[In the following essay, Eastman investigates the similarities between the characters of Othello and Iago, maintaining that since both approach the world as ironists, Iago's efforts to corrupt Othello are successful.]

When we think about it, it is scarcely less extraordinary that Othello should submit himself to Iago's tutelage, turn his love into hate, and destroy Desdemona, then himself, than that he and Desdemona should have transcended the barriers of race and age and culture in the first place and boldly entered into their ecstatically intuitive union. Iago is diabolically skillful, of course, and the marriage was quick, denying in its brevity of courtship the richness of familiarity that might have withstood the Devil himself. We recognize, too, Othello's role as alien, his radical ignorance of Venetian society, his military simplicity, and his proven faith in “honest” and bluff Iago. All these things bear on Othello's transformation, but they do not get to the center of the mystery. The center of it—the psychological center, at least, if not the archetypal, religious, or dramaturgic—may be this: that just as beneath all their multitudinous differences Othello and Desdemona shared some essential identity that made them one whatever the worldly odds might be, so between Othello and Iago there obtains “an unfortunate affinity” (Schlegel's phrase) by means of which, despite the extraordinary differences between them, the Ancient practices upon and destroys his master. Van Doren observes that

Nothing that is in Iago is absent from Othello, though there is much in Othello of which Iago never dreamed. It would be misleading to say that Iago is an extension of Othello, for Iago is complete in himself. But it may be illuminating to point out that the response of one to the other is immediate, or if not immediate, sure.

Iago, we might say, is able to find his way to Othello's heart by looking within his own.

The thing he finds there is a way of addressing his world that is for him, and Othello, temperamentally necessary. It is the ironist's way. It is the asserting of authority by confronting situations from a position of partially or totally masked power. Partial masking serves to remind the potential adversary of power which he knows but which in the circumstances he may have overlooked. It is an oblique display of recognized force. Total masking occurs when there is no immediate need to assert control, and its value to the ironist is that it multiplies his power. Socrates' wisdom gained potency from his mask of ignorance and the ace in a poker game gains potency from being buried. The might of a platoon of armed men is augmented by the surprise of ambush. Totally masked power is multiplied power kept in reserve, the knowledge of which secures the ironist in his authority.

From first to last Iago is an ironist. He contrives his life to appear other than he is—cold-blooded, self-seeking, amoral, sexually pathological, and obsessed with envy—so that what he seems becomes an ambush from which he destroys his enemies and plumes up his will in double knavery. Othello is necessarily an ironist in his vocation. As a general he must be able to confront his enemy with shows that conceal his real strength. He must keep decisive power in hidden reserve. He must betray his enemy into false estimates of his plans, strength, and disposition. But Othello is also an ironist in non-military relationships. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that his life is all military. He approaches it as a battle, himself against a potential enemy, with victory assured, should hostilities break out, to the side that manipulates its power and appearance of power most effectively.

Shakespeare has been at pains to make this clear at the outset. Iago warns Othello of Brabantio's strength. Othello replies: “My services which I have done the signiory / Shall outtongue his complaints.” Here is an unironic consciousness of recognized power: there is no question on either side about the nature of Othello's services. But the irony enters immediately:

                    'Tis yet to know—
Which, when I know that boasting is an honor,
I shall promulgate—I fetch my life and being
From men of royal seige …

Here is power in reserve, the hidden royalty, knowledge of which fortifies Othello in his conflict with Brabantio.

Shakespeare does not isolate this first revelation. The ironic temperament shines through a few moments later in the oblique intimation of recognized strength, “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.” And it appears again at the end of the scene. Brabantio has arrested Othello. His men move toward Othello's party, their hands on their swords. Othello's men prepare for resistance. Before the fray can begin, Othello stills it, turns to Brabantio, and asks: “Where will you that I go / To answer this your charge?” The irony of the situation is marvelous and of Othello's contriving. The general is apparently surrendering to the enemy, making the speech of conciliation, ready to accept the unavoidable terms. Even as he bows toward the yoke, however, hidden power is at his beck to snatch victory from defeat. For Othello's question is not candid. He knows the Duke has sent for him, that affairs of state demand his presence at the Senate, that Brabantio's cause must give way, for the moment, to the call of military council. Othello might have told this to Brabantio. Instead, the question, the trap. And Brabantio walks into it: Othello must go to prison.

                    What if I do obey?
How may the Duke be therewith satisfied,
Whose messengers are here about my side
Upon some present business of the state
To bring me to him?

Othello contrives his life to have authoritative power or knowledge in hidden reserve. He stands before the Senate, accused of witchcraft. Though he knows that he comes of royal seige and feels that he may speak unbonneted to the best, he addresses them with ceremonial humility: “Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors, / My very noble and approved good masters.” Like a Southern Senator unaccustomed to public speaking, he proclaims that he is “rude” in speech. To explain his inadequacies in “the soft phrase of peace,” he reminds them of his lifetime of broil and battle. The stated purpose is to explain a non-existent inadequacy; the ironic effect is to remind his listeners of his military prowess and their need of him.

Othello tells his tale in the quiet consciousness of his unknown royalty, the need the state has of him, the testimony Desdemona will make in his behalf. These things he keeps in reserve. The tale itself is an ironic and progressive revelation of hitherto hidden things—a marshalling of authoritative knowledge that saves the day. It begins by revealing that Brabantio had loved Othello, “oft invited” him, “still questioned” him: the accuser had himself created the occasion he now bemoans. The body of the tale puts the Senate in Desdemona's place, carries it through strange lands, moving accidents, hair-breadth 'scapes, until it is similarly bewitched. “I think this tale would win my daughter too,” says the Duke. Othello's private knowledge of the nature of his wooing, in other words, turns into persuasive strength on his behalf. And finally, most devastating revelation of all and most powerful as it evokes the admiration that men confer on those of their sex conspicuously successful in love, Desdemona was herself the wooer:

                    My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.
She swore, in faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange,
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful.
She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished
That Heaven had made her such a man. She thanked me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story
And that would woo her.

Both Othello and Iago are ironists. Within certain important limitations, they tend to think and feel in the same ways. The elements that Iago finds within Othello, by looking within or projecting himself, are these: first, a sense of authority from the ironist's superior power or knowledge in a conflict situation; second, an almost overpowering frustration when one is denied this superior knowledge—either by conscious ignorance of the salient elements in the situation or by finding that one is the victim of another's irony; third, a general tendency, which under the stimulus of frustration may mount to compulsion, to confront or manipulate situations so that one achieves ironic mastery—by reserving knowledge, by finding knowledge hidden from others, by posing as ignorant where one has knowledge or as weak where one is strong; and fourth, a tendency to project one's own nature, to assume that others also confront life ironically.

Iago's irony is inhibited only by the prudential concerns of psychopathic self-centeredness while Othello's irony, initially, is moral. “The Moor is of a free and open nature” not because he lacks a feeling for irony, but because his own irony does not hit below the belt; not because he lacks subtlety but because he lacks dishonesty. Similarly, the motives governing their resort to irony differ. For Iago irony is compensatory. It bridges the gap between his self-esteem and the place accorded him by the world. Irony becomes for him both a means and an end, a means of getting what he wants, whether Roderigo's money or the downfall of his enemies, but an end as the very act of irony indulges his self-importance. Othello, at least at first, needs no such compensation, for in most respects the world agrees with his self-judgment. For Othello irony is primarily a means, a prudential approach to potential danger, and, as an end, it signifies not self-importance, though there are occasional hints of self-indulgence, but self-confidence. Yet whatever the ultimate causes and however different the morality and motives, the basic tendencies are the same. From his secure intuition of these Iago projects his plot.

Iago's strategy is first to deny and then to provide Othello with the superior knowledge the ironic temperament needs. The strategy gets its test in the attack on Cassio. The alarum has sounded; the general has risen from his bed, stands before Cassio, Montano, and “Honest Iago, that look'st dead with grieving.” What has happened? What does happen is step one in the strategy: Othello is forced into conscious ignorance. Neither Cassio nor Montano can speak and Iago will not. Othello is not simply in ignorance; he is ignorant where others have knowledge, and knowledge that, as commanding general, deeply concerns him. His blood begins his safer guides to rule. Now it is Iago's turn to speak, and so to speak that Montano will credit his integrity, Cassio his loyalty, and Othello find the authoritative knowledge toward which his temperament inclines him. Playing the role of one reluctant to give his friend away, Iago protests Cassio's decency too much. And Othello seizes on the hint: “I know, Iago, / Thy honesty and love doth mince this matter, / Making it light to Cassio.” Iago has not made it light, but Othello, projecting his own tendency to keep knowledge in reserve, sees Iago doing the same. Compelled by his initial frustration, Othello vaults to the compensating and satisfying certainty, composed partly of truth, partly of falsehood, that Iago has prepared for him. Secure in the true knowledge of Cassio's guilt and the false knowledge of the extent of that guilt, Othello sacks his lieutenant.

With his strategy approved by its baptism of fire, Iago is prepared to attack the marriage itself. Why the marriage? For many reasons, undoubtedly, but among them, these three. First, Othello is vastly ignorant about Desdemona and marriage, a point generally recognized. Othello's ignorance is his Achilles' heel. Second, Iago's temperament, both jealous and ironic, finds the poetic justice of it satisfying just as Othello will find a gratifying propriety in strangling Desdemona in her bed, “even the bed she hath contaminated.” Third, Iago knows from his own experience both the frustration of marital suspicion and the compulsive tendency toward a knowledge that remains unverifiable, unstable, and unsatisfactory. If the jealous man is inevitably doomed to spiritual malaise, the jealous ironist is doubly damned. Doubt opens the gate to the frustration of conscious ignorance, the worse frustration of feeling oneself the victim of others' irony—and such is the common way of thinking, the frustrations are not momentary: once to be a cuckold is always to be a cuckold, always to be the ruled rather than the ruler of a power complex. Fourth, Iago knows in the marrow of his own jealous nature that when marital doubt arises, the cards are stacked in favor of the assumption of guilt. If one assumes innocence, one continues to be vulnerable, which is, to the ironic temperament, impossible. If one assumes guilt, however, one cannot be hurt further. One knows, and knowing, one is in a sense impregnable. Iago knows the frustrations and the compulsion toward assuming guilt. He knows, finally, the intolerable instability of that assumption. If one cannot verify it, if one cannot get ocular proof or admission, one's power is insecure. One has trumps that no one else will recognize. Like a man in a nightmare, one has strength and uses it, but the door will not open, the enemy will not fall. So, nagged by the knowledge that the assumption of guilt may be false yet driven to that assumption, and thwarted in realizing the mastery that the assumption should provide, the jealous ironist finds in neither poppy nor mandragora the sweet sleep he owed yesterday.

Iago adapts his attack to Othello's temperament. His first words, “Ha! I like not that,” suggest an ulterior knowledge that places Othello in ignorance. Othello, only partly attentive, asks, “What dost thou say?” and Iago, overly protesting the unimportance of his exclamation as he had overly protested Cassio's decency, baits Othello's predisposition to find out hidden knowledge: “Nothing, my lord. Or if—I know not what.” Was it not Cassio that parted from Desdemona?

Cassio, my lord! No, sure, I cannot think it,
That he would steal away so guilty-like,
Seeing you coming.

But it was Cassio. And he did steal away guilty-like. Othello feels a vague unrest. If Iago thinks Cassio would not, should not steal away, then there is something more here than meets the eye. Some kind of knowledge lies back of these exclamations and disclaimers, this unwillingness to accept the truth. In a quiet way, Othello's frustration has begun. Shall he call back Cassio? The ironist wants power in reserve. And the frustrated ironist needs that power to the extent of his frustration. Othello demurs. Iago has gained a foothold on Othello's mind.

Slowly, carefully, Iago teases Othello into a sense of his own ignorance; slowly, carefully, he sets up the counters on which Othello's mind, driven toward knowledge, will close. When Othello, progressively irritated by Iago's echoes, “As if there were some monster in his thought / Too hideous to be shown,” asks to be released from ignorance—“If thou dost love me, / Show me thy thought”—Iago, sensing that the frustration is not strong enough, retreats from the question but dangles before Othello further suggestions of secret intelligence. And step by step Othello follows until his frustration flares out: “By Heaven, I'll know thy thoughts.” The time has come for Iago to force the corrective knowledge home: “Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy.”

Othello is rescued from ignorance and is again secure. The knowledge he has gained, however, is not of Desdemona's dishonesty; it is simply of Iago's suspicion. In the quenching of his frustration, he relaxes into quiet confidence, unaware that his new knowledge is as flawed as his knowledge about Cassio's guilt, unaware that Iago has led him into admitting question of Desdemona's chastity. Though he does not know it, his ignorance, his temperament, and Iago's guile already doom his security forever.

Iago's job is now to fan the flames of new frustration by directly convincing Othello of his own ignorance about Desdemona and by suggesting that Othello is the victim of adulterous irony. He does it skillfully. First the argument from personal experience, which depends on a kind of knowledge Othello cannot have:

I know our country disposition well.
In Venice they do let Heaven see the pranks
They dare not show their husbands.

Then, the twin arguments of Desdemona's deceit: she deceived her father and she showed Othello fear when she felt love. As the flame mounts, Iago breaks off, but when Othello tries to gain certitude, seeking within his heart and experience for the truth with which to confront these doubts, Iago will not let him. With each solicitous fear that he has dashed Othello's spirits, he keeps Othello emotionally off balance and subtly evokes the ironist's predisposition to accept guilt as fact. With very few words more he achieves his goal. “Why did I marry?” cries Othello; “This honest creature doubtless / Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds.” The conviction grows as Othello seeks out the hidden knowledge to give him mastery:

                    Haply, for I am black
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have, or for I am declined
Into the vale of years …
She's gone, I am abused, and my relief
Must be to loathe her.

Doubt withers away as the conviction becomes, momentarily, absolute:

                    'tis the plague of great ones …
'Tis destiny unshunnable, like death.
Even then this forkèd plague is fated to us
When we do quicken

When Othello returns, he is on the rack. Each slightest realization of his new knowledge becomes an agony of frustration. As he imagines Desdemona's stolen hours of lust, he finds his assumption of guilt inadequately supported by knowledge: “'tis better to be much abused / Than but to know 't a little.” As he finds Cassio's kisses on Desdemona's lips, he tastes the bitter fruit of another's irony. The pain of these unfolding realizations forces doubt upon Othello: “Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore.” The doubt, alas, is at best a forlorn hope—is, in fact, little more than procrastinated belief, a shrinking from and a testimonial to the inevitable. Intuiting this, Iago floods Othello's mind with images of sexual guilt. As Othello stares in fascinated revulsion—at pictures of himself, the supervisor, grossly gaping on while Desdemona is topped, of Cassio and Desdemona “prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, / As salt as wolves in pride”—his very act of imagination is an act of acceptance. When he demands “a living reason she's disloyal,” he is no longer challenging the fact. Like a hanging judge, he is simply asking evidence to support the predetermined verdict. The businesses of the dream and the handkerchief satisfy the demand.

Iago's temptation and Othello's fall have been presented. The catastrophe looms in the offing. In between Shakespeare focuses on the workings of Othello's temperament, on the dynamics of jealousy as it operates, under cynical tutelage, in a highly imaginative mind habituated to ironic consciousness of power. In Act II Shakespeare had shown Iago listening in on the exchange of courtesies between Cassio and Desdemona. Iago's asides tainted the scene with cynical malevolence:

He takes her by the palm. Aye, well said, whisper.
With as little a web as this will I ensnare as
great a fly as Cassio. Aye, smile upon her, do, I
will gyve thee in thine own courtship … Very good,
well kissed! An excellent courtesy! 'Tis so indeed.
Yet again your fingers to your lips? Would they
were clyster pipes for your sake!

Now, in Act IV, it is Othello who stands outside a friendly exchange, sustaining his need for authority by cynically misconstruing its meaning, breathing out hate and threats:

Now he tells how she plucked him to my chamber.
Oh, I see that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it to.

Othello has sunk to Iago.

In his degradation he is true to his temperament. He is the dupe of adultery, hence the butt of others' power; but because he knows and because his knowledge is concealed from those who have hurt him, he has again something of that reserve strength the ironist needs. His realization of this strength wavers, however, for, as we have seen, he can feel it intensely only as he simultaneously senses in all its bitterness the source of that strength, which is his own ignominy.

It is such a bittersweet realization that Iago offers when he has Othello spy upon his conversation with Cassio. Othello watches and suffers, watches and feels his power wax. Predisposed to know rather than doubt, predisposed to project his own temperament on others, he twists Cassio's every motion into confirmation. And like Iago earlier, he gains power from a knowledge of which his victim is ignorant, the knowledge of his own feelings and motives, now inflamed by his kindled shame. In his threat, Othello momentarily realizes the strength he relies on.

Since this realization is twinned with shame, however, it is unstable, and as Cassio leaves, reaction sets it. Othello's mind drives back on his ignominy, on the transparent ease with which he has been duped, on the naiveté of his trust in Cassio, on the sickly sweet folly of his love for Desdemona. In his agony he feels, too, a deeper vision, a tragic and impersonal sense of Desdemona's lost perfection. Simultaneously to feel these things, however, is to be torn apart. Othello cannot say “let her rot, and perish, and be damned tonight” and “O, Iago, the pity of it” and remain whole. To escape from this emotional torment, he smothers his sense of the tragic. He asserts his ironic temperament over his deepest apprehensions of life's meaning. By the end of this episode Othello has reasserted his mastery and strengthened it with the will, born of shame, to strangle Desdemona.

Even now, however, his mastery is but momentary. Not only does his sense of power depend on a sense of shame too painful to be steadily realised, but his power must be recognized or susceptible of recognition before it is secure. Othello must test his power. Hence the brothel scene. What Othello seeks is a guarantee to his conviction, not a discovery of innocence, and he seeks it in the masochistically ambivalent way already defined, tormenting himself to satisfy his corrupted imagination.

Emilia provides no satisfaction. Her attitude, in fact, threatens Othello's conviction, for it denies the very premise on which his strength is built. But he does not yet feel much frustration, for Emilia is “a simple bawd” and Othello has to do with “a subtle whore, / A closet lock and key of villainous secrets.”

Othello begins his interview with Desdemona in ironic mastery. He is a customer, she a whore. They know the secret promptings of the flesh, these two. Then he shifts from the initiate to the outsider, the sardonically indignant justicer, his language still ironic, still making Desdemona the pawn of his bitter conviction:

OTHELLO:
Why, what art thou?
DESDEMONA:
Your wife, my lord, your true and loyal wife.
OTHELLO:
Come, swear it, damn thyself …
Swear thou art honest.

Her protestation of innocence but intensifies his conviction of her guilt and of what she has done to him. Momentarily, like a man standing outside of himself yet looking in, Othello tries to come to terms with his estate. He could have borne pain, poverty, captivity—

                    But, alas, to make me
A fixèd figure for the time of scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at!

This is the ironist's response to Othello's condition, the sense of humiliation. But deeper than the ironic vision is the tragic, the sense not of humiliation, but of utter, unredeemable loss. Once again this surfaces:

But there where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up—to be discarded thence!

Yet even as Othello contemplates his tragedy, revulsion floods through him:

                    to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!

His attention rebounds from the destruction of his life to the destroyer, and with that shift, his ironic pride reasserts itself. “I hope my noble lord esteems me honest” meets for reply “Oh, aye, as summer flies are in the shambles, / That quicken even with blowing.”

To this point Othello has not really tested his power. He has asked, he has made his charge, but his sense of his loss, his sense of the pity of it, has dominated his mind. Now, when Desdemona cries out, “what ignorant sin have I committed,” he suddenly finds himself facing nightmare. He had built a universe out of self-confidence and love only to have it destroyed. He has built another out of the ruins, one founded on pain, a suffering universe but an ordered one. And this woman who ruined the first will ruin the second, will deny its existence, will mock him with her insistence that the first world was the true one. Othello cannot surrender his certitude, for that would be to invite a second chaos, but in his torture and frustration he strikes out. He seizes on the ambiguity of “committed” and wrathfully demands,

Was this fair paper, this most goodly book,
Made to write “whore” upon? What committed!
Committed! O thou public commoner!

When he can still obtain no confession, no corroboration of his conviction, Othello ends the interview as he began it. To maintain his universe and his own suffering authority over it, he returns to the acted irony, the leering insistence on shared knowledge of guilt:

                    I cry you mercy …
I took you for that cunning whore of Venice
That married with Othello.

When Othello first succumbed to Iago's temptation, he knelt down and “by yond marble Heaven, / In the due reverence of a sacred vow,” swore his revenge. When Iago proposed that he strangle Desdemona in “the bed she hath contaminated,” Othello replied, “Good, good. The justice of it pleases.” Now, as he stands over his sleeping wife, it is as justicer. Why? The reasons are in part religious, but they are also temperamental. When Othello swore his vow, he was putting himself in a position of power, both as his reverently sworn intent was knowledge denied Desdemona and Cassio and as he thereby enlisted in the cause of divine justice and thus became its agent. When he was gratified by the poetic justice Iago proposed, he was realizing a sense of providential strength: the all-powerful forces of the universe bring about their justice with ironic propriety, and Othello found himself, as it were, partaking of divine knowledge, divine intent, divine strength as he planned strangulation in the very bed of shame. At the bedside he is supreme. His conviction is absolute, his intent gives him the fullest realization of that conviction, and in his identification of his own purposes with the moral order of the universe, he has purged himself alike of the lust he had imaginatively shared and the sense of shame, powerlessness, and frustration hitherto concomitant with his mastery.

The strangulation scene is in many ways the brothel scene all over again. Again Othello puts his power, now religiously enforced, to the test; and again the test fails. Again he begins in ironic, though impersonal, control; again the control is threatened, and again his passion erupts, nullifying the religious reinforcement, to destroy the thing that threatens him. Othello destroys Desdemona, it seems to me, to save himself, to assert for the last time against the challenge of her adultery and her protested innocence his own mastery.

As the play draws to a close, Iago, by his final act of sealing his lips, remains true to his temperament and maintains his power over those who would exort confession from him. Othello, at the end, likewise remains true to his ironic nature. He has struggled out of chaos only to find chaos again in Emilia's dying revelation. Now he builds anew, rapidly, for the true order is but the old one turned upside down: his is the damnation, not Desdemona's; hers is the purity, not his. This discovery, though, and the suffering that has gone into it change Othello's relation to his world. He is beyond it now, invulnerable. Other men cannot touch him. When Gratiano tries, Othello begins to respond as of old, bringing forth a concealed weapon and explicitly, ironically insisting on his physical mastery:

                    I have seen the day
That with this little arm and this good sword
I have made my way through more impediments
Than twenty times your stop.

“Little” arm indeed! Yet scarcely has he asserted his power over others than he repudiates it:

Do you go back dismayed? 'Tis a lost fear.
Man but a rush against Othello's breast,
And he retires.

His present authority is of another sort. These men are concerned with life, as Othello once was, but now he holds the power which his suffering and discovery have conferred upon him, the power to reject life. Hence he leaves the stage of our minds as he entered it, the holder of concealed knowledge, concealed intent, even in death the ironic master of those whose wills oppose his own.

                    Set you down this,
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcisèd dog,
And smote him, thus.