The staging of the play's final act represents the culmination of its thematic and visual chiaroscuro, as Othello's black skin and Emilia's racialized outrage at ‘the blacker devil’ (5.2.140) contrast with the ‘monumental alabaster’ (5.2.5) of Desdemona among the white sheets of the bed. It is also the place where the private domestic world – the relationship between Othello and Desdemona symbolized by its intimate location – becomes public. There are an increasing number of people crammed into the small space of the bedchamber in Act 5 Scene 2, as Emilia, Iago, Montano, Graziano, Lodovico, Cassio and ‘officers’ all pile into their debased privacy. Othello's suicide is figured not as an act of private remorse. Nor is he subjected to the local, familial quest for revenge that Disdemona's relatives enact in Cinthio's Hecatommithi. Cinthio's story culminates with the brutal murder of Disdemona by the Moor and the Ensign armed with ‘a stocking filled with sand’. According to their plan, the Ensign is hidden ‘in a closet which opened off the bedchamber’. While husband and wife are in bed together he contrives to make a noise, and, when Disdemona is sent by the Moor to investigate, she is repeatedly and fatally bludgeoned by his accomplice. When she is dead, they pull the ceiling of the bedchamber onto her body to disguise her murder: ‘when she is dead,’ advises the Ensign, ‘we shall make part of the ceiling fall; and we'll break the Lady's head, making it seem that a rafter has injured it in falling, and killed her. In this way, everyone will think she died accidentally.’ For Cinthio's story, the destruction of the bedchamber is thus first a practical, if ineffectual, gesture of concealment; but the image also functions metaphorically to indicate the destruction of the home, the domestic and sexual sphere of the married couple. The taint of jealousy has destroyed the physical fabric of domestic life, bringing down the rafters of their broken relationship onto the defiled bed. The image of domestic rubble symbolizes a crushed marriage, but it may also nod towards the structure of tragic narrative itself.