SOURCE: Wayne, Valerie. “Historical Differences: Misogyny and Othello.” In The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Valerie Wayne, pp. 153-79. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

In the following essay, Wayne contends that Othello depicts an array of ideologies concerning women and marriage, and argues that the misogyny in Othello, for which Iago serves as the primary mouthpiece, represents just one of the prevailing views of the Renaissance.

I

Among all the critiques of the new historicism that are currently available, Carolyn Porter's remarkable essay, ‘Are we being historical yet?’, seems to me to explain most fully the process by which subversive elements are contained and marginal elements subordinated, dominated and othered in some new historicist practices. ‘The problem lies … in being limited to one set of discourses—those which form the site of a dominant ideology—and then reifying that limit as if it were...