A black and white world
On reading Shakespeare’s Othello and the Iagos amongst us
I’m reading through Shakespeare’s plays in an attempt to make sense of the world. Today I’m writing about “Othello.” For a quick reference to posts on previous plays, click here. Next week, “Measure for Measure.”
If you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” you’ve witnessed a modern embodiment of Shakespeare’s Iago. Robert De Niro’s William Hale presents himself as a close ally and advocate for the Osage. He speaks their language, he smiles with avuncular goodwill, he basks in his reputation as a good and honest advocate for the Osage people. Meanwhile, the story unfolds the truth of the man responsible for the relentless murders of Osage people for his own monetary gain.
To read Othello without a context like De Niro’s performance, you might wonder how Othello, who is being preyed upon by Iago, can persist in his misunderstanding of Iago as impeccably honest. Iago unmasks himself to the audience from the first scene to display his savage dishonesty and singular self-interest. How can a person close to him be duped into thinking he’s a paragon of virtue?
It’s a timely question. Present day Iagos boast millions of followers who attest to their godliness and goodwill. If you’re not taken in, it’s hard to comprehend how others are. How can this be?
Shakespeare’s Othello helps explain.
Summary
Iago is an ensign (standard-bearer) for Othello, Venice’s premier general. Iago is bitter about Othello appointing Michael Cassio and not him to be his lieutenant (second in command). Iago meets with Roderigo, a man of some means who’s in love with Desdemona, the beautiful daughter of a rich and influential Venetian senator, Brabanzio.1
Iago and Roderigo awaken Brabanzio to alert him to the fact that his daughter has eloped to wed Othello. Brabanzio is enraged when he discovers his daughter is gone, and he hastens to tell the Duke of Venice, who’s in council after hearing news of a Turkish fleet making way for Cyprus. The Duke is in the middle of dispatching his best general, Othello, to lead an army against the Turks when Brabanzio arrives, alleging that Othello has stolen his daughter. In his defense, Othello sends for Desdemona to testify. When she pleads her primary loyalty to her new husband, as her mother pledged to her father, Brabanzio drops his case against his daughter even though he holds onto his anger.
Roderigo, angry that he sees no path to press his suit with Desdemona, asks Iago what can be done. After hearing Iago implore him repeatedly to fill his purse, Roderigo announces his intentions to liquidate his assets, hoping that Iago can provide him the means to acquire Desdemona.
Desdemona, Othello, Cassio, and Iago set off to the island of Cyprus. Once they arrive, they discover the Turks no longer pose a threat, their ships lost at sea. Roderigo arrives and complains to Iago, who promises to devise a scheme that will place Roderigo in Desdemona’s bed.
Iago watches Othello and Desdemona in a private moment, in which she has attempted to soothe Othello’s headache by pressing her handkerchief against his brow and he’s petulantly rejected it. Iago spies the discarded handkerchief on the ground as the couple leaves the stage. He now has the means for a scheme that will achieve all his goals.
He recognizes the handkerchief is a love token from Othello to Desdemona, one that Othello made his wife swear to keep with her forever. Using his own wife as an intermediary, Iago plans to get the handkerchief to Cassio and use this love token as evidence of Desdemona’s infidelity with him. This will drive an indelible wedge between the lovers—a tangible result for Roderigo, which should enable Iago to leverage more money from him—and will besmirch Othello’s lieutenant, opening a path for him to fill the role after Cassio has been disgraced.
The scheme works perhaps too well. The handkerchief becomes irrefutable evidence when announced by Iago, a man whose integrity Othello doesn’t question. Othello dismisses Cassio and promotes Iago, immediately issuing him a command to kill Cassio. Othello confronts his wife in their bed; despite her protestations, he doesn’t believe her innocence. He smothers her. As she dies, Iago’s wife rushes in with Venetian senators and Iago. She testifies to Iago’s treachery and Desdemona’s virtue. Othello wounds Iago. Cassio tells Othello how he came to obtain the handkerchief, and of Roderigo’s part in the tragedy. A nobleman strips Othello of authority and places Cassio in his place. Before being taken into custody, Othello says this before he takes his own life:
OTHELLO 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 unusèd to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable 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 circumcisèd dog And smote him thus. He stabs himself -Act 5 Scene 2
Thoughts
As the play starts, Iago wastes no time in telling us who he is. He’s speaking with Roderigo, who introduces Iago by saying of him “thou, Iago, who hast had my purse / As if the strings were thine….” Iago damns Cassio for attaining his promotion by merit, when by old rules Iago would have been owed the position by succession.
IAGO
Why, there’s no remedy ‘Tis the curse of service.
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old graduation, where each second
Stood heir to th’ first. Now, sir, be judge yourself
Whether I in any just term am affined
To love the Moor.
RODERIGO I would not follow him then.
IAGO O sir, content you.
I follow him to serve my turn upon him.
-Act 1 Scene 1
Iago ends his speech claiming that should he ever act truthfully to his nature, “But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.” The play ensures the audience knows Iago’s character and his strategy, the better for us to observe how he manipulates the other characters around him.
Iago helps Roderigo with a plan to obtain Desdemona:
RODERIGO
What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe
If he can carry’t thus?
IAGO Call up her father,
Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets; incense her kinsmen,
And, though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such chances of vexation on’t
As it may lose some colour.
-Act 1 Scene 1
The scene plays out this scheme: they wake Brabanzio, tell him that he’s been robbed, that ‘an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe’ and caution him to take action lest ‘the devil will make a grandsire of you.’ Iago continues taunting Brabanzio, in public, using bestial language for Othello and his daughter’s union, equating Othello’s blackness with the devil, shaming him to move him.
We see Iago next with Othello. He’s spinning a tale of his encounter with Brabanzio, how he would have liked to have slain him, but lacks ‘the iniquity.’ He says that Brabanzio is coming for Othello so that he can force him to divorce his daughter, and cautions Othello that Brabanzio has the means to convince the Duke to do so. Othello tells him he will stand firm to face whatever adversity he encounters.
OTHELLO
[…]
For know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona
I would not my unhousèd free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the seas’ worth.
-Act 1 Scene 2
Iago urges him to hide from the group of men that approaches; Othello retorts “Not I. I must be found. / My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly.”
When Brabanzio fronts up Othello, he charges his language with references to black magic, expanding Iago’s insinuations into his own profane tirade. This sequence demonstrates one of Iago’s primary strategies: surface hidden fears and prejudices, so that the person he’s influencing thinks he has thought of it on his own. Brabanzio doesn’t think he’s a tool of Iago because he’s convinced of the rightness of what he’s thinking independently.
This strategy works so well with Brabanzio that his reaction to public shame for his daughter marrying a Moor outweighs his love for his daughter. When he finally accepts that his daughter willingly married, he says he’s glad he has only one child, because having lost her, he might prove himself a tyrant and shackle any other children to him.
Slavery as a theme
Enslavement repeats thematically throughout the play. Muslims and Christians engaged in enslaving each other during the time Shakespeare was writing2, and Othello places Muslim-Christian warfare central to the theatrical background, with the Turks threatening to attack Cyrpus.
Between the Renaissance and the French Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Muslim men and women from the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean were forcibly transported to Western Europe. Those who were not ransomed or who did not return to their homelands as part of prisoner exchanges, languished for decades and, many, for the remainder of their lives, in chattel slavery.
-Ariel Salzmann, “Migrants in Chains”
The language Christian characters in the play use to demonize the Moor—bestiality, satanism, magic—attest primarily to the endemic Islamophobia amongst Christians. That the Turks lose by default, before engaging militarily, augurs how the tragedy will unfold.
Indeed, after Othello kills Desdemona and then himself, her kinsman are on hand to determine who will inherit. Graziano announces that Brabanzio has died of grief in losing his daughter, which leaves him, Brabanzio’s brother, as the sole inheritor to Desdemona and Othello. Othello’s estate therefore transfers to a Venetian who abhorred him, in an act of final disenfranchisement.
How to make a murderer from an honorable man
In tragedy, the hero’s character seeds the ultimately tragic ending to his story. Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear are all flawed men. The term tragic hero encompasses a tension between the polar opposites contained within the character—which is to say that ‘tragic’ is not only a modifier but also an opposing concept. The tragic hero contains both the sublime and the venal. Something terrible that befalls a perfectly honorable man holds no drama. This character would be merely a victim. Such is Desdemona, or Cordelia in King Lear, or Ophelia in Hamlet (and very much not Lady Macbeth). Their deaths evoke sentiment, but not drama. By contrast, tragic heroes like Hamlet and Lear are complex: heroic yet deeply flawed.
So we have to assume that Othello’s transformation from loving, dutiful husband to wife murderer begins with something in his character, a spark that Iago inflames. There is artifice in playing a mark, and also something in the mark himself that allows him to be manipulated.
Speaking to Iago, Othello claims who he is: a man whose worldview is of two opposing forces, only one of which is right. He’s a dualist. He sees everything simply as ‘black and white.’ And, he relies on physical evidence to convince him of truth.
Immediately prior to the speech below, Iago has declaimed the importance he places on an unstained reputation (“Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing; / ‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands. / But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him / And makes me poor indeed.”). He’s introduced the concept of jealousy (“the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.”), to which Othello responds.
OTHELLO Why, what is this?
Think’st thou I’d make a life of jealousy,
To follow still the changes of the moon
With fresh suspicions? No to be once in doubt
Is once to be resolved. Exchange me for a goat
When I shall turn the business of my soul
To such exsufflicate and blowed surmises
Matching thy inference. ‘Tis not to make me jealous
To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well.
Where virtue is, these are more virtuous,
Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw
The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt,
For she had eyes and chose me. No, Iago,
I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;
And on the proof, there is no more but this:
Away at once with love or jealousy.
-Act 3 Scene 3
That this play’s tragic hero is a man with dark skin who lives amongst light-skinned people extends the dualistic metaphor, as does his back story as a former Ottoman who defected to lead armies against the Turks. To Othello, people are good or bad. Without evidence of their enmity against him—that is, as long as they act as if they love him—he assumes they’re good. Being a general, he’s devoted a career to sizing up the world according to polar affiliations: our side that he must defend, and their side that he must battle.
Therefore, Othello easily condemns Cassio, a man with years of unquestionable service to him, after being presented with a single piece of so-called evidence. He doesn’t adjudicate Cassio’s guilt, which would require parsing ambiguity, but instead makes an instant cut, as if taking a sword to an enemy on the battlefield. Little is required of Iago to present a damning case against Cassio, because Othello doesn’t question. He sees a physical fact, and makes a decision. If something isn’t all good, it is therefore evil.
Woman as Madonna or whore
He extends this dualism to women. He married a spotless virgin; a handkerchief—one single, unquestioned piece of ‘evidence’—causes him to denounce her as a whore. Shakespeare generally challenges this Madonna/whore view of women, despite it being entrenched in the literature he relied upon for sources. His plays are filled with complex female characters. That he has his hero espouse it points to the character flaw that will undo him. If a man weds a woman for her purity, it’s impossible for her to retain what he prized in her.
OTHELLO
[…] O curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours
And not their appetites!
-Act 3 Scene 3
The play repeatedly brings up their marriage bed and the newlyweds’ use of it, until it finally becomes the stage on which their deaths will be played. Desdemona’s sustained fidelity to her marriage vows only makes inevitable her condemnation as a whore, in this false duality imposed upon her.
Desdemona, striving to be perfect in love, lacks the means to dissuade him. She loves his lieutenant, not romantically, but as Othello professes to love him. In this, she unwittingly provides further ‘proof’ to Othello of her disloyalty to him. Unlike Emilia, Iago’s wife, who challenges her husband and Othello by means of applying her principles, Desdemona hasn’t the means to defend herself, which would be to defy her husband.
The importance of embracing ambiguity
Accepting complexity and recognizing ambiguity require effort. It’s so much easier to start a world-view with “There are two kinds of people in the world…..” It’s easy to shut down dialogue with “You’re overthinking it.” Immerse yourself in studying the natural world and you’re likely to let go assumptions that previously blinded you to thinking only from the perspective of the body you inhabit and its umwelt3. But that’s uncomfortable. Admitting you don’t know, and perhaps can’t know, is humbling.
Othello makes the point that to the extent that religions and nations draw impermeable lines that divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ they pit people against each other and cause tragic harm. Further, it dramatizes that even someone who’s victimized by dualism can also perpetuate that evil. Othello faced an internal duality: lover and general. He could allow only one to win. The one he chose destroyed his love and his life.
We too have choices. Recognizing complexity isn’t the same as giving a pass to every bad actor, nor does it support a passive retreat from accountability. Othello closes with Cassio being charged to bring the full weight of justice against the evil that is Iago, because accountability is essential to civil harmony. Embracing the complexity of others does, however, require listening without prejudice, remaining open to reason and factual evidence, and allowing for the possibility of redemption.
Thanks for reading,
Other texts spell his name Brabantio.
“Migrants in Chains: On the Enslavement of Muslims in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe”, Ariel Salzmann, 4 September 2013.
I learned this term from Ed Yong’s book, “An Immense World.” It refers to how a body’s perceptual mechanisms define the animal’s perception of the natural world it inhabits.