In the Bitter Letter (A Rendition of Othello)

Abstract

Through a series of ‘rents’, this article reads the interplay between Shakespeare's Othello and various senses of rendition. The strange relations of theatricality, desire, violence and the unknown that the play stages are read in the light of Jacques Derrida's thinking on strangers, inhabitation, pity and blindness. In offering a rendition of Othello, much hinges on the politics of the word ‘in’.