Othello

Some of Shakespeare’s most intricate stories involve the bestowal of a token of affection between two lovers. The love-trinket is then stolen, mislaid or voluntarily given into hostile hands. This malevolent third party uses possession or knowledge of the memento to manipulate the lovers into mistrusting one another. If the play is a comedy, then all’s well that ends well, but if the play is tragedy, then murder is probably not far behind. Othello, falls into the latter column. Othello’s first gift to Desdemona was a handkerchief embroidered with strawberries. After Desdemona uses it to soothe Othello’s headache, Othello unknowingly loses it. Eventually le mouchoir fraise (as the French might call it) falls into the hands of the treacherous Iago, who plants it in the rooms of a different character, Cassio. It doesn’t take long for Iago to engineer suspicion of Desdemona’s fidelity in the mind of the jealousy-prone Othello. The O-Man eventually smothers Faithful-D as she sleeps, then realizes his mistake. While the strawberry hankie in the play is supposed to be embroidered, here I have rather obviously used a rubber stamp and red (I’ll have you know, archival) ink. When I realized I didn’t have anything white, I rummaged around and finally found a bag of my son’s old baby clothes with some kind of white diaper shirt in it – et voila! Le mouchoir fraise!