"A Round Unvarnished Tale": The Dissolution of Narrative Authority in Othello

ABSTRACT:Folklorists have much to learn from Shakespeare's protoethnographic handling of the storytellers and storytelling he portrays in his plays. One case in point is Othello in which our title protagonist disclaims an aptitude for oratory ("Rude I am in my speech, / And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace" [1.3.96–97]), a common disclaimer to performance, yet Othello's subsequent storytelling betrays that he is in fact a skilled narrator who recounts personal experience with rhetorical prowess and expressive style. Furthermore, despite being an outsider in Venice, Othello enjoys an elevated station due in part to his artful narrative building. We witness the depreciation of his status as a master narrator, however, when Iago takes over the storytelling ethos of the play with whispers, innuendo, and veiled aspersions. Once Iago's deceptions fully bloom, there is, in the end, no accommodation for Othello's lofty personal narratives. Tracking both how Othello uses personal narrative to construct and present a coherent self, and how Iago deploys equally virtuosic verbal skill to dissolve Othello's persona and narrative authority, reminds us of the fictive nature of narrative, its variable power to build and destroy, and the competition inherent in the discursive construction of social realities.