murderous what should such fool Do with so good wife? Emilia in Othello (5.2.231-32) Critics have struggled to account for disturbing comic elements in Othello. Most famously, at one extreme, outraged neoclassical critic Thomas Rymer, in his aptly named A Short View of Tragedy (1693), labeled Othello simple booby or a paultry buffoon, since, he claimed, the Handkerchief is so remote trifle, no Booby, on this side Mauritania, cou'd make any consequence from it, while he concluded that There is in this Play, some burlesk, some humour, and ramble of Comical Wit so that Othello as whole is none other, than Farce. (1) Although I certainly do not share Rymer's rigid, neoclassical short view that play's comic moments are ineffective, reducing it merely to farce, I not only believe that Rymer was astute in detecting surprising amount of in Othello, and even more remarkably disturbing comic potential in character of Othello himself; but I suggest that his neoclassical bias against mingling of and tragedy--ultimately bias against itself--is instructive precisely because it has been so persistent in subsequent traditions of Othello performance and criticism. While notion of Othello as merely Bloody Farce has long been rightly abandoned, critics and directors alike have still tended to shy away from integrating troubling humor into an interpretation of play as whole. It is only relatively recently that commentators have begun to attend to play's employment of disturbing humor based on racial stereotypes to enhance its tragic effect. Michael Bristol, for instance, arguing that play's organizing principle is humiliating comedy of abjection evident in custom of charivari, claims that in Renaissance Othello have been seen as comically a kind of blackface clown.... [a] monstrous, and funny substitute who transgresses norms. (2) Remarkably, what Bristol has so exactly, but apparently unwittingly, described here is tradition of so-called fool (in Renaissance parlance), an comic butt, who is laughed at because he is physically and/or mentally different and socially deviant, comic transgressor of norms to be scapegoated and abused. Recovering Shakespeare's deployment of troubling natural fool type (often, as we shall see, depicted in blackface) in play will help us to understand why Shakespeare is so emphatic about making his characters refer to Othello in terms that suggest an innocent or natural--credulous fool, coxcomb, ass, gull, dull Moor, and dolt, ignorant as dirt--and why Othello rebukes himself with O fool! in final scene. Such recovery will also clarify one source of audience discomfort play is so famous for producing. Horrid Blackface If, as Bristol argues, much of [t]he history of both interpretation and performance of Othello has been characterized by search for consoling and anaesthetic explanations that would make its depictions of humiliation and suffering more tolerable, (3) there is much work to be done to recover play's original, unconsoling theater history in Renaissance in terms of its disturbing comic aspects. I will argue that what Rymer found so bewildering about Othello's characterization can actually be explained by popular associations with natural fool available to audiences in earliest performances of play. Indeed, I will demonstrate that on Shakespearean stage Othello would have recalled such traditional visual emblems of natural fool as blackface, fool's coat, and muckender or fool's handkerchief. Shakespeare draws upon such traditional emblems, I argue further, in order to produce what Nicholas Brooke has termed horrid laughter characteristic of Jacobean tragedy: a nightmare of complicit participation in which even normally gentle will occasionally find themselves, disgustingly, involved. …