuality makes manifest. Such language disrupts essen
tialist notions of identity within the play by making blood a changeable ob
ject of action rather than a stable source of identity. Whereas Brabantio's use
of the phrase is meant to evoke an image of integrity breached, two other
uses aim at describing or, what is more, effecting a psychological change,
conceived of corporeally. Upon his arrival in Cyprus, Lodovico wonders at
Othello's treatment of Desdemona saying "Is it his use? / Or did the letters
work upon his blood, / And new create this fault" (4.1.274-765). As Braban
tio did with respect to Desdemona's behavior, Lodovico assumes that a
change in blood can effect a fundamental change in personality. The letters
work on the blood to change Othello's expected bearing. Similarly, Iago de
scribes his actions against Othello as "Dangerous conceits [that] . . . with a
little act upon the blood" (3.3.329-31). Tellingly, both instances figure
words—the tool that Othello admits to using to woo Desdemona—as wreak
ing the kind of havoc on the blood that Brabantio sees in Desdemona's
changed behavior. All three characters—Iago, Brabantio, and Lodovico—
recognize actions against the blood as causing a change in personality at once
physical and psychological. Blood in these instances is not a fixed essence
but a changeable fluid.
Desdemona's marriage ultimately brings Brabantio to the horrible realiza
tion not that blood incontrovertibly dictates her identity but, quite the oppo
site, that her blood is not a stable marker of identity, that it can in fact be
wrought upon by mere words. His language moves from the violent over
throw of her person to a recognition of her betrayal. She is no longer merely
stolen but has willfully and deceitfully made her "escape" (1.3.198). As Bra
bantio famously predicts saying, "Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to
see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee" (1.3.2921-13), Desdemo
na's purported infidelity brings Othello to the same unbearable realization
that social position does not secure behavior. Othello's disquiet is clearly
caused by the instability that her infidelity implies. He vacillates in doubt,
saying "I think my wife be honest, and think she is not" (3.3.387), unequivo
cally disturbed by his inability to fix his sense of her. In fact this inability

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250 JENNIFER FEATHER

threatens the basis both of Othello's previous conception of Desdemona a

of his own masculinity. In his description of jealousy, Richard Burton writ
that " 'Tis full of fear, anxiety, doubt, care, peevishness, suspicion, it turn
man into a woman."24 The suspicion that Iago engenders in Othello effem
nates him, disrupting the stability of his identity.
This instability undermines his insistence on presenting an unified identity,
ensured by violent acts that bring together social position and physical re
ity. Much as Brabantio represents Desdemona as possessing a comprehensiv
integrity, Othello originally presents himself as an integral whole. Rath
than understanding himself as having an interiorized identity which cou
conflict with his behavior, he sees his identity as pervasive and undifferen
ated. When discovered on his wedding night, he refuses to hide, insistin
"Not I, I must be found. My parts, my title and my perfect soul shall manifest
me rightly" (1.2.30-32). Just as Desdemona's nature, years, country, a
credit all dictate a single action that Brabantio cannot believe she did no
take, Othello insists that his parts, title, and perfect soul must show his tr
nature. Even when invoking the term "blood," Othello presents his identi
as both stable and outwardly manifest. He insists upon confessing "the vi
of his blood" (1.3.125), bringing into line his identity and its corpor
source. This sense of integrity, implied in the early modem conception
blood, is precisely what begins to unravel because of Iago's treachery, poin
ing not to the stability of blood but to its variability.
Initially, Iago disturbs the stability of "blood" as the basis of identity, b
more importantly, he offers biological determinism as a means of repairi
that identity. By questioning Desdemona's fidelity, presenting her essent
identity as hidden rather than visible in her public acts, Iago creates a fiss
between social and personal identity, between what Iago calls in his criticis
of Cassio's martial prowess "prattle" and "practice" (1.1.25-29). The ve
language of the exchange between Iago and Othello creates the kind of dou
Iago claims Othello should have. Iago's repetition of Othello's word, "hon
est," obscures Othello's view of Iago's interior thoughts (3.3.100-109). Rh
torically, he creates a question out of precisely what Othello felt w
unquestionable, Cassio's honesty and Desdemona's fidelity.
Othello responds to this threat by attempting to stabilize both his own a
Iago's identity within this new system. He demands of Iago "Show me th
thought" (1.3.3.119), seeking Iago's disclosure of his essential self as a wa
to stabilize Iago's identity. As he explains,

For I know thou'rt full of love and honesty

And weigh'st thy words before thou giv'st them breath
Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more.
For such things in a false disloyal knave
Are tricks of custom, but in a man that's just

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 O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD 251

They're close delations, working from the heart

That passion cannot rule.
(3.3.121-27)

At this moment, he pictures true meaning as interior and stable. Meaning, no

longer externally visible in acts, must be discovered and uncovered. This
quest to locate interior meaning produces the idea that a stable essence exists.
Unless one is a false, disloyal knave, whose meaning and identity are never
stable, one's essence lies in "close delations . . . that passion cannot rule."
Othello fantasizes here about the stable essence hidden deep within a "just"
man that is not at the whim of the fickle passions. To know this hidden es
sence, another man must be "shown" this man's thought. In this moment,
the epistemology, which will drive Othello through much of the play, crystal
lizes in his mind. Not only does Othello proceed to search for hidden secrets
inside the body of Desdemona, from this point forward he also shows Iago
his thought, constructing himself as just the kind of just man he believes Iago
to be. Like an anatomist, he attempts to locate the truth about Desdemona in
her physical being and his repetition of the word "blood" in one sense sug
gests this strategy. "Blood," as ideas of biological determinism, would sug
gest, is a stable, interior essence—a physical guarantor of behavior. However,
as we have seen, the notion of blood operating in the early modern period
cautions us against a solitary reading of Othello's approach, urging us to ex
plore the equally prevalent notion of "blood" as a unifying principle associ
ated as much with the power of bloodshed as with biological essence.

IV

Rather than wholly accepting Iago's introduction of essentialism as a solu

tion to the unstable meaning of Desdemona's identity, Othello uses violence
not to uncover Desdemona's essential identity but in fact, to stabilize her
identity. Drawing on his sense of "blood" as capable of unifying psychology
and corporeality, he reconstructs Desdemona's integrity just as he constructs
his own. Othello's consistent presentation of pervasive integrity is fundamen
tally grounded in physical acts of violence. Rather than these acts of violence
being the performance which manifests some stable interior, as Iago would
have it, Othello sees action and essence as one in the same. What the undoing
of Othello reveals is that this integrity is produced for Othello not by "blood"
in the sense of heredity but by "blood" in the sense of heroic, violent action.
Many scholars have noted the anatomical epistemology that Iago intro
duces, which seeks truth in fixed and interior physical evidence, under
standing Othello's descent into murderous rage as a failure of Othello's
interpretive capabilities, as I do above. This confrontation with a new episte

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252 JENNIFER FEATHER

mology grounds Othello's introduction to an individualized and interiorize

notion of self.25 For instance, Mark Rose argues that Othello is caught b
tween mercantile values and the absolute world of chivalry, Iago representi
the former. As he explains it, "In the transitional culture of the early modern
period the concept of the soul is also affected by the hegemonic principle
property. Now a soul is something a person has as well as something a pers
is."26 Identity thus becomes a possession as well as an all-encompassin
being. Though I agree that Othello finds himself poised between two world
one based on martial might and the other based on securing private proper
Rose's characterization of that previous world as superstitiously supernatur
and one in which "the cosmos is a single vast text and [in which] knowled
is a form of interpretation, a matter of reading mystic signatures written
things" misunderstands the relationship between matter and meaning in
period, seeing the two as entirely separate. Rose continues claiming that
"There is finally no difference between language and nature, authority an
observation."27 Even as Rose sees no difference between language and na
ture, he also suggests a hidden meaning separate and apart from physica
reality that must be uncovered. At the same time that Rose's notion of "re
ing" implies an analogy between word and deed, or "language and nature
it also implies a disjunction between the two. "Blood" in its multiplicity
meaning provides a far more fertile analogy for this relationship. In fact,
the period, it serves not as a mere analogy but as the mechanism where
the relationship between things and ideas, identity and bodies, occurs and
perceived.28
In his self-assured defense before the Duke, Othello explicitly refuses t
kind of interpretive process Rose claims marks his chivalric identity. Oth
constructs his identity by valorizing the very interpretive lack characteri
of his martial identity, promising that because he is rude in his "speech, a
little blest with the soft phrase of peace, ... [he will] a round unvarnish
tale deliver of [his] whole course of love" (1.3.82-91). He connects his "ru
speech" both with his heroic identity and with the honesty of his "roun
unvarnished tale." His heroic identity, his martial prowess, is in direct op
sition to perfidious speech, and his heroic actions make him incapable of
tering "the soft phrase of peace." Martial prowess, as much as barbarism,
associated with a lack of linguistic sophistication. He can only presen
"round, unvarnished tale" that admits no distinction between surface and
sence. By pointing to his martial identity, Othello authenticates the claim
individual and social integrity he made in insisting on being found, insist
on the integrity of his "parts," "titles," and "perfect soul." His social pre
tation and his individual identity must be one and the same, just as Desde
na's were. As a solider he has little eloquence, and therefore, his tale mu
necessarily be without deception or inconsistency. His martial acts are ne
sary to maintain his integrity.

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 O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD" 253

Moreover, he argues that he has no identity beyond that of a soldier, that

nothing is hidden from view. His words cannot and do not require interpret
tion, though they do rely on physical acts for their significance. He present
Desdemona's love for him as based on his soldierly qualities. As he says
before the Duke, "She loved me for the dangers I had passed" (1.3.168). He
claims not that his eloquence wooed her but that the history itself did
Though Othello is actually quite linguistically sophisticated and gains access
to Brabantio's house through his words, he insists upon a lack of verbal skill
that implies plainness much as Henry V does in Shakespeare's depiction of
his wooing of Katharine of Valois.29 Others agree with his self-perception. A
Iago muses, "The Moor is of a free and open nature / That thinks men hones
that but seem so" (1.3.398-99). Iago believes that Othello lacks the guile to
suspect other men, precisely because he lacks the guile to be deceptive him
self. His very guilelessness indicates his understanding of himself as an int
grated whole.
The opposition between Othello's method of securing identity through
martial violence and the biological determinism Iago propounds is perhaps
best articulated in Iago's description of Cassio to Roderigo. He says:

Forsooth a great arithmetician,

One Michael Cassio, a Florentine
A fellow almost damned in a fair wife,
That never set a squadron in the field
Nor the division of battle knows
More than a spinster—unless the bookish théorie,
Wherein the togaed consuls can propose
As masterly as he. Mere prattle without practice
Is all his soldiership; but he, sir, had th'election,
And I of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds
Christened and heathen—must be be lee'd and calmed.
(1.1.18-29)

Here Iago makes a distinction between practice and performance, essence and
appearance, that defines early modern gender identity. Heroic deeds are set
against theory that is no more related to military reality than the female work
of the spinster. Martial action, which Iago calls "proof," is set against "book
ish théorie," as Iago makes a gendered distinction between representation and
actual practice. Practice, as the basis for identity, consists of deeds whose
reality is unquestionable because of their bloodiness. Not only does Iago
question Cassio's masculinity, comparing him to a spinster whose work is
not only feminine but discontinuous, he implies that no substance underlies
his military title. He is "mere prattle without practice" just as a spinster is
dismissed as both female and lacking steady work.30 Soldiership, then, serves

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254 JENNIFER FEATHER

as the ultimate basis of masculinity because it is a practice that unifies ide

tity, connecting titles to prowess through corporeal acts of bodily damage.
Othello's defense before the Duke does not acknowledge a distinction b
tween his tales and the trials themselves. What Othello, then, represents i
practice as essence. He does not allow the kind of difference Iago creates
between "prattle" as a false performance, and "practice" as a true essence
As evident in Iago's slander of Cassio, this kind of bounded integrity is ce
tral to masculine identity.31 As Robert Burton explains, love melancholy,
which jealousy is a type, effeminates because it is "immoderate, inordinat
and not to be comprehended in any bounds."32 Having a bounded identit
created by military feats is central to masculine identity. Othello's acts
martial prowess fundamentally unify his identity by realizing his se
presentation, grounding his identity in physical reality—the physical reali
of prowess rather than the physical reality of lineage or race.

Othello ultimately resorts to bloodshed because of the ability of blood to

unify his fractured sense of himself in visible acts of prowess. Othello's vio
lent response to Desdemona's purported infidelity is a strategy that partakes
of both the recently accessible anatomical literature and the more pervasive
fluid conception of the body, bolstering the faltering connection between self
and self-presentation. Understood in the context of the polysemous utterance
that marks Othello's realization of betrayal, his ultimate actions restore the
social significance of blood. Throughout the initial scenes of the play,
"blood" comes to signify the coherence of physiology, action, and social po
sition. In separating blood from will, Iago made manifest to Othello the pos
sibility that these forms of selfhood might be at odds and that blood might
not stably signify identity. However, rather than resorting to Iago's essential
ist model, seeking merely to uncover Desdemona's lascivious nature, Othello
ultimately embraces the unifying power of bloody action.
The solution Iago offers to blood's instability is a notion of blood as con
veying a physiological essence apart from will, an idea that becomes increas
ingly common in the seventeenth century as evidenced in early modern
medical texts.33 Iago creates for Othello the necessity for firsthand knowledge
as Othello searches for and demands "ocular proof" of Desdemona's infidel
ity, indoctrinating Othello in an anatomical epistemology. The impact of this
epistemology extends beyond inciting in Othello a need for visible evidence,
however. It introduces an entire new conception of the body and its relation
ship to identity. Anatomical literature of the period, as Jonathan Sawday has
explained, begins a process whereby "the body became objectified; a focus
of intense curiosity but entirely divorced from the world of the speaking and

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 "O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD" 255

thinking subject. The division between the Cartesian subject and corpor
object, between an 'I' that thinks and an 'it' in which 'we' reside, had bec
absolute."34 Though I question the absolute nature of this split, certainly
fore and even after Descartes, it is precisely the split that Iago introduce
Othello. The subject, once evenly dispersed throughout the body in the bl
is now isolated in its interior, or better yet in the will as Iago would hav
Again, Iago calls love "merely a lust of the blood and a permission of th
will," invoking a guiding consciousness absolutely in control of the ani
nature contained in the blood. Iago here anticipates William Harvey's disc
ery of the circulation of the blood, which understood blood, not as the s
of identity or as the source of "animal spirits ... brought up to the brain,
diffused by the nerves, to the subordinate members, giv[ing] sense and
tion to them all" as Burton had, but as simply another part of the mechan
body.35
This fundamentally different sense of the body creates an understanding of
identity as hidden and in need of discovery and, according to many, is re
sponsible for Othello's tragic end. Both Michael Neill and Patricia Parker
have noted the similarity of the epistemology Iago presents here to the project
of anatomical texts of the period.36 However, the compromise that Othello
develops between this system of meaning making and the chivalric one is
more subtle than either these authors or Mark Rose would suggest, combining
elements of both systems in a way similar to the one presented in early mod
ern anatomies. Rose is representative of scholars who see Othello as tragi
cally overtaken by a new system of meaning. Othello's tragic demise, then,
is a result of his inability to adapt to the development of a new form of hero
ism. As Rose explains, "The arts of the modern hero must be to govern and
give laws ..." not to engage in violent action.37 Ultimately, Rose feels that
Othello's death partakes of a chivalric nostalgia typical of Elizabethan tilts
and that the play explores the playwright's role in the demise of the chivalric
world. Thus, Othello and Desdemona become the tragic victims of a shifting
notion of the place of the body.
However, I would argue that Othello more or less successfully negotiates
this shifting scenario, despite his death, by restoring the social significance
of blood and providing a workable model for his Venetian comrades. This
model uses violence to authenticate self-representation, actually repairing the
split Iago has suggested to him between behavior and identity. Though
Othello and Desdemona are indeed victims of the tensions the play invokes,
we have every reason to believe that Othello's compromise is adopted by the
society around him, suggesting the ultimate triumph of his model even in the
face of his death. Othello begs of Lodovico, "Speak of me as I am. / Nothing
extenuate nor set down aught in malice" (5.2.340-41). Tellingly, his greatest
concern is how he will be presented, betraying his preoccupation with unify
ing his body and his social identity. He authenticates the narrative that he

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256 JENNIFER FEATHER

suggests—that he was one who loved "not wisely but too well" (5.2.342
by stabbing himself to which Lodovico responds "O bloody peri
(5.2.354) and Gratiano replies "All that's spoke is marred" (5.2.355
could understand Gratiano as exclaiming that the deaths of Desdemon
Othello mar all the power of Othello's speech, but it seems at least as l
that Gratiano indicts speech in general here, especially given Othello'
ries about the distortion of his story. The "bloody period" ensures that
lo's identity is fixed in his actions. He uses a bloody deed to tie the nar
of his identity to his physical person, just as he initially "confesses the
of his blood" bringing action and identity in line through blood.
He demonstrates this notion of identity construction early on when he ar
trates the conflict between Montano and Cassio. Upon seeing the uproa
admonishes Montano that, "My blood begins my safer guides to rule /
passion, having my best judgment collied, / Assays to lead the
(2.3.201-3), suggesting precisely the split that Iago does between "b
and will. However, his identity does not reside in these passions but
ability to rule them. This ability, not an essentialized notion of the pas
separates Christians from barbarians. A hundred lines earlier he deman

Are we turned Turks? And to ourselves do that

Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?
For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl;
He that stirs next, to carve his own rage,
Holds his soul light: he dies upon his motion.
(2.3.166-70)

What separates the Turk from the Christian is not racial essence but a lack of
heroic values—allowing personal rage to interfere with social order. More
over, in behaving like Turks, Cassio and Montano not only draw Othello's
wrath jeopardizing their physical life, they place their souls in jeopardy.
Again, Othello uses violence to make psychological truth—they will lose
themselves in behaving like barbarians—into physical reality—they will lose
their actual lives. His masculinity resides in his ability to govern the "blood"
that attempts to behave treasonously and rule his "safer guides." Othello not
only articulates his sense of identity but secures it by using violence to bring
physical and psychological realities together.
His murder of Desdemona too speaks of the unifying properties of bloody
action. Just before strangling Desdemona, Othello explains to himself the ur
gency and inevitability of what he must do saying,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!

Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,
It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow

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 O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD"' 257

And smooth as monumental alabaster:

Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.
(5.2.1-6)

Here Othello refuses to cause a breach of Desdemona's corporeal integrity,

insisting on keeping her "blood" intact, yet the possibility of her betraying
more men demands her death. He wants to freeze her in a state of corporeal
integrity to prevent the unbearable fragmentation of identity implicit in her
supposed sexual perfidy.
This sexual perfidy is intimately connected to the notion of blood. The
blood that should serve as the basis of a coherent social identity, one in which
Desdemona would never commit such an infidelity, has actually caused Des
demona, according to the fantasy that Iago creates, to behave in direct opposi
tion to her essential nature as defined by her social position. In fact, it has
been treasonous. The blood, then, rather than being the stable basis for social
position, is the uncontrollable essence of nature, making nature and social
structure unbearably incongruent and fractured. By keeping her blood con
tained, he does not, like the anatomist, search for a stable essence but keeps
her body both intact and filled with unifying blood. Rather than choosing to
reveal her essence, he uses her murder as a means of stabilizing her blood,
containing it within her corporeal integrity.
Though Iago's understanding may be more and more visible in
seventeenth-century texts, the older conceptions persist, and early modern
anatomists work out a compromise similar to the one Othello does. Perhaps
no better example exists than Andreas Vesalius and his English "borrowers."
While little original anatomical work is published in England before the six
teenth century,18 several versions of Vesalius overseen by a Flemish engraver
named Thomas Lambrit (who used the pseudonym Thomas Geminus) appear
in 1544, 1553, and 1559 respectively. The text, when it is in English, is drawn
not from Vesalius but from a fourteenth-century manuscript, itself a compila
tion of several medieval anatomists. These works and the works of English
anatomists, such as Thomas Vicary whose Anatomy of the Bodie of Man
draws from the same fourteenth-century manuscript, present a conception of
the body and identity much like Othello's. Geminus's version of Vesalius
describes blood in much the same way Burton did, saying, "And by hyt [the
blood from the heart] are refreshed and quickened all the membres of the
bodye syth the spirite that is receyued in them is the instrument and treasure
of the virtue of the soule."39 Again, the blood is the source of the spirit which
not only nourishes the body but is "virtue of the soule" and thus, determines
identity. As in both Burton and Othello's conception, blood is responsible for
keeping the different parts of identity in harmony.
Othello's murder of Desdemona and his eventual suicide show blood serv
ing a similar function, connecting the narrative of identity Othello produces

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258 JENNIFER FEATHER

specifically to the body. Cassio immediately exclaims that but for th

that he believed Othello to be weaponless he would have expected
bloody end "For [Othello] was great of heart" (5.2.359). Cassio's ex
tions construct Othello as a heroic figure, reinstating the integrity wh
central to his masculine identity. Because Othello is "great of heart," h
fers to proclaim his integrity through his suicide than to preserve his phy
life. Cassio locates Othello's heroism in his heart, situating his identity
organ that purifies the blood with its unifying properties.40 Thus, Cas
tols Othello's blood and remarks upon it as the source of a unified iden
Violence connects Othello's narrative to his physical body, defining h
the proud and honorable individual he is. However, this body is neithe
mechanistic body that Sawday locates in the work of William Harvey n
essentialized racial body that Iago suggests but the body permeated by
and the spirits it produces. As we have seen time and again, Othello u
violence to create an identity at once rooted in the body and
essentialized. This conception of identity provides a sense of pervasive
rity but only through acts of violence.
Othello's actions in the end of the play unify word, deed, and social s
knitting together the discrepancies which Iago revealed to him. They a
ther, as some suggest, the last gasp of a romantic heroism soon to be r
by a mercenary mercantilism, nor are they the projections of a raciali
temology but a subtle negotiation between the two. Employing the earl
ern conception of blood, Othello uses action to cement his and Desde
identities, repairing the integrity breached in Desdemona's supposed a
in her "treason of the blood." Othello specifically describes Desdem
murder as a sacrifice (5.2.65), and I would suggest that his own suicid
sacrifice as well. His death, as he suggests of Desdemona's, will make
crucial and violent connection between body and identity. After Cassi
comium, Lodovico reorders the scattered Venetian state by proclaimin
social meaning of the dead bodies. He demands that Iago "Look on the
loading of this bed: / This is thy work" (5.2.361-62). unmistakably jo
Iago's deeds to the bodies themselves. He begs Gratiano to enforce ju
against Iago, explicitly associating the bodies with Gratiano's governi
tions. The social order, disturbed by Desdemona's "treason," is re
using the model Othello enacts. In this model, violence connects soci
tity and the body. Unlike an essentialist model that understands the b
innately determining identity, Othello's understanding connects socia
tity and the body through bloody action. Thus, Othello's final actions,
than revealing his innate barbarism and the play's racialism, manife
solution to the tension between a mechanistic and a fluid identity. I
these actions like the utterance that prefigures them are not atavistic
basis for restoring social order. Othello's anguished cry explains the
sity of the violent actions of the end of the play. Rather than following Ia

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 "O BLOOD. BLOOD, BLOOD 259

instruction, Othello uses martial violence and his polyvalent under

of blood to unify physical, social, and psychological bases for identi

Notes

Previous versions of this article were presented at the October 2006 Ohio Valley
Shakespeare Conference (Marietta, OH) and at the April 2002 Symposium on Vio
lence, Politics, and Culture in Early Modern Europe at the University of Mississippi
(Oxford, MS). I would like to thank the participants at each for their comments and
suggestions. I would also like to thank the members of the Mellon Workshop on issues
of embodiment at Brown University (2005-6) and the members of the Folger Shake
speare Library Seminar on Early Modern Embodiment led by Valerie Traub for help
ing develop the project. Finally, I would like to thank Coppélia Kahn and Michelle
Dowd for their careful reading of the many drafts of this article.
1. 3.3.454. AH citations are taken from William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J.
Honigmann (New York: Arden, 2001).
2. For a discussion of various iterations of this argument, see Virginia Vaughn,
Othello: A Contextual History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp.
68.
3. This reading contends that the pressures of living as a cultural and social mi
nority in Venetian society drive Othello to revert to the stereotypical behavior to
which the Elizabethan mind thought he was predisposed. In other words, the strain of
Desdemona's infidelity causes his racial essence violently and visibly to emerge from
underneath his composed exterior. Michael Neill has suggested that this type of read
ing is, indeed, the "most common twentieth-century strategy" to deal with the issue
of race. Michael Neill, "Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,"
in Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Othello, ed. Anthony Gerard Barthélémy (New
York: Macmillan, 1994), 216-38, esp. 191 first printed in Shakespeare Quarterly 40
(1989): 383-412, esp. 393. In rejecting this narrative, I follow the work of Natasha
Korda who argues that such a conception "define[s] him as irremediably other."
Korda, "The Tragedy of the Handkerchief: Female Paraphernalia and the Properties
of Jealousy in Othello," in Shakespeare's Domestic Economies (Philadelphia: Univer
sity of Pennsylvania, 2002), 129.
4. For the reliance of ideas of difference on humoral distinctions and the flexibil
ity implicit in this system see Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in
Early Modern Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Daniel Vit
kus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean 1570-1630
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Ania Loomba suggest that it was in fact the
problem of conversion that "catalysed the development of 'biological' ideas of race,"
suggesting that new, racialist discourses were created in response to the inadequacy
and instability of existing racial discourse Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 26. For further evidence of a "climatological
but non-essentializing discourse" of difference, see Carol Thomas Neely, "Hot
Blood: Estranging Mediterranean Bodies in Early Modern Medical and Dramatic

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260 JENNIFER FEATHER

Texts" in Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the

Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Burlington, VT: A
5. See, for example, Lara Bovilsky, Barbarou
sance Stage (Minneapolis: University of Minne
Shades of Difference (Philadelphia: University
Bovilsky insists that an idea that we can underst
embedded in scientific racialism operates in the
ing Raymond Williams, helpfully distinguishe
emergent structures of feeling, arguing that a
with an emergent mythology of race over the c
centuries.
6. Jean Feerick, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (Buffalo,
NY: University of Toronto Press, 2010), esp. 31.
7. Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New
York: Palgrave, 2009), esp. 130.
8. The Oxford English Dictionary cites multiple meanings of the word "blood"
operating in the seventeenth century. Particularly frequent are references to blood as
"taking of life, manslaughter, murder, death" (Def. 3a), "The vital fluid; hence, the
vital principle, that upon which life depends; life" (Def. 4a), and "The supposed seat
of emotion, passion;. . . Passion, temper, mood, disposition; emphatically, high tem
per, mettle; anger" (Def. 5). In addition, it bears the sense of familial kinship. How
ever, the Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes between the definition of blood
that is "popularly treated as the typical part of the body which children inherit from
their parents and ancestors; hence that of parents and children, and of the members of
a family or race, is spoken of as identical, and as being distinct from that of other
families or races" (Def. 8) most popular in the nineteenth century and the notion of
blood as "Blood-relationship, and esp. parentage, lineage, descent" (Def. 9a) more
prevalent in the seventeenth century.
9. Both Emily Bartels and Michael Neill suggest that Iago is responsible for insti
tuting a racialist epistemology. As Bartels explains, "It is Iago and not the play itself
that attempts to fix the terms of difference, and Iago's terms not Othello's difference
that come under fire." Bartels, "Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Re
naissance Refashionings of Race," Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Winter 1990):
433-54, esp. 448. Michael Neill, "'Mulattos,' 'Blacks,' and 'Indian Moors': Othello
and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference," Shakespeare Quarterly 49,
no. 4 (Winter 1998), 361-74, esp. 362.
10. What follows is by no means an exhaustive list of discussions of race as calling
on an increasingly fixed idea of biology in Othello. However, it should serve to offer
some exemplary instances. Arthur A. Little, Jr., for instance, argues that
"Blackness... is an individual body or soul that creates and gives meaning to already
present cultural meanings." He points back to the stability of the body as a foundation
for cementing cultural meanings. Little, "'An Essence that's Not Seen': The Primal
Scene of Racism in Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 304
24, esp. 322. Similarly, Karen Newman invokes the notion of "stock prejudices
against blacks" implying the existence of a relatively stable racial discourse. New
man, "'And wash the Ethiop white': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello," Criti

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 "O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD" 261

cal Essays in Shakespeare's Othello, ed. Gerard Anthony

G. K. Hall, 1994), 124-43, esp. 128. This discourse, wh
overly preoccupied with sex, is one that Anthony Barthélé
tions of non-villainous Moors confirms. Barthélémy, "Eth
of the Nonvillainous Type," Critical Essays in Shakespeare
thony Barthélémy, (New York : G. K. Hall, 1994), 92-104
use of the terminology of black and fair cannot be ignore
discourse. As Hall puts it, "The language of fairness and
tially racialized." Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of
Modern England, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 19
Dympna Callaghan argues that "black skin is at once imm
expressing a sense of racial essence, even if that essence
these critics are right to point out the burgeoning racial dis
to Othello himself or even to the broader Venetian commu
11. See note 4.

12. For examples of the idea that Othello's occupation drives him violently to re
store a world of absolutes, see Vaughn, Othello, 50 and C.F. Burgess, Shakespeare
Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Spring, 1975): 208-13.
13. Not all early modern medical texts operate with the same conception of the
body. In addition to a burgeoning discourse of the mechanistic body, both Galenic
and Paracelsan model compete in these texts. See Stephanie Moss, "Transformation
and Degeneration: The Paracelsan/Galenic Body in Othello," in Disease, Diagnosis,
and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, eds. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 55-68, esp. 58.
14. Andreas Vesalius, Compendios a totius anatomie delineatio, aere exarata: per
Thomam Geminum (London: 1553), 15r. The ascription of this text to Vesalius is
somewhat misleading. Geminus copied plates from Vesalius's De Humani Corporis
Fabrica but appended a Fourteenth-century manuscript. See also page twenty six
above.

15. Quoted in Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni
versity Press, 1993), 65.
16. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. and trans. Floyd Dell and Paul
Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1927), 128-29.
17. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 127.
18. Ibid., 129.
19. For further discussion of this distinction, see John Sutton, Philosophy and
Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), esp. 57.
20. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 540. In early modern medicine, a "simple" is
any medicine that is formed of a single constituent. See Oxford English Dictionary,
"Simple" (Def. 6).
21. For a further discussion of the importance of miscegenation in the play see
Newman, "And wash the Ethiop white."
22. For further explication of the analogy between commonwealth, individual
household, and individual health see Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society:
Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Blackwell, 1988) and

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262 JENNIFER FEATHER

Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars : Repr

England, 1550-1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Unive
23. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 65.
24. Ibid., 728.
25. For examples of this reading see Stanley
Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Cambridge Un
erg, Anxious Masculinities in Early Modern En
sity Press, 1996), and David Hillman, Shakesp
the Interior of the Body (New York: Palgrave,
Othello's interiorized sense of self see also, Ka
and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicag
and Howard Marchitello, Narrative and Meanin
Skull and Other Histories (Cambridge: Cambrid
26. Mark Rose, "Othello's Occupation: Shak
alry," English Literary Renaissance (Autumn
27. Ibid., 305.
28. Richard Sugg argues that anatomy, at least
connection between body and soul literal rathe
Sugg, Murder after Death: Literature and Anat
NY : Cornell University Press, 2007), 89.
29. For more on Othello's verbal acumen in relation to race see Ania Loomba,
"Shakespeare and Cultural Difference," Alternative Shakespeares, Vol. 2 (New York:
Routledge, 1996) 164-91, esp. 174.
30. "Spinster," like blood, is a polyvalent term in early modern England, denoting
alternately an occupation, a criminal category, or a sexual category. As an occupation,
spinning could not be the sole means of support, and hence, Iago's invective dispar
ages not only Cassio's masculinity but also his professional stature. See Fiona Mc
Neill, Poor Women in Shakespeare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
esp. 31-34.
31. See, for instance, Paster, The Body Embarrassed , esp. 64-112 and Susanne
Scholz, Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early
Modern England (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), esp. 15-38.
32. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 655.
33. For a further discussion the split between mind and body circulating in early
modern medical texts see Sugg, Murder after Death, 130-159.
34. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1996), 29.
35. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 29. Though William Harvey published "On
the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals" in 1628, most of the work for it was
completed in 1616. Gail Kern Paster describes the understanding that preceded Har
vey saying that "In the conceptual linking of blood flow, both arterial and venous,
with neural transmission, blood, spirit, and sensation become nearly indistinguishable
in action and properties," indicating that blood was not merely the purveyor of nutri
ment but the substance of identity. Gail Kern Paster, "Nervous Tension: Networks
of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body" in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of
Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, eds. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 107-25, esp. 113.

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 "O BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD" 263

36. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identi

Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Pat
Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the 'Secret Place' of Wom
The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ MacDonald (Ithaca
1994) 105-46.
37. Rose, "Othello's Occupation," 308.
38. For a discussion of English anatomical studies in th
C. D. O'Malley and K. F. Russell, introduction to Introdu
Facsimile Reproduction with English Translation and an I
tomical Studies in Tudor England, by David Edwardes (S
versity Press, 1961), esp. 24.
39. Thomas Geminus: Compendiosa totius anatomie delin
First English Edition of 1553 in the Version of Nicholas
by C.D. O'Malley (London: Dawson's of Pall Mall, 1959)
40. Tellingly, Katharine Park points out the heart rathe
locus of selfhood until the eighteenth century. Katharin
Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissecti
2006), 264. For the significance of the heart, see also Wil
the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Cambridge, 2008).

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