THE BARDATHON - The Tragedy of Othello

I have long considered myself a Shakespeare nut, but, in reality, whenever I read Shakespeare, I end up reading one or other of a favourite dozen or so. So, about a year ago, I determined to read all the Shakespeare plays, roughly in the order in which they were written. I say “roughly”, as we cannot be sure of the exact order. I decided to follow the order in which the plays are presented in the Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. That edition, I realise, has its detractors, but the order in which it presents the plays is possibly as good a chronological order as any. The plays themselves I read in the individual Arden editions.

I have now finished the project (it took me nearly a year), and I made notes as I was reading them. These notes, while far from being erudite exegeses – I am certainly no Shakespearean scholar – do, at least, capture what I, an enthusiastic amateur, made of them. And I have decided to polish up those notes a bit, and put them up on my blog, play by play.

Isn’t it astonishing the difference that even a slight re-wording can make? Shortly before Desdemona is killed, Othello tells her she is on her death-bed. In most editions, Desdemona replies “Aye, but not yet to die”. This gives the impression that she is responding to Othello in a calm and collected manner, and discoursing with him. But in both the Folio and in the Quarto text, she replies “I, but not yet to die”. This obviously makes little sense, and one can see why most editors change the “I” to “Aye” (ie "yes"). But in the Arden edition, the editor, A. J. Honigmann keeps the “I”, but re-punctuates it so it reads “I? – But not yet to die!” So now, Desdemona is not discoursing with the man about to kill her – she is beside herself in blind terror, and is shrieking incoherently in panic. Of course, she doesn’t stand a chance. “I hope you will not kill me,” she says with a sort of child-like innocence before she has had the chance to take in the full horror of the situation. And soon, she is pleading desperately with all her might: “Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight!” But it is no use. In full view on stage, Othello drags this screaming, terrified woman, an adolescent still almost a child, back to her bed and strangles her. It is horrible. Even if Desdemona were be guilty of what has been alleged, it is horrible even beyond what may be imagined. And Shakespeare forces us to watch it being done.

And yet, isn’t it curious that the man who commits so horrendous an act even before our eyes should command such sympathy? That we can refer to him (as so many do) as the noblest tragic protagonist that Shakespeare had created? In real life, a man who murders his helpless teenage wife (for, as I shall go on to argue, I cannot see Desdemona as anything other than very young – possibly about sixteen or so) would, quite rightly, be regarded as a monster. Most of us, I imagine, would close our ears to any possible mitigating factor. So why do we not feel that way about Othello?

To answer this question one must peer deeply into some of the most complex characters that even Shakespeare ever created. Indeed, so complex are they that no two readers, and no two members of the audience, can have the same view of them. And no matter how often one reads or sees this play, one comes away with a changed perception from the last time – one’s mind becomes a seething cauldron full of different possibilities.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that any interpretation is correct. I’ve read too many accounts of this play that are just wrong – some embarrassingly so. (I read a profoundly embarrassing column in the Guardian blog some time ago advising Lenny Henry not to demean himself by playing Othello, as Shakespeare had merely written a racist stereotype.) One rule of thumb is that any interpretation that is simple is bound to be wrong. Shakespeare knew not merely the complexity of human character, but also the essential mystery at the centre of it.

It seems to me that if this play is “about” anything at all, it is “about” damnation. Throughout the play there are references to hell and heaven, to demons and angels, to salvation and to damnation. The play is about how we forfeit our very souls, by allowing evil to enter. At the centre of this play is the damnation of Othello’s soul. No matter what Iago’s part in all this may be, Othello has committed a crime for which there can be no forgiveness. Othello himself knows this, and does not look for absolution, either in this world, or in the next: he knows at the end that he is irrevocably damned, and that Desdemona, his vision of heaven, is lost to him for all eternity. At the end, he asks someone to ask Iago why “he hath ensnared my soul”. Iago refuses to answer: “what you know, you know,” he says. And given what Othello knows, he cannot even hope for redemption of his soul:

When we shall meet at compt,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl!
Even like thy chastity. O cursed slave!
Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphur!
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
O Desdemona! Desdemona! dead!

Of course, one may say that Iago made him do it. I doubt whether that would count as much of a mitigating factor in court, but to understand the drama, we must try to understand the nature of both Iago and of Othello.

Iago is a fascinating character, but also, I think, a very shallow character. There are some who think that it is actually Iago, and not Othello, who is at the centre of the play. I find myself disagreeing with this strongly. It is true that Iago is on stage longer than Othello, and has more lines; but Iago is, I think, incapable of feeling anything very deeply. For instance, consider his suspicion of Emilia: he tells us, twice, that he suspects his wife of having had an affair with Othello (for which, incidentally, Shakespeare gives us not a shred of evidence), and he says that the thought of this “gnaws [his] inwards like a poisonous mineral”. But he only says this: we don’t see him feeling anything- certainly nothing remotely comparable to the inner torment Othello later feels when he begins to suspect his wife. Iago, I think, wanted Othello merely to experience something of thediscomfort he had himself experienced; but when Othello reacts with far greater passion (in III,iii, 362ff), Iago is taken by surprise: the depth and intensity of Othello’s passion are beyond Iago’s own narrow emotional horizons.

There is a very surprising scene also in IV,ii, where Iago is made to witness Desdemona’s distress. And here, too, I think Iago is taken by surprise. He says a few comforting words to Desdemona, but on the whole, seems surprisingly ill at ease: it’s one of the few scenes in the play where he is not in charge of the proceedings. Immediately afterwards, Iago meets with Roderigo, and in this confrontation, it is Roderigo who does most of the talking, and the normally loquacious Iago is mainly restricted to the occasional “go to” and “very well”. I think the reason for this is that Iago has been affected by Desdemona’s distress: his own limited imaginative capability could not have foreseen the depths of Desdemona’s anguish – it is well beyond his own stunted emotional range.

The eternal question, of course, is that of motive: why does Iago do all this? Iago himself gives two motives – that he had suspected Emilia with Othello, and that he had been overlooked for promotion. It has been said that neither motive is strong enough, but I don’t think that’s entirely true: it seems to me more the case that Iago does not appear to feel either motive very strongly. (And the very fact that he is given two motives when one would have been sufficient seems to me to weaken their power rather than otherwise.) Sure, he mentions these two motives, but when he does so, he seems curiously lacking in passion. Rather than seeking revenge for slights, real or imagined, it seems more likely that Iago is using these two reasons to spur himself on: this brings us to Coleridge’s famous formulation of “motiveless malignity searching for a motive”. But how does such malignity arise?

We get a clue, I think, in a revealing aside Iago has in V,i, where he speaks of Cassio having a “daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly”. Iago is aware that there is something missing in himself: what that something is, he does not know, but he knows that others have it, and that he doesn’t. He is a shallow character aware of his own shallowness. And in Othello and Desdemona, he seems to catch a glimpse of something that he knows is beyond his own narrow emotional horizons; and, although he cannot understand what exactly it is, he resents it.

Iago clearly did not intend everything from the very start: in his soliloquies, we see him making up the plan as he is going along, and, to begin with, he thinks of nothing further than placing impediments to Othello’s happiness. However, when Othello reacts with such unexpected passion, Iago realises that he has to go further – if only for his own safety (Othello threatens to kill him if he doesn’t provide proof of Desdemona’s infidelity); and as he does so, he finds himself enjoying the power he now wields over Othello, who is his superior in every way – in both social and military hierarchies, and also morally and spiritually. Iago finds enjoyment in his ability to bring Othello down to his own level: it is tremedously exciting. And, intoxicated by this sense of excitement, he goes further and further, unable to resist.

Yes, Iago is a fascinating character, but it is Othello who is at the centre of the play. Iago is at the end what he had been at the start – a morally and emotionally stunted character: it is in Othello that we see a nobility of soul, a grandeur that makes his descent into damnation all the more painful. And in the innocent, childlike Desdemona, we are offered an antithesis to Iago. “We work by wit, and not by witchcraft,” Iago says near the start of the play; Desdemona, on the other hand, works by witchcraft – of a sort: indeed, her lord father had suspected sorcery in her love for Othello, and in a sense, he was right, but it is not the sort of enchantment he had in mind. So, at the end, Iago, still alive, refuses to speak further, while in contrast, Desdemona speaks miraculously from apparently beyond death to forgive Othello: where Iago ensnares Othello’s soul, Desdemona offers the possibility of redemption – a redemption that, by the end, Othello does not himself look for.

There is a mystery at the heart of the relationship between Othello and Desdemona. On the surface, this is a story of a European woman who unwisely marries someone from a background very different from her own, and eventually pays for her mistake with her life as she becomes the victim of an honour killing. But if we see the play in these terms (and rather depressingly, many do – even certain “cultural commentators” who write for national newspapers!), we miss the essence of this very profound work.

I think that to appreciate the nature of the drama, we must consider the nature of the relationship between Othello and Desdemona. In I,iii, Desdemona’s lord father, upon taking his leave of her, says to Othello: “She has deceived her father, and may thee.” Othello’s reply is magnificent: “My life upon her faith.” This is no mere figure of speech: Othello really has staked his very life on the matter. Desdemona is his image of heaven itself, and if this image proves false, then the all of life itself becomes insignificant, devoid of meaning. This is made quite clear by the imagery of heaven and hell, and of salvation and damnation, that runs throughout the play:

Perdition catch my soul,
But I do love thee! And when I love thee not
Chaos is come again.
(III,ii,90-92)

If she be false, O then heaven mocks itself,
I’ll not believe it.(II,iii,283-4)

But there where I have garnered up my heart,
Where I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from which my current runs
Or else dries up –(IV,ii,58-61)

Such depth of feeling, such witchcraft, is beyond the scope of Iago’s wit. But Iago’s perspective is, of course, a very limited one. He cannot see the extent to which Othello has invested his very being into his love for Desdemona. This is, indeed, beautiful and noble, but it is also dangerously fragile; and Iago, being what he is, cannot understand the beauty and the nobility, but he does detect its fragility,

It is fragile because Othello and Desdemona come from completely different worlds. It is not merely a question of race (although it seems that modern interpretations of this play seem fixated on the issue of race at the cost of everything else): Othello is, for a start, much older than Desdemona; and on top of that, he comes from a different culture, a different world. Othello has no understanding of the world of the aristocracy, any more than Desdemona has any understanding of the world of military campaigns. Their decision to marry was a tremendous act of trust and of faith on both sides. Such trust is, of course, very beautiful, but once it is broken, there remains no stable base. Othello himself knows this: he has, as he says, “garnered up” his very heart in Desdemona’s love, and it is from there that his “current runs, or else dries up”: there is no middle course.

But once Iago breaks this fragile trust, Othello’s mind itself collapses. The exact nature of this fragility depends upon the interpretation: Antony Hopkins, in the BBC production, played up the fragility – he was, throughout, insecure in his relationship with Desdemona. Willard White, in Trevor Nunn’s RSC production (also available on DVD) takes Othello at his word: his Othello is not “easily jealous”, but, “being wrought, perplexed in the extreme”. But however we interpret this, the blind trust between Othello and Desdemona is fragile indeed, and no-one knows this better than Iago.

Iago knows that the world of the aristocracy is a closed book to Othello, who knows nothing about its customs and mores, about how people behave in that society. What Othello does know – and hence trusts – is the world of the military. Soldiers have to rely on each other implicitly: often, they rely on each other for their very lives. So when a fellow soldier – especially someone as universally renowned for his honesty as Iago is – suggests something, it is very powerful. And it is all the more so when that suggestion concerns something that Othello knows he does not understand – i.e. aristocracy. Even so, Othello resists: after Iago first starts to apply his poison, Othello says “If she be false, heaven mocks itself: I’ll not believe it”. But for the drama to work, we must appreciate how very potent this particular poison is: quite literally, it drives Othello mad. He turns on Iago with a violent fury, threatening to kill him:

Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore,
Be sure of it, give me ocular proof,
Or by the worth of man’s eternal soul
Thou hadst better been born a dog
Than answer my wak’d wrath!
….
If thou dost slander her and torture me
Never pray more, abandon all remorse;
On horror’s head horrors accumulate,
Do deeds to make heaven weep, all earth amazed,
For nothing canst thou to damnation add
Greater than that!
(III,iii,362-376)

(Once again, “eternal soul”, “heaven” and “damnation”! But whose damnation is Othello referring to? Iago’s, or his own?)

This is way beyond Iago’s understanding. But he knows that he can’t now stop here. And Othello, who has always been aware of the fragile nature of his faith in Desdemona, is now easy prey in Iago’s hands.

The final scene of this play is gut-wrenching. Othello knows he is damned: he does not ask for pardon or for mercy, either in this world or in the next. He knows the earth-shattering nature of the crime he has committed, and nothing can he to damnation add greater than that.

All Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists undergo a transformation, but none undergoes a transformation more dramatic than does Othello, who changes from a man of noble character and of spiritual grandeur into an unhinged wife-killer, a child-killer. He comes down, indeed, to the level of Iago, and one cannot descend to a level lower than that. (Othello’s unspeakably horrible murder of Desdemona has been pre-figured in the earlier scene by Iago’s murder of Roderigo, who, like Desdemona, is also, I think, a teenager.)

Desdemona doesn’t have as prominent a part in the play as does Othello and Iago. While Shakespeare was happy to write leading parts for women in his comedies (Rosalind, Viola, Beatrice, etc.), he seemed less keen to write prominent parts for women in tragedies: this may have been because he didn’t feel that the boy actors available for female roles could convincingly depict tragic passion – although, presumably, he changed his mind on that score by the time he came to create Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra. But whatever the reason, Desdemona is not as much at the forefront of the drama as are Othello and Iago. But that is not to say that she is not characterised.

If it is true that Desdemona has an idealised vision of Othello, it is also true that Othello has an idealised view of Desdemona: to Othello, Desdemona is a vision of heaven itself. But Shakespeare presents both as real characters, and not as ideals. Desdemona eventually does prove herself to be something of a saint, but this is all the more moving because she has been depicted not in terms of an ideal, but as a figure of flesh and blood. Far from being some sort of perfect vision, she is a young woman capable of deceiving her own lord father and the society she came from: this, indeed, is one of the main planks of Iago’s case – “This girl deceived her own lord father, the only family she had, aside from all of high society; and is therefore, is not only capable of deceiving, but is well-versed in the art of deception.” Othello cannot deny this, and neither can we, the audience.

Another point is the lie she tells Othello. When he asks her if the handkerchief is lost, she instantly answers it isn’t, even though, earlier in the scene, she had asked Emilia where she thinks she may have lost it. This seems to me the instinctive reaction of a child afraid of being told off. As to the question of why she hadn’t looked after the thing properly, well – she’s an aristocrat, and is used to having servants picking things up after her.

There’s also the scene where she pleads for Cassio to be reinstated. Now, Cassio has been quite rightly demoted for having been drunk while on guard duty. Whatever Iago’s part in the incident, for a senior officer such as Cassio to become drunk while on duty (especially in a time of war) is an extremely serious matter, and one suspects that were it not for Othello’s personal regard for him, Cassio may well have been clapped in irons and court-martialled. Desdemona is completely out of order in interfering in such a case, and pleading on Cassio’s behalf. Othello, as a military leader, must realise how improper it would be to reinstate Cassio, and he should have asked Desdemona, gently but firmly, not to interfere in this matter; but he seems incapable of doing so, and merely puts the thing off, saying to her “I will deny thee nothing”. (Antony Hopkins is particularly good in this scene in the BBC production: he seems unable to look Desdemona in the eye here, and started fidgeting with various things.) We may wonder why Othello behaves this way, but the reason for Desdemona’s behaviour isn’t hard to deduce: she is still childlike and immature, and, what’s more, she is still the spoilt daughter of privilege, an only child used to being pampered by her indulgent lord father, and blissfully unaware of the wider issues in the big bad wide world. In short, given her social background and her upbringing, Desdemona is, throughout, a perfectly believable creature of flesh and blood.

And, although Desdemona is usually played by a mature actress, I really cannot see her as anything other than a child, or at least an adolescent. There is much that is child-like about her behaviour. Emilia, for instance, says of her:

…but she so loves the token [the handkerchief],
For he conjured her she should ever keep it,
That she reserves it evermore about her
To kiss and talk to.

This is very much the behaviour of a child. Her failure to see that mention of Cassio is driving her husband mad seems to me very odd in a mature adult, but in a child inexperienced of life, it is more understandable. And her pleading on behalf of Cassio, while inexcusable in a mature woman in mid-adulthood, is perfectly understandable in a child used to asking for favours. And she seems to look on Emilia almost as a sort of mother-figure (or aunt figure, or oneesama), although Emilia herself, married to a man who says he is twenty-eight years old, is most likely still in her twenties.

All of this makes it all the more surprising that this otherwise unremarkable girl, still virtually a child, should make such an extraordinary leap of faith to marry Othello: there is, indeed, some form of witchcraft in this. She breaks off completely from the only society she knows, and goes off to a completely alien environment – a military outpost on the front line of a war. However, if Othello and Desdemona had seen each other in terms of ideals, neither is really greatly mistaken: for Othello is the great hero that Desdemona sees in him; he is a man of real nobility, and of moral and spiritual grandeur: were it not so, his moral decline would have been, in dramatic terms, unremarkable. Othello is a man who feels deeply, a man who loves not wisely, but too well. And, as the play progresses, it becomes apparent that Desdemona, for all her immaturity and her foibles, is also a saint: when Othello saw in her a vision of heaven, he wasn’t far mistaken. But Shakespeare depicts this saint very much as a creature of flesh-and-blood. It may be said with some justification that in King Lear, Cordelia is more important for what she represents than for what she is, but I don’t think this can be said of Desdemona, who emerges as a well-rounded, well-characterised figure in the drama. And it is precisely because she is so believable that her tragedy, and her forgiveness, are so unbearably moving.

Iago may be the epitome of evil and Desdemona the epitome of saintliness, but Shakespeare saw both in human terms. And, despite delving into these characters as deeply as he could – or as deeply as anyone could – he acknowledges the mystery that lies at their heart, the mystery that lies at the heart of human existence itself.

***

The structure and pacing of the play are also deserving of comment. Given how tense the tragedy is, the tempo at the start is surprisingly leisurely. For almost half the play – right up to the middle of the third act – Shakespeare maintains this leisurely tempo. It’s not that nothing happens – far from it: but there seems little sense of urgency. But it is in Act 3 scene 3 (a worthy contender for the single greatest scene that Shakespeare ever wrote) that it really starts to grip. Indeed, in this scene, we find ourselves caught in a vice: it is here that Iago first starts applying the poison to Othello’s mind. And from this scene onwards, Shakespeare does not let up. In terms of emotional involvement, I don’t think any other play in the canon can quite compare with this. We register every agony felt by Othello and by Desdemona: no matter how often I revisit the play, I seem to re-live this extraordinary intensity of mental turmoil. If Othello’s mind becomes unhinged – as it surely does – we can feel why it does so, even if we cannot explain it fully to our satisfaction.

Perhaps we can never explain it. Great works of art always retain that mystery at their heart – although that is not to say we shouldn’t try to think about it as deeply as we can. Certainly, not even Shakespeare ever wrote anything more wonderful than this.

Some Further Thoughts on Emilia and Iago (and Cassio as well)
The problem with trying to write about something such as Othello is that even after you’ve written thousands of words, you still feel you’ve barely scratched the surface. It feels like probing an iceberg - how large is that iceberg, how deep into the ocean is the plunge?

One question is often raised about Emilia: how much did she know of her husband’s plotting? I personallty don’t think that she did know about it. When Othello, after killing Desdemona, mentions that it was Iago who had told him about Desdemona’s unfaithfulness, there can be no doubting Emilia’s surprise and shock:

OTHELLO
Cassio did top her; ask thy husband else.
O, I were damn’d beneath all depth in hell,
But that I did proceed upon just grounds
To this extremity. Thy husband knew it all.

EMILIA
My husband!

OTHELLO
Thy husband.

EMILIA
That she was false to wedlock?

OTHELLO
Ay, with Cassio. Nay, had she been true,
If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and Perfect chrysolite,
I’ld not have sold her for it.

EMILIA
My husband!

OTHELLO
Ay, ’twas he that told me first:
An honest man he is, and hates the slime
That sticks on filthy deeds.

EMILIA
My husband!

OTHELLO
What needs this iteration, woman? I say thy husband.

A bit later, when Iago enters, we get this:

EMILIA
O, are you come, Iago? you have done well,
That men must lay their murders on your neck.

GRATIANO
What is the matter?

EMILIA
Disprove this villain, if thou be’st a man:
He says thou told’st him that his wife was false:
I know thou didst not, thou’rt not such a villain

This does not seem like counterfeiting to me. Emilia is certain that her husband, whatever faults he may have had, could not be such a villain. A bit villainish, may be – but not such a villain.

Yes, it is true that Emilia had picked up the handkerchief when Desdemona had dropped it, and had given it to Iago, as he had requested. She is not entirely unquestioning: she does ask “why?”; but she does not insist on an answer to her question:

EMILIA
What will you do with ‘t, that you have been
so earnest
To have me filch it?

IAGO
[Snatching it] Why, what’s that to you?

EMILIA
If it be not for some purpose of import,
Give’t me again: poor lady, she’ll run mad
When she shall lack it.

IAGO
Be not acknown on ‘t; I have use for it.I
Go, leave me.

She clearly does not know what Iago plans to do with the handkerchief. This brief scene between Emilia and Iago does suggest very strongly to me that their marriage is on the rocks. Iago, we know, suspects Emilia of being unfaithful (although there is no evidence apparent for this). And when later in the play, Emilia speaks passionately of the bad treatment wives get from their husbands, one feels that she may be speaking from experience:

But 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 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.

It may be possible, I think, that Emilia gives the handkerchief to her husband as a sort of peace offering. Of course, she sees (in III,iv) that Othello is angry with Desdemona for having lost the handkerchief, but, not knowing how Iago has been affecting Othello’s mind, she is in no position to judge the severity of this matter: as far as she can see, it is simply a domestic row – the sort of thing that may be quite commonplace in her own life. Of course, she could have said that the handkerchief was with Iago, but she could not do this without giving her husband away. As far as she is concerned, nicking the handkerchief was just a piece of petty pilfering and nothing more, and she certainly wasn’t going to incriminate her husband on that point just to settle a domestic row between Othello and Desdemona.

Of course, things get much worse after that, as Othello strikes Desdemona in public (IV,i), and then humiliates her horribly in a scene that is almost too unbearable even to read (IV,ii), but there is no reason for Emilia to associate any of that with the handkerchief.

Does she suspect Iago? I doubt it. In IV,ii, after that terrible scene between Othello and Desdemona, Emilia vents her fury at the injustice of it all; but, interestingly, the fury is aimed not at Othello, but at someone who Emilia imagines (as it happens, quite rightly) has been poisoning Othello’s mind. Although she comes very close to the truth in her guessing, I’d be very surprised if she suspected her own husband as the villain. If she did, her words to him at the end would make little sense:

Disprove this villain, if thou be’st a man:
He says thou told’st him that his wife was false:
I know thou didst not, thou’rt not such a villain

I really can’t see any evidence in any of this to suggest that Emilia suspected her husband, even vaguely. If she had done, and had remained silent, then she would have been complicit in the terrible crime. And yet, her distress on discovering the crime can hardly be doubted. When she realises the truth, she insists on speaking it. Given the social mores of the time, the wife was expected to obey the husband (which is, indeed, what Emilia had done when she pilfered the handkerchief for him); but now, to reveal the truth, she is prepared to defy those social mores:

IAGO
What, are you mad? I charge you, get you home.

EMILIA
Good gentlemen, let me have leave to speak:
‘Tis proper I obey him, but not now.
Perchance, Iago, I will ne’er go home.

She even has a premonition of her own end at this point, I think, when she speaks those last words.

Emilia, in this scene, is heroic. Whatever petty pilfering she may have done in the past, she is now prepared to sacrifice her very life to reveal the truth about her beloved Desdemona. A few minutes earlier, she had said this to Othello:

Thou hast not half that power to do me harm
As I have to be hurt.

This is magnificent. Emilia feels that the willingness to receive hurt for the sake of the truth is in itself a strength. As, indeed, it is. This moral strength that she displays, the power of her love for the dead Desdemona, is something else that was beyond Iago’s limited horizons: he could only see into the weaknesses of people, but such matters as moral courage or self-sacrifice are beyond his limited vision. Just as he could not even conceive the nature of the relationship between Othello and Desdemona, neither could he conceive that Emilia – whom he had taken for granted – would be prepared even to face death for the sake of someone she had loved. The more I ponder this, the more I think how very pathetic and lacking in insight Iago’s view of humanity really is: the worst he can see in people is the only truth there is for him. Although he succeeds in bringing Othello down to his level, humanity is capable of being far, far greater than Iago could ever imagine.

Othello, it is true, does not see through Iago, but neither does anyone else. He is referred to throughout by everyone as “honest”. In Act One, Othello proposes that Iago escort Desdemona to Cyprus, saying about him: “A man he is of honest and trust.” If anyone had known Iago to have been otherwise, they would have objected immediately, but no-one does. Later, we see that Iago is trusted by Cassio, who is happy to take his advice on being re-instated. Desdemona, when in deep distress in IV,ii, asks Emilia to fetch her husband to advise her. And after Cassio is wounded and Roderigo murdered, both Ludovico and Gratiano trust Iago, and are happy to allow him to take charge of matters:

GRATIANO
This is Othello’s ancient, as I take it.

LUDOVICO
The same indeed; a very valiant fellow.

I think Iago was overlooked for promotion because of his class. He is actually quite right when he says this:

Why, there’s no remedy; ’tis the curse of service,
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to the first.

My history books tell me that Cromwell’s New Model Army was successful in part because it was a complete meritocracy: promotion depended purely on ability, not on social standing. And Shakespeare, of course, predated the New Model Army (and eighteenth-century military academy). Cassio is an aristocrat: he belongs to the same social circles as Desdemona. In II,1, while they are all waiting anxiously for Othello’s ship to arrive, Desdemona whiles away the time for a bit listening to Iago’s jokes, but then goes off with Cassio to one side of the stage to speak in private – away from the mere “riff-raff”, as it were. Iago notices this, and resents this. Cassio seems to me a sort of Renaissance equivalent of the Sandhurst-trained officer: Harrow, Cambridge, Sandhurst… he has all the connections, and, naturally, gets the top posts. At no time does he show any leadership qualities: indeed, when he gets drunk while on guard duty, he displays qualities that should have disqualified him from high position altogether. And yet, even so disgraceful a display earns him a mere demotion rather than a court-martial; and later, he is appointed the new Governor of Cyprus. Iago is well within his rights to resent this.

But for all this, I don’t think it is this motive (any more than the belief that his wife had slept with Othello) that drives him on: he doesn’t seem to feel any of this strongly enough. He seems to use these motives merely to spur himself on into doing what he wants to do anyway. For instance, when he speaks of his suspicion that Emila has had an affair with Othello:

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.

In short, “I don’t know if this is true, but I’ll assume it is, and go on from there.” This seems strange. If the thought bothers him, why not investigate it further? Why not look for evidence one way or the other? And similarly with being overlooked promotion: if it really rankles with him, why does he mention it so rarely? Surely, if this were a major motive, it would always have been in the forefront of his mind? And if it was, then surely – given his extreme loquacity – he’d have mentioned it more often? But he mentions it only once, and then seems to forget all about it. He may feel these things – but he really he doesn’t seem to feel them strongly enough. Certainly not strongly enough to justify the atrocities he commits: one has to feel very strongly indeed to do something so unspeakable.

No matter how much one writes about these characters, one still feels that one hasn’t scratched the surface. And I’m sure that the next time I read or see this play, I’ll think about it differently once again…

“Chaos is come again”: “Othello” at Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon

The following is a not really a review – I don’t really do reviews, as such! – it’s more an attempt to make sense of various thoughts that struck me on seeing The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Shakespeare’s Othello from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, directed by Iqbal Khan. I saw it as a live cinema broadcast on August 26th, 2015.

Not being a very frequent theatre-goer, I cannot claim to be in any way an authority on interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays in performance, and of how these interpretations have changed over time, but I do get the distinct impression that depictions both of Othello the play, and of Othello the character, have changed quite significantly: they have both become much harsher than they used to be. Not that interpretations used to be all sweetness and light: that is hardly possible in a play in which the titular character ends up murdering his innocent and helpless wife onstage; but actors and directors are, it seems to me, less inclined nowadays to portray Othello as an essentially noble figure. Some forty or fifty years ago, judging by the audio recordings that still survive from that era, and remembering also what I can of a wonderful performance I had attended in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre back in 1979 (with Donald Sinden a quite magnificent Othello), performances emphasised a certain nobility, a certain majesty, in Othello’s character: indeed, it was because he was so grand and so noble a figure that his transformation into a murderous beast seemed so particularly horrible. Actors found in his lines a solemnity and grandeur that, even at the height of his homicidal rage, seemed to foreshadow the sublimity and magnificence of Milton:

Never, Iago: Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.

But more recent Othellos tend to eschew this kind of approach: instead of the sonorous grandeur that actors of a previous generation had found, modern Othellos tend to break these lines up into shorter units, preferring staccato rhythms to long legato lines. The effect is to diminish, or even to deny altogether, the sense of nobility in the character. I suppose this reflects in part a modern sensibility that is sceptical of the very idea of nobility or of sweetness: actors do not generally depict Hamlet as a “sweet prince” either these days. But I wonder to what extent this harsher, and, some would say, less sentimental view of Othello – both of character and of play – is informed by the well-known 1952 essay by F. R. Leavis, “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero” (included in this collection), in which it is argued with considerable vigour that Othello, far from being the noble and dignified protagonist that A. C. Bradley had described in his famous study, is actually a most ignoble and, indeed, shallow personage, vain and self-dramatising, unworthy of Desdemona, and unable, given his shortness of vision and triviality of mind, even to come close to appreciating her worth.

Bradley is very much Leavis’ target in this essay, and in every way, Leavis seems Bradley’s opposite: where Bradley is gentlemanly and charming, Leavis is abrasive, relishing a trenchant and quite wicked vituperative wit. And where Bradley tries to find the best he can in the characters, Leavis only sees characters who are morally short-sighted, blinkered, self-serving, and most ignoble.

There are two main points in which Leavis takes issue with Bradley: firstly, he rubbishes Bradley’s contention that it is really Iago who is at the centre of the play; and secondly, he rips to shreds – with some gusto – the idea that Othello possesses even the slightest hint of nobility or of dignity. On the first point, I agree with Leavis whole-heartedly: Iago certainly has more lines than Othello, but this hollow, pathetic shell of a man, lacking as he does anything of Macbeth’s pained consciousness of the damnation of his soul – lacking consciousness even of the existence of a soul that may be damned – simply does not have enough substance to hold the centre of so immense a tragic work. But Leavis’ second point – that Othello is similarly hollow – I find more troubling. If the drama is essentially that of an empty eggshell cracked open revealed its emptiness, then why does it grip so powerfully? Why is it that by the end of a reading, or of a good performance, we feel that we have glimpsed into the very depths of the human soul?

Leavis certainly does not see the play in such grand terms: at the end of his essay, he writes:

It is a marvellously sure and adroit piece of workmanship; though closely related to that judgement is the further one that, with all its brilliance and poignancy, it comes below Shakespeare’s supreme – his very greatest – works.

I couldn’t help feeling when I first read this essay that, given Leavis’ view of the character of Othello, his judgement on the play could not be otherwise – that the mere cracking open of an empty shell to display the emptiness is not and cannot be the stuff of supreme masterpieces. But since it does seem to me self-evidently a supreme masterpiece, it must surely follow that there are flaws in Leavis’ arguments. However, what is remarkable is that even when Othello is played as Leavis had seen him (Antony Hopkins’ interpretation in the 1981 BBC production strikes me as very Leavisite in conception), the drama retains still its extraordinary power. In other words, Leavis’ conclusion is not inevitable, even if we were to accept his arguments: Othello himself can be hollow and empty, lacking in nobility or in majesty, but the tragic power of the drama, even from this Leavisite perspective, somehow remains undiminished. And it is worth investigating where this tragic power lies: if it is not in the depiction of the great fall of a great man – since Othello is not great here to begin with – where is it?

My own view of the play – an interpretation that for many years has satisfied me, and which continues, despite Leavis, to satisfy – I tried to describe here, and there’s little point my repeating it; however, Leavis’ view is certainly worth considering, not merely because he was among the most perceptive of literary critics both of his or of any other generation, but also because his interpretation is coherent, and entirely consistent with Shakespeare’s text. But it does leave us with an enigma: a drama that, on the surface, should really be quite trivial – the exposure of a hollow man as but a hollow man – turns out to be gut-wrenchingly intense. How can this be?

This latest RSC production is Leavisite in many ways. Othello, played by Hugh Quarshie, is allowed little of the nobility and majesty that I remember from Donald Sinden’s performance of the late 70s, or is apparent in the thrilling performance by Richard Johnson in an audio recording from the 60s. This lack of nobility is clearly a conscious decision, since Quarshie, given his stage presence and charisma, his superb verse-speaking, and, not least, his imposing and sonorous voice, is certainly more than capable of depicting nobility had he so wanted. But this Othello is far from noble: we see him happy to oversee torture of prisoners as a routine part of his job; and, right from the start, he seems to express little sense of wonder that Desdemona had chosen him: he takes it all in his stride, as if all this were no more than his due. He is a supremely confident man, well aware that he can flout the authority even of a senator with impunity, and unsurprised that so valuable a prize as Desdemona – for prize is how he seems to consider her – could fall to him.

“Prize” is also the word Iago uses to describe Desdemona:

Faith, he to-night hath boarded a land carack:
If it prove lawful prize, he’s made for ever.

And in the next act, even as Othello expresses his love for Desdemona, he does so very disconcertingly in terms borrowed from the world of commerce, as if his union with Desdemona were no more than a financial contract:

Come, my dear love,
The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue;
That profit’s yet to come ‘tween me and you.

All this is in Shakespeare’s text: seeing Othello in such Leavisite terms is a valid interpretation of the text, and not an imposition. And, somewhat unexpectedly and very disconcertingly, it seems to point to certain parallels between Othello and Iago. These parallels are reinforced in this adaptation, as Iago here is also played by a black actor – Lucian Msamati. This casting removes – to a certain extent, at least – racism from Iago’s motivation, but what it substitutes in its place is most disturbing: for if it is true that Iago manages to bring down Othello to his own bestial level, the journey Othello makes is not a very long one; the implication seems inescapable that Othello, even from the start, is no stranger to Iago’s mindset.

Not that they are identical, of course: the differences are as important as the similarities. But the similarities are worthy of notice, for only when we are aware of these similarities do we realise the significance of the differences. Both Othello and Iago are aware, I think, that they are missing something in their lives – something vitally important. Iago, in a deeply significant aside, says of Cassio:

He hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly

And Othello, in parallel, knows that were he not to love Desdemona, his very soul would be lost, and his entire world collapse into chaos:

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,
But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again.

The use of the word “again” seems to imply that Othello is no stranger to “chaos”: for all his seeming confidence in the affairs of men, in other matters, he knows how precariously balanced his soul is between redemption and perdition.

But there, where I have garner’d up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up…

And here, I think, we see a very significant difference between the two – a difference that Leavis does not comment upon: where Iago wishes to destroy that quality which he knows he lacks – that “daily beauty” – Othello craves it, for he sees it as a path towards redemption. And this, I think, is what gives the play its gut-wrenching tragic power: even if Othello were to be everything Leavis claims he is, he seeks redemption: Iago doesn’t. Iago, working by “wit and not by witchcraft”, cannot bring himself even to believe in such a thing.

If I am on the right track on this, the tragedy lies not in Othello’s fall from a great height, but in his failure to reach that height in the first place. That height may be but vaguely glimpsed, but Othello, unlike Iago, is capable of glimpsing it, however vaguely, and the entire play seems suffused with a terror of that chaos that lies just under the surface of our lives – a chaos that prevents us from attaining those vaguely glimpsed heights, and which instead hurls our very souls from heaven.

Hugh Quarshie as Othello and Lucian Msamati as Iago in “Othello”. Image courtesy Royal Shakespeare Company

This latest RSC production certainly captures that sense of terror. Othello as a play is curiously paced: the tempo seems quite slow for the first half, and, given that the play is most famous for its depiction of jealousy, Othello doesn’t even start to be jealous till after the half-way mark. But once it starts to grip – somewhere in the middle of Act 3, as Iago starts applying his poison – it doesn’t let go: even the “Willow song” scene, as Emilia prepares Desdemona for bed (IV,iii), where Shakespeare gives us something of a calm before the final storm, the air is thick with menace and with forebodings of impending doom. Perhaps no other play by Shakespeare, not even King Lear, leaves us quite so emotionally drained as does this.

It is Iago rather than Othello who commands centre stage for most of that first half, and Lucian Msamati gives a quite extraordinary performance here of a man who is, psychologically, deeply damaged. Some actors present Iago as a sort of likable villain, but Msamati’s Iago is, from the beginning, a dangerous sociopath. There is a powerful scene in the fourth act in which Desdemona, in her innocence and naivety, turns to Iago for help; and in this production, she kisses Iago in gratitude for what she thinks is his good advice. The sheer sense of physical revulsion with which Iago reacts to this kiss is startling. This is a man who finds the whole of humanity disgusting – he is obsessively cleaning up after everyone, as if the very physical presence of others is to him an abomination.

In the text, we clearly see Iago making up his plot as he is going along, and I have long thought that Iago engineers the destruction of Othello and of Desdemona only because, having underestimated the violence of Othello’s reaction, he is forced into doing so; but here, Iago wills the destruction from the start: it is merely the mechanism of his plot rather than its end that he has to improvise. Far from being a likable villain, this is an Iago whose very presence makes one’s skin crawl.

Quarshie’s Othello, as we first see him, is a man who is, seemingly, supremely confident. But Iago understands his weakness. He may not understand what Othello is aspiring towards, or why, but he is as aware as Othello is of the chaos that lies just below the surface, and he is aware of it because, in this, Othello resembles himself. And Othello’s surface cracks very quickly indeed. When Othello exits some half way through III,iii – the great scene in which Iago starts to apply his poison – he is perturbed, yes, but still in control of himself; but when he re-appears later in the scene, he is a raging maniac. This bipolar nature is, admittedly, written into the text itself, but I don’t think I’ve seen any actor emphasise this to the extent that Quarshie does.

Desdemona is one of Shakespeare’s most thankless roles. I think Shakespeare did depict a real flesh-and-blood woman rather than merely a symbol, but there seems little for the actress to do other than display vulnerability and bewilderment. By the end, of course, she proves herself saintly, as she miraculously forgives Othello seemingly from beyond death itself, but on the path to that ending there seems little scope for the actor playing Desdemona to make her mark. Joanna Vanderham does a fine job – at times going so far as to display resentment – but in terms of stage presence, Othello and Iago are too powerful to be easily removed from the centre. The “Willow song” scene – that calm before the storm that is nonetheless saturated with such deep foreboding – is particularly effective, with Ayesha Dharker a most effective Emilia.

Not that the production is beyond criticism. I regretted in particular the excision of Iago’s improvised cynical rhymes in II,i: presumably they were removed because they show Iago as too sociable a figure, but it would have been interesting to see how they might have fitted with Lucian Msamati’s interpretation. But the biggest misjudgement came, I think, in the later scene in which Cassio becomes drunk while on guard duty. Here. Iago’s song is replaced with a sort of karaoke scene, in which the soldiers improvise rhymes to each other. While most productions can get away with a bit of judicious cutting, it is never advisable to add lines to Shakespeare’s text, as the added lines are bound to suffer in comparison with what is around it. This is especially the case when the added lines are merely trivial doggerel, as they are here. Further, these lines indicate racial tensions amongst the soldiers, and there seems little point introducing such a theme in a play that gives no scope to develop it. The audience is simply left wondering what purpose this scene serves.

When, shortly afterwards, we see Othello supervising the torture of a prisoner, hooded and terrified, that seemed to me at first also to be a misjudgement – a fashionable reference to current world events that does little to advance the drama. But I was mistaken in this: this torture scene does actually fit into the overall concept of this production: such torture does take place in military bases, after all, and, since this Othello is not the majestic and noble figure that Bradley had envisaged, it is not amiss to see something of the brutal world with which he is so familiar. And in any case, torture is central to the play: Iago tortures Othello; Othello, in turn, tortures Desdemona (and, one may argue, himself); and at the end, once Iago’s villainies are exposed, Iago is threatened with actual physical torture. When Othello re-emerges in III,iii, raving like a maniac, he ties Iago to a chair that had previously been used for torture, and threatens to torture Iago physically even as Iago continues to torture him mentally: it is a scene of powerful theatricality. The only point that I’d take issue with is the appearance of Desdemona on stage even as the torture victim is still present. Now, given the conventions of the theatre, it is entirely possible for two people to be on stage together, and yet be in different places, so it is not necessarily the case that Desdemona sees the torture victim, or even that she is aware of the torture; but having them both on stage at the same time does inevitably implicate Desdemona in the torture, and that is surely a mistake.

So it’s not a flawless production by any means; but once it starts to exert its grip, it doesn’t falter. It demonstrates once again that a Leavisite view of Othello does not diminish the tragic greatness of the drama, but merely shifts its focus: the awe and the terror we experience are not occasioned by the fall of a Great Man, but springs, rather, from an awareness of the horror and of the chaos that lie immediately below the seemingly civilised surfaces of our human lives. However we view Othello, however we view its central character (who is most certainly Othello himself, and not Iago, as some still continue to insist), there is no other drama that is quite so gut-wrenching in its effect.

WHAT THE F., IAGO?

No unanswered question in all Shakespeare beats that one. And before you point to Hamlet, he actually resolves to be or not to be, though in a sneaky and backhanded way three acts after the question’s first posed. (“If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.” Hamlet V, ii, 168-170) We know whether that’s a dagger Macbeth sees before his hand. (It’s not, though that opens a dialogue about the reality of images and fantasy beyond the scope of this parenthetical.) We know what Rosalind and Celia think of falling in love. (They’re for it.) We know that if they prick us we do bleed, and if they wrong us we do revenge.

But this question haunts the canon: What the fuck, Iago?

Most people walk away from their first viewing or reading thinking Othello’s about how love transforms jealousy, and they’re not wrong; the famous summation of its theme is Othello’s own, from his suicidal monologue:

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme… (V.ii.342-6)

But while all this is true enough, at least from Othello’s perspective, it doesn’t resolve the questions that burn hottest as the curtain falls. Othello, for all his tragedy and pathos, is at root a man whose good sense has been practiced upon and subverted by Iago, the master manipulator. We’ve seen every step of that transition. Iago’s methods are not mysterious to us. The question is, why did he deploy them in the first place?

If you haven’t read or seen Othello in a while, my apologies, since we’ll be rooting through a lot of text in this essay; that said, let me offer the roughest outline of the plot. Iago is the personal aide to Othello, a general, consummate soldier, and immigrant of Moorish extraction. Othello falls in love with, and in the play’s first act marries, Desdemona, the daughter of a grand  noble family. Iago schemes against them both—he tricks Othello into thinking Desdemona’s having an affair with Cassio, Othello’s lieutenant and a general man-about-town. Iago’s prodding, scheming and general Hannibal Lectering drive Othello mad with jealous rage; Othello kills his beloved Desdemona, while Iago tries to murder Cassio but fails. In spite of this failure, Iago has committed an apocalypse upon the stage by masterminding Othello’s murder of Desdemona. After all, Othello himself says, of Desdemona, in Act III:

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul
But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again. (III.iii.90-2)

By shattering Othello’s bond with his wife, Iago has caused chaos to come again. He has, at least figuratively, destroyed the world. Lodovico, in the play’s final speech, presents Iago in suitably apocalyptic terms: “O Spartan dog, More fell than anguish, hunger or the sea!” (V, ii, 361-2) Iago stands as a human incarnation of the all-destroying storm from II.i.

And he would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t a been for his dang wife! Emilia, Iago’s wife, exposes his treachery, whereupon the man is captured and held to account. Othello, distraught on the verge of suicide, poses the question:

Othello: Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnar’d my soul and body?

Iago: Demand me nothing; what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.(V.ii.301-304)

These are Iago’s last lines in the play: he refuses to answer Othello’s, and by extension the audience’s, questions about his true motivation. Lodovico and Cassio both claim they’ll torture Iago until he talks, but given what we’ve seen of Iago and of the two Venetians we’re quite sure he’ll die leaving them unsatisfied, no matter how prolonged his demise.

Iago’s actions seem so vicious they tempt the audience to, like Othello, regard him as a satanic figure:

Othello: I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable
If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee. [Wounds Iago.]
[…]
Iago: I bleed, sir, but not kill’d. (V.ii.286-8)

“I look down towards his feet,” here, meaning that Othello expects to see cloven hooves. And, god, every time I read Iago’s I bleed, sir, but not kill’d, I wrack my brain to think of a more horrific taunt. It’s perfectly demonic, right down to the blood leaking through his knife of a smile on the stage.

But that’s not enough, is it? Claiming a character is a “demon” is the 17th century version of the 21st century horror novel’s abuse of “sociopathy.” By calling our antagonist a demon, or a sociopath, we bow in the direction of the unknowable, as Yama from Lord of Light would have it. There’s no shame in motivating a villain with a shrug of the shoulders and a twirl of the mustache, but Shakespeare does it rarely, especially in the great tragedies—Edmund, Claudius, and Lady Mac all have their reasons.

More to the point, in spite of its trappings of religious war, this play admits of supernatural intervention less than any of Shakespeare’s other great tragedies. Hamlet has his ghosts, Lear his gods, and Macbeth his witches—but religious proclamations in Othello, when not explicitly mocking, as they tend to be in Iago’s mouth, are wickedly ironical. The word ’heaven’ appears in the text seventy-two times; here are a few things to which characters in Othello swear ‘by heaven,’ according to a rapid search of MIT’s full-text Othello:

• Roderigo: By heaven I would rather have been[Othello’s] hangman (I.i.34) than serve him as an aide-de-camp. How holy.
• Iago: Heaven is my judge. (I.i.60) He sincerely hopes not.
• Montano: Pray heavens [Othello] be [safe] (I.i.34), which is pretty ironic all things considered
• Desdemona: The heavens forbid / But that our loves and comforts should increase / even as our days do grow. (II.ii.193-5) They don’t.
• Herald: Heaven bless the isle of Cyprus and our noble general Othello! (II.ii.11) Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
• Iago: Good Heaven, the souls of all my tribe defend / from jealousy! (III.iii.175-6) Iago’s plan depends on this not happening.

And so on. I could take the rest of this essay listing such examples. Thank heaven (hah!) I’m not writing this for academic publication, or I’d have to—suffice it to say that heaven gets invoked with painful dramatic irony too often for me to be comfortable reading Iago’s evil as expressly or supernaturally demonic. His “I bleed, sir, but not kill’d” is a taunt, a boast, but we’re not meant to credit Iago’s deviltry. Yes, he rejoices at the “Divinity of Hell!” (II.iii.350), but his rhetoric for the most part is aggressively materialist and nihilist, forechoing Nietzsche two hundred fifty years later:

Virtue? A fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are
thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the
which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant
nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up tine,
supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with
many; either to have it sterile with idleness or manur’d
with industry—why, the power and corrigible
authority of this lies in our wills. (I.iii.319-26)

Iago here addresses his dupe Roderigo; later he dismisses the value of reputation to his slightly less complete dupe, Cassio, with similar rhetoric. He’s practicing upon them both, yes, but the philosophy he lays out here seems consonant with his actions throughout the play. He decides what he wants, and works to achieve it. If he calls on devils for their aid, he does so because he knows no one else will help him—not because he, like the witches in Macbeth, depends on the assistance of Hell.

Which, unfortunately, brings us no closer to our question’s answer! If demonic intervention does not explain why Iago’s such a dick, and if Iago refuses to explain his motives, are we left with an unresolvable problem? Lots of Shakespeare scholars think so—so many that Coleridge’s quote about Iago’s “motiveless malignity” shuffles around the papers of first semester Shakespeare students like a guy who needs his car jumped shuffles around a grocery store parking lot in January. If we believe Iago is basically self-interested, what prompted him to take such incredibly risky and self-ruinous action?

While Iago refuses to answer the Venetians in Act V, he offers—or tries to offer—a few reasons earlier in the play. As soon as Iago hits the stage, he starts offering motives. First, to Roderigo, he proclaims that he hates Othello because he, Othello, promoted Cassio to lieutenant over Iago:

And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine…
That never set a squadron in the field,
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster…
Mere prattle, without practice,
Is all his soldiership. But he, sir, had th’ election
And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds
Christen’d and heathen, must be belee’d and calm’d. (I.i.18-30)

Iago further impresses upon Roderigo the unfairness of this promotion:

’Tis the curse of service;
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to th’ first. Now, sir, be judge yourself
Whether I in any just term am affin’d
To love the Moor.
Roderigo:I would not follow him then.
Iago: O, sir, content you;
I follow him to serve my turn upon him. (I.i.35-42)

Iago’s fury at being overlooked, he claims to Roderigo, has driven him to conspire against Othello.

But this motivation devours its own tail. If Cassio is the man who was promoted undeservingly, surely it should be Cassio Iago wants to dethrone; Othello seems to like Iago well enough, and frequently protests his affection for him. (Calling him honest Iago at every opportunity, twice even in V.ii!) We might feel persuaded by Iago’s fury at corruption within the military hierarchy, but earlier in this same speech Iago proclaims that he, himself, attempted to gain Othello’s lieutenancy by means of the “letter and affection” he later decries.

In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,
Of-capp’d to him…. (I.i.7-10)

It stands as a testament to Iago’s wit and Shakespeare’s that the character can, within the same speech, present himself as furious that he has not been promoted like he would have been in the days of yore, back when men were real men, military officers were real officers, small fuzzy creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small fuzzy creatures from Alpha Centauri, back when Good Works were rewarded with Fitting Accolades and before bean counters like Cassio (who Iago also explicitly feminizes, by the way: “nor the division of battle knows / more than a spinster,” I.i. 23-4) received honors belonging by right to true red-blooded warriors like Iago—and as furious that his own attempts to game the system with “mediators” (I.i.16) failed! Roderigo doesn’t catch on, which is fine, Roderigo’s an idiot—but nine times out of ten neither does the audience!

As if that weren’t enough to make us think there was something deeper at work here, Iago keeps offering new reasons for his own actions. A few hundred lines later, he closes out Act I with the following soliloquy:

I hate the Moor,
And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets
H’as done my office. I know not if’t be true,
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety. He holds me well,
The better shall my purpose work on him. (I.iii.386-90)

I have never seen a production of Othello for which the reaction to Iago’s reasoning here was not a collective ripple of wait. What?! through the audience. There may be an actor who can sell the line—and Iago’s decision to engage in grand treachery that will expose him to brutal reprisal even if it succeeds, on the basis of mere rumors of infidelity—but I’ve not yet seen it played successfully on stage or screen. Nothing we know of Othello, the devoted lover or the eminently competent and controlled soldier who can stop a lynch mob with a quip and a glare, gives the slightest hint he may have seduced Iago’s wife. Iago himself lacks proof, as he admits. We haven’t yet met Iago’s wife Emilia, one of the play’s most fascinating characters—but when we do, we discover Iago himself doesn’t even seem to like her much, making this motive even less satisfying. And here, as in I.i, Iago’s stated motives and goals conflict. He hates the Moor, but the plan he proposes is to “get [Cassio’s] place and to plume up my will / in double knavery” (I.iii.393-4), seizing Cassio’s lieutenancy so as to…. Work more closely with Othello? Who he hates?

Iago’s third and most confusing attempt to explain himself comes at II.i:

Now I do love [Desdemona] too,
Not out of absolute lust (though peradventure
I stand accomptant for as great a sin),
But partly led to diet my revenge,
For that I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leap’d into my seat; the thought whereof
Doth (like a poisonous mineral) gnaw my inwards;
And nothing can nor shall content my soul
Till I am even’d with him, wife for wife;
Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor
At least into a jealousy so strong
That judgment cannot cure. Which thing to do…
I’ll have our Michael Cassio on the hip,
Abuse him to the Moor in the [rank] garb
(For I fear Cassio with my night-cap too),
Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me,
For making him egregiously an ass,
And practicing upon his peace and quiet
Even to madness. ’Tis here; but yet confus’d,
Knavery’s plain face is never seen till us’d. (II.i.290-312)

So Iago starts confessing that he wants Desdemona, sexually, for revenge—but if that’s what he really desires, he probably shouldn’t have spent at least fifty lines of the last scene scorning and mocking Desdemona in specific, and women generally, to her face (II.i.110-60). That said, his sexy vengeance plan’s abandoned by “failing so” in line 300, by which point he’s decided that because of his suspicion that Othello has slept with Emilia (who by this point we’ve met, seen share the stage and precisely zero words with Othello, and receive Iago’s mockery herself, undercutting more resolutely a jealous motivation for Iago), he’ll inspire mad jealousy in Othello. Oh, yes, and because Iago suspects Cassio, now, of having an affair with Emilia (with just as little textual evidence), he’ll conspire against Cassio too—having by this point forgotten, or at least set to one side, his ostensible fury over Cassio’s promotion in I.i.

Reading these speeches line by line, in sequence, we see Iago grasp at straws, desperate for a consistent explanation of his own motives. By II.i, he knows he wants to destroy these people, but each attempt to explain how he wants to destroy them, or why, slams head-on into a wall of self-contradiction. So he reaches for more reasons, more methods, only to find them crumbling. He’ll sleep with Desdemona—“Or failing so,” he’ll infect the Moor with jealousy—he’ll drive Othello mad—he’ll use Cassio to do it, why? Because, oh yes, he also hates Cassio, for, um, reasons. Reasons! By the end of the speech, I read “’Tis here; but yet confused” as Iago throwing up his own hands at the futility of sussing out his motives. And this, in a soliloquy! Soliloquizing characters bare their hearts to the audience. They confess, and boast, and explain their internal logic. But Iago, in I.iii and II.i, has surrounded himself with sandcastles. In this context, Iago’s final refusal to set forth his motives in V.ii may be his first true moment of honesty, in this play where he’s so often described as honest (by everyone but his wife). He does not know why he has done these things.

This is especially weird because in all other respects Iago is the character in this play most likely to claim he knows how the world works and why. Here’s Iago offering firm counsel to Roderigo:

I have look’d upon the world
for four times seven years, and since I could
distinguish betwixt a benefit and an injury, I never found
man that knew how to love himself. (I.iii.311-314)
[…]
It cannot be long that Desdemona should continue her
love to the Moor—put money in thy purse—nor he his
to her. It was a violent commencement in her, and
thou shalt see an answerable sequestration—put
but money in thy purse. These Moors are changeable
in their wills—fill thy purse with money. The food
that to him now is luscious as locusts, shall be to him
shortly as acerb as the coloquintida. She must change
for youth; when she is sated with his body, she
will find the error of her choice. (I.iii.341-351)

His advice to Roderigo is full of confident statements about the world, of is verbs and musts and cannots, presenting racist and misogynist perspectives for which Roderigo is all too receptive an audience. This same speech contains the discourse on gardening and the will I quoted above. One scene later, Iago’s again discoursing on the Workings of the World—this time scorning women to Desdemona and Emilia.

Come on, come on, you are pictures out of doors
Bells in your parlors, wild-cats in your kitchens,
Saints in your injuries, devils being offended,
Players in your huswifery, and huswives in your beds.
Desdemona.O, fie upon thee, slanderer!
Iago. Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk:
You rise to play, and go to bed to work. (II.i.109-15)

Once again, the passage turns on bald statements about the world, here in an enormous parallel construction revolving on the verb ’are’—and returning to that verb in 114: “It is true.”

Iago’s rhetoric continues in II.iii when he describes various nationalities’ tolerance of drink (“your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander… are nothing to your English”—again, ’are,’ II.iii.76-85). After engineering a rift between Cassio and Othello, Iago sweeps in to reassure Cassio reputation isn’t, after all, terribly important.

As I am an honest man, I had thought you had
receive’d some bodily wound; there is more sense in that
than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false
imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving. (II.iii.265-70)

Of course, when poisoning Othello against Cassio and Desdemona, Iago immediately and with as much confidence reverses course, proclaiming the primacy of reputation.

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed…
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. (III.iii.155-67)

Iago contradicts himself here, but in full consciousness of how his statement will affect his targets. There’s no grasping at straws, no confusion here—he finds it useful to adopt another position, and so he does. He presents himself as an authority on whatever topic the moment requires: on what reputation (or good name) is, on what women are, on how people of other races behave, on what jealousy is, and if you were to ask him about the price of tea he’d probably tell you about that too. On none of them is he so uncertain as he is about his own motivations, even to himself.

Nor does anyone else in the play make such bald definitional statements, or rely so heavily on forms of ‘is’—nor do other characters spend so much time defining and describing the world, rather than discussing one another. A bare bones text search for the string ’tis, again off the MIT Othello corpus, shows that Iago uses the contraction twenty-nine times. The only character to come close in the entire play is Othello, at twenty-three—but the frequency of Othello’s usage of the contraction spikes after Iago has successfully ‘poisoned’ him with jealousy in III.iii. In the play’s first half Othello ’tis-es eight times, and in the second half fifteen. Now, Iago has more lines than Othello in the play, and the two of them together outweigh any other speaker, but still, I find that shift—from relating to the world and other characters to definingthat world to other characters and refusing their input—a powerful ideological hinge.

Because what if Iago’s motivational difficulties, and his definitional rhetoric, really do not operate at cross purposes at all? What if Iago’s inability to describe his own motives without contradicting himself, and his diagnostic rhetoric, which scorns any opinions about the world that are not useful to him—what if these two monsters give birth to one another?

To explain what I mean here, let’s violate the rules of Textualist Club and discuss Iago, and Othello generally, in the greater context of Shakespeare’s work. Shakespeare as an artist is always in conversation with himself. He, like everyone, repeats favorite patterns, and one of his strongest is the conflict between the passionate and the systematic man. Hotspur and Hal in 1 Henry IV are a stand-out example: Hal the watchmaker prince, careful manipulator of circumstance, utterly unsentimental, versus Hotspur the consummate knight of the old model, brave, rambunctious, loving, and arrogant. (In fact, the outcome of the Hostpur-Hal struggle prefigures the later outcome of Hal’s relationship with Falstaff.) Mark Antony and Octavian in Antony & Cleopatra are another standout example: Antony brims with love, sorrow, mysticism, and even godhood; Octavian, meanwhile, sees a world of wheels. Hamlet and Laertes similarly embody this distinction: Laertes is a fighter and a son and a brother, while Hamlet is…. Hamlet. Macbeth is a man overcome by his passions; Malcolm, the little we know about him, is enough of a schemer to test MacDuff’s loyalty by tricks and treachery. In this light, Iago and Othello (and, by a lesser echo, Iago and Cassio) stand in similar relation to one another: Othello as the passionate man, who loved not wisely but too well, and Iago as the schemer and comprehender.

This angle of interpretation explains an odd doubling among Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Lear. Hamlet’s clearly a young person’s play, for all Hamlet’s supposedly thirty—it cares about people coming of age in the shadow of their parents, and it’s told from the perspective of young people coming of age in the shadows of their parents. It’s basically YA, only with more poisoning. Lear is a play about age and loss. Younger characters in Lear are antagonists, or supporting roles; Lear and Gloucester, and to a lesser extent the also-aged Kent, occupy the centers of our minds. Othello and Macbeth seem at first to double up—they’re both midlife and mid-career plays concerned with marriage and professional development by means of murder. Why treat on the same subject twice? And in adjacent years, even? (Shakespeare writes Othello in 1605, then Lear and Macbeth in 1606. Don’t think about that too hard, or else your brain will explode.)

But the repetition makes sense if Shakespeare’s examining the limits of both sides of the passionate-systematic dipole. Macbeth’s a man of great dreams, ambition, love, and personal loyalty. He’s easily afraid, easily furious, easily desperate, easily awed. His world is enchanted, albeit enchanted by evil. Macbeth tells how the passionate man destroys the world. In Othello, which on the surface might seem to revolve around passion, we see instead the systematic man destroying himself, and the surrounding universe. The operation of the systematic mind leads to chaos, come again.

Iago, you see, knows things. He knows what women are like. He’ll tell you volumes about women, if you sit still long enough to listen. He knows what Venetians are like. He knows what Othello is like. He knows what is the proper course to win the Moor again. He asks no one for counsel; he trusts no person’s opinion, even of their own internal state. He is complete and assured in his knowledge and judgment—and equally certain that the world has done him wrong, even if he cannot say precisely what wrong.

But his judgments about the world are only as sound as the premises upon which they are based. Judgment, in the world of Othello, is fundamentally incomplete: Iago himself says he will instill in Othello “a jealousy so strong/ that judgment cannot cure” (II.i.299-300), and later describes jealousy as the “green ey’d monster that doth mock / the meat it feeds on” (III.iii.168-9)—hearts or minds, in my reading. In fact, Othello’s jealousy—the jealousy with which the title character’s afflicted, and the condition the play describes with that word—seems more like suspicion. The problem is not that Othello feels resentful of Cassio. That’s just a symptom of his abandoning his trust in Desdemona. Iago’s true poison is his advice that Othello “Wear your eye thus, not jealous nor secure” (III.iii.198), that is, abandon his trust in his wife and lieutenant. Once Othello regards his people with suspicion rather than love, even their simplest speech and actions inform against them, as we see in III.iv. Even the flimsiest gesture toward proof sets Othello into a rage. All of a sudden “for mere suspicion in that kind / will do as if for sureity” doesn’t sound quite so outlandish.

Jealousy, or suspicion, burrows into the heart of reason, and perverts it. Once Iago poisons Othello’s mind, once Othello alienates himself from Cassio, Desdemona, and indeed from everyone except for Iago, sole other acolyte of “the truth,” then everything Othello sees or hears—Cassio’s expressions, Desdemona’s pleas, the disposition of the handkerchief—becomes food for this poisonous world view. As Emilia herself puts it:

Desdemona: Alas the day, I never gave [Othello] cause.

Emilia: But 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.

Once Othello ceases trusting Desdemona and fills with suspicion and jealousy, he is left alone in the world of proof and definitions—and in Shakespeare, that world is inimical to human life.

John Keats, in a letter to his brother George, made what is in my opinion one of the most trenchant observations about Shakespeare’s technique and art in the whole mountain of Shakespeare scholarship:

At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

This is Hamlet’s let be and the unexpected joys of The Tempest; this is the gift of Lear’s reunion with Cordelia, however horrific that story ends. When human beings in Shakespeare’s plays reach irritably after fact and reason in their dealings with one another, they break, or break the world. Certain truths and chains of logic bind souls, and drive people mad. There is no room for slack or play within them. Hamlet’s hunger for certainty drives him to the edge of suicide; Lear’s demand that his daughters prove their love undoes his kingdom. The isolated mind uses all its tools and power to protect and justify itself—but so long as its judgment is driven by suspicion and fear, it will never be able to diagnose its own flaws.

When Othello confronts Desdemona outright in IV.ii, he’s certain of her guilt: “This is a subtle whore / a closet lock and key of villainous secrets; / And yet she’ll kneel and pray; I have seen her do’t” (IV.ii.21-3), he says to himself, and to her face: “Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell” (IV.ii.39). Yet when Desdemona defends herself—when she asks Othello for proof she’s been false, or even to describe what he thinks she’s done—he cannot answer.

Desdemona: Alas, what ignorant sin have I committed?

Othello: Was this fair paper, this most goodly book,
Made to write “whore” upon? What committed?
Committed? O thou public commoner,
I should make very forges of my cheeks,
That would to cinders burn up modesty,
Did I but speak thy deeds. What committed?
Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;
The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,
is hush’d within the hollow of mine earth
And will not hear’t. What committed? (IV.ii.70-80)

Desdemona asks Othello what she’s done, and he, who’s at this point convinced he has proof of her infidelity, nevertheless stutters, and stammers, grasping around for some clear and clean accusation he can throw in her face. He asks “What committed?” four times without answering it once—each time repeating the question when he’s clearly stumped to provide hard proof. ’Tis clear, but yet confused, indeed! This pattern of desperate scrambling is in form and seeming identical to Iago’s flailing attempts to describe his own motivation, just filtered through Othello’s more vivid rhetoric. Iago has transformed Othello into a version of himself, complete with his own inability to describe the causes of his malignity. Iago has begot himself on Othello’s mind.

Watching Othello, we watch contagion at work. Given the formal similarities of their development, we can, I think, grant Iago an etiology much like Othello’s in Acts III and IV. He was a man with a schematic habit of mind, who at some point grew jealous, or suspicious. Perhaps he grew jealous of Cassio’s promotion as he says in I.i. Perhaps he thought Emilia betrayed him, as he says in I.iii. Perhaps he grew suspicious or jealous on some other day, for some other cause. But as a man of systems and facts, once he was infected with distrust he could not convince himself to trust again. Every use of logic justified the wound in his heart. The world became a conspiracy against him. He tries to tell us, over and over, why he acts the way he does. He’s angry about cuckoldry; he’s angry about aristocratic hypocrisy; he’s angry about ethics in military promotion. He’s angry, and alone, save for his dupes and victims—unless he makes others angry too. Unless he seduces them, as he seduces Othello, to his jaundiced rhetoric and worldview—they even kneel and swear to one another in III.iii, in mockery of a marriage.

Shakespeare’s plays don’t sympathize with the systematic mind, often, but again and again show it victorious. Octavian crushes Antony; Hal dispatches Hotspur in a duel that, when properly staged, feels like an execution rather than a contest. Reading Shakespeare one starts to feel that, even if the systematic mind is lonely and less romantic, it’s also strictly better. The systematizers win. But not until Othello do we see so clearly the dangers of that victory, or of that mindset: that the system cannot diagnose or correct itself. It sees flaws in the world, not in its own soul.

But what alternative do we have? How can we prevent ourselves from falling victim to this poison?

Emilia offers this play’s answer, I think: Emilia, Iago’s wife, who has seen his degradation firsthand.

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 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?(IV.iii.92-9)

When our minds cannot force their way out of the traps they set themselves—when in our jealousies we poison our own vision of the world (“The object poisons sight,” V.ii.362), the only path toward healing is to forget what we think we know about other people, to break our images of them as objects of investigation and to trust them instead—to conceive of them as subjects as worthy of consideration and forgiveness as we judge ourselves. The most radical and healing revelation possible in life is that the world is full of sentient beings like us, who are like us capable of fault, growth, shame, cruelty, and beauty.

This knowledge comes too late for Othello, for Desdemona, and for Emilia. But it is not too late, I hope, for us.