I sponsor the reading that, however untenable, must be right. Doing so I promote a reading that, however tenable, must be wrong. It claims that Othello is all about tobacco—that the play and our critical response cannot do without the identification and interpretive use of this specific drug. Such a reading advertises tantalizingly concrete materialist and historicist claims about literary and cultural causation. Renaissance tobacco, after all, was from the first a temptingly tangible thing; and its introduction to England can "very now" (O, 1.1.88, p. 1251) be located with correspondingly alluring historical specificity.⁴ The play and our own critical-theoretical moment invite Iago's italicization of time and matter: Who or what has done what to whom, and when? And so I serve time and matter by plugging tobacco as the root cause of Shakespeare's play.

But such apparently radical announcements have already been disturbed if not uprooted, not just by our annual caviling with materialism and New Historicism,⁵ but by the perennial tendency of the Renaissance to sow for us what it has already reaped for itself. Othello, in other words, refuses entirely to support the reading that it also demands. In fact Othello anatomizes this reading, and this kind of reading, as unsustainable critical behavior--behavior compulsively motivated by toxic theoretical and methodological assumptions. What does it mean to be put in this position with the help of a text, by its enabling capacity to invoke a kind of interpretation that it also renders symptomatic of a prescribed pathology? What does it mean to have come to be conditioned to need some thing at some time (analytically, bodily, theatrically, theoretically) that one also has learned to be objectively undesirable, implausible, unsustainable? What does it mean to occupy a position that appears so hopelessly confused about the boundaries between matter and metaphor?

It means that one is addicted. And however unsustainable my necessary case for Othello and tobacco, I intend to demonstrate convincingly that the play is all about addiction. By addiction I mean the emphatic ascription of agency and causality to time-bound matter that cannot completely support such investment. To be addicted is to occupy a subject-position divided between consumer and critic, a position that identifies one's needs (behavioral, chemical, interpretive, theoretical) as both necessity and poison.⁶ By addiction, then, I mean Iago and the critical approach for which he stands as synecdoche and model. That approach seeks to explain literary and cultural phenomena through the revelatory imputation of material novelty and historical disturbance. That approach is at war with coincidence and contiguity that do not analytically signify, advocating instead a material and historical and social causality always on the verge of magic. And that approach always risks (and always seeks) an overinvestment of meaningful agency in things and their social circulation. Technological innovation, epistemic disruption, dubiously reified agency, and the conversion of contiguity into causality provide the methodological urges of materialist and New Historicist readings; they have already provided, I will argue, the scapegoating tactics of Iago (who ascribes the tragedy of Othello to novelty items such as drugs, race, and textiles) and King James (who in the first years of the seventeenth century blames an exotic and recently discovered weed for all that is wrong with England). Iago and James enact and embody a kind of cultural criticism that many readers of Othello irresistibly emulate. It is, again and not for the last time, an interpretive mode that the play prescribes and pathologizes.