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                                               I hate the Moor:
And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets
He has done my office: I know not if’t be true,
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety. (I. iii. 375–79)

This is the speech Coleridge described as ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’. Do you believe in the rumour Iago has heard?

In the next scene Iago witnesses Cassio kiss Emilia – ‘’tis my breeding / That gives me this bold show of courtesy’ (II. i. 109–10) – and responds,

Sir, would she give you so much of her lips
As of her tongue she oft bestows on me,
You would have enough. (II. i. 111–13)

Her ‘tongue’ here could connote kissing, but more overtly suggests that she talks too much. When Desdemona defends Emilia (‘Alas, she has no speech’ [II. i. 114]), Iago goes on:

Marry, before your ladyship, I grant,
She puts her tongue a little in her heart
And chides with thinking. (II. i. 117–19)

He claims – to use the phrase he coined in the first scene of the play – that sometimes she does not wear her heart upon her sleeve. Iago goes on with his sexist comedy about women being ‘pictures out of doors, bells in your parlours’ etc. (II. i. 121–). In this scene it is sort of true that Emilia ‘chides with thinking’, in that she says little in response to her husband’s provocations. Then again, what she does say is to disagree and contradict him: ‘You have little cause to say so’; ‘You shall not write my praise’; ‘How if fair and foolish?’ (II. i. 120, 127, 147).

In Act 3, Scene 1 Emilia unwittingly(?) aids Iago’s plans by helping to arrange for Cassio to speak privately to Desdemona. Then in Act 3, Scene 3 she knowingly gives Iago the handkerchief. Having said that, he doesn’t have much choice in the matter – stage directions in most editions say that he takes/snatches it.

In Act 3, Scene 4 we find that in her cynicism about men Emilia somewhat resembles her husband: ‘They are all but stomachs, and we all but food’ (III. iv. 108). There’s a parallel between this and Act 2, Scene 1, where Iago says what he thinks women are like. Emilia also uses that resonant J-word:

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       jealous souls will not be answered so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they’re jealous: it is a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself. (III. iv. 166–69)

She is referring, in effect, to motiveless jealousy. John Vyvyan has a good line on this: he says, ‘Iago is jealousy, and jealousy is the flaw in Othello’s character.’ But is there something self-fulfilling about Iago’s and Emilia’s cynical expectations that the other (sex) will be cynical? More evidence relating to this comes in Act 4.

In Act 4, Scene 2, Emilia defends Desdemona’s reputation to Othello, then Iago:

I will be hanged if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander[.] (IV. ii. 146–49)

The slander that Desdemona is a whore, that is. This exchange is obviously heavy with dramatic irony, since the villain, her husband, is standing right next to her. In each production the actress playing Emilia, and the director, can decide whether to imply that she already suspects Iago.

Then we see a contrast between the two women. Desdemona says, ‘If any such there be, heaven pardon him!’, while Emilia responds, ‘A halter pardon him!’ (IV. ii. 151–52), i.e. a hangman’s noose. Mercy and justice; forgiveness and revenge; ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ (see Matthew 5: 38–39).

Act 4 ends with Emilia’s longest speech, but the build-up is important too. The scene begins with Othello ordering Desdemona to ‘Dismiss your attendant’ (IV. iii. 7–8), which she never does, so the entire scene (including the tender ‘willow song’) is a kind of transgression of the feminine against the masculine. Martin L. Wine:

The so-called willow or bedchamber scene between Desdemona and Emilia [iv iii] is, as Carol Thomas Neely points out, the only scene of genuine friendship in the entire play and is sadly and ironically ‘sandwiched between two exchanges of Iago and Roderigo’[.]

Even if Emilia sometimes ‘puts her tongue a little in her heart’, this scene does not show her doing so with Desdemona, as Iago alleged. She says forthrightly, ‘I wish you had never seen him [Othello]’ (IV. iii. 18).

Some rare frustration breaks out of Desdemona – ‘O, these men, these men!’ – and she asks Emilia a question: ‘Dost thou in conscience think […] That there be women do abuse [deceive] their husbands[?]’ (IV. iii. 63–65). This introduces a fascinating dialogue for understanding Emilia:

ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ There be some such, no question.
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ Why, would not you?
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ No, by this heavenly light!
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ Nor I neither by this heavenly light:
I might do’t as well i’th’dark.
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ The world’s a huge thing: it is a great price
For a small vice.
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ In troth, I think thou wouldst not.
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ In troth, I think I should, and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition: but for all the whole world, why, who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? (IV. iii. 67–80)

What was your answer to the earlier question of whether you believed the rumour Iago claims he has heard, that Emilia has slept with Othello? Even if we still do not buy the idea that she has, she says here in terms that she would be willing to cuckold her husband. It is just one example in the play of Iago saying something bad about someone and then – in the Iagoan world of Othello – it turning out to be true: Othello is a threat to Desdemona, Emilia is a would-be cuckold, Cassio is a bit of an arse. My final contrarian take on what Emilia says is that in a way she is being loyal to her Machiavellian (and perhaps sexually weird?) husband. Wouldn’t Iago think it a good deal to be cuckolded if it made him a monarch?

The scene ends with Emilia’s speech. I think of it as being analogous to Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ etc. (III. i. 40–49). Hath not a woman (wandering) eyes? Hath not a woman a stomach? asks Emilia:

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     I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us, or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite:
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is. And doth affection [desire] breed it?
I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too. And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so. (IV. iii. 89–106)

If ‘They are all but stomachs’ is a claim of victimisation, this speech is instead a claim of equality. But consider a disturbing thought, namely that in Emilia’s case equality with her husband might be related to complicity in his crimes.

Tony Bromham states,

Emilia’s […] speeches […] suggest that the husband’s treatment of his wife is an encouragement to her to take lovers. […] there is something of Iago’s cynicism about Emilia’s speeches on married life and one can only feel that there is a level of bitterness here which derives from her own experience of being married to him. She believes it is right to respond to hurts done to her by hurting in return[.]

As if Emilia and Iago are locked in a ‘gender war’ of self-fulfilling sexist assumptions.

Emilia experiences ‘a divided duty’, to employ Desdemona’s earlier phrase (I. iii. 197), between Iago and Desdemona. (So often the terms required to analyse Othello are to be found in the play.) When does she definitively shift her loyalty from the former to the latter? In some productions it is in Act 4, Scene 2, during her ‘some eternal villain’ speech, but if not then, it happens unambiguously in the final act. Her bond with her mistress defines her throughout – it is the source of her utility to Iago and ultimately his reason for killing her. In this play only Desdemona deserves her good reputation, hence, as Emilia puts it, it is to ‘belie [slander] her’, as Othello does, to say ‘she was a whore’ (V. ii. 153–54).

Emilia overhears, without quite knowing what she hears, Othello murder Desdemona, and is then told by him, ‘Thy husband knew it all.’ ‘My husband?’, she responds (V. ii. 161–62), and utters these words six times over the course of the scene.

In her last interaction with Iago, like her first, he tells her to be quiet: ‘charm your tongue […] hold your peace’ (V. ii. 209, 248). If Desdemona is something of a sacrifice, Emilia is something of a martyr. For indicting him so vehemently, Iago kills her. ‘O, lay me by my mistress’ side!’, she says, adding to what Lodovico calls ‘the tragic loading of this bed’ (V. ii. 271, 408).

Harold Bloom calls Emilia ‘a figure of intrepid outrage, willing to die for the sake of the murdered Desdemona’s good name.’

Emilia’s heroic victory over Iago is one of Shakespeare’s grandest ironies, and appropriately constitutes the play’s most surprising dramatic moment […] That Emilia should lose her worldly wisdom, and become as free as the north wind, was the only eventuality that Iago could not foresee. And his failure to encompass his wife’s best aspect—her love for and pride in Desdemona—is the one lapse for which he cannot forgive himself.

Emilia truly is Desdemona’s lieutenant and ensign.

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               The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil – and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. (II. ii. 551–56)

The way Claudius presents himself to his court is a deception of sorts. He wants to suggest that all is well (and of course intends to continue to cover up his crime). Hamlet refers later to his uncle’s ‘cozenage’ (V. ii. 67), i.e. deception. Claudius’s deception(s) are what motivate the ghost to appear.

Laertes warns Ophelia not to trust Hamlet as a suitor. In Act 3, Scene 1 she laments, ‘I was the more deceived’ (III. i. 118). But Hamlet responds by accusing her of deception: ‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another’ (III. i. 137–38). A. C. Bradley:

Hamlet does not, as the popular theory supposes, break with Ophelia directly after the Ghost appears to him; on the contrary, he tries to see her and sends letters to her (ii. i. 109). What really happens is that Ophelia suddenly repels his visits and letters. Now, we know that she is simply obeying her father’s order; but how would her action appear to Hamlet, already sick at heart because of his mother’s frailty, and now finding that, the moment fortune has turned against him, the woman who had welcomed his love turns against him too? Even if he divined (as his insults to Polonius suggest) that her father was concerned in this change, would he not still, in that morbid condition of mind, certainly suspect her of being less simple than she had appeared to him? […] There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother; that she was shallow and artificial, and even that what had seemed simple and affectionate love might really have been something very different.

Polonius sends Reynaldo to spy on Laertes’ conduct in Paris. Similarly, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are recruited to spy on Hamlet, but it doesn’t take him long to see through the deception. Then Claudius and Polonius hide in order to spy on Hamlet.

The whole theme of madness can be related to deception – a mad mind deceives itself. But the play itself is deceptive on the question of Hamlet’s madness. Harold Bloom: ‘We rarely know when Hamlet is not acting-out a part he has devised for himself: if your intellect is limitless, how can you know when you are being sincere?’

Consider ‘The Mousetrap’ (III. ii. 216) – all theatre is a kind of deception, but this one has a specific secret purpose. And just as the play-within-the-play had a secret purpose, Claudius responds by sending Hamlet to England, and does so with a secret purpose.

Polonius again hides to spy on Hamlet, this time behind the arras. Janyce Marson: ‘Polonius’s predilection for deception ultimately causes him to become the agent of his own demise.’

Another deception: Claudius and Laertes conspire to orchestrate the fencing match.

In the final scene, Hamlet tells Horatio that he discovered the letter to the English king and replaced it with a forgery telling the king to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed instead. Another case of one deception being countered by another.

Shakespeare’s most important dramatic technique in Hamlet is the soliloquy, in which everyone is deceived as to real motives, except the speaker and the audience. People are capable of self-deception – ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ (II. ii. 239–40) – and maybe in his soliloquies Hamlet works through his motives so as not to deceive himself. Stanley Wells writes, Hamlet ‘cannot both obey the Ghost and remain true to himself’; Harold Bloom that Hamlet’s ‘consciousness [is] infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself.’ Jean Brooks: ‘The large number [of Hamlet’s soliloquies] – seven – reflects the importance of Hamlet’s inner world as a touchstone of integrity set against the deception of Claudius’s corrupt public world.’

Charles R. Forker: ‘The very court of Denmark is like a stage upon which all the major characters except Horatio take parts, play roles, and practice to deceive. The irony is that Hamlet himself must adopt a pose in order to expose it in others.’

Meredith Anne Skura: ‘Hamlet’s refusal of the deceptive roles he finds himself forced to play is part of his recoil from all seeming in a world where hypocrisy taints even love and friendship, and where all human achievement is illusory.’

‘I have that within which passes show; / These but the trappings and the suits of woe’ (I. ii. 85–86). Brett Foster: ‘Already Hamlet sounds some of the play’s major preoccupations—what one knows and how one knows it, and how external signs deceive.’ Paul A. Cantor: ‘Characteristically his first speech in the play expresses his contempt for seeming and his suspicion that truth lies buried beneath layers of deception’.

Stephen Booth: ‘The theme of suicide, for all the inconstancy of its fluid moral and emotional value, is a constant and unifying factor in the play. So too is the theme of appearance and reality, deceit, pretense, disguise, acting, seeming, and cosmetics’.

Graham Bradshaw: ‘Hamlet is (or at any rate was) healthy, while the Court’s “life” is founded on deception, intrigue, murder and (less clearly, I think) incest.’

Jean Brooks on the ending: ‘Tragic exaltation lies in the heroic endeavour of a man who was never a soldier or a king to fulfil rightly the role life imposes on him in a deceptive world, with every part of the good-and-evil “nature” the Ghost appeals to, despite lapses caused by the “dram of evil” infecting his “noble substance”.’

Paul A. Cantor on Hamlet’s ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ speech (IV. iv. 32–66): we see Hamlet’s

refusal to accept heroic action at face value, his probing beneath the surface issues of epic warfare to reveal the triviality of the disputes at its base, his suspicion that the heroic warrior is merely deceiving himself and throwing away his life and many others for the sake of an empty ideal.

In the first scene Orsino says, ‘my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, / E’er since pursue me’ (I. i. 23–24). So unrequited love is cruel, but we are also invited to find Orsino’s self-indulgence comic.

Surely the cruellest character is Sir Toby. Take his very first statement: ‘What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus? I am sure care’s an enemy to life’ (I. iii. 1–2). Or his question to Malvolio: ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ (II. iii. 88–89). Behind his superficially Falstaffian persona, and in the total absence of care and virtue, in Toby there is great potential for cruelty. (His attitude to Sir Andrew is that of a psychopath: because Sir Andrew can be parted from his money, he deserves to be.)

And consider the rest of the group who gull Malvolio: Sir Andrew is both gulled and guller; Feste disguises himself as Sir Topas to persecute Malvolio in Act 4, Scene 2; and, of Maria, Harold C. Goddard says that she ‘plainly means it when she says that if Malvolio really does go mad, it will be well worth it: the house will be the quieter! There is a cruel streak in her as there generally is in practical jokers.’

Toby explicitly pitches his ‘dark room’ idea as a sadistic pleasure: ‘Come, we’ll have him in a dark room and bound. My niece is already in the belief that he’s mad. We may carry it thus, for our pleasure’ (III. iv. 103–04).

(A dark room was ‘A place of confinement for a person considered insane’ [OED].)

We feel for Malvolio when he pleads, ‘Good Sir Topas, do not think I am mad. They have laid me here in hideous darkness’ (IV. ii. 21–22). But does he in any way deserve what he gets? Maria’s charge seems to be that he is not virtuous but rather a virtue-signaller:

The devil a puritan that he is, or anything constantly, but a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass, that cons state without book and utters it by great swarths. The best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him. And on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work. (II. iii. 111–15)

(Strange to think of Twelfth Night as a ‘revenge play’.)

And when Malvolio reads the forged letter in Act 2, Scene 5, we as it were see the puritan’s eyes bulge in private:

I will be proud, I will read politic authors, I will baffle Sir Toby, I will wash off gross acquaintance, I will be point-device the very man. I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me: for every reason excites to this, that my lady loves me. (II. v. 118–21)

The final scene/act contains several examples of Malvolio complaining about his cruel treatment, e.g. in his letter to Olivia:

By the Lord, madam, you wrong me, and the world shall know it. Though you have put me into darkness and given your drunken cousin rule over me, yet have I the benefit of my senses as well as your ladyship. […] I leave my duty a little unthought of, and speak out of my injury. The madly-used Malvolio. (V. i. 285–91)

Remember that Fabian reports Toby and Maria have married: ‘Maria writ / The letter, at Sir Toby’s great importance, / In recompense whereof he hath married her’ (V. i. 347–9). If we want to imagine of what they will be capable together we might think of the Macbeths.

How interesting that the one character credited with a lack of cruelty is Viola, when Fabian says that Cesario ‘bears in his visage no great presage of cruelty’ (III. ii. 43). Almost as if Viola is the antidote to all the cruelties of the play.

‘Fig’ here functions like another F-word, so that Iago the Machiavel says: Virtue? Eff virtue! All is will and power, and this leaves no place for love, which Iago sees as a weakness. In the same scene he says that ‘love [of Desdemona] hath turned [Roderigo] almost the wrong side out’, that Othello is ‘enfettered to her love’, and that he will ‘turn her [Desdemona’s] virtue into pitch’ (II. iii. 41, 309, 324). Like moral jujitsu he takes others’ love or virtue and uses it against them. When he insinuates that Desdemona’s is ‘a will most rank’ (III. iii. 261), he ironically describes himself.

‘I follow but myself’ (I. i. 60), Iago says. He seems to believe that he can construct himself and control those around him through willpower. Many ‘self-’ compounds can be applied to him – he is self-interested, self-absorbed, self-aggrandising, etc. Harold Bloom says that he possesses ‘self-delight’.

Detectives, journalists, and screenwriters are all interested in motive. You might be familiar with Coleridge’s famous observation that Iago’s is a ‘motiveless malignity’, and it is worth looking in a bit of detail at the context. The soliloquy Coleridge refers to follows the one quoted above:

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                                                 I hate the Moor:
And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets
He has done my office: I know not if’t be true,
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety. (I. iii. 375–79)

(Stuart Hampton-Reeves makes a good distinction when he says that ‘Iago is the only character who seems to have direct access to the audience […] Other characters soliloquise, but none address the audience as a real presence.’)

Coleridge calls this speech ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’, meaning the rumour that Othello had sex with Emilia is a potential motive, but Iago’s innate malignity does not require one. If we don’t find this rumour plausible, we might note that the general and his ancient are both able to believe in what’s untrue, or at least, in the latter case, to behave as if they do: the manipulable Othello ends up believing that Desdemona has cheated on him, while Iago simply chooses, ‘for mere suspicion’, to behave ‘as if’ Emilia has cheated on him.

Iago’s other obvious motive is Othello’s promoting Cassio to lieutenant instead of him, which again is not sufficient to explain the extent of the hatred. (It is easy to miss the fact that at the end of the central scene Othello does give Iago the position he wanted: ‘Now art thou my lieutenant’ [III. iii. 527]. Of course this does nothing to alter Iago’s malignity.) So how else to account for it? Othello suggests that Iago is Satanic when he calls him a ‘demi-devil’ (V. ii. 339), one of Shakespeare’s numerous coinages. Remember, Genesis 1 says that God created the world and ‘saw that it was good’, while Satan’s motivation in the Garden of Eden was to destroy what was good precisely because it was good. Iago has also been ‘diagnosed’ with psychopathy (see ‘Iago the Psychopath’ [1978] by Fred West). Finally, a potentially helpful concept is what Nietzsche called ressentiment, ‘An attitude which arises, often unconsciously, from aggressive feelings frustrated by a sensed inferiority of one’s situation or personality, frequently resulting in some form of self-abasement’ (OED). In other words, to quote a later work which was certainly influenced by Othello, Iago has a sense of ‘injured merit’ (Paradise Lost, I. 98). In the penultimate scene Emilia speculates about ‘[making] her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch’ (V. i. 80), a trade-off Iago would probably accept. He would certainly like to be a monarch, and a tyrannical one.

On the subject of Emilia, she is one of her husband’s victims, but what does she have in common with him? A certain amount of cynicism?

There is something of the incel about Iago, a misogyny perhaps born of resentment that women do not love him. He is prurient, showing too much interest in other people’s sex lives. It is easy to miss, but when he says of Desdemona, ‘I do love her too’ (II. i. 275), he seems to be honest.

He likes to ‘educate’ Othello about types of people:

I know our country disposition well:
In Venice they [wives] do let heaven see the pranks
They dare not show their husbands: their best conscience
Is not to leave’t undone, but kept unknown. (III. iii. 224–27)

Later in the same scene: ‘There are a kind of men / So loose of soul that in their sleeps will mutter / Their affairs’ (III. iii. 458–60).

He can also, to employ a Lord of the Rings comparison, be a bit of a Wormtongue: ‘I humbly do beseech you of your pardon / For too much loving you’ (III. iii. 237–38).

Harold Bloom makes a series of typically penetrating statements about Iago:

• ‘Iago is a pyromaniac who wishes to set fire to everything and everyone.’

• ‘Iago is the genius or bad angel of Othello and of Othello.’

• ‘Modern literature has not surpassed Iago; he remains the perfect Devil of the West, superb as psychologist, playwright, dramatic critic, and negative theologian.’

• ‘Iago has no inner self, only a fecund abyss, precisely like his descendant, Milton’s Satan, who in every deep found a lower deep opening wide.’

• ‘Negative charisma is an odd endowment; Iago represents it uniquely in Shakespeare’.

Think about why Bloom would call Iago a ‘playwright’. Iago proceeds towards his intentions – his ‘peculiar end[s]’ (I. i. 62) – by directing other people, telling them what to do and even what to feel. For example, in that first scene, his doing so instigates the action of the play: ‘Call up her father’, then ‘put on your gown! / Your heart is burst’ (I. i. 70, 90–91). Once he has done enough to set things in motion, he leaves the stage.

It can even seem as though he’s in charge of stage lighting. The first act ends with his rhyming couplet, ‘hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth [his plan] to the world’s light’ (I. iii. 392–93). Things can be accomplished at night because he, metaphorically, can see in the dark. In Act 5, Scene 1 he ‘stabs Cassio on the leg’ and exits, Lodovico notes that ‘’Tis heavy night’ (V. i. 44), and then Iago re-enters ‘With a light’!

Consider this in relation to his belief in his own military prowess. He is good at both strategy and, particularly, tactics. That is, he can take the long view in pursuit of Othello’s destruction, but he is also an exceptional opportunist, seamlessly combining invention with interpretations of real events. Can you think of any examples of him thinking on his feet and exploiting contingencies?

Think about how sharing an enemy can bind people together. Othello the Moor, Iago the Venetian, and Cassio the Florentine leave Venice apparently united in their war against the Turks. On Cyprus they discover that the Turkish fleet has been ‘banged’ by a storm (II. i. 22) and are soon in various forms of conflict with each other.

Another critic, John Vyvyan, says, ‘Iago is jealousy, and jealousy is the flaw in Othello’s character.’

He is a catalyst in the true sense of causing others to change but remaining unchanged himself.

He is also an agent of chaos. He wants the message for Brabantio to have an effect as when ‘the fire / Is spied in populous cities’ (I. i. 79–80). Recall what Othello says later to Desdemona: ‘when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again’ (III. iii. 90–91). Bloom calls this ‘an accurate foreboding of chaotic engulfment’, Iago being the one who brings this about. And why does Othello say ‘again’? He is probably thinking of chaos in the sense of ‘The formless void believed to have existed before the creation of the universe’ (OED). So, again, Iago is the enemy of creation and its goodness. Finally, we could relate chaos to disharmony, discord, and untuning. Speaking aside when with Othello and Desdemona, Iago says, ‘O, you are well tuned now! / But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music’ (II. i. 206–07). The metaphor is an image of untuning a stringed instrument by loosening the keys (pegs) that keep the strings taught.

Of course, there can be no ‘ocular proof’ (III. iii. 398), as Othello demands, that Desdemona is a whore, because there can be no ocular proof of a rhetorical construct. But this does not stop Iago asserting the existence of proofs – he twice refers to ‘other proofs’ (III. iii. 473, 486). (It is also interesting to note that in the first scene Iago expresses his resentment at being passed over for promotion by Othello: ‘I — of whom his eyes had seen the proof’ [I. i. 28]. The real, ocular proof?) How would you describe Iago’s various strategies for manufacturing Desdemona’s infidelity?

Consider Iago and the theme of reputation. ‘Who steals my purse steals trash’, he says, while ‘he that filches from me my good name […] makes me poor indeed’ (III. iii. 178–82). But in fact Iago uses reputation management like money – to achieve his ends – and ultimately does not care for his own. Ironically, he uses Cassio’s good reputation when he says to Othello, ‘Cassio, my lord? […] I cannot think it, / That he would steal away so guilty-like’ (III. iii. 41–42). Iago does not ‘wear [his] heart upon [his] sleeve’ (I. i. 66), but when it does become known that he was never ‘Honest Iago’ – ‘I am not what I am’ (I. i. 67) – he does not defend his ‘good name’, but rather says nothing: ‘Demand me nothing’ (V. ii. 341). To care about reputation entails caring about others and what they think – Cassio cares too much and Iago too little.

Relatedly, in Act 3, Scene 3, in her only soliloquy, Emilia says that Iago has asked her a hundred times to steal Desdemona’s handkerchief, and calls him ‘My wayward husband’ (III. iii. 325). The editors of The New Oxford Shakespeare gloss ‘wayward’ as meaning ‘unaccountable’. More fully, ‘Conforming to no fixed rule or principle of conduct; capricious, unaccountable; erratic, unpredictable’ (OED). Iago retains this quality to the end. When asked by Othello to explain himself – asked for his ‘motive’ – he refuses to defend his reputation by accounting for his malignity. In fact, as noted above, he refuses to say anything at all: ‘Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word’ (V. ii. 341–42).

Finally, a mini thesis on identity in Othello. Iago’s key statement in the first scene is ‘I am not what I am’ (I. i. 67), and we could see the whole play as being about characters having apparent identities (or reputations), but not in fact being what they seem, and lacking the grounding of secure self-identity. Once Iago’s identity as honest is proved false, and Othello’s as noble is destroyed, the former falls silent and the latter commits suicide. Cassio too is all reputation, and goes to pieces when his is lost. Iago says, ‘he that filches from me my good name […] makes me poor indeed’ (III. iii. 178–82), and the play shows this to be true, at least for the male characters, because without their good names they seem to be left with nothing. (Only Desdemona deserves her good reputation, hence, as Emilia puts it, it is to ‘belie [slander] her’, as Othello does, to say ‘she was a whore’ [V. ii. 153–54].) This thesis is complicated by the idea that, in his final speech, Othello retains some of his nobility. Bloom: ‘How can tragic dignity be maintained if one is reduced to incoherence by Iago’s subtle art? Shakespeare is uncanny in preserving a residue of Othello’s self-identity which can be reaffirmed in his suicidal final speech.’