Honest Iago
O Spartan dog,
More fell than anguish, hunger or the sea,
Look on the tragic loading of this bed:
This is thy work. The object poisons sight;
Let it be hid.
- Lodovico (V|ii|357)
Iago is the manipulative and omniscient puppet master of Othello that seemingly controls everything from behind the scenes. He methodically ensnares the naive moor Othello, and insidiously orchestrates his downfall. If you wish to divide the play into proactor and reactor; Iago is the one who instigates most of the interactions, conflict and action. He skilfully manipulates all who are around him; and it seems as if his ruthless determination and dogged persistence will not fail him.
Despite this, it appears that Iago has lost.
His plan is unveiled, betrayed to his victim and power slips through his fingers like fine sand through the sieve of potential greatness. His plot is revealed, and bound, unrepentant and stubbornly silent; he is faced with the future of hellish torment and punishment. His enemy Cassio still lives, vengefully tasked with his punition and he himself is forever denied the power he sought. Iago has lost.
And yet…
And yet at the end of it all, he is triumphant. He has succeeded in his goal; not to elevate his position as he had once wished, but to utterly and completely destroy his hated master. The nobleness of Othello, the kindness of Desdemona, and the loyalty of Cassio, Iago turns all these virtues into traps that destroy them all. Two dead and one wounded, and honest Iago is still left behind to cackle at his dominion while the marionettes hang limply from the puppet-master’s fingers. If there was ever a victor in this bloody avocation they play, it would only be honest, brave and loyal Iago.
To play the villain
One has to ask, why? Why sow such destruction, such chaos, such misery? Iago has no apparent motive, providing only flimsy and translucent justifications. It is obvious to us that Iago himself knows how flimsy they sound, even to his own ears, and yet it appears he doesn’t care or is willfully ignorant.
An antagonist that justifies their terrible actions with ‘the Greater Good’ or some other inconsequential or weak rationalization is one we have all seen before. This is a villain that, although how reviling it may be at some times, we can empathize with. We’ve all been faced with a situation where we justify a wrong action with a reason that, in our heart, we know is fundamentally flawed. Ironically, this point may seem familiar to you:
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul:
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars.
It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow
And smooth as monumental alabaster —
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.
- Othello (V|ii|1–6)
It is obvious to all what Othello is doing here. In an attempt to rid himself of guilt and doubt, Othello sloppily paints a picture where he is the hero, the brave vindicator on a quest to rid the world of a great evil; the heinous slut (pardon the slur) Desdemona. He is the valiant knight atop a horse, adorned with laurels and proclamations of moral righteousness. He is the protector of the weak, he who safeguards the honor of cuckolded men. He has painted a false pretense for himself, where he is the Templar on a quest to vanquish the maleficent dragon. This is a punishment she deserves. This is a punishment he deserves to inflict.
Othello’s true motivations are so painfully transparent that the story he has told himself hides nothing more than a window would. In reality he feels betrayed, his plot to kill Desdemona is born out of intense jealousy and a desire for vengeance for her (perceived) betrayal. Is Othello, our valiant and brave titular protagonist, nothing more than another transparent villain? I digress, but that is a thought provoking question for another time.
However, the assumption that Iago’s motivations can be compared to Othello’s or other antagonists is not only false, but misleading. You see, Iago is a rare breed of villain. He is a villain that knows exactly what he’s doing and doesn’t care. At the end of things, Iago murders and lies and plots and knows that it’s wrong. Othello, and other villains that attempt to rationalize their actions, are caught up in their justifications. They believe what they’re saying and thus act with the vigor of a man on a righteous quest.
This is why Iago is so fascinating; he’s the type of villain that’s so utterly foreign and alien to most of us. He, who cannot muster guilt or even the slightest doubt in the morality of his plots, is someone we cannot recognize, we cannot relate with.
And what’s he then that says I play the villain,
When this advice is free I give, and honest,
Probal to thinking, and indeed the course
To win the Moor again? For ’tis most easy
Th’inclining Desdemona to subdue
In any honest suit. She’s framed as fruitful
As the free elements; and then for her
To win the Moor, were’t to renounce his baptism,
All seals and symbols of redeemed sin,
His soul is so enfettered to her love,
That she may make, unmake, do what she list,
Even as her appetite shall play the god
With his weak function. How am I then a villain
To counsel Cassio to this parallel course
Directly to his good? Divinity of hell!
When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows
As I do now. For whiles this honest fool
Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes
And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,
I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear:
That she repeals him for her body’s lust;
And by how much she strives to do him good,
She shall undo her credit with the Moor.
So will I turn her virtue into pitch,
And out of her own goodness make the net
That shall enmesh them all.
- Iago (II|iii|303–329)
This soliloquy is perhaps the most powerful in the play because it carries so much depth and subtext. It reveals to us the depths Iago is willing to fall to and more broadly reveals much about his character and motivations. His mocking question; “How am I then a villain”, ironically and contrary to his statements, confirms what we have suspected. Iago is a unrepentant villain. A villain that cares not the evil he wroughts, a villain that remorselessly sows discord and violence with no regret.
Furthermore, Shakespeare has cleverly sprinkled nuggets of insight into Iago in this soliloquy. His monologue on how he will entrap his victims shines a sliver of light onto his sheer manipulative, the almost inhuman insight into how exactly his victims work and how he’ll destroy them.
So will I turn her virtue into pitch,
And out of her own goodness make the net
That shall enmesh them all.
Moreover, “Even as her appetite shall play the god With his weak function.”, betrays some of his prejudice and bias on women. Iago believes that women are controlled by their sexual desire, and that in her insatiable appetite Desdemona will surely grow tired of Othello’s sexual prowess (who being black, is surely inferior to whites). There is much sub context in Othello on gender representation and conflict, but that too is something for another time.
So we know Iago is utterly unrepentant and makes no attempt to justify his actions. What are his motivations? Surely there must be a reason why he embarks on this quest for vengeance? Why did he sow such chaos, discord, violence and ruin?
His Moorship’s ancient
Iago does provide several motivations for his actions throughout the play:
I hate the Moor,
And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets
He’s done my office. I know not if’t be true
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety.
- Iago (I|iii|369–372)
and
For that I do suspect the lusty Moor
Hath leaped into my seat, the thought whereof
Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards;
And nothing can or shall content my soul
Till I am evened with him, wife for wife;
Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor
At least into a jealousy so strong
That judgement cannot cure Which thing to do,
If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trace
For his quick hunting, stand the putting on,
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
- Iago (II|i|276–283)
Iago suspects that Othello and Cassio have slept with his wife, and presents these motivations as the ones that empower him to destroy them. Moreover, at the very beginning of the play Iago presents his anger at being passed over a promotion to lieutenant as the cause of his hate for the two.
When Roderigo asks:
Thou told’st me thou didst hold him in thy hate.
Iago replies with;
Despise me if I do not: three great ones of the city,
In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,
Off-capped to him; and by the faith of man,
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.
But he, as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them with a bombast circumstance,
Horribly stuffed with epithets of war,
And in conclusion,
Non-suits my mediators, For ‘Certes’, says he,
‘I have already chosen my officer’
And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine,
A fellow almost damned in a fair wife,
That never set a squadron in the field,
Nor the devision of a battle knows
More than a spinster, unless the bookish theoric,
Wherein the toged consuls can propose
As masterly as he. Mere prattle without practice
Is all his soldiership. But he, sir, had the election,
And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds
Christian and heathen, must be lee’d and calmed
By debitor and creditor; this counter-caster,
He, in good time, must his lieutenant be,
And I, God bless the mark, his Moorship’s ancient.
(I|i|8–33)
Iago is angered that his suit for lieutenant, which was supported by “three great ones of the city” was rejected in favor of Cassio, who he sees as nothing more than a theorist, someone with no experience in war and less skill than a spinster; while Iago remains as Othello’s ensign, a position he views as useless.
While these motivations are legitimate and logical, Iago almost halfheartedly provides them. Iago knows that the allegations about adultery between Othello and Emilia may be untrue, and yet he acts as if they are certain “I know not if’t be true, But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, Will do as if for surety.” This hints that Iago does not really care that Othello is cuckolding him, but rather that he uses it as a convenient argument. Moreover, he casually slips in a suspicion of adultery between Cassio and Emilia “For I fear Cassio with my night-cap too”. At this point, it appears more that Iago is desperately searching for an excuse, a reason to hate Cassio.
Furthermore, there is a single glaring fallacy in all of these motivations.
Iago must have foreseen the fragility of his plan. He must have expected the possibility of being captured, of being revealed as the mastermind; of being guiltily caught red handed with the bloodstained puppets hanging from his fingers.
And yet he did it anyway. We can deduce something from this; the reason why Iago did all the terrible things he did, his motivation, is:
For the beauty of destruction.
Many of Iago’s actions are not concurrent to what one would call ‘normal’. He acts with impunity and an disregard for the risks associated with his plot. He’s violent, manipulative and shows no remorse for his actions. Iago is a psychopath.
As Fred West states in his article; Iago the Psychopath, Iago is so much more complex a character than a simple villain.
It is not sufficient to simply drape Iago in allegorical trappings and proclaim him Mister Evil or a Machiavel or a Vice. Such a limited view of Iago is an injustice to the complexity of his character
The reason why he is so alien to most of us, so different in how he thinks and acts is because he thinks differently. Iago’s actions fit well into the patterns of psychopaths and sociopaths. West illustrates his complete lack of remorse:
But the play itself shows clearly enough that Iago goes off as he comes on, devoid of conscience, with no remorse. This guiltlessness,… is one of the central features of psychopathy.
His predilection for violence:
As a bluff, hearty soldier, he [Iago] had indulged himself in all the peccadilloes that are generally more excused in the uniformed warrior than in the civilian; his more excessive asocial whims had been pretty well channeled off in the violence of war where even killing was not only accepted but honored. The psychopath is asocial; war is asocial;
And more important to this analysis, his lack of motives:
As Coleridge said, Iago is motiveless. His motives-or excuses come more as afterthoughts, not as stimuli toward the heinous actions he perpetrates. Like the psychopath described by Cleckley, Iago is impulsive, but he sees nothing basically wrong with his own behavior, no matter how erratic or antisocial; therefore, he doesn’t bother to find or invent excuses unless prodded. The very first lines of Othello contain just such prodding on the part of Roderigo, Iago’s gull.
Make note of the conversation between Iago and Roderigo I quoted above. Iago presents his hatred for Othello and Cassio because of him being passed over for a promotion as his motivations for the vengeance he wishes to wrought upon the two. But as West states, these motivations seem… a little fake. They seem unconvincing, like “afterthoughts”. Iago doesn’t really believe in these motivations. This really is illustrated most clearly when Iago mentions his “suspicions” of Emilia cheating on him in his soliloquy. He claims that this cuckolding incites him to seek bloody reprisal against Othello and Cassio. Yet, however, he makes no note of anger towards Emilia. In his conversations with her he reveals none of his suspicions and indeed we as the audience get the impression that Emilia is of little concern to him. This directly contradicts his stated motives; if he truly cares about his wife cheating on him, why does he only seek retribution on Othello and Cassio but not Emilia? You see, Iago doesn’t plot to kill Othello, Desdemona and Cassio in one fell sweep because he truly thinks he’s being cuckolded, or because his skills have been overlooked;
Iago commits all this violence, and destruction because he wants to. He doesn’t need a motive or a reason; such concerns are beneath him. Iago would kill a thousand men, women and children and not feel the need for a motive, for a reason. This is who Iago is. He killed Othello, slandered Desdemona and injured Cassio for the love of destruction. Honest Iago, a title that many in the play use to refer to him is especially ironic because it is both true and untrue. Iago is dishonest because he lies without regret, and yet he’s honest because he’s perhaps the only character who is honest to himself.
Shakespeare is a genius for creating a character so deep and multifaceted in a time that did not know what the word ‘psychopath’ meant.
Shakespeare’s studies in personality are acclaimed by psychologists for their accuracy and profundity. Although the influence of the miracle plays and the later morality plays with their type-characters still lingered in some Elizabethan drama, the English Renaissance is widely recognized as a period of great interest in that branch of science which has become known in modern times as psychology. Dramatists were particularly intrigued by the more bizarre working of the human mind, often creating characters whose personalities could form the subjects of contemporary psychological case studies.
He has created a spectacularly intelligent and manipulative villain. It’s obvious who the real star of Othello is, and it isn’t the brave protagonist; it’s our favorite antagonist. If ever there was a victor in Othello, it would be honest Iago.
fin.
Afterword
Comparisons
While writing this analysis my mind kept drawing parallels between Iago and characters in other works of fiction. Of particular significance to me is House of Cards’ Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey). Underwood is just as ruthlessly driven and manipulative as Iago; perhaps more so.
As therealrivke states; both Underwood and Iago are master manipulators that skillfully mold their targets and victims.
Iago and Frank both achieve revenge and attain power by orchestrating from the shadows. From behind the scenes, Frank sets characters in motion to achieve his goals but his true intentions are never recognised by them. When they are, he admits to wanting that certain role or goal. Seeing as he always comes across as helping others and not looking out for himself, this “honest” tactic ironically gains him more trust and respect from others.
“Honest Iago” is a motif I’ve made an attempt to bring up many times in this article because I wanted to really illustrate the dichotomy of Iago’s outward and inward characters. A viewer of House of Cards doesn’t leave without, frankly, being shocked by how manipulative Frank is and how weak and defenseless the other characters are in his hands. Iago and Frank are master sculptors, molding and bending their victims to their will like putty.
At the same time they remain behind the shadows, pulling the strings of their victims while they remain blissfully unaware that they’re being controlled.
Most of the time however, the majority don’t realise how Iago/Frank are orchestrating and manipulating everything and everyone. Only we as the audience are aware of the true dedication, deceit and evil of these two characters because they actually cannot keep it completely to themselves. They have to tell someone.
Indeed soliloquy play a significant part in Othello, and Shakespeare’s works as a whole; and House of Cards shares this similarity. Frank’s secret conversations with us, the furtive sweet nothings he whispers in our ears, are a pathway to his character. We know him better than his most trusted confidantes (his wife and Doug).
These similarities are unlikely to be coincidental. In fact, seeing as Spacey’s career started with stage acting in Shakespeare’s Richard III, it is not surprising that House of Cards draws much from Shakespeare’s work.
It’s a pity that Spacey won’t be returning for the last season, I doubt the show will ever be the same.
Fiction, however, is not the only thing I can draw comparisons to.
DuChene outlines several parallels between Iago and Trump that illustrate perhaps how unstable the leader of the United States is:
When my class first began the play we were struck by how Iago’s speeches were strikingly similar to the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Both Trump and Iago appeal to sexism and racism as scapegoats for their insecurities. These men have also duped almost everyone around them and, in Iago’s case this has devastating consequences.
And with the growing instability in the world; famines in South Sudan and Somalia, violence in Syria and growing religious intolerance around the world in response to abhorrent terrorist attacks; perhaps we should be vigilant of the next megalomaniac out to destroy something. After all, Iago’s plot was not revealed until after the destruction had happened and it was too late.
Trump’s character wasn’t the only thing that I saw comparisons between, but also what he says. Fake news is a real, recurrent and important issue in today’s hyper-saturated media environment. It is often difficult to tell what is and isn’t real. This is an increasingly important issue in a time where more and more young people can’t tell the difference between partisan, sponsored content and reliable unprejudiced news. What would a world with rampant mistruth and people unable to tell fact from fiction on important issues look like?
82 percent of students couldn’t differentiate sponsored content from a real news story
Approaching Othello from a critical perspective
When I set out to write this analysis, I chose Iago because, to me at least, he is simply the most interesting character in the play; and I decided to approach the text from a Psychoanalytical perspective because his psychology is really the most interesting part of him. I wanted to examine his motivations; why he did what he did.
Schapiro bases her psychoanalysis around the nature of evil in the text, particularly in Iago.
Othello (1604) is a text that forces us to consider the nature and problem of evil, as well as the difficulty of acknowledging our own destructiveness.
However, unlike me, she rejects the concept of motiveless malignity. Schapiro states that it’s incorrect to state Iago does not have a motive, or that his motive is meaningless. She advocates that this ignores the fact that Iago is human too, and thus there are countless small inferiorities or possible catalysts that may have caused the violence he wreaks.
I noticed a real difference from previous years in the class discussion of “motiveless malignity”: students embraced it far more readily and unquestioningly. Many expressed the view that Iago represented the reality of evil, an evil all the more powerful and terrifying because it was not based on reasons and could not be understood … This past fall, I asked my students to respond in writing to the issue of motiveless malignity. More than twice as many students as not wrote that they believed in such a phenomenon. “I do believe in motiveless malignity,” one stated. “All you have to do is watch the 6 o’clock news every night. Society is full of people who do evil things just because the opportunity is there.” Several referred to 9/11 and the terrorists. A female student declared, “Yes, I believe in such a thing. Just check the hallways in any middle school or high school.” Another student wrote about coming out of a Wendy’s restaurant to find “a punky guy” sitting in the car parked next to hers, “just spitting over and over into my car. Where was the motivation in that? I didn’t do anything to initiate such a mean and nasty thing for him to do to my car.” A number of responses referred to Iago and evildoers in general as simply being “crazy.” Some of the more thoughtful responses, however, expressed doubts. One student wrote that although we may not see it explicitly expressed in the play, Iago’s malignity had to arise, he believed, “out of feelings of inferiority.” Another asserted, “Just because we cannot see the motive does not mean a motive does not exist.” And finally, one wrote, “We, as humans, are all complex, unique, and sometimes imbalanced individuals. ‘Motiveless malignity’ is incorrect, in my estimation. To me, some people operate under their own set of rules which the rest of us just can’t understand.”
I disagree with this opinion. I do concede that yes, normal human beings don’t murder, manipulate and lie without a reason or a motive; but Iago is an exception. As I’ve outlined above Iago is a psychopath. Motives and justifications are barely a blip on the radar for him. He isn’t concerned with justifying his opinion through motives because they are irrelevant to him.
Schapiro’s assessment, however, is still valid and very interesting. I really haven’t given it the attention and assessment it deserves but it is perhaps something I’ll go over more thoroughly later.
References:
- Shakespeare, William, and Jane Coles. Othello. 3rd ed., Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014.
- West, Fred. “Iago the Psychopath.” South Atlantic Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 2, 1978, pp. 27–35. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3198785.
- “Frank Underwood- A Modern Day Iago”. Life In The Lens, 2016, https://lifeinthelenseblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/frank-underwood-a-modern-day-iago/.
- Lawless, Jill. “Kevin Spacey Shines As Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’”. Sandiegouniontribune.Com, 2011, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-kevin-spacey-shines-as-shakespeares-richard-iii-2011jun30-story.html.
- “9 Things ‘House Of Cards’ Took From Shakespeare”. Huffpost, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/21/house-of-cards-shakespeare-_n_4823200.html.
- DuChene, Courtney. “Parallels Between Donald Trump And Iago In Shakespeare’s Othello”. The Odyssey Online, 2016, https://www.theodysseyonline.com/trump-will-leave-everyone-behind-parallels-between-donald-trump-iago-shakespeares-othello.
- Stecula, Dominik. “Analysis | Fake News Might Be Harder To Spot Than Most People Believe”. Washington Post, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/10/fake-news-might-be-harder-to-spot-than-most-people-believe/. Accessed 3 May 2018.
- Schapiro, B.A. (2003). Psychoanalysis and the problem of evil: Debating Othello in the classroom. American Imago, 604, 481–499. https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2004.0010
