129.
4 ]
Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise
of Magic
donald hedrick
DONALD HEDRICK, professor of English at
Kansas State University, founded and di-
rected one of the first graduate programs
in cultural studies. He coedited Shake-
speare without Class: Misappropriations
of Cultural Capital (Palgrave, 2000), and
he has published widely on Shakespeare,
early modern drama, architecture, film,
cultural theory, business culture, conver-
sational linguistics, and pedagogy. This
essay, his second for PMLA, is part of a
book project, “The Entertainment Un-
conscious,” examining the origins of the
self-valorization of entertainment value
escorting capital’s triumph.
Magic is what happens when you’re paying attention to something else.
—Winifred Gallagher
Magic1 and Magic2
he present study, while necessarily lacking the historical breadth
and thoroughness of Keith homas’s magisterial Religion and the
Decline of Magic, seeks to invert his central claim about the early
modern decline deined by the inroads that rational and experimen-
tal thinking made on occult and, by extension, religious thought.1
In efect, I shit the topic beneath the shell of the term magic, ob-
serving that Thomas’s study constitutively excludes a magic un-
mentioned. His attention to supernatural magic, designated here
as magic1, produces historiography more for a history of ideas
than for one of embodied practices. I stipulate a counterconcept,
magic2 , or stage magic, and related forms of legerdemain exploit-
ing attention, to demonstrate that sleights of hand, body, mind, lan-
guage, and thought inform the distinctive tragedy of Shakespeare’s
Othello. Dramatizing characters’ perceptions more than their self-
knowledge, tragedy ater this analysis looks less like an “epistemo-
logical problem” (Cavell 126) and more like a perceptual one.2
Renaissance studies have almost exclusively focused on occult
magic (hermeticism, Neoplatonism, white magic, folk belief), as
have works on Shakespearean magic.3 Even inluential treatments
of Othello, such as Robert Heilman’s Magic in the Web: Language
and Action in Othello and Alvin Kernan’s he Playwright as Magi-
cian: Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public heater,
emphasize the supernatural. Although Iago’s tactics are occasion-
ally linked to stage magic, they are mostly analogized to nonmagic
© 2014 donald hedrick
PMLA 129.4 (2014), published by the Modern Language Association of America 649
650 Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic
professions—playwright, director, manager,
or actor4—thus embodying theater-privileged
reiications of “metatheatricality.”
Magic 2 , often paratheatrical, does not
actually require stage performance in ixed
theater’s industry, although magic stunts do
appear throughout Shakespeare (Bottom’s ass
head, he Tempest’s disappearing banquet).
Designating a broad practice of technical
deceptions, magic2 includes ofstage legerde-
main by pickpockets and the tricks demysti-
ied in popular “discoverie” (i.e., exposure)
literature, which revealed rogues’ tricks,
“cony-catching” or gulling con games (Har-
man), dicing cheats (Mihil Mumchance), and
money scams (Pasquils Jestes).
Conjuring shows, increasing in the late
sixteenth century and accompanied by fraud
and petty crime (During 79), included card,
dice, and other table tricks; false-bottomed
boxes; false daggers; mirrors and screens;
automata shows; and more. hen called “jug-
glery,” such magic now carries the stigma of
entertainment, theorized by Richard Dyer’s
study Only Entertainment and perhaps re-
f lecting prejudice beyond Jonas Barish’s
historicized “anti-theatrical prejudice.” Inter-
pretive biases result, such as failure to appreci-
ate Othello’s debt to popular “sensational and
graphic” domestic tragedies (Benson 3). Many
marginalized entertainments—acrobatics,
miming, clowning, and other performances
at fairs and markets and in households—have
been largely neglected (Westfall 45; Preiss
2–16). Aside from related work on rogue lit-
erature (Dionne and Mentz), scholarship on
early modern magic 2 has only recently ac-
quired its counterpart’s thoroughness. Philip
Butterworth’s pioneering study Magic on the
Early English Stage must nevertheless often
rely on limited archives of ephemera, city re-
cords of payments to “jugglers,” and anecdotes
sometimes themselves deceptions. Another
important corrective, Simon During’s Mod-
ern Enchantments, primarily covers “secu-
lar magic,” especially illusionism, from the
[ PM L A
eighteenth century on as supernaturalism’s
“double” (61). During’s thorough cultural ac-
count of illusionism’s inluence connects it to
commercial deception deemed largely benign
because “self-consciously illusory” (26), with-
out exploring distraction technologies.5 Asso-
ciated with Las Vegas, where performances by
pickpockets now join magic acts in popular-
ity,6 magic2 has low prestige value as cultural
capital. Yet perhaps as architectural postmod-
ernism once discovered, there is more to learn
from Las Vegas (Venturi, Brown, and Izenour).
As noncanonical “minor” literature for
Deleuze and Guattari deterritorializes an
entire literary ield (105–06), so magic2 reor-
ganizes the ield of tragic performance, as its
“entertainment unconscious” (Hedrick, “King
Lear”). Familiar Tudor dramatic enchanters,
like Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus (whose
necromancy descends into trivial conjura-
tions) and Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon, would
completely vanish from Jacobean theater
(Traister 1), while the nonliterary performant
energies associated with magic2 would find
habitation there. his magic is identiied with
psychological, criminal, and commercial prac-
tices of manipulations of attention—current
topics in fields ranging from cognitive psy-
chology to philosophy; some neuroscientists
become actual magicians to explore attention
(Macknik and Martinez-Conde).7 his range
of associations establishes theatrical “distrib-
uted cognition,” a system of know-how com-
bining textual practice, actor embodiments,
and theatrical property and space (Tribble 4),
to which I add paratheatrical entertainments.
hrough such associations, Othello joins the
larger historical narrative of capital’s triumph,
preiguring its later ampliication and multi-
plication of distractions, condemned or cel-
ebrated (Benjamin 804);8 its maximization of
afect; its elevation of the trivial; and its novel
ability to produce more capabilities for plea-
sure. By fracturing the genre, Shakespeare
creates a form that—if tragedy at all—rewrites
tragedy’s accompanying afect of wonder un-
129.4 ] Donald Hedrick
der a new sign, perhaps speaking less urgently
to Shakespeare’s moment than to ours, giving
us tutorials on attention.
“O Gull!”: Tragedy and Discovery
Our understanding of Othello’s innovative-
ness has been much advanced by scholarship
enlarging its historical context, especially in-
sights from feminist criticism. After earlier
interest in characterological questions, Shake-
speareans have explored the gendered ideo-
logical territory of domestic space (Rose; Wall;
Korda), in relation to and as a model of state
sovereignty (Orlin). We have acknowledged
the rising importance of “companionate mar-
riage” (Stone), as well as Puritan-inflected
reciprocity of wives as biblical “helpmeets”
(Deats)—complicating doctrines dictating
traditional wifely obedience. Important schol-
arship has also excavated ideological materi-
als regarding racial and postcolonial others
(Bartels), judicial thought (Maus), Reforma-
tion debates on faith in “evidence of things
unseen” (Diehl; McAdam), and “cultural traf-
ic” in trade and exploration (Vitkus).
Aside from these valuable contextualiza-
tions, what has struck generations of readers
and theatergoers is Othello’s sheer sensation-
alism. Michael Goldman observes that of all
Shakespeare’s tragedies, this is “the one in
which the audience comes closest to inter-
vening in the action” (46), as demonstrated
by amusing anecdotes of audience members
interrupting performances to stop Iago. Aside
from a 1610 note about Desdemona’s afect-
ingly staged death, the major seventeenth-
century response was Thomas Rymer’s
infamous extended denunciation of Othello
as “bloody farce” (1693). Loyal defenses fol-
lowed: Samuel Johnson argued that Shake-
speare, a comic writer by “instinct,” followed
not neoclassical rules but nature (17). Rymer’s
critique, however, survived in critical aterlife:
while later critics rejected Rymer as a cur-
mudgeon, others resuscitated positively his
651
disapprovals. His distaste nevertheless mir-
rored Johnson’s own summation of Othello’s
overpowering effect as “not to be endured”
(Pechter 193).
Rymer’s overtly racist contempt is fueled
by Othello’s sensationalism and sustained nar-
rative of duping or gulling the “jealous Boob”
and others (Rymer 128). Shakespeare pep-
pers this nontragic action, performed by Iago
for “sport and proit” (1.3.368),9 with famil-
iar touches of the medieval comic character
Vice (Spivack). Iago thus subverts both tragic
protagonist and genre, perhaps accounting
for Shakespeare’s hesitation to use the term
tragic, especially ater Othello (Rossiter 183).
Othello’s melodramatic climax highlights
the long delayed denunciation of Othello
that Emilia delivers to his face, on discover-
ing Desdemona murdered: “O gull, o dolt, /
As ignorant as dirt!” (5.2.170–71). Her insult
evokes the long-standing critical controversy
over Othello (Kolin, “Blackness” 10), whether
readable as the extreme of ideal hero (Bradley
137) or of blackface clown (Bristol 90). Perfor-
mances, however, have most oten represented
him nobly (Potter 24)—if, more recently,
ironically (Pechter, Othello 108–12)—ex-
cept when he has been played as a “racial-
ized bufoon.”10 Given the gulling of Othello,
how can we think of him as nobly tragic, or
look “beyond . . . the defeat of a more or less
noble dupe” (Snyder 89)? Emilia’s outburst
loosens the play’s traditional link to trag-
edies of self-knowledge and fall. Strikingly,
Emilia chooses as insult a gesture from low-
est culture: the popular literature of exposing
gulling practices, such as Thomas Dek ker’s
satirical Guls Horne-book (1609). Her speech
undoubtedly serves as a lightning rod for
audience frustration intensely magniied by
Othello’s relentless, play-length gulling.
Tragedy, as Raymond Williams argues,
should be considered a “selective tradition”
(Modern Tragedy 30), each era sorting out
diferent elements, oten nostalgically (Grady,
“Modernity”), for a historiography. Greek
652 Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic
tragic protagonists, although sometimes sub-
jected to gelan, or scornful laughing (Wallace
20), are less frequently gulls, except insofar
as they are deceived by extraordinary or di-
vine fate—powers that make one marry one’s
mother (Oedipus) or delusionally battle sheep
(Ajax). Greek plots do contain secret villain-
ous deceptions, such as the revenge Medea
carries out on her husband, Jason, and his
new bride, although that tragedy fools the au-
dience as well (Foley 261), revealing Medea’s
supernatural powers only at the end, when
she departs as a demon mounting a dragon-
driven sun chariot.
Today, cognitive psychology furnishes its
own gulling literature, researching “focaliza-
tion” accompanied by “inattentional blind-
ness” (Most et al.). he psychologist Daniel
Simons devised a famous experiment in
which subjects focusing on a video and asked
to perform a complicated visual task fail to
notice a gorilla-costumed person who crosses
the screen and even stops to beat his chest.
Given the subjects’ assigned “attention set,”
or perceptual orientation, the gorilla becomes
invisible, an extreme efect of perceptual dis-
traction (Chabris and Simons).
Othello’s many gazings and blindings—
inviting actors’ complex glances and gazes—
include a humorous “blindness” moment
related not to jealousy but to invisibility
through status, the lip side of imagining the
unseen. Conferring with senators about the
Turkish military threat, the Duke welcomes
his indispensable general, Othello, but fails
to see the distraught father-in-law entering to
accuse Othello: “I did not see you. Welcome,
gentle signor” (1.3.50). Such frissons of poten-
tially comic, momentary perceptual disorder
litter the tragedy, in throwaway moments
such as the Clown’s paying the Musician
for “music that may not be heard” (3.1.15).
Othello’s “noble” blindness thus inds reduc-
tive analogy in everyday blindness—just as
many cognitive experiments demonstrate
ordinary inattention, experiments like magic
[ PM L A
tricks performed on gulls. Psychology’s irst,
late-nineteenth-century experimental labora-
tories studied attention length (Johnson and
Proctor 7), even acknowledging attention’s
connection to stage magic (Pillsbury 120–21).
While the entire cast is Iago’s gulls,
Shakespeare distinguishes among them to
create a wonder cabinet of fools, like one
contemporary jestbook’s “Baker’s Dozen of
Gulles” (Pasquils Jestes E4v). Broadening the
range of gulls by adding the clueless Roderigo
to the novella by Cinthio that he used as his
source for Othello, Shakespeare opens the play
with Roderigo’s complaint that Iago had not
informed him of the marriage: “Tush, never
tell me! I take it much unkindly / hat thou,
Iago, who hast had my purse / As if the strings
were thine, shouldst know of this” (1.1.1–3).
Roderigo’s word choice directs atten-
tion to something unseen—losing control of
one’s purse, a term also for a magician’s bag
of concealments. He unwittingly underscores
the sleight of hand defining magicians’ and
cutpurses’ joint art of distraction—an aes-
thetic concept that has been argued to anchor
“an entire subjective and interpretive ethic
for Shakespeare” (Pye, “To hrow Out” 427).
At Roderigo’s words, the audience may mo-
mentarily turn its attention away from the
stage, looking out for pickpockets working
the crowd or watching notorious pickpockets
captured and tied to the stage for sensation-
alist “real entertainment” (Hedrick, “Real
Entertainment”)—even more discomfort-
ing if audiences risk being distracted by the
play itself (but leaving open the question of
Shakespeare’s possible self-identification as
magician-artist- distracter).11 As Iago bilks
Roderigo of gold and jewels, his refrain “Put
money in thy purse” (1.3.333)—followed by
smug soliloquizing: “hus do I ever make my
fool my purse” (365)—recalls pickpocketing, as
does Desdemona’s lament that she “had rather
have lost my purse full of crusadoes” than the
handkerchief (3.4.23–24). While Shakespeare
invents a “rhetorical theater” that gives the
129.4 ] Donald Hedrick
audience an illusion of “having seen things
impossible to view” (Hutson 318), Othello par-
ticularly generates a mindset of global suspi-
cion, theatrical and extratheatrical, with its
judicial, evidentiary “unseen” (Maus).
Roderigo typifies extreme gullibility,
blind to everything, defining classic “inat-
tentional blindness”—the becoming invis-
ible of what is unattended—now studied by
cognitive psychologists.12 heir experiments,
however, demonstrate this vulnerability to be
common, blinding even shrewder characters.
Yet Roderigo fails basic psychology, as Iago re-
cruits him as confederate while professing that
he serves only himself, famously declaring, “I
am not what I am” (1.1.65). Observing this
pretend confederacy, we are more disposed to
scrutinize the next one: Iago and Emilia.
Gulling not the gullible but those of supe-
rior perception—culturally “hoodwinking su-
periors”13—thus feeds Iago’s escalating “sport.”
Always entertaining himself, Iago uses mag-
ic2’s one-upmanship logic to create scenarios
whereby, immediately following our superior
amusement at watching someone else fooled,
we discover ourselves fooled. he magician’s
self-conident audience, like traditional tragic
protagonists, falls from hubristic visual superi-
ority. So are Desdemona and Othello undone
not by their weaknesses but by their “virtue[s],”
which Iago boasts of turning to “pitch”: “And
out of her own goodness make the net / hat
shall enmesh them all” (2.3.335–36).
Shakespeare accordingly underscores
how Othello’s self- confidence—“Think’st
thou I’d make a life of jealousy?” (3.3.181)—
and even wariness of being manipulated
(126–27) are redirected against him. Legalis-
tically demanding that Iago provide “ocular
proof ” of Desdemona’s inidelity, moreover,
ironically makes Othello more subject to
magical rearrangement of perception. While
we acknowledge the magician’s skill, but not
often our vulnerability, we are fooled even
as fooling practices are “discovered.” Shake-
speare comments on this distinctive audac-
653
ity of stage-magic aesthetics when hersites
describes Cressida’s infidelity: “a juggling
trick—to be secretly open” (Tro. 5.2.24).14
Exposure of one’s own tricks corresponds,
moreover, to Othello’s judicial and sexual the-
matics exposing or “dilating” secrets (Parker).
So do psychologists’ own “tricks” (experi-
ments) even work on subjects fully aware of
attempts to trick them.15 The exposure of a
magic trick becomes just another trick.
Depending less on tragedy’s traditional
powers of fate or providence, Shakespeare’s
gulling narrative amplifies Cinthio’s fewer
deceptions (Mehl 63), to which Othello adds
the gulling of Cassio, whose self- confessed
“poor and unhappy brains for drinking”
make him vulnerable (2.3.29–30). At the
Cyprus military outpost, Iago plays enter-
tainer, leading drinking songs to distract
Cassio from his duty and getting him ired by
Othello for a nighttime brawl with Roderigo
and the island’s governor. Cinthio’s Captain
tries returning the stolen handkerchief to
Desdemona when her husband is not there,
but the Moor unexpectedly returns before the
Captain leaves. Shakespeare reconceives this
moment as an extemporaneous move by an
observant Iago: Cassio’s innocently leaving
Desdemona’s company just as Othello enters
is capitalized on by Iago’s understated com-
ment “Ha, I like not that.” Directing Othello’s
attention to Cassio’s departure, Iago tries irst
to awaken his master’s suspicion: “I cannot
think it, / hat he would steal away so guilty-
like / Seeing your coming” (3.3.37–39).
Shakespeare recasts the crude source-
tale plot, in which Desdemona is beaten to
death, as skillful, magician-style diversions:
Iago shits Othello’s primary murderous de-
sire from Cassio to Desdemona and diverts
Othello’s ordering of Iago to poison Desde-
mona into Iago’s scheme for Othello to stran-
gle her “in her bed,” prompting Othello’s
typifying response “he justice of it pleases”
(4.1.197), thereby substituting Othello for
himself as murderer. Iago bets accurately that
654 Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic
an impassioned Othello will be too distracted
to cover up his crime.
Shakespeare does eliminate one oppor-
tunity for staging sleight of hand, albeit un-
skilled. In Cinthio’s tale the Ensign lifts the
handkerchief ater Desdemona holds a baby,
whereas Shakespeare deploys his husband-
wife confederacy: Emilia seizes the opportu-
nity to retrieve the fallen handkerchief ater
Desdemona distractedly attends to Othello’s
distraction. Here Emilia plays novice pick-
pocket—less adept at distraction than at
retrieving unattended triles. Taking the hand-
kerchief to Iago to “please his fantasy,” Emilia
is greeted with an expectant trainer’s query—
Iago eagerly asks if she stole it (3.3.315).
Despite its immersion in perceptual ad-
ventures, Othello does not support some cur-
rently debated cognitive or philosophical view
of attention; rather, it airms the consensus
among psychologists that attention is not a
“unitary phenomenon” (Mitchell and Le Pel-
ley 7). Displaying all the ways in which atten-
tion is manipulated, Othello radically expands
what Bertrand Evans theorized as Shake-
spearean “discrepant awareness” (audience’s
vs. character’s knowledge) into multiple forms
of discrepant attention beitting magical-act
variety16—what Ellen Spolsky terms “diferent
kinds of visual knowledge” (64; see also Cook;
McConachie). Not my subject here, these dif-
ferences could provide research-generating
taxonomies further illuminating Othello’s per-
ceptual issues and even performance possibili-
ties for actors. For instance, Othello contrasts
focalized and distributed attention (Watzl
726): the former, switchable on or of, exem-
pliies the narrowed or (mis)directed focus of
gulls; the latter the varying global awareness
of cozener, magician, or pickpocket.
The Rise of Distraction: From Montaigne
to Adorno
Yet attention must be historicized. What hap-
pens to distraction between Montaigne and
[ PM L A
the Frankfurt School of heodor Adorno, dur-
ing the historical trajectory Othello mediates
between residual and emergent formations?
Viewing traditional tragic nobility as a casu-
alty of cultural vulgarity (Eagleton 87), Max
Horkheimer and Adorno treat distractions as
deining politics and aesthetics in “he Cul-
ture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Decep-
tion.” he culture industry, although arguably
similar to what is regarded as London’s “en-
tertainment industry” (Bruster, “Birth” 224),
earns their scorn as “fun”: “Fun is a medicinal
bath which the entertainment industry never
fails to prescribe. It makes laughter the instru-
ment for cheating happiness” (Horkheimer
and Adorno 112). Promoting cheap novelty,
it sufers “permanent compulsion to produce
new efects” (101), requiring being capable of
experiencing multiplying pleasures (genuss-
fähig), which Marx considered art’s reception
character under capital (409).
Surveying this cognitive territory in “Of
Diversion,” Montaigne adopts a perspective
that sharply contrasts with the Frankfurt
School’s orientation. Especially striking is
how positively Montaigne treats diversions
and how much less entertainment igures in
them. Examples abound: military diversion
of enemies (recalling the “pageant” of Turkish
naval maneuvers in Othello designed to keep
the Venetians in “false gaze” [1.3.19–20]), dis-
traction of multitudes from riot, and the sal-
utary distraction a friend might perform to
cure one’s “diseases of the mind” like revenge
passion (634). In the light of Montaigne’s
probable inluence on Shakespeare, we note
that Hamlet’s play-length diversions from
his revenge duty often transvalue distrac-
tion positively, relieving his depression while
causing Claudius’s. Montaigne recommends
diversion for splitting obsessive passions into
pieces, as he once did to divert his own ro-
mantic obsession. Philosophical diversion
helpfully distracts “from consideration of the
thing itself,” such as death—stoicism thus re-
quiring distraction to be efective.
129.4 ] Donald Hedrick
Three of Montaigne’s topics anticipate
the magic 2 entertainment sea change: the
trivial, actors’ affects, and the principle of
variety. Montaigne explains that “little” is
required to “divert and distract . . . to hold
us,” that an actor diverting us may even feel
the pretended emotion, and that variety rules:
it “solaces, dissolves, and dissipates” strong
feelings (635), an aesthetic opposing Philip
Sidney’s disdain for “hodgepodge” or “mon-
grel” tragedy that mixes, as Othello does igu-
ratively, kings and clowns (Wallace 41).
Constituting new pressures on attention,
the elevation of distracting variety character-
izes London’s proliferation of entertainment
choices, its “ongoing wealth of diversions”
(Weimann 111) that paralleled theater’s va-
riety and excess (Lopez 38, 81). Its “basics,”
however, included animal blood sports,
dicing houses, brothels, athletic contests,
acrobatic “feats of activity,” and drinking—
anticipating the psychological consequence
that with too much choice one focuses on
small differences (Gallagher 126). Popular
choices were the pamphlet publications such
as “gulling” guides and “magic books” re-
counting tales about rogues (Mentz; Whibley)
aiming lowbrow or lower, entertainingly ex-
posing distracting urban deceptions (Dionne;
Dionne and Mentz, “Rogues”).
One entertainment commercializer of
trivial attention accumulation, perhaps the
irst person to be “famous for being famous”
(Capp 195), was the self-styled “Water-Poet”
John Taylor. A hames ferryman and autodi-
dact, Taylor publicized stunts, such as his river
trip in a paper boat or the gastronomic specta-
cle of a celebrity “great eater” on a public stage.
Taylor’s dozens of pamphlets include some
of the earliest nonsense verse, poetic odes to
laundry, and catalogs of taverns’ and bears’
names—mixed together with serious histori-
cal, religious, and journalistic pamphlets in a
much mocked would-be classicizing volume,
All the Workes of John Taylor the Water Poet
(1630), the next literary folio following Shake-
655
speare’s. Given such commercial monumen-
talization of trivia mixed with prestige value,
as cultured taste was hardening, Othello’s hy-
bridity would unsurprisingly be skewered by
Rymer as “he Tragedy of the Handkerchief.”
Within his project of purging Christianity of
bogus witchcrat (Anglo 108), Reginald Scot
in he Discoverie of Witchcrat (1584) briely
treats more trivial magic, exposing hand-
kerchief tricks and other magic2 practices he
describes as “cousenage so manifestlie de-
livered in the art of juggling [that] I thought
good to discover it, together with the rest of
the other deceiptfull arts; being sorie that it
falleth out to my lot, to laie open the secrets of
this mysterie, to the hinderance of such poore
men as live thereby” (268). Onto his militant
debunking mission he thus grats exposure of
professional magic, casually wrecking the live-
lihoods of entertainers sometimes denounced
for becoming rich by “juggling and jesting”
(Ingram 10). Itself “pickpocketed,” the chapter
was published in many editions anonymously
as Hocus Pocus Junior: he Art of Legerdemain
Discovered, Scot’s “discoveries” turned magi-
cian’s manual.
Beitting magic 2’s conventions, Shake-
speare intensiies the handkerchief ’s stage-
prop function of directing and sustaining
theatrical attention. As in a magic act, the
handkerchief manipulates our focalization
and Othello’s: its whiteness disappears and
reappears in variations on conveyance (leg-
erdemain, furtive transference)17—the gen-
eral term for con- artistry sleights paired
with its companion term, confederacy (But-
terworth 49).
Conveyance
Early in Othello Shakespeare ironically em-
ploys the magic2 term conveyance, meaning
“transport,” as well as legal property transfer,
when Othello requests that Iago, “a man of
honesty and trust,” accompany Desdemona to
Cyprus. “To his conveyance I assign my wife,”
656 Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic
he says (1.3.283–84), glancing at conveyance’s
ironic other meaning—“thet” or “sleight of
hand or jugglery” (“Conveyance”)—omi-
nously forecasting Iago’s craty conveyances.
When we first encounter Iago with
Emilia, his role as onstage entertainer, not
soldier, might surprise us. Earlier, having
awakened Brabanzio with racist slanders in
his failed attempt to disrupt Othello’s mar-
riage, Iago conjures lurid imagery (“your
daughter and the Moor are now making the
beast with two backs,” he shouts [1.1.110–18])
for our appalled amusement. Later he en-
tertains the onstage audience dockside—a
scene that may distract from the play but is
not therefore “gratuitous” (Pye, “To Throw
Out” 429). Anxiously awaiting Othello’s ship,
Desdemona innocently turns to Iago for
Montaigne-like distraction, admitting, “I am
not merry, but I do beguile / he thing I am
by seeming otherwise” (2.1.125–26). Iago of-
fers overtly misogynist amusement, reminis-
cent of battle-of-the-sexes entertainment in
popular pamphlets, in the rhetorical “woman
question” debate about the nature of women,
oten representing misogynists treated comi-
cally (Woodbridge), and in he Taming of the
Shrew. Performative stage sexism seems espe-
cially entertaining to Desdemona, who repeat-
edly prompts an Iago well known for comic
improvisational skill—“Come, how wouldst
thou praise me?” (2.1.127)—like London au-
diences at staged contests throwing prompts
to improvising comedians (Wiles 14).18
Here follow forty lines of perhaps forget-
table banter, oten omitted in performance,
whose entertainment unconscious seems
apparent from the Folio’s curious textual
italicization of Iago’s jests, which may “sig-
nal a stylized delivery . . . of familiar comic
routines” (Shakespeare, Othello: A Norton
Critical Edition 32). Iago amuses Desdemona
and Emilia with his patter, turning praise
of women’s types into insults, claiming, for
instance, that a “fair and wise” woman will
only use her beauty for ill. He responds to
[ PM L A
their prompts—how about “black and witty”
(Desdemona), “fair and foolish” (Emilia),
or “foul and foolish” (Desdemona [2.1.128–
45])?—and improvises a tour-de-force sonnet
describing a perfect, “deserving” woman. Its
inal lines brand her as only good “to suckle
fools and chronicle small beer” (i.e., keep
household accounts [150–62])—the sonnet’s
“turn” “discovering” the soldier-entertainer’s
contempt for gullibility.
With a magician’s virtuosity, Iago places
his corrupting rhetorical legerdemain in plain
sight, assuring audience complicity with the
“secretly open.” Cataloging his virtuoso tac-
tics here would add little to their extensive
critical history—a history that testiies to their
domination of the tragic. Worth underscor-
ing, however, is how they require magicians’
embodied skills of direction and misdirec-
tion, especially visually, illustrating pick-
pocketing’s prerequisites: an eagle eye, a quick
hand, and enormous audacity. Sometimes
Iago announces his tactics innocently: tell-
ing Cassio that he will “devise a mean to draw
the Moor / Out of the way” for Cassio to meet
with Desdemona (3.1.35–36). Iago is willing to
appear as a pander, something Othello later
accuses Emilia of being. Indirectly summariz-
ing Shakespeare’s transformation of tragedy,
Iago confides to Roderigo that “we work by
wit, and not by witchcrat” (2.3.345).
When Iago advises Othello, “Look to
your wife,” he shrewdly adds directions for
creating a suspicious, mental attention set be-
itting a magician’s subject. He tells Othello
to scrutinize everything he observes—“Wear
your eyes thus, not jealous nor secure”
(3.3.201–02)—ironically echoing the bitter
father-in-law’s earlier, ominous couplet “Look
to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. / She has
deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3.291–
92). Opportunities abound to practice direct-
ing characters’ or audiences’ visual focus,
even in unremarkable cues noting entrances
and exits, such as Emilia’s “Here he comes”
(4.1.97) and Iago’s “Before me, look where she
129.4 ] Donald Hedrick
comes” (140)—typical magician’s patter tac-
tically stating the obvious, to direct focus or
even, as Scot revealed, to “protract the time”
for further manipulations (Butterworth 85).19
Directed perception is also sexualized, when
Iago attempts, unsuccessfully, to divert Cas-
sio’s gentlemanly admiration of Desdemona
(“she’s a most fresh and delicate creature”) to
her body, strikingly inviting focus on her eyes
(“What an eye she has!” 2.3.19–20). Iago’s suc-
cesses and occasional failures at perceptual
manipulation generate moment-by-moment
microsuspenses about the deceptions’ esca-
lating risks.20 In the inal nighttime scene’s
chaos, when Iago cold-bloodedly murders the
wounded Roderigo, we watch Iago’s global
management of the atermath, his cognitively
broad attention contrasting with the blink-
ered focalization he urges on others, direct-
ing their focus on Cassio’s mistress Bianca as
if her sexuality were the source of the men’s
violence—“What, look you pale?” “Do you
perceive the gastness of her eye?” “Behold
her well; I pray you, look upon her. / Do you
see, gentlemen? Nay, guiltiness / Will speak”
(5.1.106–12)—thus drumming attention away
from the search for a real cause.
Legerdemain requires interdependent
skills: narrowly focalizing as well as broadly
distributing attention across elements of the
scene and others’ awareness. Iago’s earlier
cynical aside grotesquely focalizes, recording
details of Desdemona’s and Cassio’s innocent,
though possibly lirtatious, banter: “He takes
her by the palm. . . . Ay, smile upon her, do.
. . . Very good, well kissed. . . . Yet again your
ingers to your lips?” Yet from this visual in-
tensity Iago can quickly shift to aural atten-
tion, announcing to everyone Othello’s arrival:
“he Moor—I know his trumpet” (2.1.168–77).
Iago’s extemporaneous magician-like practices
and speech replicate traditional clowning’s
“visible acts of unscripted bodily performance”
(Weimann and Bruster 79), thus resisting tex-
tuality (Preiss). While comedy can be narrated
(as in the era’s popular jestbooks), magic2 tricks
657
cannot—their efectiveness is constituted en-
tirely by performative “liveness” (Auslander).
By act 4, scene 1, Iago has successfully
amused us with villainous variety. Othello,
wrecked by jealousy, is now completely dis-
tracted and “distract” (i.e., mad), incoherently
babbling—“Pish! Noses, ears, and lips! Is’t
possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!”
(4.1.40–41). His sudden falling “trance” or it
shows attention overload, prefiguring cur-
rent “pathological” anxieties attributable to
late capitalism’s communicative saturation of
human attention (Dean, Communist Horizon
143). Iago then stage-manages Othello’s spying
of Cassio, Bianca, and the handkerchief. Ater
establishing another attention set, which al-
lows Othello to see “gibes and notable scorns /
hat dwell in every region of his [Cassio’s] face”
(4.1.80–81), and commanding Othello to “mark
his gesture,” Iago continues his visual coaching:
“Did you perceive how he laughed at his vice?”
“And did you see the handkerchief?” (164–66).
he scenes following this dramatic build
require closer attention. Lodovico arrives
from Venice, discharging Othello of his gen-
eralship—the catalyst for Othello’s greatest
brutality yet. Driven to frenzy, he publicly
strikes Desdemona, then humiliates her with
sexual slurs: “Sir, she can turn and turn, and
yet go on / And turn again, and she can weep,
sir, weep; / And she’s obedient, as you say,
obedient, / Very obedient” (250–53).
Iago stands by as observer, manipulat-
ing as oten at a distance—the audience likely
scrutinizing him for signs of suppressed
amusement. When Lodovico naively inquires
about Othello’s anger—“Is there division
twixt my lord and Cassio?”—the reply Desde-
mona gives undoes her further, pushing the
already incensed Othello, harboring murder-
ous fantasies just now conjured up with Iago,
over an emotional clif: “A most unhappy one.
I would do much / T’atone them, for the love I
bear to Cassio” (224–25). he magic works, as
if Iago were performing a magician’s popular
ventriloquism act (Butterworth 108):
658 Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic
OTHELLO. Fire and brimstone!
DESDEMONA. My lord?
OTHELLO. Are you
wise? (4.1.226)
When Desdemona naively refers to “the love
I bear to Cassio,” she not only exacerbates
her guilty appearance to Othello but also
renders her inidelity public—“discovering”
her transgression while branding Othello a
cuckold. We anticipate his explosion from
his phobia of public humiliation and racial
self-loathing: “My name, that was as fresh /
as Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black /
As mine own face” (3.3.391–93). His rage
then implicitly threatens violence: asking
Desdemona, “Are you wise?” Othello is not
questioning her wisdom but issuing a warn-
ing to “be smart.” Yet her response sounds
even more audacious—ignoring his implied
threat, she replies she is “glad” that Cassio is
taking over Othello’s generalship. Approv-
ing of Cassio’s replacing him—words Othello
hears as replacing him as husband—is simply
too much: he strikes her, calling her “Devil!”
(235). Shakespeare will later replay this in-
tense dramatic moment, Iago’s masterwork
of preliminary violence.
Desdemona and Othello having exited,
Iago responds to Lodovico’s question—
whether Othello’s distraction is typical or an
angry reaction to being discharged. Iago re-
veals his hidden triumphalism translucently,
answering that what Lodovico witnessed
needed no coaching to be perceived as the
general’s ruin:
It is not honesty in me to speak
What I have seen and known. You shall
observe him,
And his own courses will denote him so
hat I may save my speech. (4.1.274–77)
In this iterative pattern of diverting others
from probing causes, Iago asserts brazenly
that there is nothing further to “discover”:
just look, don’t interpret.
[ PM L A
Confederacy
Along with conveyance, the essential skill of
early modern magicians and con artists was
confederacy—provided by Emilia in the role
of apprentice.21 Her character has generated
controversy in both traditional and feminist
criticism, the latter oten reading her variously
as “foil to Desdemona’s submission” (Deats
249) and key to Othello’s diagnosis of em-
bodied “patriarchal ideology” (Marshall 88).
Emilia, like the play’s sensationalism, has of-
ten produced highly personal responses from
scholars: Kim Hall remembers an outspoken
aunt as “an Emilia” (xii); Carol homas Neely
even identiies herself as an Emilia critic (213).
Emilia’s complicity with Iago, particularly her
failure to reveal her knowledge of the hand-
kerchief, has drawn more critical readings,
especially recently (H. Berger).
Contrasting her voluble “discovery”
of the play’s intrigue—“All, all cry shame
against me, yet I’ll speak!” (5.2.228)—is the
silence Emilia initially maintains in her role
as Desdemona’s obedient attendant. Defend-
ing Emilia against Iago’s jesting accusation
that his wife has a liberal tongue, Desdemona
protests, “Alas, she has no speech.”22 Iago’s
darker charge, that even when Emilia is quiet
she is a mental shrew who “chides with think-
ing,” elicits a denial from Emilia, who never-
theless shares pentameter lines with him:
IAGO. She puts her tongue a little in her heart
And chides with thinking.
EMILIA. You ha’ little cause
to say so.
. . . . . . . . .
EMILIA. You shall not write my praise.
IAGO. No, let
me not. (2.1.110–19)
Knowing this partnership’s catastrophic con-
clusion, we may resist reading their initial
banter as a merry war or erotic “friction”
(Greenblatt, “Fiction”). We detect instead its
iceberg’s tip of resentment; yet here Iago and
129.4 ] Donald Hedrick
Emilia publicly perform a married life, repre-
senting their joint self as an “honest,” bicker-
ing, easygoing team—a gregarious entertainer
husband and his silent sidekick wife.23
Later in this scene of Iago and Emilia’s
irst teamwork, Desdemona lightheartedly of-
fers her attendant some slightly jarring advice:
“Do not learn of him, Emilia, though he be thy
husband” (2.1.163–64). Conventional wifely
service and loyalty—Desdemona’s ideal—sud-
denly manifest a new valence sometimes seen
in domestic manuals: husband as instructor,
wife as pupil. Relecting the emergent Puritan
domestic ideology of “helpmeet,” such confed-
eracy more ominously prepares the ground for
one couple’s joint attack on another couple, like
Petruchio and Kate’s comic campaign against
other married couples at the end of he Taming
of the Shrew. his partly accounts for Emilia’s
much debated silence about the handkerchief,
which she maintains even as she observes
Othello’s jealousy violently escalate. However
resistant Emilia inally is to Iago’s mastery, her
role as apprentice would have been italicized
theatrically by a boy actor apprenticed to an
adult, perhaps even to one playing Iago.
hroughout the play, we observe Emilia’s
apprentice-like activities, including the acqui-
sition of the fatal handkerchief—requested
by Iago (as test?) long before the play begins
but befitting pickpocket opportunism. Un-
derscoring the couple’s collaboration, Shake-
speare transfers the handkerchief acquisition
from Cinthio’s Ensign to Emilia, who then
conveys it to Iago, who snatches it not from
Desdemona but from his wife. Whereas Cin-
thio’s Ensign explicitly uses legerdemain and
distraction, Emilia’s skill seems less the pro-
fessional cutpurse’s—although women were
regarded as dangerous confederates with
hands ideally sized for pickpocketing (Greene
34). She seems, in training, to be cultivating
observational skills, like the global aware-
ness of Shakespeare’s clown Autolycus, who
fancies himself no thief but a “snapper-up of
unconsidered trifles” (WT 4.3.25–26)—his
659
pickpocketing staged for entertainment, as in
Ben Jonson’s masque Gypsies Metamorphosed.
My description of Iago’s “snatching” the
handkerchief is misleading, since “snatching”
appears nowhere in Othello’s quarto or folio
versions. The stage direction “Snatching it”
is a long-established editorial interpolation
(3.3), inferred by the eighteenth-century editor
Nicholas Rowe. Assigning more guilt to Iago,
this direction makes Emilia less confederate
and less complicit. We ind “snatching” cited in
innumerable editions,24 criticism (Elliott 125),
and even plot summaries (Hampton-Reeves),
although a few editions more cautiously use less
dramatic implied actions: “Taking it” (Pechter)
or “He takes the napkin” (Norton Shakespeare).
We should nevertheless again hesitate to pro-
ject the confederacy’s inal breakdown back to
this scene, despite Emilia’s expressed fear of
the loss distressing her mistress. The elected
stage action matters for a magician’s skill, since
snatching would be cruder conveyance than
any imagined jugglery. Emilia’s lines also imply
that the handkerchief is not snatched but may
even be given: she asks Iago, “Give’t me again,”
since she has been attempting sexual barter for
it—“I have a thing for you”—her offer sneer-
ingly dismissed by Iago’s slur “It is a common
thing” (3.3.305–22; my italics).
At the tragedy’s “discovery” climax,
Emilia confirms that she gave it to him
(5.2.233), presumably honest in heroic truth
telling, even though her words register un-
speciied misgivings—“I thought so then”—
or she may wishfully think she remembers
having experienced inner conflict. Her de-
scription of having “found [it] by fortune,”
however, morally equivocates about her own
agency; originally she did it spotting an “ad-
vantage” (3.3.317), to please Iago’s “fantasy”
(303). Shakespeare thus represents this hand-
kerchief transfer within a complex psychol-
ogy and ethics (Altman 215) of confederacy
edging toward breakdown.
he handkerchief brings into relief Emi-
lia’s apprentice role, compromising her loyalty
660 Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic
as Desdemona’s attendant and confirming
Harry Berger’s observation about her “pattern
of nondisclosure” (117).25 While the audience
watches in frustration as Emilia’s silence
turns fatal for Desdemona, Shakespeare high-
lights the moments of dialogue and silence
when we hope she might reveal her thet. In
each case, she performs a canny distraction,
evident through Shakespeare’s linguistic bril-
liance in representing conversational impli-
cature’s topic shiting (Hedrick, “Merry and
Weary Conversation”), her sleights of speech
drawing attention away from the love token.
The famous willow scene “discovers”
onstage the play’s formerly imagined mar-
riage bed, “like a psychoanalytic revelation”
of “hideous” miscegenation then murder
(Neill, “Unproper Beds” 249). As she pre-
pares the wedding sheets requested by Des-
demona—imaginatively enlarged versions
of the strawberry- spotted handkerchief
(Boose)—Emilia redirects her mistress’s
musing on the outspoken Venetian who had
just defended Desdemona to Othello. Des-
demona has grotesquely mirrored Iago and
Emilia’s instructor-instructed relationship,
pathetically wishing that Othello would treat
her with “gentle” chiding, like “those that do
teach young babes” (4.2.114). Here Emilia
replays the same entertainment tactic Iago
used in an attempt to redirect Cassio’s hon-
orable attraction to Desdemona: she quickly
rephrases Desdemona’s delicately ambiguous
praise of Lodovico as “a proper man” into “a
very handsome man” (4.3.33–34), then bawd-
ily diverts Desdemona’s praise of Lodovico’s
speech into comic praise of his mouth: “I
know a lady in Venice would have walked
barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether
lip” (36–37).
Her identical distraction tactics show
that Emilia, apprentice and protovillain, has
certainly “learn[ed] of ” Iago, though argu-
ably with some Montaigne-like decency. But
why place this diversionary bedroom-scene
chat just before the murder? he scene’s and
[ PM L A
Desdemona’s haunting intimations of death
foreshadow the violence, but they also signal
the inal chance to avert tragedy, maximiz-
ing the audience’s repeatedly frustrated wish
for Emilia to come clean about the cause of
Othello’s rage. Instead, she dashes all hope,
humorously improvising new distraction out
of Desdemona’s surprisingly naive question
about whether women who commit adultery
exist. Emilia proceeds with her well-known,
sensational, extended attack on the double
standard—“I do think it is their husbands’
faults / If wives do fall” (4.3.84–85) and “Let
husbands know / heir wives have sense like
them” (91–92), implicitly advocating pay-
back adultery by women treated badly in
marriage. (A disturbing “shadow story”26
arises that Desdemona might carry out what
she was falsely accused of.) Emilia thus re-
moves from the table the topic of the hand-
kerchief—invisible here, but loosed into the
audience’s imagination through the women’s
chat of “lawn” (linen), “gowns,” “petticoats,”
and “caps” (4.3.72). Emilia’s famous proto-
feminism, widely viewed as dissident, even
culturally prophetic, distracts all the more
because of its believed truth. Her conversa-
tional tactic, however, deploys magic2’s chief
practice of concealing a smaller movement
within a larger, the political hidden by the
grander ideological. Montaigne’s essay on
diversion describes this tactic benignly but
precisely: how one conversationally “steals” a
thought from someone by “diverting it bit by
bit to subjects nearby” (631).
Such diversion is not unique, having
occurred at other critical moments, when
Othello rages and the handkerchief’s eviden-
tiary status is most vulnerable. Signiicantly,
each time this happens Emilia turns the
topic to a generalization about men. When
Desdemona laments her handkerchief’s loss,
Emilia distracts her luridly, just as Iago the
entertainer did in his initial, sexist banter, by
reviling the opposite sex, using “emphaticall
words” as Hocus Pocus recommends to magi-
129.4 ] Donald Hedrick
cians for distracting patter (Br): “hey are all
but stomachs, and we all but food. / hey eat
us hungerly, and when they are full, / They
belch us” (3.4.100–02). Later, encouraging
Desdemona’s tentative rationalization that
“state matters” disturb Othello, Emilia prac-
tices her skills again: when Desdemona asks
about the cause of Othello’s distraction—an
inquiry capable of resolving the entire dra-
matic conflict—Emilia again redirects the
conversation to jealousy generally, deploying
folk truisms that redirect Desdemona away
from the real cause: “hey are not ever jealous
for the cause, / But jealous for they’re jealous.
It is a monster / Begot upon itself, born on
itself” (155–57). Her rhetorical force here ef-
fectively stops conversation, as ironically dem-
onstrated by one Shakespearean editor’s gloss:
“What more is there to say?” (Bevington 229).
Shakespeare’s gulling tragedy wrenches
the audience, not merely because, as Rymer
and everyone else note, the jealous passion
was created by what Iago aptly formulates
as “trifles light as air” (3.3.326) but because
the hidden “cause” (the play’s frequent legal
term)27 could be “discovered” so easily—with-
out Othello’s profound, tragic soul-searching
or his conlicted identity. An audience’s aware-
ness that handkerchiefs were merely magician
stuf, moreover, would further reduce trage-
dy’s generic privilege, prompting the audience
to feel Rymer-like disdain or unease.
Othello’s climax warrants extended scru-
tiny for its spectacularly manifest magic2 . At
the discovery’s denouement, Emilia begins
furiously denouncing Desdemona’s murderer:
“O gull, O dolt, / As ignorant as dirt!” When
the enormity of Othello’s act irst sinks in, her
confederacy with Iago collapses convention-
ally, as the bumbling apprentice destroys the
magic in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon or as
the schemers break up in Jonson’s Volpone and
he Alchemist. As Othello explains “honest”
Iago’s involvement, her incredulous repetition
of “my husband” almost comically performs
a gull’s self-discovery (5.2.149–56). Ater her
661
revelation, Othello replays her disgusted “dis-
covery” of him: “O fool, fool, fool!” (332).
Emilia’s own tragedy follows. Having re-
alized how Iago used the handkerchief to fool
Othello, Emilia cries out, “O God! O heavenly
God!” (223). In response to Iago’s angry com-
mand “hold your peace!” (224), Emilia, no
longer performing the role of silent wife and
apprentice, renounces subordination, chal-
lenging the powers of magic1, magic 2 , and
men: “Let heaven, and men, and devils, let
’em all, / All, all cry shame against me, yet I’ll
speak” (227–28). A rapid-ire melodramatic
sequence unfolds, as Iago—closely echo-
ing Othello’s warning to Desdemona before
his violence erupted (“Are you wise?”)—ic-
ily warns her, “Be wise and get you home”
(229). Following her astonishingly blunt
mutiny—“I will not” (230)—Emilia divulges
how she found the handkerchief and gave it
to Iago, thus fully exposing his villainy, just
as Desdemona had earlier appeared to expose
Othello’s cuckoldry. In further dramatic par-
allelism, this exposed husband’s outrage also
exceeds all bounds: “Villainous whore!” Iago
shouts before killing his wife (236).
As it happens, Iago’s inal warning, “Be
wise,” may well channel signiicant extradra-
matic force from magic2 . Like most London-
ers, Shakespeare knew of at least one celebrity
magic act—involving, however, a nonhuman
confederate: Morocco, the horse famous for
dancing on two legs, for somehow ascend-
ing St Paul’s Cathedral, and for perform-
ing magic tricks with his master, Banks, in
London taverns and on the continent (Rus-
sell). Alluding to Morocco’s performance of
mathematical tricks, Shakespeare has Mote
in Love’s Labour’s Lost jest about dividing
“three years” into “two words” as “the danc-
ing horse will tell you” (1.2.49–50). Given
voice in one literary work (John Dando’s Ma-
roccus Extaticus [1595]), Morocco was also
mentioned by Dekker, Nashe, Jonson, Donne,
and many others, even into the 1660s. When
master and horse were arrested in Paris and
662 Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic
sentenced to be burned to death for witch-
crat, Banks was forced to reveal their tricks’
secrets (Halliwell-Phillipps 27)—an instance,
beyond this study’s scope, of the two incom-
mensurable magics’ brief collision.
Despite their status as too trivial for
scholarship, Morocco’s tricks were famous
enough to be included in Gervase Markham’s
massive horsemanship compendium. here
Markham exposes—as Reginald Scot “dis-
covered” witchcrat and as Samuel Harsnett
exposed exorcisms—how Morocco solved
mathematical equations and returned con-
cealed handkerchiefs or gloves to their
owners. Markham nonetheless profoundly
admires the psychology of nonhuman atten-
tion, evident in tricks requiring Morocco’s
extraordinary attentiveness to slight aural
or visual cues such as his master’s tiny eye
movements. Just as Iago needs a way to divert
the attention of Emilia’s listeners from her
imminent exposure of his plot, Banks needs
a “watch-worde” to warn Morocco when, di-
rected to ind some hidden object, the horse
starts in a wrong direction. he master cor-
rects and warns him with the command “Be
wise” (Markham 29–30).
If this colloquial warning and watchword
fails to redirect the horse from mismoves,28
Banks issues a threat in the form of another
coded warning—“villain” or “traitor”—fol-
lowed by physical punishment. hus, Shake-
speare—who employs the style and language
of this confederacy- coded training ban-
ter—has Iago use these same words to warn,
then threaten and curse, Emilia as a “villain-
ous whore” before stabbing her. An index of
greater indebtedness to popular “jugglery”
magic, this instance of a speciic entertain-
ment unconscious might well have been
conscious: the private code could easily have
become known in Shakespeare’s own enter-
tainment circles, providing a itting dramatic
climax to his conveyance-and- confederacy
tragedy. Indeed, London con artists com-
plained that plays and the comic dialogue
[ PM L A
accompanying jigs were exposing their trade
secrets to everyone (Baskerville 138). Grat-
ing popular London entertainment onto the
prestige of a classical genre, Shakespeare reg-
isters Othello’s extreme debt to new perfor-
mance patterns of attention and distraction.
Ultimately, he exalts magic 2 over magic 1,
generating Othello’s conlicting receptions of
fascination and derision.
“Some Wonder”
An entertainment revolution, not only a sci-
entiic one, has helped erode tragic wonder.
Accompanying this tragedy-transforming
revolution were seismic shits in the language
of leisure (Burke 139–45) and thus of magic,
even in Shakespeare’s own “mental lexicon”
(Crane 26). he term wonder, however, reg-
isters less, since it has meant “admiration”
or “enchantment” since before Shakespeare’s
era. Other language, often Shakespeare’s,
more directly registers magic’s “decline.” As
Horkheimer and Adorno note, “he world of
magic still retained diferences whose traces
have vanished even in linguistic form” (7).
Unlike Othello, where the handkerchief’s
status crucially shits between trick and won-
der, Shakespeare’s early Comedy of Errors more
ohandedly mixes magic1 with magic2 termi-
nology that includes both tricksters and the
supernatural, yet all under the magic2 rubric
of cozeners, cheaters, and magician jugglers:
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE. hey say this town is
full of cozenage,
As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many suchlike libertines of sin.
(1.2.97–102)
To “change the mind,” as Othello illustrates,
hardly requires sorcerers. Yet separating
the two incommensurable magics for pur-
poses of ideology was not always successful.
129.4 ] Donald Hedrick
Doubts that stage magic was harmless “coz-
enage” could be raised: a 1616 condemnation
of witchcrat, for instance, claimed that the
demonic could also hide in mere “jugglery”
(Pye, Vanishing 41).
Magic and witchcraft index important
shifts of meaning for Shakespeare. He can
treat the occult as a contested concept, as
we see when Brabanzio, accusing Othello of
seducing his daughter with “spells and med-
icines bought of mountebanks,” confuses oc-
cult with non-occult charlatanism. Othello
cleverly appropriates Brabanzio’s accusatory
language, to explain teasingly by “what drugs,
what charms, / What conjuration, and what
mighty magic” he won Brabanzio’s daughter
(1.3.91–94). The Oxford English Dictionary
suggests that Shakespeare was the irst to use
magic iguratively, to mean “an enchanting or
mystical quality” (“Magic”). It also suggests
that Shakespeare may have helped shit the
meaning of witchcrat from actual bewitch-
ing to “power or inluence like that of a ma-
gician” (“Witchcrat”), attributing the term’s
irst metaphoric use to Henry V, when Henry
tells Katharine, “You have witchcrat in your
lips, Kate” (5.2.256). he dictionary also re-
cords Shakespeare as being the first to use
charm—Brabanzio’s magic1 term—figura-
tively (“Charm”) and to use trick speciically
for magic tricks (“Trick”).29 Othello’s defense
centers on the story of his invited visits to
Brabanzio’s house, where he narrated heroic,
exotic stories to a hyperattentive Desdemona,
who, distracted from housework, “de-
voured up” his exploits with a “greedy ear”
(1.3.148–49). Telling the story of distracting
Desdemona with stories, he concludes his
multileveled distraction of the senators, emp-
tying magic1 of its power: “This only is the
witchcraft I have used” (168). Surprisingly,
however, as Othello abjures magic1 he uses
magic2 to distract his audience—a precursor,
as we will see, of the tragedy’s inal moments.
Othello’s magic 1 signifiers slide into
powerful magic 2 terms of entertainment
663
value. Distraction, derived from the Latin
verb distrahěre, “to pull asunder,” would by
Shakespeare’s time signify a mind divided
between or drawn to diferent objects, hence
deranged (“Distraction”). Such radical divi-
sion would eventually constitute a igure of
entertainment- choice overload, everything
“distracting.” Hamlet, calling his mind “this
distracted globe” (1.5.97), glances at the shit
by evoking the audience’s present distraction,
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Shakespeare
portrays distraction by sleight of hand in
he Winter’s Tale—the pickpocket Autolycus
boasts of picking pockets while his audience
was distracted by ballad singing: “no hear-
ing, no feeling, but my sir’s song, and admir-
ing the nothing of it” (4.4.598). Distraction
upon distraction, wonder at nothing, aptly
characterizes London’s expanding cultural
scene—in “real entertainment” when Lon-
don’s real-life celebrity cutpurse, Moll Frith,
did public penance at St Paul’s, while her
confederates picked the rapt crowd’s pockets
(Crankshaw 57).
If Shakespeare’s plays chart the rise of
magic2 , we might expect the term magic to
metamorphose, as it appears to do. Shake-
speare uses the term twelve times, the most
frequently in Othello. Two or three instances
arguably indicate the supernatural; he Tem-
pest portrays “real” magic—garment, spirit,
staf, Ariel—yet magic almost igurative or al-
legorical. Other examples are more explicitly
igurative: in he Winter’s Tale Leontes says,
“If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as
eating” (5.3.110–11; my italics), as the magi-
cian igure Paulina brings to life the “statue”
of Hermione, the king’s slandered wife—
“resurrected” after sixteen years in hiding
not with real charms but with “magical” mu-
sic (98). Even Macbeth’s Hecate refers to a po-
tion distilled by “magic sleights” (3.5.26; my
italics), thus mixing witchcrat with cozening
dexterity. Among the instances of magic in
Othello, however, we see Brabanzio’s accusa-
tion undercut by Othello’s tale of his “mighty
664 Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic
magic,” marking both magic2’s rise and mag-
ic1’s decline from cultural power.
Othello’s two versions of the handker-
chief ’s origin tale leave its magical status
ambiguous. He first gives Desdemona an
exotic, magic1 account of the “magic in the
web of it”—the handkerchief was woven by
a prophetic Sybil, dyed with maiden’s blood,
presented by an “Egyptian charmer” to his
mother, who gave it to Othello (3.4.53–73).
Losing it loses love—the story maximiz-
ing Desdemona’s guilt (perhaps Othello’s
hidden intent) over having lost it already.
Her response hints at ambivalence about its
“wonder”: “Sure, there’s some wonder in this
handkerchief” (3.4.97). Othello’s later account
to Emilia, however, reduces the tale’s exoti-
cism: given to his mother by his father, then
to him, it is an “antique token” (5.2.223)—the
keyword token (also Emilia’s earlier term) im-
plying magic2 . For magic1 the handkerchief
is love; for magic 2 it only represents love,
hence is subject to manipulation, as surrogate
money, or as a coin or handkerchief trick.
The aesthetic distinctiveness of Shake-
spearean tragedy has often been assigned
the purportedly timeless affect of wonder.
he poet and critic J. V. Cunningham’s early
study Woe or Wonder: he Emotional Efect
of Shakespearean Tragedy centers on attitudes
toward death, citing Horatio’s summation of
Hamlet as a spectacle of “woe or wonder”
(5.2.307). he commonplace of wonder dom-
inates Sidney’s view of tragedy as inspiring
“admiration and commiseration,” a notion
traceable to Aristotle, for whom philosophiz-
ing entails wonder when one first “puzzles
and wonders . . . thinking [one]self ignorant”
(Cunningham 21, 63). Ignorance and dis-
covery structure Shakespeare’s experiments
in writing gulling tragedies from Hamlet to
Macbeth to Othello.
Cunningham’s subject is expanded
by T. G. Bishop, who views wonder not as
tragedy-speciic but as a “recurrent theatrical
experience,” “generated” but also “interro-
[ PM L A
gated” by Shakespeare (13). Celebratory treat-
ments have been written by Adam Cohen and
Peter Platt, the latter interpreting wonder as
sublime “reason,” “diminished” but capable
of being regarded more critically, as in Shake-
speare’s The Tempest (179).30 Further histo-
ricizing wonder by looking at its treatment
by classical and Renaissance authorities,31
Stephen Greenblatt even deines it as founda-
tional for new historicism and traceable to the
aesthetics of private art collection: an object’s
power “to stop the viewer in his tracks . . . to
evoke an exalted attention” (“Resonance” 170).
For this intense “kind of looking” he secular-
izes, much as Shakespeare seems to do, magic1
discourse: “Looking may be called enchanted
when the act of attention draws a circle
around itself from which everything but the
object is excluded” (176). Greenblatt insulates
“exalted attention” from its contemporary
decline, noting that museum designers, los-
ing faith in “arousing” real wonder, aim only
for novel efects through the mere lighting of
displayed objects, displacing afect “onto the
windows of designer dress shops” (177).
This commercial appropriation of af-
fect, however, was already accompanying
Shakespeare’s tragic innovations, as might
be expected from the market’s relation to the
theatrical industry,32 not extraneous to their
sensational effects but contributing to the
“new discursive order” of his tragedies (Reiss
202). Greenblatt’s anxiety about advertising,
however, was already inscribed in early mod-
ern formations. he irst treatise dedicated to
advertising acknowledges ethical misgivings
about commercial distraction and deception:
William Scott’s 1635 An Essay of Drapery; or,
he Compleate Citizen: Trading Justly, Pleas-
ingly, Proitably nevertheless answers the mis-
givings by sanctioning lighting tricks used to
improve a commodity’s appearance (21). In-
deed, among the many igures that critics have
seen in Iago—from evil magician to play-
wright—a key one is advertising-agency writer
(Grady, “Tragedy” 137). hus, the practitioner
129.4 ] Donald Hedrick
of magic2 preigures modernity’s commercial
advertising, which Raymond Williams aptly
calls our “Magic System” (“Advertising”).
I do not contend that the “low” art of
magic in Othello’s “entertainment uncon-
scious” unlocks everything worth understand-
ing about the play; provisionally bracketing
race, even if a putatively colorblind approach
is avoided (Thompson), may, for instance,
prove distorting, especially since magicians
were sometimes seen as dark-skinned “gyp-
sies” (Kinney 19). Proposing a more rigorous
theorization of “entertainment value,” I sug-
gest rather that this entertainment mode, con-
veying with it contemporaneous attention and
distraction practices shared by theater, mar-
ket, and culture, brings into relief how tragedy
could now be reshaped by Shakespeare and
others to “unhallow” theater and “profane
the name of Tragedy,” as Rymer feared (112).
he revolution of which theater was only one
part and one consumer option was indebted
to the new limitlessness and pleasure produc-
tion of competing choices, as brothels and dic-
ing houses complained of losing customers to
playhouses (Chettle 35–36), and as competi-
tive capital was on its way to triumph. Maxi-
mizing return would accompany maximizing
dramatic affect (Hedrick, “Advantage”), as
entertainment’s economic model would yield
the most return from the least investment—
whose limiting case is theft or pickpocket-
ing. Othello’s sensational maximizations
anticipate the infusion of entertainment
throughout contemporary culture, hybrid-
izing education (“edutainment”), journalism
(“infotainment”), and more—even creating an
“attention deicit democracy” (B. Berger). As
the subject of attention under late, “commu-
nicative capitalism” achieves urgency (Dean,
Democracy), the play’s Hegelian conflict of
ethically defined characterizations reflects
a conlict of world-historical forces (Palmer
59; Roche 57), an epochal shift of valuation
that fueled and was fueled by Shakespeare’s
Othello. Magic2 becomes our real magic.
665
If Shakespeare has designed a tragic
mode whereby a broadly understood magic2
trumps magic1, how do we read the play’s
extraordinary theatrical ending, the now
“cankered comedy” of the gull-hero’s suicide
(Neely 234)? Does it meet or revise such tradi-
tional criteria as the catharsis of pity and fear
or newer afects (Pollard)? Since throughout
the play Shakespeare associates Othello with
exotic, supernatural magic (the handker-
chief ’s myth) or with the metaphoric magic
of narrative seduction (the story he tells the
senators), we would expect Othello finally
to contrast Iago’s cheap conveyance- and-
confederacy trickery, even as he falls for it. Yet
Shakespeare disrupts the expected diference
by having Othello, magician-like himself,
disarmed twice of exotic weaponry—a sword
with which he wounds Iago, then a “sword of
Spain” he inds in his bedroom—reveal a hid-
den dagger to commit his extemporaneous
suicide. his tour-de-force magician’s stunt he
performs while being guarded (5.2.347–65);
Cassio, speaking for the tricked audiences
onstage and of, “thought he had no weapon”
(370). Othello begins his lengthy written-at-a-
distance play summary—“Set you down this”
(360)—with his state-service tale, proceeding
through his jealousy tale as he discovers to us
the inal concealed weapon, performing his
last story within a story, of having once slain
a deceptive Turk (“who traduced the state”),
by slaying himself, simultaneously acting out
his story: “I . . . smote him thus” (363–65).
As if composing his own magniicent magic
act, the born-again entertainer carries out his
feat using the traditional trick of bodily sub-
stitution—himself for Turk—along with the
foundational magic maneuver, concealing
a small movement within a larger. His stage
dagger would undoubtedly have been a trick
one, like those illustrated in the era’s magic2
handbooks (Scot 295; Hocus Pocus).
Othello’s final summation of himself
as “one who loved not wisely but too well”
(5.2.353) is revealed not as the eloquent
666 Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic
storytelling of his Senate defense but as pat-
ter for deliberately distracting both audi-
ences, protracted just long enough to make
a dagger appear from nowhere—Othello’s
“real” intention. From this artistic inale, new
questions, new uses for tragedy, arise: Does
the tragic protagonist thematically confed-
erate with the villain, by resorting to literal
sleight of hand for a grand inale of gulling
distraction, rendering everyone a gull?33 En-
tertaining magic2 , has Othello “discovered”
the worst in himself here, while imagining
the best?34 Has Shakespeare, both competing
and collaborating with stage magic, through
this surprise dialectical reversal of profes-
sional identities exalted the arts of deception
and distraction, elevating them to the tradi-
tional status of tragedy, as enchantments of
embodied instrumentality? Or does he adul-
terate tragedy in a nostalgic throwback to
preindustrial, artisanal entertainments? Does
this inal moment, as Nietzsche thought the
limiting consequence of Euripedean drama
did (54–55), perform the suicide of tragedy?
Or its renewal?
Whatever the answers to the percep-
tual problematics of Othello, an attention-
distraction dialectic inherent in newly
commercial entertainment value assembles
Shakespeare’s construction, which in turn
skews dominant forms of the tragic genre he
inherited, rendering them irredeemably resid-
ual—yet redirecting us toward, or warning us
from, future intensities of shared distraction.
NOTES
I gratefully acknowledge a fellowship from the Folger
Shakespeare Library, whose staff members and fellow
scholars provided essential support for this project. I
dedicate the essay to the memory of Janet Adelman, its
earliest reader.
1. The “triumph over magical thinking” was “only
partly achieved” (McAdam 388). Yet hermeticism may
have impacted scientiic imagination (Hill 296).
[ PM L A
2. For Hirsh “perception” means understanding.
Altman discusses contingent, “probable” knowledge in
Othello. Taxidou, however, theorizes tragedy much as I
do here, not as idea but as theatrical event (7–8).
3. McAdam; Mebane; Reed; Traister; West; Woodman.
4. Kernan’s magicians include sleight-of-hand artists
and spirit-controlling philosophers (155). For Mowat both
inluence Shakespeare’s magicians or “Art-magician(s)”
(30–31). An unpublished dissertation by J. A. Shea pro-
vides an important reading of Iago as a contemporary
juggler igure and “magician of the mind,” citing practices
of illusionism from “monster shows” to handkerchief
tricks. Shea’s treatment does not emphasize, however,
links to genre, cognitive psychology, or capitalism, and
Emilia is read as more mesmerized than assisting.
5. I provisionally require the less wieldy term magic2
rather than During’s “secular magic,” since his category,
a binary linked to “supernatural,” cannot convey the
range, distraction technologies, and incommensurability
of magic2 , loosely translatable as “entertainment magic.”
6. The reformed felon Apollo Robbins is one such
pickpocket performer.
7. Reynolds examines early modern identiication with
criminal subjectivity through a theory of “transversality.”
8. Jameson observes Benjamin’s “paradoxical” de-
fense of distraction as new, defamiliarizing perception
(430); Davidson champions distraction for creative
multitasking (12).
9. Citations of Shakespeare’s works refer to he Nor-
ton Shakespeare.
10. Jonathan Miller directed Anthony Hopkins as
Othello in a motley-costumed, arguably racist BBC pro-
duction (Iyengar 115).
11. Homan thus identiies Shakespeare with Iago.
12. Others might seek parallels in studies taxonomizing
“modulator” chemicals speciic to brain functions of “alert-
ness,” “orientation,” and “executive attention” (Posner 48).
13. Maus, qtd. in Neill, “English Revenge Tragedy” 329.
14. See Weimann and Bruster on “secretly open” rep-
resentation (139–59).
15. I have seen firsthand how Simons’s lecture-
demonstration dupes an audience already alert to deception.
16. Evans’s illuminating close reading of Iago as “prac-
tiser” on “dupes” in a “structure of awarenesses” parallels
my perceptual approach (129).
17. Ian Smith’s intriguing proposal that the handker-
chief might be black would render it less theatrically or
magically efective.
18. Desdemona’s exchange with Iago literalizes Green-
blatt’s reading of Iago’s cultural improvisation (“Im-
provisation”). See Wayne on the background of Iago’s
misogynist discourse (160–65).
19. Porter notes many such visual directives (81–82).
20. In gambling parlance, Iago practices “opportunis-
tic betting.”
129.4 ] Donald Hedrick
21. Schalkwyk discusses Othello’s master-servant dia-
lectic (214–62).
22. Mann explores Emilia as Shakespeare’s stereo-
typical shrew (152).
23. Compare Emilia’s function to the mute magician-
performer Teller (of Penn and Teller), who assisted a 2004
Folger heatre production of Macbeth and whom I thank
for responding to this essay.
24. See editions by Bevington; Evans; Hall; Honig-
mann; Kernan; Kittredge; Neill; McDonald; Mowat and
Werstine; Ridley; Sanders; Wilson and Walker.
25. For the handkerchief ’s multiple meanings, see
Teague (25–27). For valuable materialist interpretations,
see Bruster (Drama 81–86), Yachnin (“commodity fetish-
ism” [202]), Linton (colonial “trifles” [84–103]), Harris
(“palimpsest of temporality” [169–87]), and esp. Callaghan
(“productive labor” in female textile manufacture).
26. his is Greenblatt’s term for reader-imagined ver-
sions registered only “in passing” (“Fiction” 66).
27. he meaning of cause is dramatized when Othello
enters Desdemona’s bedroom for the murder, repeating,
“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul” (5.2.1).
28. Cf. Sutton’s Puritan tract Be Wise, and Be Warned.
Iago earlier used this colloquial warning ostensibly to steer
Othello away from becoming jealous, while in fact seizing a
propitious moment to introduce his irst ohand mention of
the just-acquired handkerchief: “Nay, yet be wise” (3.3.437).
29. Because The Oxford English Dictionary relies
heavily on Shakespeare for examples of first uses, its
claims about his innovations should be approached with
caution. Nonetheless, the shit in these keywords’ mean-
ing supports my overall perception of a widespread shit
in the discourse of entertainment.
30. Bennett’s political argument rehabilitates modern
“enchantment.”
31. Cohen also explores the role of wonder in classical
and Renaissance writings (99–108).
32. See Bruster (Drama); Agnew; Leinwand; Hawkes.
33. Adelman argues that Othello confederates with
Iago psychologically, as his racial alter ego.
34. Consider Eagleton’s summation of Marxist tragic
sensibility: confronting the worst, while hoping for bet-
ter (40).
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