“The Meruailouse Site”: Shakespeare, Venice, and Paradoxical Stages*
This essay begins by providing some early modern definitions, as well as a brief history, of paradox in the Renaissance. But paradox could be more than a rhetorical figure. Thus, the paper turns to sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century descriptions of Venice in English and explores how a geographical site could do the work of the verbal paradox. The essay then reads Othello's complicated epistemological, ontological, and sexual issues through Venice's symbolic geography. Finally, it will suggest briefly that the stage — and particularly the interaction between audience and play — is also a site of paradox, a place where spectators, dazzled and destabilized by unresolved and unresolvable problems, are forced to reevaluate their cognitive and cultural worlds.