Shakespeare’s Iago

Summary

In the introduction to his Arden Shakespeare Othello, E. A. J. Honigmann tries to make a case that it is the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies: “We may fairly call it the most exciting of the tragedies—even the most unbearably exciting—so why not the greatest?” I leave that judgment to others (I still opt for Hamlet), but Othello is certainly a great work of art. So what is it about, and what makes it so exciting?

David Bevington in his introduction to the play in The Complete Works of Shakespeare says that in this tragedy the “action concerns sexual jealousy.” As Iago tells Othello in the temptation scene, act 3, scene 3: “O beware, my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” (3.3.178–80). “Jealousy” in Shakespeare’s vocabulary means “suspicion” or “mistrust.” I recall Madeleine Doran at the University of Wisconsin arguing in a lecture that “the tragic experience in Othello is concerned with the loss of faith.” That is, Iago causes Othello to lose his faith in Desdemona, to suspect her of infidelity. From either perspective it is Iago who is at the root of the tragedy.

In the first act of the play, Othello and Desdemona mutually express their deep love for one another (see 1.3.78–96, 130–72, 182–91, 251–62). “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them,” he tells the Duke and Senators in act 1, scene 3 (169–70), and later in that same scene she tells them and her father, Brabantio: “That I did love the Moor to live with him, / My downright violence and storm of fortunes / May trumpet to the world” (251–53). As Othello himself later says in the third act in the temptation scene: “Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again” (3.3.98–100). During the final scene of the play, when Othello comes to the realization that the woman he has just murdered is gone forever, he says: “Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon, and that th’ affrighted globe / Should yawn at alteration” (5.2.102–4).