Othello has been commanded on his wedding day to head off the Turkish fleet making for Cyprus (in Greek mythology, the island of Aphrodite). "You must away tonight", orders the Duke peremptorily. Desdemona's natural expostulation "Tonight, my lord?" is brushed aside by the Duke's still more emphatic "This night"; and her dismay finds no echo in the alacrity of Othello's disturbingly-worded compliance: "With all my heart."
The result is that when the Venetian forces land in Cyprus Othello and Desdemona's marriage is still unconsummated. Othello alludes to the fact as he leaves the stage before the drinking bout begins:
Come, my dear love,
The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue:
That profit's yet to come 'tween me and
you.
Iago's entrapment of Cassio is a sinister kind of wooing, just as Cassio's drunkenness is an inferior kind of rapture. The romantic love which is being fulfilled offstage is shadowed and parodied in the drinking bout, which is itself a miniaturised version of Iago's larger entrapment of Othello.
What is so interesting about the scenes in which that more terrible seduction is carried out by Iago is that, although the emotion which fuels them is hatred rather than love, the dramatic form of those encounters is a reworking of the wooing conversations between suitors which, in the years preceding Othello, Shakespeare has written for his comic heroes and heroines. So those scenes also stand as minatory presences in the wings of romance.
The ambivalence of wine — both Cassio's devil and Iago's good familiar creature — allows it to play a role in both the celebrations of love and the parodic rituals of hatred. When Boito was recasting Shakespeare's play into a libretto, he indulged in some desperate surgery — for instance, cutting the whole of Act I. But he was attuned to this aspect of the play. In Verdi's Otello, when Jago and Cassio carouse, Cassio sings of the "true bounty of the vine", and Jago invites him to taste "the draught of Bacchus", del ditirambo. The Dionysiac, which fuses wine, love, and violence, was abroad in Shakespeare's Cyprus on Othello's wedding night.
