| Summary: | This article proposes that the sexually explicit illusions counterfeited by Spenser's enchanter Archimago and Shakespeare's slanderer Iago, while grounded in early modern debates about idolatry and morality, disturbingly prefigure contemporary anxieties about pornographic deep-fakes. After examining invocations of Shakespeare in current handwringing over deepfake, the article reveals that Othello responds to similar moral and epistemological apprehensions among Shakespeare's contemporaries—most notably Spenser—spawned by trompe l'oeil and erotica from Renaissance Italy, as well as by cross-dressing on the Renaissance stage. Shakespeare's tragedy interrogates the power of representational technologies (such as visual art, theater, costume, cosmetics, and language itself) to objectify and falsify the bodies of both women and racial others, reinscribing them within a libidinal economy that subjects them to "sadistic voyeurism." Spenser and Shakespeare's canny entraining of readers to resist the erotic forgeries of Renaissance media provides a model for an engaged pedagogy that could help foster digital skepticism among twenty-first century students. This article proposes that the sexually explicit illusions counterfeited by Spenser's enchanter Archimago and Shakespeare's slanderer Iago, while grounded in early modern debates about idolatry and morality, disturbingly prefigure contemporary anxieties about pornographic deepfakes. After examining invocations of Shakespeare in current handwringing over deepfake, the article reveals that Othello responds to similar moral and epistemological apprehensions among Shakespeare's contemporaries––most notably Spenser––spawned by trompe l'oeil and erotica from Renaissance Italy, as well as by cross-dressing on the Renaissance stage. Shakespeare's tragedy interrogates the power of representational technologies (such as visual art, theater, costume, cosmetics, and language itself) to objectify and falsify the bodies of both women and racial Others, reinscribing them within a libidinal economy that subjects them to "sadistic voyeurism." Spenser and Shakespeare's canny entraining of readers to resist the erotic forgeries of Renaissance media provides a model for an engaged pedagogy that could help foster digital skepticism among twenty-first century students.
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