“Palpable to thinking”: Othello and Gross Conceits

Abstract

Beginning with Iago’s insults against Cassio as both “arithmetician” (1.1.18) and “counter-caster” (1.1.30), this essay explores the deep epistemological divides that the two terms suggested in the period. The essay turns to another mathematical conceit in the play, the word “gross.” Although suggesting stupidity, stolidity, and other terms of weight, the paper locates the associations of “gross” within debates on mathematical representation in the period. The essay focuses on the term gross in the period’s mathematical handbooks, particularly in John Dee’s preface to Euclid’s The Elements (1570). It shows how Dee is juggling complex epistemic issues in positing a third category between the material and the immaterial. This third category, mathematics, relies upon metaphors of the gross and ideas of movement in order to gain a foothold in Dee’s cosmic system for all forms of thought. The essay thus shows how Shakespeare’s tragedy picks up on the mathematical and representational difficulties of the term “gross” to both point to and play with the productive limitations of language. In Othello’s persistent use of “gross” to describe the inability of representation to fully reach its auditors, the essay uncovers a similar concern with the gaps between language and mental apprehension. Both mathematics and Othello, that is, traffic in the concerns over what is gross, what can never be gross, and characters’ need to imagine objects and ideas as gross in order to theorize computations. [K.W.]