THEME SERIAL KILLERS AND OTHELLO

 A Theme Serial Killer, according to TV Tropes, has to pattern his kills after a famous set, like the seven deadly sins, or a work of fiction. The killer will choose victims who match up with the set and/or he will kill them in manners befitting the set. Note that the killer will avoid repeating methods of murder: each death will represent, in some way, another portion of the set or story. 

In particular, and given my own personal catnip, I want to focus on murders committed by two British Theme Serial Killers in particular, both of them Wicked Cultured (villains with a taste for high culture), one of them with a Shakespearean theme and another with an operatic theme. Naturally, both of them just felt like they had to sink their teeth into having a Desdemona (in one of their cases, with an Othello on the side) on their respective hit lists.

Significantly, both murders took place in the United Kingdom; the Shakespearean one in London town and the Verdian one in a railway yard on the outskirts of Oxford. They also took place around the same time period; Evelyn Balfour née Tate was killed in the 1960s and Maisie Psaltery in the 1970s. 

.....

"Ancora un bacio" (Die On the Third Kiss - my own translation of the lyric!): Desdemona in the Endeavour episode Fugue

Victim: Evelyn Balfour née Tate, a married thirty- or forty-something housewife. She was chosen by the killer because she was involved in his legal trial, being the daughter of a pub barmaid who was a female witness at the trial. Also because Evelyn's first name began with an E, the first note in the lines of the treble clef (another theme the killer followed). Also because Evelyn had been cheating on her husband, Mr. Balfour. Like, having real love affairs, subverting what we expect of a Desdemona stand-in!

Killer: Mason Gull "The Opera Phantom," an unstable musical prodigy who was sentenced to juvie as a teen for matricide.

More Information: Evelyn was strangled by Gull in a railway yard, inside a disused railway carriage (the killer combining Othello and Iago), with a handkerchief embroidered with a capital D stuffed into her mouth (as a clue to which character she represented); he wrote the final words of the Verdian opera by Arrigo Boito, Othello's last words said to the corpse of Desdemona as he kisses her, in original Italian, "ancora un bacio" ("die on the third kiss," in my translation of the libretto on this blog as Miss Dermark's Verdian Othello), on the back of the railway carriage door. The main suspect was Evelyn's (real-life) lover and Cassio counterpart Roy Adamson, imprisoned for the crime. Evelyn Balfour's husband naturally comes under suspicion after her body is found. As does Roy Adamson, her lover, who spends some time in the cells before his name is cleared. 

......

The Psalteries' Marital Crisis: Othello and Desdemona in Theatre of Blood

Victims: Maisie and Solomon Psaltery, an old, as in elderly, happily married couple of caustic theatre critics. Happily until Solomon was cajoled into believing Maisie was flirting with others... They were chosen by the killer for having panned (harshly criticised) his Shakespearean performances on the stage.

Killer: Edward Lionheart, a frustrated Shakespearean thespian whom the Psalteries and other caustic critics had panned, and who had attempted suicide and was presumed dead. Assuming the umpteeenth out of many new identities, he gained the Psalteries' trust and pitted Solomon against Maisie. Taking on the roles of both Iago and Cassio, Lionheart posed as an Italian masseur and gave Maisie a faux-erotic naked massage, not before having told her husband to watch the procedure...

More Information: Just like in the finale of both the Shakespearean and Verdian versions (but having Shakespeare as the source material), Solomon stifled Maisie with a pillow in the couple's bed in a jealous rage. Then, when Solomon realised what he had done (unlike Othello) he did not commit suicide, but rather survived and turned himself willingly to be seized and imprisoned by Scotland Yard for uxoricide (it's implied, though, that his old age and poor health won't let him survive prison for long... and what is harsher in hindsight, Jack Dawkins, who played Solomon Psaltery, died of throat cancer three months after the film's initial release. He had to be live-action dubbed by an uncredited Charles Gray, as his larynx had been removed).

.....

SUMMING UP: "Who Says I Play the Villain?" Or: What Drives Theme Serial Killers to Play Iago?

Both the Shakespeare-themed and the opera-themed serial killer had a multitude of appropriate motifs to choose from, and yet both of them were drawn to the same plot (seen through the lens of Shakespeare and Verdi, respectively), and both cast themselves as Iago. 

Maybe they were drawn to the story for the same reasons that draw me and countless others to pick it as a personal favourite. The way Iago manipulates his fellow humans by using their flaws is something we even admire; even if we do not have access to the gift of people-speaking or the Imperius Curse, this is a form of mind control some of us muggle people can have access to in real life. The way he even poisons, or gaslights, a happy couple of newlyweds into abuse and even murder is also shocking. Even Mr. Burns himself lists Iago in his catalogue of villains in his character song "High to be Loathed," making a shadow puppet of him in Elizabethan garb! And that among the likes of Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Megatron, and Skeletor, not to mention Mr. Burns mentioning himself (ie leaning on the fourth wall)! The only fictional character as classic and public domain as Iago in those lyrics is Southern slaver Simon Legree...

So, long story short, we admire Iago for his superb manipulation skills, and love to hate him for his outright wickedness and nihilism and utter disregard for the lives of others, all at the same time. As John Eglinton puts it in Joyce's Ulysses:

-- And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père?) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.

And we're talking a (fictional?) major scholar of Shakespeare here! In fact, Iago is regarded by countless thespians and baritones as a great challenge to perform as because of the many masks you have to don on stage when interacting with all the different co-stars. Iago is cheerful with Cassio, professional with Othello, cold-hearted with the ladies... And, at heart, a sinister riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma. Furthermore, that scheming that is required for both being Iago and being a theme serial killer requires a lot of creativity, if you think of that. Creativity warped to serve sinister aims, but nevertheless creativity:

According to A. C. Bradley, “. . . Iago is motivated by a love of excitement and by his perception of himself as an artist.  He derives great pleasure from the successful execution of his complex and dangerous intrigues.”

The same way that Mason Gull is a musical prodigy and Edward Lionheart is an ace thespian. No surprise that both of them would, in their revenge-fueled serial killings, be drawn to the intrigues of Iago, and pick a married wife among their respective lists of victims to cast as Desdemona (in the case of Lionheart and the Psalteries, with her husband co-starring as Othello). If I had a blacker heart and a grudge against a married wife, and more of a knack for persuasion, maybe I would have gone down the same dark path... who knows?

ULYSSES, EPISODE 9: SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

ULYSSES, EPISODE 9: SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
A few scholars discussing the Bard, and notably his Othello. 
John Eglinton admires his creation of a villain like Iago!! 
The chapter is consecrated to literature:

Lapwing.

I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.

On.

-- You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others? Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann (what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?

-- That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. Que voulez-vous? Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.

-- Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor is not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth: an original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure, and in all the other plays which I have not read.

He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage. Judge Eglinton summed up.

-- The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all.

-- He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five. All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like José he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.

-- Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!

Dark dome received, reverbed.

-- And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père?) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.

-- Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet pére and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

-- Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka!

Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's desk.

-- May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.

He began to scribble on a slip of paper.

Take some slips from the counter going out.

-- Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one, shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.

He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.

Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

-- You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?

-- No, Stephen said promptly.

-- Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a dialogue, don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.

John Eclecticon doubly smiled.

-- Well, in that case, he said, I don't see why you should expect payment for it since you don't believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is some mystery in Hamlet but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to visit the present duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he believes his theory.