Sofie Kellar
“He does mischief to himself who does mischief to another, and evil planned harms the plotter most” (Hesiod, Works and Days, 23).
In William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (c. 1603), Iago the villain dominates each scene with a manipulative power, driving every twist and turn and remaining unsuspected until the end. He steers the other characters’ choices with an uncanny intuition, allowing him to shape the trajectory of Othello until it spirals into chaos and entropy; indeed, he works with cruel pleasure. But in the final scene, Iago is unmasked by another intuitive power like his own, but one profoundly different. Iago, the scheming trickster, warps the perspectives of the other Venetians, yet he is undone by that “Virtue” exemplified in a single character whom he greatly underestimated (1.3.320).
The trickster archetype, arguably, suits Iago best. Paul Radin describes his trickster as “at the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and is always duped himself. […] He possesses no values, social or moral, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being” (xxiii). Iago is certainly a creator of Brabantio’s anger and Othello’s jealousy, and he also negates trust or peace for Othello concerning his love. And Radin’s use of the verb “dupes” pinpoints Iago most directly. He tricks every character with whom he comes in contact. In fact, deception is so ingrained in him that eventually Iago seems to have duped himself. His profound ignorance is revealed by the intuitive power embodied in his wife, who turns out to be a different character than he thought she was.
Iago fails to suspect Emilia has virtue; in fact, if he possesses no moral values, naturally he would struggle to recognize them in others. He treats virtues, he says, like tools to be picked up when they are needed and thrown away when they are not, indicating that Iago does not see how such a thing would have merit in itself. Instead, all must feed his own fancy and power lust. Virtues are useless except as pretense. When, for example, Roderigo admits he is embarrassed to be infatuated with Desdemona but lacks any virtue to fight it, Iago gives him this opinion: “Virtue? A fig! […] Our bodies are gardens, to which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop or weed up thyme, […] why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills” (1.3.320-23; 326-27). Iago believes one’s will, even if used for evil, should control what they value.
This view is comparable to that held by Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose best-known work, The Prince, led to his reputation as an immoral cynic and advocate of the view that one’s power over a situation gives one the right to use it. Whether such actions are moral is irrelevant, but behaving in a moral way to further one’s power is acceptable—even admirable. As Ken Jacobsen explains, Iago’s conduct in the play lines up with Machiavelli’s as exemplified in The Prince (498). One example of this conduct is Iago’s exhortation to Roderigo as he prepares to attack Cassio: “Come, be a man!” (1.3.336). This is a strategy specifically mentioned by Machiavelli, says Jacobsen. In another instance, Iago averts Othello’s suspicion by making himself look like a victim of love and loyalty (3.3.378-83) and by using what Jacobsen describes as blunt, soldierly speech that is supposed to be, to the other Venetians, inherently honest (508). The Prince teaches the traits of Machiavelli’s ideal general. It works as a practical, and sometimes violent instruction guide to those lucky and skilled enough to be leaders. However, as many tragedies such as Othello show, it is the luckless man, the tragic hero and the victim of happenstance, whose choices reveal virtue and vice. Yet Iago, who is the opposite of this heroic victim figure, disregards the difference.
Iago, latching on to whatever truths suit him best at any moment, falls into his own elaborate series of lies and seems to enjoy the ensuing confusion. He wants “to plume up [his] will in double knavery” (1.3.392-3). Knavery is his area of expertise, and he pointedly derides Cassio and Othello for their lack of it. Of Cassio he says, “mere prattle without practice is all his scholarship” (1.1.25-26); and he says Othello is “[h]orribly stuffed with epithets of war” (1.1.13). Iago is different—he is immersed in action. His core motivation must be intrinsically linked to how he does what he does. He uses more trickery than needed to get the job done because he seems to enjoy it, such as the instance in which he talks about his snare for Cassio. “He takes (Desdemona) by the palm; ay, well said, whisper. With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon her, do: I will gyve thee in thine own courtesies. […] Yet again, your fingers to her lips? would they were clyster-pipes for your sake!” (2.1.167-70; 175-77). Iago is wildly ambitious in his high self-esteem. He uses his Machiavellian-like philosophy to guide the plot, where his skill appears to be a major source of pride.
Iago’s pride may be what causes him to convince Othello to kill Desdemona. Pride would allow him to deceive others unhindered by obligation to anything other than self-esteem. It also would allow him to work without honesty nagging in his ears, to hear only his own murmurs of self-satisfaction. Even Roderigo at least knows his fault and seems ashamed of it. But Iago needs no excuse for his actions, no vice like lust or revenge, only pride. A. C. Bradley argues that during his soliloquies, Iago suggests the possible motivations that may work as an excuse but remains faithful to none of them. For example, Iago seems to want vengeance on Othello for not promoting him (“And I, God bless the mark, his Moorship’s ancient!” [1.1.32]) and mentions that he suspects Emilia and Othello have had a relationship behind his back (“For that I do suspect the lusty Moor \ Hath leaped into my seat” [2.1.293-94]), but these concerns are hardly mentioned again. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge notes, Iago’s actions spring from a “motiveless malignity” (qtd. in Bradley 209). When the play climaxes and the fatal result occurs, Iago remains unfixed to any clear motivation. Iago is proud of his abilities, but to what end? Since he never asks what virtue and right action are, he cannot say what his wrong action was meant to be.
Iago has deceived not only others, but ultimately himself. This is the cause for his silence at the end of the play: although he knows well what he has done, he does not know why. Daniel Stempel, who makes this argument, suggests further that Iago’s malevolence does not come from the execution of his powers but from the manner in which he savors the result (262). He senses the degradation that occurs in the minds of his victims and revels in it; but he possesses little insight into his own mind. Towards others, his mind-reading becomes a monstrous power that draws Iago further from himself:
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In complement extern, ‘tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am. (1.1.60-64)
Acting under a veil of deceit trains Iago to abandon his individuality. In many soliloquies, Iago is absorbed by the spiritual entropy in his victims, which also causes him to lose a sense of his own spirit, as well as his motives. Paul Cefalu states that Iago’s “hyperbolic mind-reading [is] not a manipulable talent as much as the unavoidable cause of his seemingly motiveless evil” (266). This “hyperbolic mind-reading” certainly turns upon his own mind with a disturbing energy. But mind-reading alone probably does not cause his evil ambition. Without pride or a sense of pleasure in his conceits, Iago would not likely have said something so ominous and close to the truth. Pride and self-deception warp his goals and even his individuality by the end of the play.
For instance, if Iago’s goal is revenge against Othello for promoting Cassio, would not this goal be achieved with a simple murder of them both? Why does Iago spin a complicated plot, riddled with lies and trickery? His decisions seem to be motivated by his ambition as a trickster because he so often seems to revel in his power over the other characters. As he plots, he ruminates:
I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin
And let him find it. Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ. (3.3.324-27)
First, Iago makes his plan; next, he reflects on Othello’s jealousy. In the third sentence he moves on from the plan and its backbone to what it all means: “This may do something,” he says, but this statement is vague (l. 327). Then,
The Moor already changes with my poison:
Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons
Which at the first are scarce found to distaste
But with a little art upon the blood
Burn like the mines of sulphur. (ll. 328-32)
Iago has shown that what interests him above all is not precisely what will happen in the end, but instead, he is absorbed by the process, the entropy he creates. Here he makes his most elaborate statements on this developing evil, and his only consistent delight is that he causes Othello to change and “burn.”
As Iago ruminates, he calls his conceits “art” (l. 331). Indeed, Iago seems to imitate the art of a writer. As Bradley observes, there is a “curious analogy between the early stages of dramatic composition and those soliloquies in which Iago broods over his plot” (231). Iago has achieved a hold on the other characters, similarly to the playwright, who can exercise a level of tyranny over the characters. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), for example, illustrates the tyranny of the author over the helpless characters in his invented world. In the play, two confused and aimless side characters in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet are led to their inevitable deaths. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are secondary characters and trapped, tragically it seems, where they are. Iago is different from them not only because he is a primary character and a stronger agent in the play, but because he works almost as a sub-author, sharing some of Shakespeare’s relationship to the world of the play and the characters. Unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Iago manipulates the plot; he is simultaneously an unstable, impulsive trickster and an artful strategist. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, according to Stoppard, Shakespeare merely manipulates and abandons those characters. In a similar way, Iago manipulates Roderigo and then kills him as a means of abandonment or silencing.
Iago works with an artist’s balance of impulse and deliberation, which allows him to twist the plot around other proactive characters if he can get close enough to influence them. “If I can fasten but one cup upon him…,” says Iago when trying to put Cassio into an compromising situation (2.3.45). A playwright must also think along the same lines in order to manipulate a world with concrete internal rules. Although Iago is vulnerable to events like the storm that delays Othello’s ship, he is also as much in control of things as is possible (2.1.1-17). Iago’s craftiness, competence and proactivity make him in a sense the sub-author of the play. Part of the real author’s job is “predicting” what this trickster will do next to decide the plot.
Clearly, Iago’s art is tinged with a darker impulse, almost madness, while the playwright’s art includes a higher method, Aristotle’s mimesis, an imitation of things “as they could be, not as they are,” a process that achieves its end “by action rather than narration” (Poetics 37). Mimesis focuses on the speculative and metaphysical rather than the strictly chronological; its point is dialectical. That is, the aim and drive of mimesis is the philosophical rather than the historical, and its climax is the conclusion to which all the other incidents are premises. Mimesis elaborates what Iago rejects, acting with a philosophical motive of aspiring for virtue, which is why the final plot point of Othello catches him by surprise.
Iago’s actions, this essay attempts to show, reveal that motiveless facades lead to his loss of identity and virtue. Throughout the plot Iago tries to degrade Othello from his noble self, “practicing upon his peace and quiet / Even to madness” (2.1.308-9). But as a result, Iago experiences some of the entropy he creates in Othello so that he too becomes deluded and, at last, caught unprepared by the climax. He is surprised that virtues are not trifles, that Othello possesses enough strength to see his error, and that Emilia is loyal to the truth.
Emilia seems to represent the opposite of Iago in her embodiment of morality. In Othello morality centers on virtues, such as the prudence of Desdemona when she attempts to reconcile her father and Othello in her first speech in the play (1.3.180-189). Desdemona is faithless to neither her father nor her husband but calmly observes this “divided duty” and finds a balance between them in an act reminiscent of the “Golden Mean,” Aristotle’s widely acknowledged definition of morality.[1] Ayanna Thompson, however, argues that the play speaks against moralism, but in doing so she changes its definition (14). She points out that Othello is a literary response to the source tale in Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565), whose moral is that ladies should not marry “a man whom Nature, Heaven, and all manner of life separate” them from (Cinthio 389). This morality centers on race, social status, and temporal ideals, an unstable and impermanent morality as compared to that based on honesty and loyalty in tragedies like Othello. Thompson points out the simplicity of the moral of Cinthio’s tale, but morality in a larger sense refers, or ought to refer, to ideas of virtues and justice that transcend time and space. These ideas cannot apply to Cinthio’s moral. Immanuel Kant described morality in the categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Kant’s is the morality that underscores Iago’s defeat. By loudly disregarding virtue, Iago ironically heightens the audience’s awareness of virtue in the play (1.3.320-21). John Roe argues that Shakespeare often registers “at the height of the crisis, a strong counter-thrust, which affirms his belief in the efficacy of the traditional, ethical scheme” (xi). This “counter-thrust” in Othello is the voice of Emilia, vehemently decrying the treachery that has come to light (5.2.187-90). In this way, she exemplifies the virtues of honesty and loyalty that Iago has attempted to erode.
Iago does not appear to understand his wife any more than he understands himself. While it may be obvious that she is loyal to Desdemona, he does not guess to what extent; he does not know her motives. Each is so ignorant about the other that her surprise upon learning his true nature is equal to Iago’s surprise upon learning hers. Emilia asks in disbelief, “My husband?” when she learns the truth (5.2.138; 142; 145); and Iago exclaims, “What, are you mad?” when Emilia, instead of submitting to him, will not cease decrying him (l. 191). Although Iago possesses an uncanny insight into everyone else, he seems to underestimate Emilia. His ignorance of his own motives is like his ignorance of his wife’s; he asks no questions of himself, just as he asks none of her. At the climax, therefore, Iago is dumbfounded by her bleak counterattacks. “Villainy!” (5.2.187-88; 90) she cries, a concept which Iago more often describes as “knavery” (2.1.310), “art” (3.3.331) or “wit” (2.3.367).
Iago’s adeptness in twisting the meaning of words reveals a significant aspect of his decline. Throughout the play Iago tries to twist language, as he tries to twist the people and the circumstances around him. Shakespeare often utilizes a character’s use of language to show their level of spiritual growth. However, Iago’s use of language demonstrates a spiritual degradation, as he often uses words in ways that subvert their meaning to make Othello change with the “poison” of his language (3.3.328). Iago is unable to speak “the language of affection”: “In every dimension of his identity—metaphysical, psychological, social—Iago asserts an absolute separation between language and meaning. […] In a sense, then, Iago is the antitype of the romantic dream of growth through and beyond language” (Zender 327). Whereas other characters’ words grow a subtlety in meaning, Iago’s “words and performances are no kin together,” and he tricks others to fall in this same way, deceiving them into acting contrary to their own words (4.2.185). The contrast between high poeticism and subjugating language, layering meanings and nullifying them, characterizes Iago’s demise.
The fall of Iago begins with his search for a motive. Yet as he searches, he lies to himself and in this process develops a taste for wily deception. As he follows this impulse, his victims’ degradation becomes his own. In deceiving them he clouds his own acutely sharp vision until Emilia slips through the curtains. For Iago has not only lied to Othello about his wife but to himself about his own wife, leading to Iago’s humiliation and ultimate fall at Emilia’s hand. A seemingly trivial woman’s outcry undoes all his work. As a result, Othello suddenly understands his tragedy. Now everyone knows the truth despite Iago’s villainous art.
Works Cited
Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905. Shakespeare Navigators, https://shakespeare-navigators.com/bradley/tr231.html
Cefalu, Paul. “The Burdens of Mind Reading in Shakespeare’s Othello: A Cognitive and Psychoanalytic Approach to Iago’s Theory of Mind.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, 2013, pp. 265–94., www.jstor.org/stable/24778472.
Cinthio, Giraldi. “The Third Decade, Story 7.” Hecatommithi. Honigmann, pp. 377-96.
“Ethical Virtue as Disposition (5.1).” “Aristotle’s Ethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/#EthiVirtDisp.
Hesiod. “Works and Days.” Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica. Loeb Classical Library, #57, Loeb Classical Library, 1914.
Honigmann, E. A. J., editor. Othello by William Shakespeare. Introduction by Ayanna
Thompson, 3rd Revised Edition, The Arden Shakespeare, 2016.
Jacobsen, Ken. “Iago’s Art of War: The ‘Machiavellian Moment’ in Othello.” Modern Philology, vol. 106, no. 3, 2009, pp. 497–529. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/605074.
McKeon, Richard, editor. Aristotle. Poetics by Aristotle. Modern Library, 2001.
Radin, Paul. The Trickster. Schocken Books, 1978.
Stempel, Daniel. “The Silence of Iago.” PMLA, vol. 84, no. 2, 1969, pp. 252–63. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1261282.
Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Grove Press, 2017.
Thompson, Ayanna. Introduction. Honigmann, pp. 1-116.
Zender, Karl F. “The Humiliation of Iago.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 34, no. 2, 1994, pp. 323–39. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/450904.
Works Consulted
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second Edition. The U of Chicago P, 1983.
Draper, John W. “Honest Iago.” PMLA, vol. 46, no. 3, 1931, pp. 724–37. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/457857.
Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. Basic Books, 1992.
Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. The U of Chicago P, 2011.
Hedrick, Donald. “Distracting Othello: Tragedy and the Rise of Magic.” PMLA, vol. 129, no. 4, 2014, pp. 649–71. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24769504.
McCullen, Joseph T. “Iago’s Use of Proverbs for Persuasion.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 4, no. 2, 1964, pp. 247–62. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/449625.
Pechter, Edward. “‘Iago’s Theory of Mind’: A Response to Paul Cefalu.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, 2013, pp. 295–300. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24778473.
West, Fred. “Iago the Psychopath.” South Atlantic Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 2, 1978, pp. 27–35. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3198785.
[1] “[E]very ethical virtue is a condition intermediate (a “golden mean” as it is popularly known) between two other states, one involving excess, and the other deficiency” (“Ethical”).