IAGO

Iago is a fictional character in William

Shakespeare's Othello (c. 1601–1604).
Iago is the play's main antagonist, and
Othello's standard-bearer (also known as
an ancient or an ensign). He is
twenty-eight years old in the play. He is
the husband of Emilia, who is in turn the
attendant of Othello's wife Desdemona.
Iago hates Othello and devises a plan to
destroy him by making him believe that
his wife is having an affair with his
lieutenant, Michael Cassio. While his
ostensible reason for desiring Othello’s
demise is that he has been passed over
for promotion to lieutenant, Iago’s

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motivations are never very clearly
expressed and seem to originate in an
obsessive, almost aesthetic delight in
manipulation and destruction.

Iago is one of Shakespeare's most sinister

villains, often considered such because
of the unique trust that Othello places in
him, which he betrays while maintaining
his reputation for honesty and
dedication. Shakespeare contrasts Iago
with Othello's nobility and integrity.
With 1,097 lines, Iago has more lines in
the play than Othello himself.

Iago is a Machiavellian schemer and

manipulator, as he is often referred to
as "honest Iago", displaying his skill at
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deceiving other characters so that not
only do they not suspect him, but they
count on him as the person most likely
to be truthful.

Iago is a soldier who has fought beside

Othello for several years, and has
become his trusted advisor. At the
beginning of the play, Iago claims to
have been unfairly passed over for
promotion to the rank of Othello's
lieutenant in favour of Michael Cassio.
Iago plots to manipulate Othello into
demoting Cassio, and thereafter to bring
about the downfall of Othello himself.
He has an ally, Roderigo, who assists him
in his plans in the mistaken belief that
after Othello is gone, Iago will help
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Roderigo earn the affection of Othello's
wife, Desdemona. After Iago engineers a
drunken brawl to ensure Cassio's
demotion (in Act 2), he sets to work on
his second scheme: leading Othello to
believe that Desdemona is having an
affair with Cassio. This plan occupies the
final three acts of the play.

He manipulates his wife Emilia,

Desdemona's lady-in-waiting, into taking
from Desdemona a handkerchief that
Othello had given her; he then tells
Othello that he had seen it in Cassio's
possession. Once Othello flies into a
jealous rage, Iago tells him to hide and
look on while he (Iago) talks to Cassio.
Iago then leads Othello to believe that a
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bawdy conversation about Cassio's
mistress, Bianca, is in fact about
Desdemona. Mad with jealousy, Othello
orders Iago to kill Cassio, promising to
make him lieutenant in return. Iago then
engineers a fight between Cassio and
Roderigo in which the latter is killed (by
Iago himself, double-crossing his ally),
but the former merely wounded.

Iago's plan appears to succeed when

Othello kills Desdemona, who is innocent
of Iago's charges. Soon afterwards,
however, Emilia brings Iago's treachery
to light, and Iago kills her in a fit of rage
before being arrested. He remains
famously reticent when pressed for an
explanation of his actions before he is
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arrested: "Demand me nothing. What
you know, you know. From this time
forth I never will speak word." Following
Othello's suicide, Cassio, now in charge,
condemns Iago to be imprisoned and
tortured as punishment for his crimes.

Shakespearean critic A. C. Bradley said

that "evil has nowhere else been
portrayed with such mastery as in the
evil character of Iago", and also states
that he "stands supreme among
Shakespeare's evil characters because
the greatest intensity and subtlety of
imagination have gone into his making."
The mystery surrounding Iago's actual
motives continues to intrigue readers
and fuel scholarly debate.
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In discussing The Tragedy of Othello,
scholars have long debated Iago's
role—highlighting the complexity of his
character and manipulativeness.
According to Fred West, Iago, who sees
nothing wrong with his own behaviour, is
"an accurate portrait of a psychopath",
who is "devoid of conscience, with no
remorse".
West believes that "Shakespeare had
observed that there exist perfectly sane
people in whom fellow-feeling of any
kind is extremely weak while egoism is
virtually absolute, and thus he made
Iago".

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Weston Babcock, however, have read
and see Iago as "an human being,
shrewdly intelligent, suffering from and
striking against a constant fear of social
snobbery". According to Babcock, it is
not malice, but fear, that drives Iago.

Iago has been described as a "motiveless

malignity" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
This reading would seem to suggest that
Iago, much like Don John in Much Ado
About Nothing or Aaron in Titus
Andronicus, wreaks havoc on the other
characters' lives for no ulterior purpose.

A possible motive for Iago's actions is

envy towards Desdemona, Cassio and
Othello; Iago sees them as more noble,
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generous and, in the case of Cassio,
more handsome than he is. In particular,
he sees the death of Cassio as a
necessity, saying of him that "He hath a
daily beauty in his life that makes me
ugly".

There are a million theories to Iago's

motivations, but I believed that Iago was
once a good soldier, a great man's man
to have around, a bit of a laugh, who
feels betrayed, gets jealous of his
friend, wants to mess it up for him,
enjoys causing him pain, makes a choice
to channel all his creative energy into
the destruction of this human being, and
becomes completely addicted to the
power he wields over him. I didn't want
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to play him as initially malevolent. He's
not the Devil. He's you or me feeling
jealous and not being able to control our
feelings.

Iago reveals his true nature only in his

soliloquies, and in occasional asides.
Elsewhere, he is charismatic and
friendly, and the advice he offers to
both Cassio and Othello is superficially
sound; as Iago himself remarks: "And
what's he then, that says I play the
villain, when this advice is free I give,
and honest...?"

Iago is Othello's jealous and bitter ensign

who maliciously goads his master's
jealousy until the usually stoic Moor kills
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his beloved wife in a fit of blind rage.
There is a supposed rivalry between
Cassio and the play's villain, Iago. Iago
claims to resent Cassio because Othello
chose Cassio rather than Iago as his
lieutenant, in spite of the fact that
Cassio has no practical knowledge of
battle. Iago uses Cassio in his scheme to
destroy Othello; Iago insinuates
throughout that Cassio is having an affair
with Othello's wife, Desdemona.
Othello's jealousy is eventually stoked by
Iago into homicidal rage.

In the second act, Cassio's life is nearly

ruined by Iago's cunning and his own
foolishness. Iago tricks Cassio into
getting drunk and then incites his friend
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Roderigo to start a brawl with Cassio.
The Cypriot governor Montano tries to
end the fight by stepping between the
two men, and Cassio, now blind drunk,
strikes out at him. As a result, Cassio
loses his lieutenancy.

Later in the play, Iago persuades

Roderigo to assassinate Cassio, and
together they arrange an ambush.
Roderigo attacks Cassio by surprise.
Cassio retaliates and mortally wounds
Roderigo, but is himself stabbed from
behind by Iago. His leg is wounded, but
he survives. Iago then kills the wounded
Roderigo.

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Possibly the most heinous villain in
Shakespeare, Iago is fascinating for his
most terrible characteristic: his utter
lack of convincing motivation for his
actions. In the first scene, he claims to
be angry at Othello for having passed
him over for the position of lieutenant.
At the end of Act I, scene iii, Iago says
he thinks Othello may have slept with
his wife, Emilia: “It is thought abroad
that ’twixt my sheets / He has done my
office”. Iago mentions this suspicion
again at the end of Act II, scene i,
explaining that he lusts after Desdemona
because he wants to get even with
Othello “wife for wife”. None of these
claims seems to adequately explain
Iago’s deep hatred of Othello, and Iago’s
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lack of motivation—or his inability or
unwillingness to express his true
motivation—makes his actions all the
more terrifying. He is willing to take
revenge on anyone—Othello,
Desdemona, Cassio, Roderigo, even
Emilia—at the slightest provocation and
enjoys the pain and damage he causes.

Iago is often funny, especially in his

scenes with the foolish Roderigo, which
serve as a showcase of Iago’s
manipulative abilities. He seems almost
to wink at the audience as he revels in
his own skill. As entertained spectators,
we find ourselves on Iago’s side when he
is with Roderigo, but the interactions
between the two also reveal a streak of
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cowardice in Iago—a cowardice that
becomes manifest in the final scene,
when Iago kills his own wife.

Iago’s murder of Emilia could also stem

from the general hatred of women that
he displays. Some readers have
suggested that Iago’s true, underlying
motive for persecuting Othello is his
homosexual love for the general. He
certainly seems to take great pleasure in
preventing Othello from enjoying marital
happiness, and he expresses his love for
Othello frequently and effusively.

It is Iago’s talent for understanding and

manipulating the desires of those around
him that makes him both a powerful and
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a compelling figure. Iago is able to take
the handkerchief from Emilia and know
that he can deflect her questions; he is
able to tell Othello of the handkerchief
and know that Othello will not doubt
him; he is able to tell the audience,
“And what’s he then that says I play the
villain,” and know that it will laugh as
though he were a clown. Though the
most inveterate liar, Iago inspires all of
the play’s characters the trait that is
most lethal to Othello: trust.

The incident that sets the Othello and

Iago on a collision course occurs before
the play begins, when Othello choose
Cassio as lieutenant. In being passed
over for promotion, Iago feels cast aside
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and left to fill the role of “ancient”
(i.e., ensign), a military position that
ranks at the very bottom of all
commissioned officers. Though angry
with Othello’s choice, Iago feels equally
upset that the coveted job went to
Cassio, who Iago considers less qualified
than he is. He also later reveals that he
believes Cassio might have slept with his
wife (in addition to suspecting Othello
slept with her): “For I fear Cassio with
my night-cap too.” Iago feels doubly
degraded: a promotion he believes was
rightfully his went to another man, and
both men responsible for the slight –
Othello and Cassio – may be sleeping
with his wife. At this point, the
audience’s sympathies are aligned with
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Iago, as we haven’t yet seen Othello,
and Iago does have just cause for his
grievances.

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