The improbability of Othello : rhetorical anthropology and shakespearean selfhood

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Prologue. 'As if for surety': the problematics of shakespearean probability

Toward a rhetorical genealogy of Othello

'My parts, my title, and my perfect soul': ingenuity, apodeixis, and the origins of rhetorical anthropology

'Against my estimation': ciceronian decorum, stoic constancy, and the production of ethos

The logic of Renaissance rhetoric

'Apt and true': speech, world, and thought in Shakespeare's humanist dialectic

'Yonder's foul murders done': place, predicament, and grammatical space on Cyprus

Willful words, Christian anxieties, and shakespearean dramaturgy

'Tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus': will, habit, and the discourse of res

'Preposterous conclusions': eros, enargeia, and composition in Othello

'Prophetic fury': the language of theatrical potentiality and the economy of shakespearean reception

Tropings of the self in Shakespeare's scripts

'I am not what I am': Shakespeare's scripted subject

'Nobody. I myself': discovering what passes show

Performing the improbable other on Shakespeare's stage

'Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago': ligatures of self and stranger

'It is not words that shakes me thus': Burbage, as if Othello

Epilogue. 'Make not impossible/that which but seems unlike': the twilight of probability and the dawn of shakespearean romance