Reckoning Reputation

Chapter 1 analyzes Shakespeare’s Othello alongside sixteenth-century commercial arithmetics. Othello makes a problem that inflects certain narrative examples in these math books into grounds for tragedy: the problem of calculating the value of persons in a society where new forms of commercial credit were unsettling traditional notions of worth. Social evaluation comes to the fore in the specific mathematical genre of “partnership problems,” which were designed to teach merchants how to calculate returns on joint ventures but which also demanded skill in reckoning the worth of words and of persons. Othello’s jealousy operates according to an extreme version of the logic inherent to these mathematical problems. The evaluation of others and of the self are linked, in Othello, to acts of evaluation drawn from the world of trade—the world reflected and addressed in arithmetic textbooks in general, and partnership problems in particular.