Bianca (Othello) request. Midway through 4.1., and prior to Bianca's entrance, Othello has been secretly observing a bawdy discussion between Iago and Cassio about the latter's sexual exploits with a young woman. Thanks to Iago's impeccable planning (and some bad luck), neither speaker mentions the name of the woman in question; it is in fact Bianca, but Othello tragically assumes it to be his wife, Desdemona. Bianca suddenly enters, and her suspicions of Cassio are even greater than before. She is convinced that the handkerchief belongs to another woman, and throws it contemptuously at Cassio's feet. In Othello's eyes, her apparent jealousy
Othello on Othello. Although characters described as "moors" appear in two other Shakespeare plays ("Titus Andronicus" and "The Merchant of Venice"), such characters were a rarity in contemporary theatre, and it was unknown for them to take centre stage. There is no consensus over Othello's ethnic origin. E. A. J. Honigmann, the editor of the Arden Shakespeare edition, concluded that Othello's race is ambiguous. "Renaissance representations of the Moor were vague, varied, inconsistent, and contradictory. As critics have established, the term 'Moor' referred to dark-skinned people in general, used interchangeably with terms such as 'African', 'Somali', 'Ethiopian', 'Negro', 'Arab', 'Berber', and