Othello (1602-3) explores the tragic power of storytelling. In addition to his military experience, Othello is a traveller, who wooed Desdemona with tales of exotic journeys to places where he encountered the monstrous and the marvellous: ‘the cannibals that each other eat,/ The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (1.3.142-4). Roderigo, at Iago’s instigation, denigrates Othello to Brabanzio by referring to him as ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger/ Of here and everywhere’ (1.1.137-8).1 The implication is that his decentredness and foreignness combine to render him inherently suspect. As John Gillies observes, Othello is a ‘voyager’, a figure traditionally tainted by associations with the margins, transgression and extravagance, in terms of exceeding boundaries.2 The peripheral places of the world, to the early modern mind, were spaces of marvel, vitality and perceived savagery, and the play taps into this rich imaginative vein. The edges of late medieval and early modern maps feature depictions of hybridity and monstrosity, of deviation and difference.3 Even as maps progressed beyond the medieval T-O design, the habit of lining the edges with the monstrous races was common; these included the Cynocephali (the dog-headed people), the Blemmyae (headless, and with their faces in their chests, which Othello refers to), and the Sciapods, with a single large foot.4 At the edges of maps, as the spaces of the known moved to the unknown, reality slipped into fantasy.5 Before the Senate, Othello conjures a tale of an exotic and colourful past, holding his audience spellbound with his narrative power. Yet as a black other, these are dangerous discourses to invoke, for Othello himself is a marvel from peripheral space, and thus potentially ‘monstrous’, both to himself and to those around him.6 As Mark Thornton Burnett observes, Othello is ‘both a presenter who locates "monstrosity" outside of himself and a self-consciously fashioned exhibit’