SOURCE: Muir, Kenneth. “Othello.” In Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence, pp. 93-116. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979.

[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1972, Muir concentrates on the figures of Othello and Iago, considering their differing connections to the theme of jealousy in Othello.]

Shakespeare found the plot of Othello in the collection of stories by Cinthio which also contained a variant of the Measure for Measure plot. The story which ends with the murder of Desdemona by a stocking filled with sand in the hands of the Ensign is not at first sight particularly promising as dramatic material. But there were three points about it that seem to have kindled Shakespeare's imagination. After the murder, we are told, the Moor mourned for the loss of his wife, because he had loved her more than his very eyes. Equally significant was Cinthio's description of the villain as

a man of very fine appearance but of the most depraved nature that ever a man had in the world … Although he was a most detestable character, nevertheless with imposing words and his presence, he concealed the malice he bore in his heart, in such a way that he showed himself outwardly like another Hector or Achilles.

Then, thirdly, the virtuous white woman falls in love with a Moor. The consummate hypocrite, the mixed marriage, and the murderer who loves his victim are the triple foundation of the tragedy. They provided Shakespeare with opportunities of contrast, irony and paradox, which he exploited to the full. Did the audience at the Globe expect the Moor to be a lecherous villain, like Aaron in Titus Andronicus or Ithamore in The Jew of Malta? They were presented with a picture of a baptised Moor, much esteemed by the senators of Venice. Did the Globe audience suppose that a white woman who takes the initiative in wooing a coloured man was certainly perverse and probably sensual? Shakespeare was careful to establish in the account of the wooing that Desdemona loved Othello's visage in his mind; and that Othello is more anxious to be free and bounteous to Desdemona's mind than to please the palate of his appetite. Did the Globe patrons, since the Devil himself was depicted as black, expect Othello to be devilish? But the demi-devil of the play is white. Did they suppose, as Rymer supposed later in the century, that soldiers in plays should be depicted as honest? Shakespeare depicted an Iago exploiting this superstition for his own ends.¹ Did they expect Moors to be violently jealous? In this Shakespeare appears to have satisfied their expectations, though some of the best critics have denied that Othello was jealous.

In The Brothers Karamazov (VIII.3) there is a discussion of Mitya's jealousy. Dostoevsky distinguishes between this and Othello's feelings:

‘Othello was not jealous, he was trustful,’ observed Pushkin. And that remark alone is enough to show the deep insight of our great poet. Othello's soul was shattered and his whole outlook clouded simply because his ideal was destroyed. But Othello did not begin hiding, spying, peeping. He was trustful, on the contrary. He had to be led up, pushed on, excited with great difficulty before he could entertain the idea of deceit. The truly jealous man is not like that. It is impossible to picture to oneself the shame and moral degradation to which the jealous man can descend without a qualm of conscience … Othello was incapable of making up his mind to faithlessness—not incapable of forgiving it, but of making up his mind to it—though his soul was as innocent and free from malice as a babe's. It is not so with the really jealous man.

Unknown to Pushkin, and probably unknown to Dostoevsky, Coleridge had expressed similar views about Othello. Jealousy, he declared, was not the point of his passion:²

I take it to be rather an agony that the creature, whom he had believed angelic, with whom he had garnered up his heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should be proved impure and worthless. It was the struggle not to love her. It was a moral indignation and regret that virtue should so fall.

Bradley similarly declared that Othello's³

tragedy lies in this—that his whole nature was indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.

The Coleridge-Pushkin interpretation is often followed by actors. Stanislavsky argued that Othello was childlike, gentle and pure in heart;⁴ Alexander Ostuzhev, who played the part in 1936, assumed that jealousy was not the theme of the play; and in all but one of the seventy-eight productions of the play in the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1957, the same interpretation was followed.

The weight of this tradition should not prevent us from questioning it. The first known critic of the play, Leonard Digges, Shakespeare's neighbour, spoke of ‘the jealous Moor’;⁵ and Othello speaks of himself as ‘not easily jealous’—not denying that he was jealous. We may allow that the shattering of an ideal by Desdemona's supposed adultery, so that (in Troilus's phrase) ‘the bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolv'd and loos'd’, is an essential part of the tragedy, but that Othello is desperately jealous it would be idle to deny.

There are, of course, several different kinds of jealousy, from irrational suspicion to unwilling conviction, from spiritual horror to animal possessiveness. One can appreciate that Coleridge would wish to distinguish Othello's jealousy from some of these. But the very characteristics of jealousy listed by him to show that Othello is free of it seem rather to prove the opposite. An ‘eagerness to snatch at proofs’ is displayed by him several times in the crucial temptation scene—the story of Cassio's dream is told by Iago when Othello demands ‘a living reason’ that Desdemona is disloyal, and he snatches at the ‘proof’ provided by the handkerchief. ‘A disposition to degrade the object of his passion by sensual fancies and images’ could be illustrated from almost any scene from the central acts of the play:

I had been happy if the general camp,
Pioners and all, had tasted her sweet body …

(III.iii.349-50)

It is not words that shakes me thus—
pish!—noses, ears, and lips.

(IV.i.41-2)

The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up—to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!

(IV.ii.60-3)

Goats and monkeys!

(IV.i.260)

‘Catching occasions to ease the mind by ambiguities’ is apparent in the brothel scene; ‘a dread of vulgar ridicule’ can be seen, for example in Othello's reference to the ‘forked plague’; and ‘a spirit of selfish vindictiveness’ is reflected in his invocation of ‘black vengeance’, in ‘O, I see that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw't to’ and in ‘I'll chop her into messes!’

It is strange that Coleridge failed to notice such passages, or failed to see that they conflicted with his conception of Othello. It was easy for Edgar Elmer Stoll⁶ to demonstrate that Coleridge was mistaken and that Othello was clearly jealous; but he went further and argued that it was impossible to reconcile the jealous maniac of Act IV with the noble self-controlled character depicted in Act I. Shakespeare's character portrayal in Stoll's view was based on a specious and unreal psychology and he sacrificed consistency of characterisation to theatrical effect. To make Othello accept Iago's slanders rather than trust Desdemona is to Stoll absurd, especially as Iago's temptation is unconvincing:⁷

An honest man who undertakes to tell you that your wife and your dearest friend have played you false makes a clean breast of it, without flourish or ado. He does not twist and turn, tease and tantalize, furtively cast forth the slime of slander and ostentatiously lick it up again … Shakespeare, in his neglect of plausibility, would have us labour under the delusion that the manners of honesty and dishonesty are almost one and the same.

But the temptation scene can be defended in various ways—by the fact that an irresolute friend might behave not very differently from Iago; that Elizabethan views of human behaviour differ in some respects from ours; that Othello did not have the advantage of Shakespeare's readers or audience of knowing that Iago was a villain; that every character in the play is deceived by Iago; and that a dramatic poet does not attempt to give a naturalistic, ‘photographic’ picture of human behaviour, provided that he can convince an audience of his truth to life. Audiences do in fact accept Iago's temptation of Othello as a true representation of how a villain pretending to be an honest man would behave and they accept Othello's behaviour as the natural reaction of a noble, but credulous, Moor.

Of course the temptation scene is telescoped: and those critics who think they can estimate Othello's proneness to jealousy by demonstrating that between the beginning of the temptation and the fall represented by the words ‘Set on thy wife to observe’ is less than a hundred and fifty lines are absurdly prosaic.⁸ When Othello at the end of the play declares that he was not easily jealous, Shakespeare means us to believe him, at least in the sense that he was not of a jealous temperament. He would not have suspected Desdemona if he had not been deceived by the villain.

This is not the view of two of the best critics of our day, T. S. Eliot and Dr F. R. Leavis, and of their numerous disciples. Eliot in a famous essay⁹ stigmatised Othello for his boyaryism, declaring that in his final long speech he was cheering himself up and escaping from reality into illusion, by blaming fate and the Ancient. As I have tried to show elsewhere, such an interpretation is incompatible with the text of the final scene. Othello regrets the murder before Desdemona's name is cleared:

                              I have no wife.
O, insupportable! O heavy hour!

He implies to Emilia that he has been driven mad, by the fact that the moon

                              comes more nearer earth than she was wont,
And makes men mad.

He admits that if he had not proceeded upon just grounds he would be ‘damned beneath all depth in hell’. When he learns the truth, he naturally tries to kill Iago, though he knows that he himself has reached his journey's end. Although he asks ‘Who can control his fate?’ he does not disclaim his own responsibility. He knows that he is damned, that his soul will be snatched by fiends, and that he will be tortured for ever. At last he executes justice on himself, believing that his suicide would seal his damnation.

Is he really ‘cheering himself up’ in the speech which ends with his suicide?

Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service and they know't:
No more of that. I pray you in your letters
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate
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; of one whose hand
Like the base Indian threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their med'cinable gum. 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 th'throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus.

That Othello in such circumstances refers to his services to Venice has been regarded as a sign of egotism. An Elizabethan audience would have seen it rather as the natural expression of proper pride. Othello, like Hamlet, does not wish to leave a wounded name behind him. He does not wish anyone to extenuate his guilt despite the phrase ‘unlucky deeds’. The key phrase in his apologia is that he had loved ‘not wisely, but too well’. To some critics this reflects his self-deceit. If he had loved Desdemona better, he would have forgiven her supposed adultery. How much better, we are told, the hero of A Woman Killed by Kindness behaves! But tragic heroes are seldom or never patterns of right conduct. What Othello means by saying he loved too well is that his whole life had been transformed by his love. His total commitment meant that if he believed he had lost Desdemona's love, life would become a desert. His tears express his grief and his repentance and the medcinable gum may hint at atonement. The final anecdote is not merely to distract attention so that his auditors cannot prevent his suicide: he also reminds us of a time when he was a champion of Christian civilisation and implies by his fatal blow that he is killing the pagan in himself.

But, we are told by Dr Leavis, ‘A habit of self-approving self-dramatization is an essential element in Othello's make-up’,¹⁰ even in this final apologia. At best it is ‘the impressive manifestation of a noble egotism’. The Othello music of which Wilson Knight has written¹¹ so eloquently conveys ‘romantic glamour’. Othello's attitude to emotion is essentially sentimental. His love for Desdemona ‘is composed very largely of ignorance of self as well as ignorance of her’ and ‘an essential condition of the tragedy’ is that his ‘romantic idealising love’ is ‘dubiously grounded on reality’.¹² Leo Kirschbaum is another critic who complains that Othello refuses to look squarely at his crime,¹³ that he indulges in self-idealisation, that he ‘loves not Desdemona but his image of her’. Such an Othello hardly needs a demi-devil to bring about his ruin. As Dr Leavis says, ‘the tragedy may fairly be said to be Othello's character in action’.¹⁴

It must be admitted that these critics have some grains of truth in their remarks. It is true that Othello's previous experience as a soldier has left him singularly ignorant of women, especially of women of a different race, and his own awareness of this makes it difficult for him to argue rationally with Iago. There is irony, too, in the fact that his initial, unsophisticated idea of Desdemona was true, while his sophisticated idea of her, after he has been Iago's pupil, is totally false. It is therefore not true to suggest that his love is based on ignorance. It is based on intuitive, but quite genuine, knowledge—a knowledge which Iago undermines. In the same way, Desdemona's love is based on intuitive knowledge. She sees Othello's visage in his mind; she loves him not merely for the dangers he has undergone, but for the noble simplicity of character which shines through his autobiography and makes his colour basically irrelevant. Irrelevant to her, but not to the scheme of the play; for Iago plays on Othello's ignorance of Venetian women and undermines his instinctive trust. The difference of race makes him particularly vulnerable. As Professor Eldred Jones says, Othello ‘is a complex story of how a noble and upright but isolated man is subjected to temptation in the area of his being where he is most vulnerable—his difference in race’.¹⁵ It could be argued that Othello is deluded when he plays down the erotic aspect of the marriage—‘the young effects in [him] defunct’; but he is a general anxious to persuade the Senate to agree to Desdemona's plea to be allowed to accompany her husband on active service, and he naturally argues that her presence will not interfere with his efficiency.

Those who see Othello as a braggart soldier are surely mistaken. He has a proper pride in his vocation; he is aware of his military achievements, his service to the state, his personal bravery. If anything he is guilty of understatement, and no Jacobean spectator would have found anything blameworthy in his awareness of his own merits. Nor can it be said that the ‘Othello music’ is somehow a symptom of egotism or of self-dramatisation. Shakespeare had to find an idiom and vocabulary which distinguished him from the Europeans; which was supremely eloquent at the same time as it enabled Othello to regard his speech as rude and unsophisticated. If we think that his account of his wooing shows that he had bragged and told fantastical lies, we are of the demi-devil's party without knowing it. The Duke directs our responses:

I think this tale would win my daughter too.

We need not go beyond the first scene in which Othello appears (I.ii) to see the distinction between his true nobility and the hollow egotistical ‘nobility’ with which he is credited. Iago warns him that Brabantio will prevent his marriage from being consummated. Othello replies—quite truly, as it turns out—that his services to the state will out-tongue Brabantio's complaints, that he comes of royal ancestors, and that his merits make him worthy of Desdemona. Iago urges him to go in, but Othello refuses:

My parts, my title, and my perfect soul
Shall manifest me rightly.

And when Brabantio arrives to arrest him, Othello averts a fight with a line which shows him to be a man of natural authority:

Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.

This scene shows that Othello is not without pride; but it also displays a man of nobility and self-control rather than an egotist.

Another example of self-dramatisation adduced by Dr Leavis is afforded by the lines in the final scene of the play:

                                        Behold, I have a weapon:
A better never did itself sustain
Upon a soldier's thigh.

The lines are a surprise to Gratiano, who believes Othello's statement that he is unarmed is true; but it is not at all a surprise to the audience who have seen Othello looking for the sword, tempered in the icebrook, in his chamber, and have heard him describe it. His other sword, with which he had wounded Iago, has been taken from him, so that it is assumed that the aged Gratiano is an adequate guard. The audience will imagine for a moment that Othello is going to try to escape; and perhaps the Moor, who would not put himself in circumscription and confine for the sea's worth, intends at first to do this. But, if so, he soon realises that he has come to the end of the road. This is an example of dramatisation by Shakespeare, not of self-dramatisation by Othello; for the audience, having seen him discard a second sword, is more likely to be surprised by his suicide. Indeed, Cassio, who is best acquainted with Othello's character, half expected him to commit suicide, ‘but thought he had no weapon’. From the dramatic point of view it is necessary to show that Othello deliberately throws away his chance of escaping and equally to make his suicide seem both inevitable and surprising.

It looks as though a prejudice against the theatre and a failure to realise the necessities of the stage have led Dr Leavis into confusing dramatisation with its necessary projection of character and the self-dramatisation of characters in real life. In his essay on the sentimentalist's Othello he was not merely disagreeing with Bradley but with three hundred years of stage tradition.

If one examines what the other characters in the play say about Othello, the impression we derive from his own speeches is strengthened. We expect the Senate to pay tribute to his military prowess and for Montano to speak of him as a worthy governor. But Cassio's admiration and affection is apparent all through the play. Even after the death of Desdemona Cassio speaks of him as ‘Dear General’ and as great of heart. Othello claims that Brabantio loved him, even though he did not want him as a son-in-law. Lodovico, after seeing Othello strike his wife, asks:

Is this the noble Moor, whom our full senate
Call all-in-all sufficient? Is this the nature
Whom passion could not shake? Whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?

(IV.i.261-5)

In the last scene he addresses him as

O, thou Othello, that wast once so good.

But the strongest testimony to the Moor's virtues comes from his bitterest enemy. Although in talking to others Iago makes derogatory remarks about him, complaining of his bombast, his bragging, his lies and his lasciviousness, in soliloquy and even in dialogue he reveals that the Moor is a great and valiant soldier and that, although he hates him, he has a ‘constant, loving, noble nature’,

                                        a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.

It is surely difficult to argue that everyone in the play is mistaken about the Moor and that in defiance of their estimate of his character we must accept the diagnosis of two or three modern critics that he is a self-deceiving egotist, bombastic and naturally jealous. Even Iago knew better than that. He knew that Othello's fatal flaw was his credulity, which enabled him to be led by the nose. Like Chapman's hero,¹⁶

He would believe, since he would be believed:
Your noblest natures are most credulous.

We are liable at times to agree with Iago that Othello is ‘egregiously an ass’ for believing his wife has played him false on the slender evidence provided—the story of Cassio's dream and the handkerchief in the hands of a harlot. Even in the theatre we may be tempted to sympathise with the spectator who is said to have shouted out during the temptation scene ‘You black fool, can't you see?’ Certainly when Emilia after the murder of Desdemona exclaims

                              O gull! O dolt!
As ignorant as dirt!

she expresses the feelings of the audience at this moment of the play. But credulous as Othello is, we do not ultimately regard him as stupid. We are prevented from doing so by the fact that Iago imposes on everyone, and particularly by the convincing nature of the temptation scene in the theatre. The epithet applied to Iago until just before the end is ‘honest’. Roderigo is convinced that the Ancient is devoted to his interests; Cassio believes him to be his friend; even Emilia, who knows him best, does not suspect that he hates Othello and Cassio. We are told by Milton, after Satan has slipped into paradise unrecognised by the angelic sentry, that Hypocrisy is

                                        the onely evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone.(17)

Shakespeare seems to have shared Milton's opinion on this matter, as we can see from his obsessional treatment of the theme of seeming.

The Leavis view that Iago ‘is not much more than a necessary piece of dramatic mechanism’¹⁸ may be a necessary retort to those who exaggerate his intellectual superiority; and it may be true, in a certain sense, ‘that he represents something that is in Othello’.¹⁹ But this kind of emphasis immeasurably impoverishes the metaphysical content of the play. It is difficult not to accept S. L. Bethell's view that Shakespeare introduced sixty-four ‘diabolic’ images into the play to show ‘Othello and Iago as exemplifying and participating, in the age-long warfare of Good and Evil’.²⁰ Iago, who refers to hell and damnation eight times in the course of the first act, brings it to an end with the hatching of his plot:

I have't. It is engender'd. Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.

The second act ends with Iago considering his satanic theology—the divinity of hell—and identifying himself as a devil.

When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows
As I do now.

He boasts that he is going to make out of Desdemona's goodness a net to enmesh her, Othello and Cassio. In the last act Othello attacks Iago with the words

If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.

A little later he calls him a demi-devil. These references—they are not, properly speaking, images—cannot be brushed aside as peripheral. Those critics who see Iago as a descendant of the Vice of the Moralities can point to a number of characteristics they have in common; but he resembles more closely the traditional stage devil. On one level, therefore, the play can be seen as the temptation of a good man by a devil to commit mortal sin.

This fits in with Coleridge's belief that Iago's soliloquies show ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’ if not with Hazlitt's brilliant analysis of the character:²¹

Some persons, more nice than wise, have thought this whole character unnatural, because his villainy is without a sufficient motive. Shakespeare, who was as good a philosopher as he was a poet, thought otherwise. He knew that the love of power, which is another name for the love of mischief, is natural to man … Iago in fact belongs to a class of character, common to Shakespeare and at the same time peculiar to him; whose heads are as acute and active as their hearts are hard and callous. Iago is to be sure an extreme instance of the kind; that is to say, of diseased intellectual activity, with the most perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference for the latter, because it falls more readily in with his favourite propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts and scope to his actions. He is quite or nearly as indifferent to his own fate as to that of others; he runs all risks for a trifling and doubtful advantage; and is himself the dupe and victim of his ruling passion—an insatiable craving after action of the most difficult and dangerous kind. … [He] plots the ruin of his friends as an exercise for his ingenuity, and stabs men in the dark to prevent ennui. His gaiety, such as it is, arises from the success of his treachery; his ease from the torture he has inflicted on others. He is an amateur of tragedy in real life; and instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters, or long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more desperate course of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his nearest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest, with steady nerves and unabated resolution.

There are some details about this analysis which are questionable. It can hardly be maintained that Othello and Cassio are Iago's ‘friends’; there is no mention of his hatred of the Moor; and Hazlitt substitutes the love of power for the divinity of hell. The passage is perhaps intended as an answer to Coleridge for Hazlitt regards the love of power as a sufficient motive for Iago's actions. But it may be observed that he ignores all Iago's avowed motives.

Hazlitt's description of Iago as an amateur of tragedy in real life was taken up by Swinburne who called him ‘a contriving artist in real life’;²² by Bradley, who pointed out a ‘curious analogy between the early stages of dramatic composition’ and the soliloquies in which Iago conceives his plot;²³ and by Granville-Barker who argued that the Ancient was endowed with the intuition of the artist and that he loved evil for its own sake, ‘pursued with the artist's unscrupulous passion’,²⁴ but that he was an actor rather than a dramatist. It is certainly true that in creating the character Shakespeare was able to make use of his personal knowledge of the psychology of an actor-dramatist, though it looks as though Granville-Barker were influenced by Shaw's eloquent statement on the unscrupulousness of the artist, expressed through the mouth of Jack Tanner.

Coleridge's view of Iago's motivelessness was also taken up by Charles Lamb in his account of Bensley in the part, in which he also stresses the impenetrability of hypocrisy:²⁵

No spectator, from his action, could divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy alone put you in possession of the mystery. There were no by-intimations to make the audience fancy their own discernment so much greater than that of the Moor. The Iago of Bensley did not go to work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the character, natural to a general consciousness of power; but none of that petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little successful stroke of its knavery—as is common with your small villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It was not a man setting his wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children, who are mightily pleased at being let into the secret; but a consummate villain entrapping a noble nature into toils against which no discernment was available, where the manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and without motive.

Booth similarly advised any actor playing Iago to try to impress even the audience with his sincerity. ‘Iago should appear to be what all but the audience believe he is.’²⁶ Bensley and Booth were surely right because an obvious villain would lower one's opinion of Othello's intelligence and the play is much more serious than it would be if played as a melodramatic villain entrapping a credulous fool.

The last two words of Lamb's remarks have been accepted by most critics as true and the view was powerfully restated by Lytton Strachey.²⁷ Shakespeare, he declared,

determined that Iago should have no motive at all. He conceived of a monster, whose wickedness should lie far deeper than anything that could be explained by a motive—the very essence of whose being should express itself in the machinations of malignity … and, when the moment of revelation came, the horror that burst upon the hero would be as inexplicably awful as evil itself.

From what was said above, it will be apparent that the Satanic Iago who hates good simply because it is good is one level on which the character must be interpreted; and, on a lower level, he can be regarded, as Stoll continually argued, as a stage villain. But an exclusive emphasis on these two sides of Iago's role ignores or distorts the significance of the motives the villain himself puts forward for his plot against the Moor, and to these we must now devote some attention.

Cinthio's villain has a single, uncomplicated motive. His love for Desdemona is turned into the bitterest hatred by his lack of success and he blames the Captain for it. His plot is directed mainly against Desdemona and his hatred of the Captain is caused by sexual jealousy, not by professional envy. Shakespeare apparently discards this motive, except for the very curious confession in one of Iago's soliloquies:

                              Now, I do love her too;
Not out of absolute lust—though peradventure
I stand accountant for as great a sin—
But partly led to diet my revenge.

(II.i.285-8)

He wishes to feed his revenge, seducing Desdemona partly to spite Othello, and partly (one supposes) for a more direct sensual pleasure. This is the first we have heard of Iago's ‘love’, but it is possible that these lines throw a retrospective light on earlier scenes. In the first scene of the play, it might be argued, Iago is surprised and upset by Othello's marriage, not merely because he is in danger of losing Roderigo's subsidies, but because he is envious of Othello's good fortune. The vivid language he uses to inflame Brabantio's anger—the black ram, the barbary horse, the beast with two backs—may also reflect sexual envy and racial prejudice. In Act II, when Cassio is talking with Desdemona, Iago's envy is even more apparent:

Ay, smile upon her, do. I will gyve thee in thine own courtship … Very good: well kissed … Yet again your fingers to your lips? Would they were clyster-pipes for your sake!

(II.i.169-77)

In the scene on the same evening after Othello and Desdemona have retired to bed, there is an obvious contrast between Cassio's respect for Desdemona and Iago's insinuations:

IAGO
He hath not yet made wanton the night with her; and she is sport for Jove.
CASSIO
She is a most exquisite lady.
IAGO
And, I'll warrant her, full of game.
CASSIO
Indeed, she is a most fresh and delicate creature.
IAGO
What an eye she has! Methinks it sounds a parley to provocation.
CASSIO
An inviting eye, and yet methinks right modest.
IAGO
And when she speaks, is it not an alarum to love.
CASSIO
She is indeed perfection.

(II.iii.15-25)

But although the motive of the source may exist as a residue in Shakespeare's tragedy, colouring Iago's thoughts, it is plainly not the main motive for his actions. In the opening scene of the play Iago tells Roderigo that he hates Othello for promoting Cassio over his head, despite his long service and the intervention of ‘three great ones of the city’. He complains of the way promotion is obtained by influence, although he had been pulling strings himself. We need not suppose that Iago is necessarily telling the truth to Roderigo, and there is no reason to believe that he is telling the whole truth. He has merely to convince Roderigo that he hates Othello by giving a plausible reason. It may be argued that in the opening scene of a play it is important not to mislead the audience and that therefore we should accept what Iago says as true. But we can deduce that he is a malcontent and that he hates Othello, without necessarily supposing that we know precisely why; and when in the second scene we find that Othello is quite different from the picture we have been given and observe Iago carrying out his policy of deceit, we are bound to revise our opinions. An arch-hypocrite who, on his own confession, is animated entirely by self-interest, cannot long deceive the audience. The Moor's commendation of him in the third scene as a man of honesty and trust already appears as a stroke of irony. But it is not until the end of the act that Iago, after promising Roderigo that he shall enjoy Desdemona, is allowed to soliloquise. We must doubt everything Iago says to every other person in the play since we know that he is manipulating them all; but we ought to accept everything he says in soliloquy, since he has no reason to lie to himself. This first soliloquy, therefore, tells the audience what has been passing through his mind during the first act of the play: that he is using Roderigo as his purse; that he hates Othello; and that he covets Cassio's job. The precise words he uses are significant:

                                        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. He holds me well:
The better shall my purpose work on him.
Cassio's a proper man: let me see now;
To get his place and to plume up my will
In double knavery. How? How? Let's see.
After some time, to abuse Othello's ear
That he is too familiar with his wife;
He hath a person and a smooth dispose
To be suspected, framed to make women false.

(I.iii.380ff.)

Several things emerge from this speech. As critics have noted, Iago does not say he hates the Moor, because it is thought he has been cuckolded by him. The conjunction And, as Bernard Spivack has said, represents²⁸ ‘the seam between the drama of allegory and the drama of nature’. In other words the evil Iago hates Othello precisely because he is good; but since Shakespeare was writing for a secular audience and dramatising an almost contemporary story he provides Iago with a plausible psychological motive, not so much the fear that Emilia has been unfaithful as the fear that other people think she has. Since Coleridge's day this has generally been dismissed as motive-hunting: Iago, evil as he is, has to look for an excuse for his conduct. There have been a few critics, however, who have gone to the other extreme, and assumed that Iago was justified in his suspicions. D. J. Snider declared that ‘the family of Iago has been ruined by Othello; now Iago, in his turn, will ruin the family of the destroyer of his domestic life’;²⁹ and Tannenbaum in an article entitled ‘The wronged Iago’ made³⁰ the same point, arguing that there is nothing improbable in the supposition that Othello had seduced Emilia who is ‘depicted as a lewd and filthy-speaking harlot’. His proof of Emilia's adultery is based on total misunderstanding of a crucial passage in the ‘brothel’ scene. He thinks that ‘This is a subtle whore’ refers to Emilia and that the fact that he had ‘seen her kneel and pray’ was proof of his intimacy. In fact Othello had referred to Emilia as a bawd in the previous line, but it is Desdemona he calls whore. Why Mr Tannenbaum imagines that seeing a woman at her prayers is a proof that he has been to bed with her is not easy to understand.

It is not, then, suggested that Iago had any grounds for his suspicions; but Shakespeare makes it clear to us that these suspicions were not fabricated on the spur of the moment to excuse his villainy by making Emilia refer to them in a later scene:

                              Some such squire he was
That turned your wit the seamy side without
And made you to suspect me with the Moor.

(IV.ii.146-8)

The argument that, if Iago really suspected his wife, he would have mentioned it before, is flimsy. Since he is afraid of being an object of ridicule it was not a matter on which he could speak to anyone, much less to Roderigo. Injured merit, according to the way of the world, is a more respectable, and less ludicrous, grievance. As Snider rightly says, ‘the true motive for Iago's hate is given … nowhere in his conversation with others, since he would not be likely to announce his own shame, or herald his self-degrading suspicions’.³¹

Iago's desire to get Cassio's place, to which he also refers in this soliloquy, links up with the resentment he mentions to Roderigo. But it is not unreasonable to suggest that Cassio's promotion rankled so much because of his sexual fears of Othello and (as we hear later) of Cassio. The ‘double knavery’ of which he speaks is to revenge himself on both his enemies at once by making one jealous of the other.

In the first scene in Cyprus, Booth when he played the part of Iago winced when Cassio kisses Emilia;³² and this prepares the way for the soliloquy at the end of the scene in which Iago confesses that he fears Cassio with his nightcap too. But the same soliloquy reveals his perverted love for Desdemona and underlines his suspicion of Othello, that

                              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.

(II.i.289-96)

The image of the poisonous mineral is difficult to brush aside as motive-hunting. As Kittredge said,³³ Iago's jealousy is ‘a raging torment’; and if he cannot revenge himself by seducing Desdemona, which he must realise is impossible, he is determined to make Othello suffer from the torments of jealousy, the green-eyed monster he knows from personal experience. He does not at this stage foresee the consequences of his plot, that he will himself be exposed unless Desdemona, Cassio and Roderigo are all killed.

In the last scene of the play Othello, who cannot bring himself to address Iago directly, asks Cassio or Lodovico:

Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?

Iago replies:

Demand me nothing; what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.

He has already confessed his deeds, but he refuses to say anything about his motives. Some critics believe that the motives he has produced during the course of the play are mere rationalisations in which he doesn't himself believe and that he can hardly say that he has acted from an irrational hatred of Othello, or that, being evil, he hates good and wishes to do evil. But if, as we have suggested, the motives are real, then it is easy to see why even after his fall Iago should not wish to confess himself an object of ridicule, a cuckold.

This argument—that Iago was the jealous man of the play—depends on the assumption that his soliloquies reveal his thoughts, but that we ought not to accept as true anything he tells other people. His soliloquies are, in fact, displaced asides. Just as Hamlet's soliloquies in the first two acts tell us what has been passing through his mind during the immediately preceding scenes, so Iago's soliloquies, though longer delayed, remove the mask for a moment or two. Novelists sometimes employ a similar device. In The Portrait of a Lady we are kept in the dark about the failure of Isabel's marriage until the chapter, of which James was justifiably proud, in which we are let into the secret of what Isabel has been thinking.³⁴

Iago's refusal to speak leaves the audience feeling that there is something left unexplained and mysterious—that he represents the mystery of iniquity. So many motives have been mentioned that we don't know which is the dominant one: his hatred of Othello which precedes any real cause, the promotion of Cassio and the desire to get his place, thwarted love of Desdemona, racial prejudice, sexual jealousy of Othello and Cassio, his fear that Roderigo will stop supplying him with money. There is one other motive which has not yet been mentioned. When Iago is discussing the advantages of getting Roderigo to attack Cassio, he shows that if Roderigo survives he will demand the restitution of his gold and jewels; and

                              If Cassio do remain
He hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly.

(V.i.18-20)

This may refer to Cassio's relative handsomeness, for Iago, unlike Cinthio's villain, is not spoken of as handsome; or it may rather refer to the fact that Cassio, in spite of getting drunk and having a mistress, is morally superior to Iago. Iago wishes to plume up his will in double knavery because he is as much aware of his moral inferiority as of his cleverness.

Lily B. Campbell has rightly said³⁵ that with Iago ‘jealousy is but one phase of envy’ and the multifarious motives for his actions are all branches of the same attitude. It is natural for him to envy Othello's success with Desdemona, to resent Cassio's promotion, and to suspect all men of sleeping with his wife. Bacon's description of envy might almost be an analysis of Iago's character:³⁶

There be none of the Affections, which have been noted to fascinate, or bewitch, but Love, and Envy. They both have vehement wishes; They frame themselves readily into Imaginations, and Suggestions; … A man, that hath no vertue in himselfe, ever envieth Vertue in others. For Mens Mindes will either feed upon their owne Good, or upon others Evill; And who wanteth the one, will prey upon the other; And who so is out of Hope to attaine to anothers Vertue, will seeke to come at even hand, by Depressing anothers Fortune. … It is also the vilest Affection, and the most depraved; For which cause, it is the proper Attribute of the Devill, who is called; The Envious Man, that soweth tares amongst the wheat by night. As it always commeth to passe, that Envy worketh subtilly, and in the darke; And to the prejudice of good things, such as is the Wheat.

It may have been the association of envy with the Devil that led Shakespeare to stress Iago's diabolic nature.

The interpretation of the play which has been outlined above is supported by two other considerations. Just as in Hamlet there are, as we have seen, a number of contrasted avengers, so in Othello there are a number of different kinds of jealousy. Bianca is jealous of her supposed rival in Cassio's affections; Roderigo, the ‘gulled gentleman’, begins as an absurd but honourable lover, and under the influence of jealousy ends as a potential murderer; and, as we have seen, both the villain and the hero are jealous.

The other consideration concerns the imagery. Every critic who has analysed the imagery of the play has been struck by the way it is used to differentiate character.³⁷ Iago's trade of war is a vocation to Othello; his prosaic images of seamanship are contrasted with Othello's romantic ones; his images from money are contrasted with Othello's pearl and crysolite. But what is more significant is the way Iago's hold over Othello's mind is shown by the transfer from villain to hero both of the diabolic images and also of the repellant animal images. There could not be a more effective way of showing that Iago infects Othello with his own jealousy.

Another group of images is concerned with magic and witchcraft, many of them relating to Brabantio's charge that Desdemona had been bewitched. But the most impressive use of the theme of magic is contained in the scene in which Othello demands to see the lost handkerchief:

                              That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give:
She was a charmer and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,
'Twould make her amiable and subdue my father
Entirely to her love; but, if she lost it
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed, and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies. She, dying, gave it me,
And bid me when my fate would have me wive,
To give it her. I did so; and take heed on't:
Make it a darling, like your precious eye.
To lose or give't away were such perdition
As nothing else could match …
'Tis true: there's magic in the web of it.
A sibyl, that had numbered in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sewed the work:
The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,
And it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful
Conserved of maidens' hearts.

(III.iv.55-75)

The handkerchief, of course, symbolises love; but the magic in the web of it, in which Othello believes wholly and Desdemona partially, suggests that Othello's christianity has not entirely eradicated a residue of superstition and that it symbolises too the fate that makes and destroys his marriage. The magic in the web leads Desdemona into her fearful and foolish lie which Othello takes as a proof of her guilt.

Some critics have also found her guilty, not of adultery but of misbehaviour. Professor Bonnard argued³⁸ that the original audience would have regarded her elopement as a crime and that all their sympathies would have been with her father. John Adams thought she was ‘coarse and unnatural in her tastes, bold and undutiful in her elopement, and obviously destined to come to grief through her marriage’. Professor Allardyce Nicoll argued³⁹ that ‘she is introduced to us as practising deceit’; she lies about the handkerchief; and she ends her life on a lie, when she tells Emilia that she has killed herself:

It is a pitiful lie; but all our pity for her should not blind us to the fact that this is entirely characteristic of her—her lack of self-respect, her tendency towards concealing of truth by prevarication.

But, of course, the lie demonstrates her love and loyalty more effectively than the truth could have done. Shakespeare cannot have meant us to agree with Othello that ‘like a liar’ she had ‘gone to burning hell’ for it is a lie that shakes his belief in her guilt.

Not that she is entirely faultless. She intervenes unwisely on Cassio's behalf and her threat to importune Othello, though a natural result of her innocence and generosity, as Iago calculates, is nevertheless a tactless intrusion into affairs which do not properly concern her. Although Iago hints to Roderigo and even to Othello that her sexual tastes are perverted, he admits in soliloquy that the success of his plot depends on her innocence and goodness.

Rymer complained⁴⁰ that the play violated our sense of poetic justice, with the innocent Desdemona murdered, Brabantio dying of a broken heart, Cassio maimed, and Othello slaying himself after he has been degraded to Iago's level. Better critics than Rymer have expressed a vague disquiet. Bradley thought the play produced feelings of oppression, and Granville-Barker was equally distressed by it.⁴¹ To Rymer's indignant question, ‘If this be our end, what boots it to be virtuous?’ we can retort that no philosophy or religion is able to protect us from disaster. To those critics who imagine that Othello is brought down to Iago's level, we can point to his recovery just before the end, and (as has been said) ‘the ultimate defeat of Iago’. Those who regard a claustrophobic domestic tragedy as necessarily on a lower level than King Lear or Macbeth may be reminded that to Tolstoy ‘the tragedy of the bedroom’ is the most dreadful tragedy that can befall man; that the Turkish danger, reminding a Jacobean audience of Lepanto,⁴² would make them think of Othello as the champion of Christendom; that as Landor said,⁴³ ‘Othello was loftier than the citadel of Troy; and what a Paradise fell before him!’; and that the age-long struggle between good and evil cannot be said to lack a metaphysical dimension.

It has been argued that the play is flawed for us—as many tragedies of the Golden Age of Spanish drama are flawed—by conceptions of honour which we have outgrown. But it is possible that when Shakespeare makes Othello call himself, with bitter irony, ‘an honourable murderer’, he was criticising ‘the aberrations of an accepted code’.⁴⁴

In one respect Dr Leavis is right. Othello is betrayed by what is false within, projected into the figure of the villain. For Iago is the intellect divorced from the imagination, the acid which eats away love and trust. So we do not merely watch a perfect marriage destroyed by a demi-devil; we watch our ‘own divided heart’.

Notes

1. cf. M. C. Bradbrook's article in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1971).

2. Table Talk, 29 December 1822.

3. op. cit., p. 186.

4. C. Stanislavsky, Stanislavsky Produces ‘Othello’ (1948).

5. Cited E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare, II.233.

6. E. E. Stoll, Othello (1915).

7. ibid., pp. 21-3.

8. cf. John Holloway, The Story of the Night (1962), pp. 155ff.

9. Selected Essays (1932), p. 126.

10. The Common Pursuit (1962), p. 142.

11. The Wheel of Fire (1949).

12. The Common Pursuit, p. 145.

13. Character and Characterisation in Shakespeare (1962), p. 150.

14. Leavis, op. cit., p. 138.

15. Othello's Countrymen (1965).

16. The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, IV.iii.80-1. Cited by Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox (1927).

17. Paradise Lost, III.682-3.

18. F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit, p. 138.

19. ibid., p. 141.

20. Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952), pp. 62-80.

21. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1906), p. 41.

22. A Study of Shakespeare (1918), p. 178.

23. op. cit., p. 231.

24. Prefaces, II.104.

25. Essays of Elia (1901), p. 185.

26. Quoted in New Variorum edition.

27. Characters and Commentaries (1935), pp. 295-6.

28. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958), p. 448. cf. J. Lawlor, The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare (1960), p. 98.

29. D. J. Snider, System of Shakespeare's Dramas (1877).

30. ‘The Wronged Iago’, Shakespeare Association Bulletin (January 1937).

31. Snider, op. cit.

32. Cited in New Variorum edition.

33. Sixteen Plays of Shakespeare (1946), p. 217.

34. Chapter XLII.

35. Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (1961), pp. 148ff.

36. Essays (1897), p. 25.

37. See W. H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (1951), ch. 13.

38. G. Bonnard, English Studies (1949), pp. 175-86.

39. Studies in Shakespeare (1927).

40. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693).

41. Bradley, op. cit., p. 180; Granville-Barker, Prefaces, II.

42. See Shakespeare Survey 21, p. 47.

43. Imaginary Conversations (1891), IV.52.

44. E. M. Wilson in The Listener (1952), p. 926.