Introduction: Romance, the “Turk,” and Europe

When Othello confronts Desdemona about her lost handkerchief, he notoriously describes it as a magical object made of hallowed silk, dyed in a substance conserved from the mummified hearts of virgins, and sewn by a sibyl in her “prophetic fury” At this moment, Othello rhetorically or perhaps compulsively affiliates himself with the most alien version of his past, a feminized Egyptian scene of sorcery and demonic magic. As he does so, he also alludes to one of the most famous romances of the sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: the “prophetic fury” of Othello’s sibyl is also the “furor profetico” of Ariosto’s Cassandra, as she sews the canopy under which the converted Saracen hero Ruggiero marries the Christian woman warrior Bradamante at the poem’s end.¹ Cassandra’s embroidery envisions the dynasty that will derive from this mixed marriage, the Estes who were Ariosto’s patrons; her weaving thus mirrors Ariosto’s text in imagining—fabricating—a long and glorious future. But what does Othello’s sibyl see, in her own “prophetic fury”? The phrase seems strangely misplaced, in the context of a marriage that will produce no descendents and that may never even have been consummated. In dynastic terms, there would seem to be nothing to see here; or, if the sibyl did see something, her vision—like the classical Cassandra, rather than Ariosto’s romanticized revision—is powerless to affect that history, to avert the catastrophe whose vehicle will be the handkerchief she weaves.