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.