In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke meditates on the writer's need for "a third person … who passes through all lives and literatures," especially drama. In a passage fascinating for its gendering of the various theatrical roles, Rilke speculates that "every playwright up to now has found it too difficult to speak of the two whom the drama is really about":

The third person, just because he is so unreal, is the easiest part of the problem; they have all been able to manage him; from the very first scene you can feel their impatience to have him enter; they can hardly wait. The moment he appears, everything is all right. But how tedious when he's late. Absolutely nothing can happen without him; everything slows down, stops, waits. Yes, and what if this delay were to continue? What, my dear playwright, and you, dear audience who know life so well, what if he were declared missing—that popular man-about-town or that arrogant youth, who fits into every marriage like a skeleton-key? What if, for example, the devil had taken him? Let's suppose this. All at once you feel the unnatural emptiness of the theatres; they are bricked up like dangerous holes; only the moths from the rims of the box-seats flutter through the unsupported void. The playwrights no longer enjoy their elegant townhouses. All the detective agencies are, on their behalf, searching in the remotest corners of the world for the irreplaceable third person, who was the action itself.⁴⁰

Even without the half-suppressed wish that the devil might take him, this "irreplaceable third person" who both catalyzes and in a sense is the play's action might well evoke the powerful presence of Iago.

Iago is the very type of the Rilkean catalyst of the action (or the action itself) and mediator of others' desire. His orchestration of Roderigo's pursuit of Desdemona frames most of the play's action, whose burden is his perversion of Othello's desire for Desdemona. As Edward Snow has noted, through his efforts to thwart the prosperity of the mismatched couple, Iago too "has done the state some service," for that marriage challenges all the ideological hierarchies—of race, class, and gender—of the social system represented in the play.⁴¹ This social role finds its dramaturgical counterpart in the improvisational nature of his stage function. In Weimann's terms, Iago represents precisely the crucial social agency in the self-authorizing appropriation of language by an emerging bourgeois subject. Witness his coy, distorting iterations of common signifiers—"thought," "indeed," "think," "honest"—which Othello mistakes for "close dilations, working from the heart" of a received fund of fixed significations.⁴²

As for Weimann's "media of circulation," Iago's dominance of the nonrepresentational mimesis of the plataea gradually emerges over the first three acts of Othello. From the moment in the first scene when, under cover of darkness, the conspiracy with Roderigo breaks out into furtive appeals to Brabantio's suppressed fears of miscegenation, Iago lurks on the margins of the play's action as both its prime shaper and its interpreter to the theater audience, a position he will retain right down to the threshold of the play's catastrophe (cf. 5.1.11-22 and 128f.). Both in his famous "motive-hunting" soliloquies and in a dozen brief asides, Iago occupies a psychological space belonging as much to the theatrical agency of representation as to the represented social world of the fiction. The asides are especially germane to the present argument. When Iago comments on Cassio's paddling of Desdemona's palm in the "clyster-pipes" speech (2.1.167-78) or the "well tun'd … music" of Desdemona and Othello (2.1.199 201), he is clearly not only inviting the audience to view the ensuing action from his own quasi-directorial perspective but also miming their potential role in constructing the meaning of the dramatic action, a key issue that will peak in the final scene of the play.

The role of the audience is a crucial factor in Othello as a theatrical event. And it is mainly through lago's plataea function as presenter and interpreter that the play includes that role in its overall representation. As more than one commentator has noted, the central anagnorisis of the play turns on the seemingly unmotivated manifestation by the protagonist of the audience's ideological assumptions. When in the temptation scene Iago wins Othello's concurrence in Desdemona's initial deceit ("And so she did" [3.3.208]) and then elicits his voluntary outburst on "nature erring from itself in her choice of a black mate (3.3.227), he succeeds in putting into play an anxiety about such social transgressions that embraces all of the principals (except perhaps Desdemona herself) and seems to arise as much from the collective psyche of players, characters, and spectators as from his own discrete subjectivity. This is the fear (and desire) that erupts in the long-deferred scene of the black man and the white woman in the nuptial bed with which the audience as well as Brabantio have been teased since the opening scene.⁴³ Othello's own internalization of this fear explains both the stern pose of a justicer in the execution scene and the strangely split subjectivity of his final psychomachy, in which the internalized Christian defender of the Venetian state executes vindicative justice against the transgressive Turkish Other.

In the murder scene (5.2), both the protagonist's delusion and its bloody consummation on the conjugal bed are presented without onstage mediation.⁴⁴ No one contests lago's interpretation of Desdemona's conduct, now appropriated by Othello himself, till Emilia enters the scene; and so the theater audience is left briefly to confront directly its own complicity in the communal "bewhoring" of Desdemona. In contrast, through its serial mediations the public finale takes a distinctly metatheatrical turn. From the moment Emilia voices the audience's resistance to lago's construction of the heroine, the stage in the denouement becomes the site of a contest for the play's meaning. The platform is overrun with interpreters vying to fill the signifying vacuum left by lago's vow of silence, Iago himself having become at last Rilke's "third person who has never existed, has no meaning and must be disavowed," a theatrical variant on Lacan's purloined letter as floating signifier.⁴⁵ The spectators, in turn, are challenged to surrender the unmediated confusions of the murder scene to one or another of the contestants fretting and strutting, in full interpretive regalia, on the stage.

The active judgment demanded of the audience in the finale is not unprepared for in the text. As early as the council scene, a Venetian senator commenting on Turkish obliquity obliquely alerts us to the play's designs on its audience: "'tis a pageant / To keep us in false gaze" (1.3.18-19). Shakespeare's plays from the time of Othello on are, of course, full of such pageants: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and King Lear from roughly the same period, and The Winter's Tale and The Tempest a few years later furnish only the most obvious analogues.⁴⁶ Through the first half of Othello, this metatheatrical tag may seem to apply solely to the machinations of Iago. In the temptation scene, for example, he skillfully displays his repertory of facial feints and vocal "stops" as an earnest of his interpretive authority regarding the invented pageant of Desdemona's duplicity. But as the play approaches its climax, the phrase's application to the theatricality of the play itself—that is, to the audience's part in the production of its meaning—emerges ineluctably.

This process begins in act 4, scene 1, where Iago sardonically makes good on his promise of "ocular proof," plying Pandarus's instruments of mimetic desire to reduce Othello to murderous infatuation. Unlike the temptation scene, here Iago deploys the basic triangularity of all theatricality, enlarging the pageant to include its audience. As in the notorious scene in the Grecian camp in Troilus (5.2), the staged scene with Cassio focuses our attention on the normally unrepresented mediation of meaning by the theatrical producers—playwright, actor, director—to a (normally) equally unrepresented audience. The calculated effects of this pageant on its on-stage spectator, Othello, are duly noted by Iago—who, unlike Pandarus, will also play a part in the pageant—on the threshold of his performance:

Now will I question Cassio of Bianca
… . . It is a creature
That dotes on Cassio (as 'tis the strumpet's
  plague
To beguile many and be beguil'd by one);
He, when he hears of her, cannot restrain
From the excess of laughter. Here he comes.
                     Enter CASSIO.
As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad.
                                 (4.1.93-100)

The speech of course is not without its ironies. lago's allusion to the beguiler beguiled not only echoes Othello's word in describing his own ultimately self-destructive persuasion of Desdemona ("I … often did beguile her of her tears" [1.3.155-56]) and foreshadows his own situation at the play's end; it also foregrounds the misogynistic construction of women that underwrites the pervasive violence of the action.

This point too is metatheatrically represented in the scene, in a more public sequel to its central mimesis of mimesis. From the outset, the "bewhoring" of Desde-mona in her husband's eyes has been the linchpin of Iago's plot. It is the theme of the brothel scene (4.2), one that the women ironically share with Iago afterward: "He hath so bewhor'd her … that true hearts cannot bear it" (4.2.115-17). And it motivates Othello's execution of justice: "Strumpet, I come" (5.1.34). But it is in the confusion following the attempt on Cassio that we see how the purely private or personal construction of woman as "strumpet" transcends the individual subject and suffuses the social structure represented in the play—as well, implicitly, as that of the players and audience doing the representing. Iago's scapegoating of Bianca here is based on his persistent construction of her as a whore. Almost immediately on her entrance, he pronounces her a "notable strumpet" to the assembled crowd (5.1.78), confides to the "gentlemen" his suspicion of "this trash" as a party to Cassio's injury (5.1.85), and finally moralizes it as "the fruits of whoring" (5.1.116). So powerful is this argument that even Emilia, a sometime protofeminist who has herself been bewhored by Iago's suspicions of her with Othello, is moved to proclaim, "O fie upon thee, strumpet" (5.1.121). Thus, under the force of Iago's suggestion the patriarchy's severest critic in the play turns against its most blatant victim.⁴⁷ My point in this seeming digression is that, like his maddening of Othello through the representation of Desdemona's supposed liaison with Cassio, Iago's public bewhoring of Bianca utilizes the neutral onstage audience—in this instance Emilia in particular—to represent to the theater audience its own susceptibility to false pageants. These scenes lend a metatheatrical twist to the action that prepares the audience for the ultimate challenge of the finale.

Othello's construction of the murder of his wife appropriates and extends Iago's construction of her (and every woman) as a notorious strumpet. The theatricality of this appropriation of his own identity, however, is not created by Iago. Indeed, the warring interpreters of the finale are competing first of all with Othello himself, whose highly theatrical self-representation has earlier persuaded Desdemona to transgress the prevailing code figuratively cross-dressed as his fellow "warrior." Throughout act 5, scene 2, Othello struggles to keep his grip on the version of himself that has been implicit in his character from the outset. In his account of his wooing of Desdemona, for example, Othello betrays a strong sense of theatricality, not only in his pitching his story to the assembled Senators—even the Duke avers that "this tale would win my daughter too" (1.3.171) as it has clearly won himself—but in the calculated effects of what he calls his "process" (1.3.142) on the receptive Desdemona, whose "greedy ear [would] / Devour up my discourse. Which I observing, … found good means / To draw from her a prayer" to tell her more (1.3.149-52).⁴⁸ In the interim, this self-conception having been subverted by Iago's improvisations, Othello exchanges his role as the exotic outsider whose marginality has convinced her she can break with the norms of Venetian society to share his profession for that of the misogynistic defender of the patriarchy who must sacrifice his strumpet wife lest she "betray more men" (5.2.6). Othello's consciousness of a role asserts itself to the very end, as within a hundred lines the universal justicer who had initiated the scene is transmogrified to an unmanned coward subject to the whim of "every puny whipster" (5.2.244), and again to a loyal patriot who has "lov'd not wisely but too well" (5.2.344).

Vying with Othello's self-definition in the finale are those of Emilia, Gratiano, and Lodovico. It is these public mediators of its meaning who keep the play from executing the simple mimetic function of representing the hero's delusion and downfall. The action transcends the represented character, Othello, and embraces the representing theatrical apparatus itself, that is, the entire panoply of production, including the audience, that constitutes the play's ultimate interpretive authority. Othello's interpretive hegemony is first challenged by Emilia's redefinition of his sacrifice of Desdemona as merely another in a succession of "foul murthers" and "filthy deeds" rending the social fabric of Cyprus (5.2.106, 149), and of his noble self as an ignorant "gull," "dolt," and "villain" (5.2.163, 172). Then, as the private site of transgression opens onto a quasi-public determination of a verdict in both the juridical and the characterological sense, Emilia is supplanted (as she must be, her modest authority as a woman being socially limited to the domestic and the erotic) by a chorus of noblemen whose readings of the scene constitute the final agon in the play's self-construal. First Gratiano, whose role in the finale as an homme moyen sensuel is signaled twice by an uncomprehending "What is the matter" (5.2.171, 259), registers in a series of banalities the action's openness to interpretation even down to its last hundred lines: "'Tis a strange truth" (5.2.189), "Poor Desdemon" (5.2.204), "[S]ure he hath killed his wife" (5.2.236). It is only in the final lines that this openness is, predictably, foreclosed by Lodovico as the representative of authority in Cyprus-Venice. Lodovico's reconstruction of the events mirrors that of Fortinbras in the last forty lines of Hamlet, displaying the same tendency to yoke the dying hero's urge to "tell my story" to the more pressing demands of a political recuperation of meaning. Echoing Othello's self-(re)definition as a man "once so good [but subsequently] / Fall'n in the practice of a [damned] slave" (5.2.291-92), Lodovico (like the triumphant Portia in The Merchant of Venice) produces the documentary evidence of Iago's plotting, manna to a starving populace in need of order, and dismisses the private catastrophe while quickly consigning Cassio to the governorship of Cyprus, Iago to a slow and torturous death, Gratiano to the inheritance of Othello's "fortunes," and finally himself to the duty of "relat[ing] to the state / This heavy act" (5.2.370-71).⁴⁹

As at the end of Hamlet, the final rhyming of state and relate, in which the former "dilations" (or "delations") of Othello's contested subjectivity yield to the more public relations or mediations of shared communal discourse, leaves the theater audience in something of a dilemma.⁵⁰ As erstwhile spectators to the bloody catastrophe whose identification with the on-stage audience of Cypriots and Venetians is nevertheless strongly solicited, they may be feeling a certain discomfort at the erasure by Lodovico's official version of the more complicated and disturbing one imbricated in the scene they have witnessed. Challenging their potential to be "coproducers of the spectacle" represented in the play's metatheatrical scenes, Lodovico arrogates to himself the function of ideologically authoritative purveyor of meaning found in traditional narrative.⁵¹ For the theater audience to submit to his version of the spectacle is to surrender their part in the production of meaning, which has been foregrounded by the play's persistent theatricality. Conversely, to resist such a surrender is to embrace a metatheatrical subtext of Othello, analogous to that in the Essays of Montaigne, whose very construction depends on a "sufficient reader" of the theatrical text being interpreted on-stage.