The eyes have it: 'Othello''s after-life and the legacy of 'ocular proof' (William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Cary, Thomas Otway, Aphra Behn, Paula Vogel)

My dissertation reads Shakespeare's Othello as a dramatization of an early modern crisis in knowledge. At issue were the proper procedures and methods to be used in the pursuit of knowledge. For example, Francis Bacon exhorted fellow investigators to “put Nature on the rack and torture her secrets out of her.” Bacon's violent metaphors provide an important interpretive context in which to gauge Othello. This play absorbs and reproduces epistemological crisis by incorporating contradictory modes of knowing. Othello's conclusion hints that truth remains unsettled: Iago is to be taken away and tortured, so that any lingering secrets he possesses can be extracted from him. The proposed punishment of Iago emphasizes that all knowledge comes at a cost. As I show in my dissertation, the epistemology peculiar to torture haunts all manner of knowledge-quests.; Reading Othello in conjunction with several adaptations allows me to chart evolutions in the knowledge-problem with which the play is obsessed. The adaptations incorporated into my project are as follows: Elizabeth Cary's Tragedie of Mariam (1602–08), Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved: Or, a Plot Discovered (1682), Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), and Paula Vogel's Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief (1987). These four texts mimic Othello in their presentations of epistemological quest as at once violent and curiously intimate. Both Othello and its literary descendants show how epistemological pursuits are refracted through the prism of gender difference, a condition that redounds to the disadvantage of women. Though the project focuses primarily upon seventeenth-century texts, the penultimate chapter considers a twentieth-century rewriting of Othello, a strategy that allows me to gauge how early modern eruptions on the frontiers of knowledge continue to shape epistemological endeavors.