W. H. Au
Iago is a wicked man. The wicked man, the stage villain, as a subject of serious dramatic interest does not, so far as I know, appear in the drama of Western Europe before the Elizabethans. In the mystery plays, the wicked characters, like Satan or Herod, are treated comically, but the theme of the triumphant villain cannot be treated comically because the suffering he inflicts is real.
A distinction must be made between the villain—figures like Don John in
Much Ado, Richard III, Edmund in Lear,
Iachimo in Cymbeline—and the merely
criminal characters—figures like Duke Antonio in The
Tempest, Angelo in Measure for
Measure, Macbeth, or Claudius in Hamlet.
The criminal is a person who finds himself in a situation where he is
tempted to break the law and succumbs to the temptation:
he ought, of course, to have resisted the temptation, but everyone, both
on the stage and in the audience, must admit that, had they been placed in the
same situation, they too would have been tempted . . .
The villain, on the other hand, is shown from the beginning as being a
malcontent, a person with a general grudge against life and society.
In most cases, this grudge is comprehensible because the villain has, in
fact, been wronged by nature or Society: Richard
III is hunchback, Don John and Edmund are bastards. What distinguishes their actions from those of the criminal
is that, even when they have something tangible to gain, this is a secondary
satisfaction; their primary satisfaction is the infliction of suffering on
others or the exercise of power over others against their will . . .
Coleridge’s description of Iago’s actions as “motiveless malignancy”
applies in some degree to all Shakespeare’s villains.
The adjective motiveless means,
firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are not the principal motive, and
secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge upon another
for a personal motive . . .
To me, the clue to . . . all Iago’s conduct is to be found in
Emilia’s comment when she picks up the handkerchief.
Wooed me to steal it . . . what he’ll do with it
Heaven knows, not I,
I nothing know, but for his fantasy.”
As his wife, Emilia must know Iago better than anybody else does.
She does not know, any more than the others, that he is malevolent, but
she does know that her husband is addicted to practical jokes.
What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a Practical Joker of a
peculiarly appalling kind . . .
The practical joker must not only deceive but also, when he has
succeeded, unmask and reveal the truth to his victims.
The satisfaction of the practical joker is the look of astonishment on
the faces of others when they learn that, all the time they were convinced that
they were thinking and acting on their own initiative, they were actually the
puppets of another’s will. Thus,
though his jokes may be harmless in themselves and extremely funny, there is
something slightly sinister about every practical joker, for they betray him as
someone who likes to play God behind the scenes . . .
The success of a practical joker depends on his accurate estimate of the
weaknesses of others, their ignorances, their social reflexes, their
unquestioned presuppositions, their obsessive desires, and even the most
harmless practical joke is an expression of the joker’s contempt for those he
deceives.
But, in most cases, behind the joker’s contempt for others lies
something else, a feeling of self-insufficiency, of a self lacking in authentic
feelings and desires of its own . . . He manipulates others, but when he finally
reveals his identity, his victims learn nothing about his nature, only something
about their own; they know how it was possible for them to be deceived, but not
why he chose to deceive them. The
only answer that any practical joker can give to the question—“Why did you
do this?”—is Iago’s: “Demand
me nothing. What you know, you know
. . .”
The practical joker despises his victims, but at the same time he envies
them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them,
whereas he has no desire which he can call his own.
His goal, to make game of others; when he is alone, he is a nullity.
Iago’s self-description “I am not what I am” is correct and the
negation of the Divine “I am that I am.”
If the word motive is given its normal meaning of a positive purpose of
the self like sex, money, glory, etc., then the practical joker is without
motive. Yet the professional joker
is certainly driven, like a gambler, to his activity, but the drive is negative,
a fear of lacking a concrete self, of being nobody.
In any practical joker to whom playing such jokes is a passion, there is
always an element of malice, a projection of his self-hatred on to others, and
in the ultimate case of the absolute practical joker, this is projected on to
all created things . . .
To his first audience and even, maybe, to his creator, Iago appeared to
be just another Machiavellian villain who might exist in real life but with whom
one would never dream of identifying oneself.
To us, I think, he is a much more alarming figure; we cannot hiss at him
when he appears as we can hiss at the villain in a Western movie because none of
us can honestly say that he does not understand how such a wicked person can
exist. For is not Iago, the practical joker, a parabolic figure for
the autonomous pursuit of scientific knowledge through experiment which we all,
whether we are scientists or not, take for granted as natural and right? . . .
Iago’s treatment of Othello conforms to Bacon’s definition of
scientific enquiry as putting Nature to the question.
If a member of the audience were to interrupt the play and ask him:
“What are you doing?”—could not Iago answer with a boyish giggle:
“Nothing. I’m only
trying to find out what Othello is really like.”
And we must admit that his experiment is highly successful. By the end of
the play he does know the scientific truth about the object to which he has
reduced Othello. That is what makes his parting shot—“What you know, you
know”—so terrifying, for by then Othello has become a thing, incapable of
knowing anything . . .
“The final scene of Othello is patently sexual. There
is tremendous sex in the murder scene, in the bedroom, in Desdemona’s long
combed hair. There is sex in the
scene that precedes it where Emilia is getting Desdemona ready for bed, and the
two women talk of cuckoldry and sheets and nether lips and Desdemona sings her
willow song. The murder itself is
certainly a sexual act. There are
two Desdemonas in Othello’s mind, and he can only restore the first, innocent
Desdemona by killing the other one. –Mary McCarthy