A telling statistic with which to begin is that Othello, the title character, speaks just twenty-five per cent of the play’s lines, while thirty-one per cent of them are spoken by his antagonist, Iago. In his long, steamrollering prose speeches to Roderigo at the end of the first act, Iago in effect articulates his creed, what Coleridge called ‘Iagoism’: ‘Virtue? A fig! ’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners’ (I. iii. 333–34).
‘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:
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.’