“Stuffed with epithets of war”: Narrative Contamination and Othello’s Military Rank

Moving from Othello’s “Intertextualities” section in the SENS archive, this essay reopens the question of the Moor’s military rank by situating it within Shakespeare’s broader practice of collating and transforming Italian narratives through multiple linguistic and cultural mediations. Focusing on the dramatisation of novella 3.7 in Giraldi Cinzio’s Ecatommiti (1565) alongside Matteo Bandello’s 1.51 story in Novelle (1554) and its French (1559) and English (1567) translations, I argue that Othello’s characterisation as a Venetian general emerges from a complex synthesis of distinct yet intersecting narrative models. While Cinzio’s novella provides, inter alia, the framework for the Moor’s ethnicity and Venetian service, the Bandellian line offers neglected precedents for his ambiguous military office through the characters of Spada and Barza, two diasporic soldiers enrolled in the ranks of the Mantuan army. Across the story’s French and English retellings, both figures are progressively ennobled and promoted, thus reconfiguring historically plausible mercenary roles into examples of social mobility and precarious cultural assimilation. When related to these characters’ cross-cultural transmission, Othello’s ‘confusing’ military rank appears less as the result of a terminological inaccuracy than as an imaginative construct shaped by Shakespeare’s engagement with layered novella traditions.