SOURCE: “The Certainty of Evil: Richard III and Othello,” in Shakespeare and the Dialectic of Certainty, St. Martin's Press, 1992, pp. 93-112.

[In the following essay, Jacobus analyzes two of Shakespeare's most thoroughly evil and manipulative characters, Richard III and Iago.]

A dozen years separate the writing of Richard III (1591-92) and Othello (1602-04).¹ Shakespeare's consistency of vision over a decade establishes the essence of evil in two characters who both possess a high degree of certainty and misuse it. The manner in which Richard and Iago manipulate the surfaces of reality regarding themselves—establishing apparently trustworthy postures and personalities—is shared in both plays, but only up to a point.² Richard is soon revealed for what he is, but his knowledge of Christian psychology is such that his capacity for achieving his ends is hardly affected for the worse. His ability to see and understand the qualities of mind of those around him enables him to use them for his own purposes despite his admission of guilt. Iago never reveals himself as Richard does, but he, too, perceives with remarkable clarity the psychologies of those he most wants to hurt. At the root of both plays, and at the root of the quality of evil that the plays reveal, is the possession of the knowledge of the true nature of things by the villains and the lack of knowledge, generally, of the true nature of things on the part of the worthy characters. In no other plays of Shakespeare does the possession of certainty seem so complete and have such dire consequences.

The opening of Richard III establishes that Richard's crookedness and deformation are not only of the body but of the mind and heart. Surface and substance are joined in him. His first visible crime is the world's oldest: fratricide, although it is committed with diabolic cunning. Having spread the rumor that “G of Edward's heirs the murtherer shall be” (1.1.40), he has his brother, Clarence (whose name is George) put under suspicion, imprisoned, and ultimately murdered. The utter frankness with which he reveals himself to the audience prepares us for the frankness that he sometimes uses in regard to others in the play. Wolfgang Clemens points out, “Never again after Richard III did Shakespeare choose to open a play in so direct a manner.”³ Shakespeare also never again had a character so dominant and so evil controlling the action of a play—unless, that is, we include Iago and the opening of Othello, with its equally bald statement of causes and intentions. The difference dramatically is that Richard begins in soliloquy, while Iago needs Roderigo to hear him out. Richard needs no confederate to achieve his will. He speaks from a position of authority and knows his quarry better than they do themselves. However, if we consider the rhetorical relationship of Iago and Roderigo, it is not impossible (although perhaps uncomfortable) to think of the audience itself as Richard's rhetorical confederate. Iago, unlike Richard, relies on agents of many sorts because he must reach upward for his victims.

Richard's opening statements begin a pattern of doublespeak characteristic of his manner of dealing with his victims. He relies on the fallacy of amphiboly (using words in two ways). Amphiboly in Shakespeare can have several purposes, resulting in comic irony in some of the comedies but in tragic irony in Richard III. Of the ironies in the play, A. P. Rossiter says, “Its cumulative effect is to present the personages as existing in a state of total and terrible uncertainty.”⁴ Richard maintains a cautious balance between what he really means and what his hearer wants him to mean. Even his constant swearing by St. Paul in act 1, scenes 1 and 2, seems more to mean that he is swearing next to the physical edifice of St. Paul's rather than that he might be swearing by, at, or according to the Apostle Paul. (Stephen Greenblatt's reminder of the Pauline language in the marriage vows strikes a particularly ironic note here.⁵) The St. Paul epithet is powerful in scene 2 because it provides a resounding ironic counterpoint to Anne's constant identification of Richard with the devil, as in their first interchange:

Anne.
What black magician conjures up this fiend
To stop devoted charitable deeds?
Glou.
Villains, set down the corse, or, by Saint Paul,
I’ll make a corse of him that disobeys.

(1.2.34-37)

Anne's identification of Richard with the devil is underscored several times in the scene: “mortal eyes cannot endure the devil.— / Avaunt, thou dreadful minister of hell!” (45, 46); “Foul devil, for God's sake hence, and trouble us not” (50); “O wonderful, when devils tell the [troth]” (73). The interchange between Anne and Richard has some of the wit of The Taming of the Shrew, including an insistent and subtle wordplay, but it also has some of the logical analysis that characterizes many moments in earlier and later plays. It particularly features a progression of causal analysis favored by Ramist logic. For instance, the purpose of the interview is all Richard’s: he sees his way through Anne, as he has told us, and demands audience even though she refuses and even though she is in cortege behind a dead and murdered husband. The fact that she speaks with him, recognizing, as she does, that he is diabolical, is her undoing. Anyone in the audience of the earliest productions would have realized that there is no way to outwit the devil; the only sure course is to avoid contesting with him. The lady in Milton's A Mask maintains as much silence as she does for this very reason. Once the progress of false logic and wit-play is begun, Anne's fate is no longer in doubt. Their discourse proceeds from acts to causes in an inexorable fashion:

Anne.
He is in heaven, where thou shalt never come.
Glou.
Let him thank me that holp to send him thither;
For he was fitter for that place than earth.
Anne.
And thou unfit for any place, but hell.
Glou.Yes, one place else, if you
will hear me name it.
Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
Anne.
Some dungeon.
Glou.
Your bedchamber.
Anne.
Ill rest betide the chamber where thou liest!
Glou.
So will it, madam, till I lie with you.
Anne.
I hope so.
Glou.
I know so. But, gentle Lady Anne,
To leave this keen encounter of our wits
And fall something into a slower method:
Is not the causer of the timeless deaths
Of these Plantagenets, Henry and Edward,
As blameful as the executioner?
Anne.
Thou was the cause, and most accurs’d effect.
Glou.
Your beauty was the cause of that effect …

(106-121)

This entire conversation, which continues another hundred lines, becomes a confession. Anne had asked him whether it was not he who had murdered this Edward, her husband, and after a moment of lying indirection, Gloucester “grants” her that, indeed, it was he. Then the causal analysis that they both perform draws them to what he reveals as a secondary cause: himself as instrument and doer. He undertakes to reveal what he represents as the primary efficient cause: her beauty, which urged him on. Obviously, since we have a privileged view of the action, we realize that neither of these causes is primary; neither reveals the true motive of his action. Anne, on the other hand, trusting to her own judgment since she posseses the certainty of his having murdered her husband, assures herself that she understands her situation. She interprets Richard's approach as a confession and a petition for forgiveness.

He offers her his life in recompense for his deeds—knowing obviously that she would not and could not hurt him. In an argument whose rhetorical power resembles that of Antony's after Caesar's death,⁶ he bares his chest to her, having given her his sword:

Nay, do not pause: for I did kill King Henry—
But ’twas thy beauty that provoked me.
Nay, now dispatch: ’twas I that stabb’d young Edward—
But ’twas thy heavenly face that set me on.

(179-182)

When she drops the sword he levels a command at her that presents a logical dilemma, a choice in this case between two almost equal evils: “Take up the sword again, or take up me” (183). Apparently unable to see that the horned syllogism of his dilemma need not be accepted at all, she resolves to choose. Since she cannot choose to kill him, she chooses to take him, complaining that “I would I knew thy heart” (192), and taking confidence in seeing that he is “become soe penitent” (220), she accedes to his will, surprising even him. As she tells us later in act 4, scene 2, she let her “woman's heart” become victim to his “honey words,” and thus grew equally a victim to the curse she had placed on him earlier. His own exultation is mixed with pride, amusement, advancing self-regard:

Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit [at all]
But the plain devil and dissembling looks?
And yet to win her! All the world to nothing!

(1.2.234-37)

Queen Margaret, distraught, frantic, begins a new theme of conscience and extends the current theme of the curse in the next scene. Lily B. Campbell and others have emphasized the power of the curse in the play, just as critics have observed that the individual curses that redound on those who pronounce them are a metaphor for England itself being under a curse at the time.⁷ Such is perhaps to be expected.

The suggestion of Richard's being the devil—maintained by Margaret—gives A. P. Rossiter the theme of Richard as a scourge that brings ultimate justice in the Christian sense.⁸ He is, however, a scourge who not only brings justice to those whose own crimes make them appropriate victims, but also one who brings pain and death to innocents. What seems to make all this possible is the temporary absence of conscience in Richard. As long as he can hold his conscience at bay, he can operate with the willfulness that characterizes him as devilish. But as his crimes mount, the weight of conscience mounts, showing Richard more and more the foul inward nature he has created. When he wishes for the sun to shine so that he may see his shadow in a mirror (262-63), he hardly realizes that the sun can shine inward as well and light up that equally insubstantial quality, the conscience. The second murderer in scene 4 observes himself how dangerous a thing conscience is: “I’ll not meddle with it, it makes a man a coward. A man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear, but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbor's wife, but it detects him” (1.4.134-37).

Margaret's curse returns to haunt those who stood by and did nothing. Grey recalled it when he was being led to his death: “Now Margaret's curse is fall’n upon our heads, / When she exclaim’d on Hastings, you, and I, / For standing by when Richard stabb’d her son” (3.3.15-17). Hastings is next to die, beginning a pattern of Richard's manipulation of the truth. When Richard condemns Elizabeth and Jane Shore for practicing witchcraft upon him—holding up his withered arm as visible proof—Hastings is slow in understanding. What he does not realize is that Richard has decided what those who are faithful to him must believe. When Hastings says, “If they have done this deed” (3.4.73), Richard bridles at “if” almost the way Hamlet bridled at “seems.” There is no “if” in this case. Richard's version of the truth, accepted as it has been by more than a few of those around him, has become certainty. When Hastings hesitates in accepting it, he loses his head. Buckingham's turn comes next. He is commanded to spread the rumor that Edward's children are bastards and that Edward's own legitimacy is seriously in question. The enormity of Richard's accusation of his own mother's infidelity is hardly softened by his “Yet touch this sparingly, as ’twere far off, / Because, my lord, you know my mother lives” (3.5.93-94). Richard's overreach is revealed instantly by the fact that a mere scrivener sees through the lie: “Who is so gross / That cannot see this palpable device?” (3.6.10-11). The citizens, as Buckingham reports back to Richard, “are mum.” They cannot believe the lie and they have no hope to gain, so there is no question of their appearing to believe it. As always, Richard is most effective against characters who are themselves not wholly innocent.⁹ But Richard has deceived so many who have vested interests in his actions and hopes of gain from them that he has deceived himself into thinking his powers of deceit are universally effective.

Wolfgang Clemens cites Richard's conversation with Buckingham as signaling not only their growing dissension, but also “the first time Richard has lost control of a conversation.”¹⁰ Buckingham has lied about Richard's piety and about his reluctance to consider the crown, but his deceit ends with lies. He cannot murder children to satisfy either himself or Richard. As Clemens points out, the murder of the princes is hardly necessary to Richard, yet he seems to demand it simply to underscore the significance of his opening soliloquy's assurance that he is “determined to prove a villain.” Motives of personal gain may have prodded him at first, but there can be little question that now Richard is merely malignant. He has made himself so. There may be a sense in which one can assume that Richard has lost control of himself and his villainy here, but if so, it is only temporary.

Once he has done away with the princes and then with his wife Anne, he gives us a first sign of possible weakness and uncertainty. Richmond is in the field, and Richard must find a way to shore up his crown. He behaves like a desperate man, even in soliloquy:

I must be married to my brother's daughter,
Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass.
Murther her brothers and then marry her—
Uncertain way of gain! But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.
Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.

(4.2.60-65)

But his weakness and temporary uncertainty fall from him once he is engaged in his maneuvering toward Elizabeth. What makes Richard strikingly different from Iago is his capacity to confront Queen Elizabeth abruptly in the full face of his previous crimes and soften her. That he reviles her after she has given in to him is typical. In a sense, scene 4 is like a da capo aria, recapitulating Richard's triumph over women in general. If Anne thought that she could have a positive effect on Richard—that she could, through charity (and a good confession), bring him to penitent forgiveness—then Elizabeth is led to believe even in the face of the horrors Richard has committed that he is now repentant and can be entrusted with her daughter. Naturally, she is led by her own desires for gain: Richard says, “If I did take the kingdom from your sons, / To make amends I’ll give it to your daughter” (4.4.294-95). But this can only be part of it, and, at that, a small part. The metaphor of the bottled spider as applied to Richard implies that he devours even his own, and her understanding must extend to such an obvious fact. If Richard is not repentant, Elizabeth will not be long for the world, and she understands as much.

The important subtheme in this scene is that of self-understanding. While Elizabeth jousts with Richard, she asks him to swear by something sacred, then disqualifies all his oaths. When he swears by himself, she simply says, “Thyself is self-misus’d” (373). This line is placed later in Q1-6 ¹¹ so that the order of oaths would be: by the world; by my father's death; by myself; by God—each of which Elizabeth refutes. The Riverside edition prefers “myself” coming first, thus rendering it a less powerful rhetorical effect. The question of self-understanding is picked up again by Elizabeth when she fears herself about to relent:

Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?
K. Rich.
Ay, if the devil tempt you to do good.
Q. Eliz.
Shall I forget myself to be myself?
K. Rich.
Ay, if yourself's remembrance wrong yourself

(418-21).

The advice may not be of high quality—particularly if we examine it in light of Paradise Regained—but its quality is of less interest than Queen Elizabeth's admitting that, in respect to Richard, her own self-knowledge, her own self-awareness is wanting. He, on the other hand, has as much control of himself as he had in act 1. His certainty here of his own villainy is such that this scene acts as a coda for the rest of the play.

However, upon Queen Elizabeth's removal, Richard gives evidence of the kind of uncertainty that eventually undoes him. He has given no commands to counter Richmond and Buckingham, but demonstrates his absentmindedness when he bids Catesby to rush to the Duke of Norfolk but neglects to give him a message. He then contradicts his previous order to Ratcliffe, saying, “My mind is chang’d” (456). He suspects Stanley will flee from him and demands a hostage to keep him honest, despite Stanley's protestations that he has never been unfaithful and that “You have no cause to hold my friendship doubtful” (492). But Richard is doubtful. Buckingham's desertion has given him cause; his own behavior has given him cause, since even the people see him for what he is. After Buckingham's execution on All Soul's Day—and after Queen Margaret's curse continues in its force—Herbert and Oxford put it plainly: “[Herb.] I doubt not but his friends will turn to us. / [Blunt.] He hath no friends but what are friends for fear” (5.2.19-20). And before that, Oxford points out, “Every man's conscience is a thousand men, / To fight against this guilty homicide” (17-18).

The question of conscience afflicts Richard after the splendid dream sequence in which all his murdered victims pass blessings to Richmond and curses to Richard. His conscience is not a thousand men, but a “thousand several tongues” (5.3.193) and every one informs him of his villainy. He sees it as “coward conscience,” but the traditions of the late 16th and 17th centuries show us that what Richard experiences in this scene is conscience catching up with him. He could keep it at bay only so long. Immanuel Bourne identifies numerous kinds of consciences: “de mortua, desperata, spatiosa, superstitiosa, scrupulosa,” among others. And of conscience he says:

Conscience is said to bee knowledge with another; and well it may, because God and conscience beare witnesse together. Or, Conscience is Cordis Scientia, the science or knowledge of the heart, because the heart knoweth both it selfe and other things. When it knoweth other things, it is called science; and when it knoweth itselfe, it is called conscience.¹²

Bourne also sees conscience as a kind of looking glass in which the “soule beholds her selfe, and sees her owne beauty or deformity.”¹³ And moving even more metaphorically, he sees it as

a kinde of practicall syllogisme; The Maior is the Law seated in the vnderstanding: The Minor brought by the memory; I remember I haue done or not done according to that Law of God: the conclusion followeth by a second act of the vnderstanding; therefore I am guilty or not guilty and shewed in the heart or will, by fears or ioy, or such kind of affections.¹⁴

Bourne is only one of dozens of commentators of the period. William Perkins, in A Discourse of Conscience, agrees with Bourne's syllogistic metaphor and also sees conscience's mode of reasoning as syllogistic. Moreover, he is remarkable in saying, “To be certen what another man hath said or done; it is commonly called knowledge; but for a man to be certen what hee himselfe hath done or said, that is conscience.”¹⁵ Ephraim Huit reminds us that St. Paul calls conscience “an impartiall discerner of the truth” and considers it the “faculty to discerne of good and euil.”¹⁶

The speech that evidences the awakening of Richard's conscience strengthens the tradition in which early-17th-century commentators worked, since much of what they observe is revealed in Richard's fears and observations. It is clear that he is no longer in possession of the certainty that characterized him in the beginning of the play. Even his echo of “I am that I am,” which is reechoed in Iago's final speeches, is a shaky moment—not so much a statement as a wishful hope. As we would expect, conscience returns at the darkest hour—midnight:

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The light burns blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I [am] I.
Is there a murtherer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly. What, for myself. Great reason why—
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deed committed by myself.
I am a villain; yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, or thyself speak well; fool, do not flatter:
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale.
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;
Murther, stern murther, in the direst degree;
All several sins, all us’d in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, “Guilty! guilty!”
And if I die no soul will pity me.
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

(179-203)

Like Immanuel Bourne, Richard is moving almost syllogistically toward an inevitable conclusion: that of his own guilt.

Clemens finds this scene singular in several senses. The soliloquy, he feels “comes as a surprise” because until this moment Richard had been defined in terms of action—although, we recall, his opening soliloquy had defined him in terms of his shaping of his own character even prior to action. Until this point, Clemens asserts, Richard had assumed disguises with each of his victims; in this final soliloquy, Richard's evasion of his own guilt, of the truth of his own character, may be seen as a form of disguise, as well. But disguise does not serve him when he faces himself, nor does witty dialectic serve him. Conscience is inexorable and condemns him totally. The fact that dialectic can be sustained by one character is news, Clemens feels. He says:

The very possibility of such a split within a person is a new and important phenomenon in sixteenth-century portrayal of character. Richard's shrewd logical arguments with himself (both here and later) are a reflection of that delight and skill in argumentation so obvious from the outset, as well as a manifestation of his characteristic attitude towards himself: he has more than once talked to himself as if to someone else, cynically described and encouraged himself.¹⁷

Richard's moment of crisis is a breakdown, but it is not a psychological breakdown in modern terms. Rather, it is a breakdown of the certainty of knowledge and the power it confers. Richard opens the play “determined to prove a villain,” but he can function perfectly well only as long as he keeps his conscience in abeyance. When conscience returns—as it must—it searches out the truth, bringing a remorse that even Richard cannot completely control. Conscience is a central theme in Richard III because it is central to the question of self-knowledge. In order for evil to function as competently as it does, Richard must always know himself, but in a special way: without the intervention of conscience. He can function as he does only as long as conscience is inactive because what it reveals is so overwhelming that it produces—even in Richard—an overwhelming and debilitating guilt.

The play ends with Richard fighting as desperately as Macbeth fights.¹⁸ He can do nothing more than to continue in the path he has set for himself, but once he is revealed to himself as conscience reveals him, he loses certainty and cannot work the evil that he manages so effortlessly earlier in the play. That he still has power and resolution is clear from the force of his oration to his troops. Yet his words now are empty rhetoric: he cannot even command a horse in the field, as he says in the play's most memorable line. That he should die fighting is clearly the best that he can do. In a scene reminiscent of the ending of 2 Henry IV, he realizes he can no longer be certain even of Richmond: “I think there be six Richmonds in the field” (5.4.11). With the loss of his certainty follows the loss of his direction. Certainty has given way to the Christian's anathema: mere chance. “I have set my life upon a cast, / And I will stand the hazard of the die” (5.4.8-9).

The criticism agrees that Shakespeare produced no villain more subtle than Iago. Coleridge's famous observation that Iago seems possessed by a “motiveless malignity” gives us the sense that Iago, like Richard, purposes himself a villain. Even as Richard's position seems secure, he continues to order murder; Iago's demonic needs seem as excessive and as complete. But Shakespeare opens Othello with some interesting clues that urge us to look closely at the question of certainty. For one thing, the first words of Othello (as quoted by Iago)—“Certes, … / I have already chose my officer” (1.1.16-17)—are painfully ironic. “Certes” is a variant of “certainly,” meaning “based on certain grounds,” and we know all too well that certainty is what Othello is robbed of point by point while Iago supplies a counterfeit to put in its place. Iago succeeds because he always knows the truth and because he is the master craftsman of the counterfeit.

The officer Othello has chosen is a theoretician, an untested soldier who stands in strong contrast to Iago, whose knowledge is practical and tested. Iago tells Roderigo that he knows Cassio's soldiership is “mere prattle,” whereas, Iago is one “of whom his eyes had seen the proof” (28). Iago has no cause for doubt: “It is as sure as you are Roderigo, / Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago” (56-57).¹⁹ Such a statement needs none of the authority of logic to give it value; it establishes, as Richard did, the fact of clear self-knowledge and self-possession. And, quite opposite from Hamlet, he openly embraces “seeming so, for my peculiar end,” explaining that because of his seeming, “I am not what I am” (65). And again like Richard, the hints begin to fall that suggest Iago is—after his blasphemous parody of Jehovah—himself the devil. The allusions and suggestions, beginning with his own curse, “Plague him with flies” (71), suggesting Beelzebub, end ultimately with Othello wondering if he should not examine his feet to see if they are cloven. The irony is that the devil is such a counterfeiter that no simple ocular examination could give Othello the truth. Many such ironies permeate the play, suggesting more strongly in Othello than in other plays that ocular proof—the evidence of the senses themselves—cannot be relied upon in moral circumstances. Iago trusts the evidence of his senses only when he has controlled it.

The model for trusting the senses and for arriving at certainty in questionable affairs is provided for us in act 1, scene 3. We have seen how Iago determined his worth in relation to Cassio: by his own witness. What we do not realize as Iago first explains the difference is that in the most important sense Othello has chosen the best man. Cassio is “plain soldier” and honest. Iago at no time qualifies to be Othello's next in command, and Othello's apparently intuitive perception of their relative worth is accurate.

But scene 3 shows us how soldiers arrive at the truth. The duke and the senators are sorting through the news that has come to them: conflicting information that suggests on one hand that the Turks bear down on Cyprus and on the other that they bear down on Rhodes. With a limited force, it is essential that the duke decide which is the case. Ultimately a messenger reveals that the doubling back of part of the fleet proves clearly that the move toward Rhodes is a counterfeit and that the real attack is “certain then for Cyprus” (1.3.43). Here, the careful and thorough witness of events, correlated by several figures, yields, when balanced and considered against probabilities, the certainty necessary for reasonable action. The irony for which we are being prepared is that the same circumspection of events in matters of soldiership is practiced by Othello in matters of husbandship with none of the same results. If the wily Turks can be discovered by comparisons of perceptions, then it follows that infidelity can be also discovered.²⁰ Yet, we know that the method works only when all parties to the observations are equally honest. And to know honesty requires quite a different mode of operation.²¹

Actually, Brabantio is setting the stage for a much more subtle approach to certainty. In both scenes 2 and 3, he bewails the events that have led his daughter into the arms of the Moor. For Brabantio, the situation is baffling because his own senses told him that his daughter gave up the “wealthy curled [darlings] of our nation” to adhere to a “sooty bosom” (1.2.68-70). He accuses Othello of having bleared her senses with magic, since, for Brabantio, it is “gross in sense”—absolutely obvious from the sensory evidence—that such must be the case. Were Desdemona “not deficient, blind, or lame of sense” (1.3.63), she could not choose as she has done. Just as the duke verifies the wily motions of the Turks by comparative sensory report, Brabantio claims the inadequacy of sensory evidence—or the deranging of senses—by wiles more subtle than the Turks’.

In response to Brabantio's claim, the duke convenes a hasty hearing in which forensics are to establish with certainty whether magic has been used to win Desdemona. He assures Brabantio of justice no matter who the villain: in “the bloody book of law / You shall yourself read in the bitter letter / After your own sense” (67-69). The duke is a stern judge who listens patiently as Othello explains equally patiently how it was he came to woo and win his wife. Othello's reasonable speech, forthrightness, and basic innocence so compel the duke that he admonishes Brabantio in a way that has a bearing on Othello's own behavior later. His response to Brabantio's continued claim is a bit of ironic foreshadowing: “To vouch this is no proof, / Without more wider and more [overt] test / Than these thin habits and poor likelihoods / Of modern seeming do prefer against him” (106-109). The hearing itself, with both Othello and Desdemona in open witness, apparently convinces not only the duke, but Brabantio himself. Brabantio abandons both his theory and his daughter. The irony of the scene is that, despite its being a hearing, Desdemona cannot be excused: either she is possessed or she is guilty of deceiving her father. Her own excuse is that her allegiance is owed to her husband now, but it is clear that she has no excuse for her behavior before she had a husband. She has done what many a woman has done and takes comfort in the fact that having a husband makes her an honest woman.²² Brabantio, foreshadowing Iago, warns only that a woman who can deceive her father can deceive her husband: an observation that makes Desdemona neither less nor more human.

Once the marriage has been validated,²³ Roderigo is revealed a disappointed suitor who, like a puppy or a cat, is on the verge (or says he is) of drowning. Iago's celebrated speech—including his ten commandments to “put money in thy purse”—is carefully designed to accomplish two things. The first is the expedient of getting access to Roderigo's ready money.²⁴ The second is giving Roderigo heart to continue pursuing Desdemona so that Iago can make use of him as a tool of his own interests. As he gives Roderigo heart, Iago builds his certainty that Desdemona cannot be long satisfied and that there will be time enough for Roderigo. When Iago explains that Desdemona will soon enough tire of her Moor, his casual “put money in thy purse” becomes a measure of complete certainty, as if he were saying, “You can put money on it.”

Act 2 sustains several kinds of imagery present in Richard III and associated closely with Richard's character. One, the suggestion of an alliance with hell, has already been alluded to in Iago's closing words of act 1. Iago plays widely with the idea of the devil in act 2, particularly when considering how he will ensnare both Cassio and Desdemona: “Her eye must be fed; and what delight shall she have to look on the devil?” (2.1.225-26); and yet Cassio is “a devilish knave” (244-45). Iago's connections with the devil and devilishness link him to Richard; they have been well treated by the critics and suggest to us the absoluteness of the devil.²⁵ Up almost to the moment Othello wishes to see Iago's feet, Iago maintains a devilish power—one that virtually tempts an audience to see him as the devil rather than what he is: a creature given over to the devil.

The imagery dominating the play is, as Caroline Spurgeon and others have pointed out, animal imagery, and particularly animals of a devilish sort: flies, toads, dogs, asses, goats, monkeys. J. Dover Wilson reminds us that “more than half of these animal images belong to Iago.”²⁶ One of those images again links Iago with Richard: that of the spider. Robert Heilman makes the most of this imagery, although it has been repeatedly observed. In the case of Richard, the imagery serves to give us a measure of his brutality and evil. In the case of Iago, it serves to remind us that he is a spinner of webs in which others, through their own natural motions, become hopelessly entangled. Iago, who is no less possessed of a soldierly reputation than Richard, performs no soldiership in the play. Instead, he practises generalship, moving his troops as if by their own volition to manifest his will. His is a more passive evil role, yet it is more ghastly and more cunning for the very fact that he works at the same long distance we associate with orb weavers.

Iago, the essence of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance improviser,²⁷ takes advantage of all unexpected prizes. After deciding that Cassio must be the way to Desdemona and thus to Othello, he takes advantage of a curiously unsoldierly defect: Cassio's inability to hold his liquor. It is a simple thing to get him drunk enough to rouse the neighborhood and startle Othello. But when Desdemona makes an unexpected appearance—at what the herald has told us is the celebration of her nuptial—Othello's ire rises to the point of casting Cassio aside entirely, leaving the way clear for Iago's own accession to the spot he coveted. Cassio blames that devil, “the invisible spirit of wine” (2.3.281). As he says, “It hath pleas’d the devil drunkenness to give place to the devil wrath: one unperfectness shows me another, to make me frankly despise myself” (296-98).

Iago's last comments in act 2 are filled with references to sin, honesty, and virtue. Behind much of his reflection lie the deeper issues of counterfeit—which he has just practiced so effectively in giving solace to the soul-destroyed Cassio. Iago actually congratulates himself when he says,

How am I then a villain,
To counsel Cassio to this parallel course,
Directly to his good? Divinity of hell!
When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows,
As I do now. …

(348-35)

The direct course of Cassio's good is through Desdemona, and out of that motion, Iago expects to “make the net / That shall enmesh them all” (361-62). Even here, Iago counterfeits more than an angelic disposition. With Cassio's preferment out of the way, he has decided to assume an injury that he has already admitted is unlikely: “I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leap’d into my seat … And nothing can or shall content my soul / Till I am even’d with him, wife for wife” (2.1.295-99). Iago serves himself up a “diet of revenge,” and any excuse is as good as another—including an excuse that has no substance whatsoever to it.

The process of Iago's undermining Othello's peace in act 3 has been amply discussed by A. C. Bradley (especially in lecture VI) and others. The pestilence Iago pours in Othello's ear is all the more awful for the fact that Iago peppers his talk with aphorisms that have lived on independently of the play itself. Madeleine Doran says that “Iago often assumes the style of the homely moralist.”²⁸ When Iago declares, “Men should be what they seem” (3.3.126), or when he tells Othello that “Good name in man and women, dear my lord, / Is the immediate jewel of their souls” (155-56), we are reminded that the devil quotes Scripture. When he warns Othello: “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!” (165), we begin to understand that Iago's genius lies in the fact that he can manipulate the truth as well as others manipulate false fronts. Richard himself discovered that the truth was his friend, although his ability to manipulate it was primitive in comparison with Iago’s. The truisms Iago dispenses represent a kind of certainty that is not in dispute. In good rhetorical form, he moves from such certainty to more questionable issues, hoping those issues will draw strength from that which is obviously certain.

As Othello is moved toward doubting his wife's fidelity, he proves a soldier in the manner of the Duke and his messengers. He does not content himself with words; his eyes must be served. He speaks like a careful Ramist logician when he says, “I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; / And on the proof, there is not more but this— / Away at once with love or jealousy!” (190-93).²⁹ Upon which, Iago sensibly cautions Othello to “wear his eyes” without prejudice: a counterfeit that supports Othello's prejudgment. As Madeleine Doran says, “The first stage is to awaken an uncertainty Othello cannot stand,” and Iago is very quick to awaken it.³⁰

The handkerchief that Othello inadvertently—through his essentially unreasonable demands of his wife—causes Desdemona to drop is one element in the intrigue that is not counterfeit, although Emilia, once she gets possession of it, tells us that it, too, could be counterfeited. But Iago gets it from her before she can “have the work ta’en out.” He sees immediately its usefulness, given the state Othello is already in. Knowing that what he has is genuine, that it can be made to seem a grave thing, he can suffer Othello's rage when the Moor demands: “Give me the ocular proof, / Or by the worth of mine eternal soul, / Thou hadst been better have been born a dog / Then answer my wak’d wrath!” (360-63).

Ironically, Othello protests too loudly. He demands ocular proof, but Iago has poisoned him so that he has already accepted the substance of his suspicions regarding Desdemona. Greenblatt questions this point carefully: “We still must ask how Iago manages to persuade Othello that Desdemona has committed adultery, for all of the cheap tricks Iago plays seem somehow inadequate to produce the unshakable conviction of his wife's defilement that seizes Othello's soul and drives him mad.”³¹ Greenblatt answers his question through an analysis of patristic attitudes toward sex in marriage. However, what we witness in this scene is the overwhelming growth of uncertainty: the more Othello says he wants proof, the more we know he speaks in a despairing fashion. When Othello again points toward his uncertainty: “I think my wife be honest, and think she is not” (384), Iago protests with a not unreasonable solution: “Would you, the [supervisor], grossly gape on? / Behold her topp’d?” (395-96). Othello never says no, but the very thought stings him so deeply that any reply is out of the question, and Iago knows it. The imagery conjured by the suggestion works almost as powerfully as the witness of the act itself—perhaps even more powerfully.

Iago continues by relating the supposed dream of Cassio, which he promotes as a serious source of doubt while at the same time disclaiming it as a mere dream. “’Tis a shrewd doubt, though it be but a dream, / And this may help to thicken other proofs / That do demonstrate thinly” (429-31). Iago's casual finesse of “thicken other proofs” has no logical authority and at best is a rhetorical flourish. At this point, however, even a rhetorical flourish can push Othello further. This entire passage is developmental, proceeding from weaker arguments to stronger, resting finally on what seems palpable, demanding, and of great substance: the visible, identifiable handkerchief, which in and of itself, had seemed weak enough. But what is alarming to us, and disturbing to the elegance of Iago's plan, is that Othello is virtually convinced before he ever sees the handkerchief. The poison Iago has poured into his ears has removed the need for ocular proof. Othello's emotions have conquered him already, just as Anne's emotions conquer her in the face of Richard's evil. Iago's counterfeiting is so remarkable that he hardly needs the final touch. Othello has been like a soil in which the seed, once planted, grew untended. Yet Iago is a careful tender and must proceed.

He brings Othello to the point of observation in act 4. On the way, Othello himself has questioned the whereabouts of the handkerchief with Desdemona, who fails to admit its loss. Giorgio Melchiori comments, “Her moment of weakness comes when she pretends not to have lost her handkerchief, but even that is justified by the scepticism of a person with a different cultural background toward the magic lore attributed by Othello to the handkerchief—a scepticism that prompts a fearful evasion of his irrational request.”³²

Othello exercises himself to such an extent that he falls into a trance thinking about the possibility of another man lying with Desdemona. Robert Heilman sees this as a symbolic failure of sight or perception. “His physical ‘blacking out’ is symbolically a darkening of vision; indeed, the ‘shadowing passion’ carries many steps further a process that began when Othello, disturbed by the Cassio-Montano brawl, acknowledged that ‘passion’ had ‘collied’—made black like coal—his ‘judgment.’”³³ It would seem that his trance (“his second fit”) is a punctuation mark telling us that an action is complete. That which follows, significant though it may be, is in many ways redundant.

The “scene” Iago sets up for Othello is a counterfeit of a sort, reminiscent of the play Hamlet stages to test Claudius. Iago wishes merely to let Othello think Cassio's coarse language regarding Bianca is spoken of Desdemona. That would be enough corroboration—of the sort that identified the Turks’ destination—to convince Othello, listening at a distance. Opportunity—Iago's friend—brings not only Bianca, but the handkerchief as well. The ocular proof Othello has ceased asking for has arrived. Othello had not been prepared for this, but when Bianca refuses the handkerchief and gives it back to Cassio, Othello says suddenly, “By heaven, that should be my handkerchief!” (4.1.156). But the irony is that Othello, as the scene's only witness and auditor, is almost out of earshot and at such a distance that he cannot be certain of what he sees. When Iago says, “And did you see the handkerchief?” he replies astonishingly, “Was that mine?” indicating only that he was not really certain until Iago corroborated the fact for him.³⁴ Upon this, Iago can speak freely and go so far as to advise a means of death for Desdemona.

It is ironic enough that Othello, having pronounced his decision to stand on ocular proof, should really have no need of it by the time chance puts the opportunity before Iago. But even more remarkably ironic is the fact that once it is delivered, Othello is too distant for it to possess the power of certainty that it could provide. And that brings us to the final overpowering irony. Even though Othello cannot see or hear clearly, and although the handkerchief's presence is taken on a perverse faith in Iago's witness, a closer examination would have proven that the handkerchief was, indeed, his own, and that indeed Cassio had given it to Bianca (even if only to have it copied). That much is real; that much represents ocular proof and absolute certainty. But it also leads us to a further question: Of what does it makes Othello certain? The model for such certainty—establishing the destination of the Turkish fleet—is itself in question when we realize how questionable the “proof” is in this scene. Just as the Turks are capable of deceit, so are the Venetians. In the first case, only the Turks know certainly which way their fleet tends, and in the second case, the Venetian, Iago, is the only one (besides Emilia, who will testify later) who knows how the handkerchief left Desdemona's side and what it means. One can only ask whether or not the Venetians’ technique of corroboration is really different from or superior to Othello’s. The point is treated in Heilman's discussion of the question of appearance and reality.³⁵ It is also treated by Winifred Nowottny, whom Heilman cites, when she asserts that Othello's search for evidence of fidelity is basically futile since infidelity does not necessarily leave ocular proof or tangible evidence that Othello could behold.³⁶ However, the question of whether any manifest difference exists between the method employed by the Venetians regarding the Turks and the method that Othello says (and thinks) he is using is not clear. An important point raised by several commentators is that matters of love are beyond reason and rationalizing and that therefore Othello is doomed from the start in his inquiry: passion dominates an inquiry into passionate matters. The question of whether the heart sees deeper than the eye, the subject of my third chapter, is pertinent here. Yet the circumstances are so different even from those in Troilus and Cressida that only some of that theme is relevant to Othello. As Nowottny points out, Desdemona is the one with penetrating insight. Her love depends upon a deeper witness than Othello’s, since she is able to know the nature of his heart even until the last. In choosing him as husband, she sees beneath his visage to the quality that resides in his bosom, and as she forgives him his murder, blaming herself in a kind of lie that draws Othello's rebuke, she still maintains that his behavior is not evidence of his true nature.

Troilus demands ocular proof of his beloved's betrayal, and he gets it. Othello demands similar proof, but only thinks he gets it. Nowottny's concern for love and justice helps us understand the complication implied by the nature of Othello's limited inquiry. Whereas the Venetians received numerous reports of the movement of the Turkish fleet, Othello depends on a more strictly limited number of sources—with Iago's witness his principal secondary source. He is content with this limitation because he believes his own observations are completely reliable and represent another source of certainty. He does not carefully listen to the accused—to permit, in other words, a defense. In terms of rhetoric, this is an elementary error; even Brabantio had done so. Contrary elenchi, reasons against one's position, could constitute an entire inquiry of the sort that Othello does not conduct. But then Othello is no lawyer, and neither is he a logician. He is a man of passion being manipulated by one who is greater at these skills than he. We are struck by the terrifying fact that the certainty Othello originally possessed, that which gave him the peace and contentment he later lost, was based on an uninquiring faith and trust paralleling that of the audience. He never inquired into the sources of his certainty but simply acted as if his knowledge of things were as intuitive as Desdemona’s. When it comes time to demand certainty in order to decide a course of moral action, he thinks he knows how to do so, but he does not. He knows ocular proof is necessary, but he does not realize what ocular proof is, nor how insufficient some forms of it may be. He does what most men would do in demanding proof; but because he is unpracticed, he understands neither the nature of proof nor how to obtain it.

As so many critics have pointed out, there is a terrible moment of irony when Othello, before killing Desdemona, and afterward, while interrogating Emilia, insists that he saw the handkerchief. He convinces himself that Cassio had confessed. The handkerchief has a fixed meaning for him, albeit one carefully fixed by Iago. In Othello, seeing is not enough. Interpreting what is seen, as in the manner of the duke regarding the Turks, is essential, although it, too, may not be enough. Intuitive knowledge of the sort Desdemona uses is also not enough. Just as Othello intuited the worth of Cassio, he did not intuit the evil of Iago. As Winifred Nowottny points out, two kinds of belief exist in Othello: belief in evidence and belief in people.³⁷ Neither is adequate for the circumstances in the play. A play like Othello, in which no kind of evidence or belief is adequate for a character contemplating a mortal action, suggests that a strong argument for scepticism could be made. Had Othello been a Pyrrhonian rather than an Epicurean, he would have avoided Iago's traps.³⁸ His confidence in thinking he can possess certainty is Othello's undoing. Had he sought the sceptic's ataraxia, what Sextus Empiricus and others identify as the state of undisturbance resulting from the thought that nothing can be known with certainty, he could not have been used by Iago.³⁹ Othello seems to be acting like a zetetic, constantly demanding proof and appearing to hold judgment, but, in fact, he behaves like a dogmatist, one who thoroughly trusts Epicurus's canons of the senses. In this regard, the play foreshadows the controversy of the sceptics and the dogmatists in the 1650s, about which Joseph Glanvill wrote impassionedly in the early 1660s and 1670s, lecturing us carefully on the deceit of our senses and the nature of passion in his The Vanity of Dogmatizing.⁴⁰

Yet the fact seems to be that just as Iago and Richard are very much alike in their ability to manipulate the people around them, Othello and Hamlet are very much alike in their desire to root out the truth of their circumstances. Both have a kind of revenge in mind; both risk their souls; and both contemplate the death of those who wronged them. They offer interesting contrasts and comparisons for the question of scepticism. To suggest that the plays differ mainly because of the personality of the respective hero is to miss an important point. Each hero had a best friend, so to speak. Had Hamlet's friend been Iago, and had Othello's been Horatio, the plays would have been unspeakably different in outcome. As it is, Iago and Richard are the controlling forces in their plays, manipulating people who depend upon all too common sense when it comes to questioning human knowledge.

The irony, a tragic irony, is that the villains possess the certainty that their victims seek. And while their victims are not what we can call innocents, nor so naive as to be completely gullible, they never suspect the enormity of the villainy being prepared for them. Richard and Iago are both dogmatists. And until they are found out for what they are—as happens in very different ways—their power is virtually complete. Evil in possession of certainty is terrifying and overwhelming.

Notes

1. Anthony Hammond (King Richard III [London: Methuen, 1981]), editor of the Arden edition, discusses the dating problems (54-61) and concludes that 1591 is the most likely date of composition of Richard III. Norman Sanders (Othello, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984]) says, “We may conclude, then, that Othello must have been written after 1601 and before autumn 1604, with late 1603 to early 1604 being the most likely time of its completion” (2). The Riverside edition proposes 1592-3 for Richard III and 1604 for Othello.

2. The question of power and self-fashioning in Stephen Greenblatt's terms are involved here. See “The Improvisation of Power,” in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

3. Wolfgang Clemens, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III, tr. Jean Bonheim (London: Methuen, 1968 [in German, 1957]), 8.

4. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (New York: Theatre Arts, 1961), 8. Before this, Rossiter says: “The same irony plays all over Richard III. It lurks like a shadow behind the naively self-confident Hastings; it hovers a moment over Buckingham when Margaret warns him against ‘yonder dog’ (Richard), and, on Richard's asking what she said, he replies, ‘Nothing that I respect my gracious lord.…’” Wolfgang Clemens also discusses irony, with special emphasis on the ironies developing in the opening scenes of the play.

5. See Greenblatt's discussion in “The Improvisation of Power,” 241.

6. Rossiter calls the play a “rhetorical symphony”; Angel with Horns, 7.

7. See Lily B. Campbell's Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, California: Huntington Library Press, 1947). Hammond tacitly disapproves of Campbell's emphasis on Shakespeare as “political scientist”; King Richard III, 119.

8. See Rossiter, Angel With Horns, 20-21.

9. “It has often been remarked that all the characters in the play (except for the Princes and Richmond) are at least partly guilty. This is so: we saw that Anne succumbs to Richard's wooing partly because he is attractive, but she would not have fallen so readily into such a terrible mistake if she too had not been corrupt. The scene opens with her dreadful curses: Richard is right when he twits her that she knows no charity. Yet Anne, like Elizabeth, is characterized in a more realistic manner than Margaret or the Duchess. She and Edward's Queen, for all their rhetoric, are believable as women. The others are mere monotones of complaint. … it is worth remembering that the motives for their behaviour, when examined, are no more rational than Richard’s” (Hammond, King Richard III, 110).

10. Clemens, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III, 166.

11. The first 6 quartos, beginning in 1597 and ending in 1622, differ from the first folio of 1623. See the Riverside edition's “Note on the Text,” 754.

12. Immanuel Bourne, The Anatomie of Conscience (London, 1623), 8.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 9.

15. William Perkins, Works, 3 vols. (London, 1612), vol. 1, 517.

16. Ephraim Huit, The Anatomy of Conscience (London, 1626), 80-81. The connection with St. Paul gives further richness to Richard's swearing by St. Paul's in his dialogue with Anne.

17. Clemens, A Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III, 218. Clemens mentions despair in connection with Richard's condition, arguing that his attempts to justify himself have failed.

18. Guy Hamel sees the “conclusion of Richard III [a]s emphatically comic” (“Time in Richard III,” Shakespeare Survey 40 [1988], 48). Although I find his confidence difficult to share, he does point out, “In Richard's soliloquy when he wakes on the eve of Bosworth, he assumes a tragic dimension from which Shakespeare has until then excluded him. The facile declaration he makes at the beginning of the play that he is ‘determined to prove a villain’ (1.1.30) becomes the fearful realization that ‘I am a villain’ (5.3.191)” (48).

19. Martin Elliot reminds us in Shakespeare's Invention of Othello (London: Macmillan, 1988) that this expression is much more lexically complex than it at first seems. It may not guarantee the certainty that Iago wishes.

20. Jane Adamson says, “Of course it is because the Venetians are themselves so adept at such calculations that they are not taken in by the Turks’ deceptive tactics. They see at once that the Rhodes expedition is a mere front, ‘a pageant / To keep us in false gaze’” (Othello as Tragedy: Some Problems of Judgment and Feeling [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 84).

21. The ramifications of honesty have been established by William Empson in “Honest in Othello,” in The Structure of Complex Words (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, n.d.), 218-249.

22. Greenblatt talks about Desdemona's “traditional right to transfer her duty” (“The Improvisation of Power,” 239) from her father to her husband. But despite the fact that the essence of improvisation is “displacement and absorption” as well as “concealment,” he does not mention that in this scene Desdemona is as much an improviser as Iago is later. The discreet question of paternal permission is displaced entirely by the fait accompli of marriage and absorbed by the fact that her duty now lies with her lawful husband.

23. The question of whether the marriage is valid is studied by Martin Elliot, who discusses marriage customs in England (Shakespeare's Invention of Othello, 57-8). “Marriages without parental consent, and secret marriages, were matters of public debate in England c. 1604. Indeed, a canon law of that year condemned both practices” (58). Elliot also discusses Moorish marriage customs (250, n. 17) and links the handkerchief with the marital sheets and the staining of virginal blood, which the Moors displayed after the wedding.

24. Iago advises Roderigo ten times in this scene to “put money in thy purse.” Robert B. Heilman, in Magic in the Web (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956), discusses this in considering Iago's economics: “He directly tells Roderigo to produce the cash” (75). See also 42ff. of G. R. Elliott's The Flaming Minister: A Study of Othello as a Tragedy of Love and Hate (New York: AMS Press, 1965; orig. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1953).

25. For a curious twist on this idea, see G. R. Elliott, The Flaming Minister, xxxi, who says about Othello, “The more he dissembles the more he is sure that she is doing likewise: his refusal to tell the truth prevents him from learning the truth. His diabolic pride far surpasses Iago’s: the hero of the play becomes the chief officer and exponent of ‘hell’ (3.3.447, 4.2.64, 92).”

26. J. Dover Wilson, introduction to Othello, ed. Alice Walker and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), xlvi.

27. “I have called improvisation a central Renaissance mode of behavior …”; Greenblatt, “The Improvisation of Power,” 229.

28. Madeleine Doran, “Iago's If—Conditional and Subjunctive in Othello,” in Shakespeare's Dramatic Language (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1976), 67. Doran's point in her essay is relevant to my discussion, although since I do not treat the “if” clauses as she does, I do not call attention to her observations. However, she does discuss Othello's use of the false enthymeme (83), false logic (70), and logic generally (68).

29. James Calderwood reminds us that there has been perhaps too much “privileging of the eye in Western epistemology. … because it is keyed to surfaces, sight is Othello's enemy in Venice, where the color virtue is not black but white” (The Properties of Othello [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989], 46).

30. Doran, Shakespeare's Dramatic Language, 80.

31. Greenblatt, “The Improvisation of Power,” 247.

32. Giorgio Melchiori, “The Rhetoric of Character Construction: ‘Othello’,” Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981), 67. Melchiori also comments that “Desdemona's is the rhetoric of the natural aristocrat.”

33. Heilman, Magic in the Web, 86.

34. Sanders says, “Even his props are not what they seem to be: the handkerchief, so emotionally loaded by Othello, is simultaneously the precious gift to Desdemona and yet a trifle light as air (3.3.323), which Cassio's possession transforms into what it is not. … that which Othello does not even see clearly in Cassio's hand—‘Was that mine?’ (4.1.166)—becomes the ocular proof of adultery”; Othello, 33.

35. Heilman, “Seeming and Seeing: Ocular Proof,” in Magic in the Web, 50-64.

36. Winifred Nowottny, “Justice and Love in Othello,” University of Toronto Quarterly 21 (1952): 332, 35.

37. Ibid., 330.

38. Interestingly, Greenblatt refers to “Iago, the Renaissance skeptic”; “The Improvisation of Power,” 246.

39. See Thomas Stanley's translation of Sextus in The History of Philosophy (London, 1660), 10, in the chapter on Sextus. Diogenes identified ataraxia in his entry on Pyrrho, and Raleigh's translation also identifies it. See my chapter 1 for further discussion.

40. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), ch. 8.