Transformative and Restorative Romance
Transformative and Restorative Romance
Re-“turning” Othello and Locating Christian Identity
Chapter 4 argues that William Shakespeare’s Othello both reveals the work of genre and geography in the formation of religious identities and enacts a debate about the uses of romance’s two competing goals: to transform and to restore identity. Othello is patterned after Ruggiero in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; Ruggiero is a convert to Christianity who, like Othello, marries an Italian woman. Like Orlando Furioso, Othello employs the infidel-conversion motif, which aims to erase the significance of racial, geographical, and cultural difference. Iago, however, seeks to reverse the effects of the infidel-conversion motif in order to restore Othello to what presumably is his prior Muslim identity. Because romances usually figure marriage and baptism as sacraments that work complementarily to create Christian identity, Iago aims to disrupt the marriage bond between Othello and his wife; dissolving Othello and Desdemona’s marriage undoes Othello’s Christian identity.
Keywords: William Shakespeare, Othello, Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, romance, genre, geography, religious conversion, Muslim identity, Christian identity
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