Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England

Abstract

OHN HOSKINS, IN THE EPIGRAPH ABOVE, MAKES A DIRECT LINK between mental stability and rhetorical mastery: production of eloquent utterances is the natural effect of a sound mind. Hoskins's statement foregrounds the importance of language and rhetorical eloquence as linked analytical categories in the construction of the healthy early modern English subject. Written for young men making their way in public life, his Directions also affords a suggestive intertextual gloss on Othello's hysterical collapse in 4.1: with her? Lie on her? We say lie on her when they belie her. Lie with her! Zounds, that's fulsome! (11. 35-36).2 Here indeed Othello's words do jar, his sentences are preposterous, and his utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties, rendering him the uneloquent man, a mere shadow of the homo rhetoricus and military public servant of the senate scene (1.3). Othello's debased prose, the strained play of the punning rhetorical figures polyptoton and antanaclasis, is a deluded expression of betrayal, whose effects Iago names tellingly a madness (4.1.53). By positing a further relationship between cultural incivility and linguistic barbarity, signified in the xenophobically charged term savage, Iago gives Hoskins's psycholinguistic presumption a decidedly racial turn. It is Iago who, at the close of the senate scene, delivers the damning sobriquet an (1.3.343), erring itself being a punning reference to Othello's geographic wandering and his propensity to make mistakes, to wander out of the proper limits. But what exactly are these errors made by Othello, and what limits has he transgressed? Or, in what fuller sense is he a barbarian wanderer? Barbarian and savage are two terms that coincide-one might even say equate-naturally in Iago's stratigraphic mind, designating Othello as cultural alien.3 The third notionlacking rhetorical eloquence-coincides as well, so that linguistic and cul-