Iago as Villain, as Id, as Nihilism
The fun of reading a Shakespeare play again over 30 years after taking a Shakespeare class.
I read Othello, the Moor of Venice recently—and for the first time since I took an undergraduate course in Shakespeare, now nearly 35 years ago. In other words, I last read Othello in what is essentially another life, when I, too, was a different person, surely someone I would barely recognize as myself, and whom I barely remember today.
And while I experienced again the terrible tragedy that befalls Desdemona, who charms and remains beyond reproach, as well as Othello’s more horrible fate, who must bear, if only for a short time, what he has done to the person he loves; nevertheless, it is to Iago I respond most viscerally. Indeed, I feel repulsed by what seems to be Iago’s psychopathy. In Iago, Shakespeare anticipates the modern manifestation of something like evil in the individual who will pursue his own ends and his own ambitions with no care at all, and no concern whatsoever, to the catastrophic harm he will cause to achieve them.
The play opens with Iago engaging with Roderigo, whom Shakespeare designates in the list of players as “a Venetian gentleman.” Roderigo feels vulnerable, it seems, since not only does he supply Iago with a steady stream of income, and worries that he is being taken advantage of, but now he hopes to enlist him in his wishes to win Desdemona, Othello’s wife. Roderigo turns to Iago both because Iago, surely, must owe him this help and because of Iago’s access to Othello. He anticipates that Iago will be able to champion his cause with Desdemona, which hope Iago enlarges by insisting that he does in fact despise his master, Othello, and would happily ruin him. And yet how do you ever trust someone you hire to perform criminal deeds on your behalf?
Iago occupies the rank of “ancient” in the hierarchy of Othello’s men-at-arms. It feels as though he is a confidante and counselor to Othello in an official capacity, as though “ancient” ought to be synonymous with something like sagacious and wise, and yet “ancient” is a corruption of the term for the military rank of ensign (according to the OED), one beneath the rank of lieutenant, which Cassio occupies. In fact, in Iago’s first extended lines, he bemoans having been passed over for promotion in favor of Cassio. He laments as well the injustice of such a passing over, for he feels he is the better candidate based on his experience, presumably (if his words are to be trusted), in combat, while Cassio he claims is merely a bookish theoretician—again, “honest Iago” is anything but trustworthy.
Iago’s discontent feels ageless, and timeless his bitter explanation for being passed over. He says, “Preferment goes by letter and affection, and not by old gradation, where each second stood heir to th’ first.” In these newfangled times, it’s not what you know, but who you know; it’s not merit, but connections that move you ahead. Or else it’s a matter of being properly credentialed. And yet Iago’s proverbial bitterness feels powerfully overawed by what he will undertake and the damage he will do in pursuing whatever he imagines to be his own advancement. In whatever else he does, whether to aid Roderigo or to spite the Moor, as Iago himself puts it, “I follow but myself,” the hobbyhorse of the modern, nihilistic egoist and narcissist.
From this early point onward in the play, Iago persists doggedly in his goal to undermine Othello. He sets his sights on sowing discord between Othello and his winsome wife, Desdemona, who, as Shakespeare portrays them, have a loving and even doting, in many respects an enviable, marriage. He will do this gradually by poisoning Othello’s trust in his wife, and by provoking him eventually into a frightful and violent jealousy. And he will make use of everyone he can along the way to achieve his aim, discharging them like spent cartridges.
In the end, he will bear responsibility for the deaths of Desdemona, Othello, Roderigo, and even his own wife, Emilia, whom he stabs for cleaving to the truth rather than supporting him in his deceits. Iago himself is taken alive after Othello wounds him, and he will be tortured, his captors proclaim, before he keeps his appointment with the gallows.
His presumed partner, Roderigo, he uses as an excuse, a justification for his nefarious actions, and, importantly, as a means of income. In their last exchange still in Act I, as Iago convinces Roderigo that he can accomplish for Roderigo what he desires, Iago tells him eleven different times in short order, using several different phrases, to gather together his assets to pay Iago for his work. In the end, convinced of Iago’s allegiance and ability, Roderigo exclaims, “I am changed: I’ll go sell all my land,” to which Iago responds, once his dupe leaves the stage, “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse.” For the right price, Iago will obligingly do the nastiest things one human can do to another.
In many ways, we might expect such a spectacle of vice and grievous wrongs from one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. For me, in any case, Othello feels different, and modern in a sense, for his foulest of all villains, Iago. We are accustomed, after all, in Shakespeare’s tragedies to wrongful usurpations being overthrown by those properly entitled; to surreptitious murders being discovered and brought to bloody justice; to blind injustice being thwarted in the end through a providential insistence upon real and lasting justice. And yet, against the tectonic slipping and sliding of these human machinations, Iago starts his demonic enterprise with a perceived slight, with racist overtones, and with a trivializing hope simply for sport, and with little to gain, truly, beyond his few pieces of silver.
Moreover, we expect from most of Shakespeare’s plays a conformity to the contemporaneous notion that nature prevails in human society. In can be unsettling for modern readers to confront in Shakespeare the views of his age: that lowborn people typically behave in lowdown ways, while noble folks can hardly conceal their nobility, even in disguise, for nobility shines like pearls among pigs when destiny consigns them to difficulty for a spell as a result of life’s vagaries and tempestuous vicissitudes. After all, Elizabethans held that nature dictated human behavior to a great extent, and few were expected to move either above or below the station where Providence placed them in life.
In fact, Elizabethan society had many impediments to keep people from moving between the classes, which almost everyone understood to be established by God’s design. It was the rare man, indeed, who exceeded his station in life through his own merit. Any nobleman would welcome into his service a capable man, and at the same time ensure that he rise only so far. After all, the Order of Being was sacrosanct. Shakespeare himself, for all his prodigious ability, received acclaim for his work, was acknowledged to be a genius, and yet could never rise above the middle class. He is an anomaly, a historical colossus in the breadth and brilliance of his skill, but mere genius does not elevate a man into the realm of those born to nobility.
Shakespeare anticipates the modern nihilistic, psychopathic villain—predatory coldness and calculation combined with baffling motivations—in the same way that pre-modern notions still cling stubbornly in places in our contemporary world. I’m reminded of the educator Paulo Freire’s work in Brazil around the idea of conscientization. As he writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the poor folks he worked among in rural Brazil expressed the understanding that they were poor as a result of God’s having willed such fates for them. Their understanding was medieval: there were the well-to-do and then the poor, like themselves, for such was the order of being. Their fate was to endure their plight with humility and faith, for surely God maintained a welcome respite from their suffering in the afterlife.
Freire describes the process of conscientization as leading these people to see that nothing about their condition is God-given, nor part of a divinely ordained order, but results rather from an analytical structure imposed upon them and meant to keep the wealthy and landed in their place at the expense of these same poor. Far from enjoying blessings benignly as God’s favored, the wealthy oppress the poor and exploit them in order to enjoy the riches they procure for themselves through every means necessary. (In a sense, they constitute an entire class of Iagos.) Seeing this situation for what it is, and understanding the actual mechanisms at play (such as greed and lack of concern for others), defines the effect of becoming critically conscious of your condition in life.
Iago feels thoroughly modern in this sense. He sees how the grand game is played and insists upon being a player. If virtue and the structure of moral constraint have helped to consolidate power amongst the powerful, then he has no use, no need of virtue and morality. He will be above and beyond such things. His understanding of power and attainment and the will to venture after them feels Nietzschean.
When Roderigo admits a fault in his fondness for Desdemona, Iago responds sharply, revealing his calculating, analytical worldview: “Virtue! a fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are gardens; to the which our wills are gardeners: so that we will plant nettles or sow lettuce; set hyssop, and weed-up thyme; supply it with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many; either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry; why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.” In other words, if virtue does anything at all, it only limits us in our ability to reach for what we want. Set virtue aside, argues Iago, and all the world awaits your taking.
Moreover, asserts Iago, it is reason, dispassionate and pragmatic, whose task it is to guide the will. Passion, after all, and lust—“unbitted lusts,” says Iago—rage and range like stallions unbridled and unmanned. Passion “is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will,” he informs Roderigo—in other words, weakness. “Come, be a man,” he continues, “drown thyself! drown cats and blind puppies.” For Iago, lust’s remedy is simple: put yourself out of your misery for your childish foibles. Or satisfy your lust, and harness your will and reason to devise a plan to obtain the object of your lust. The only point in human life, according to the wisdom of Iago, is to attain what you desire.
And finally, Iago feels modern in his sense of entitlement. In his own mind, he is supremely qualified to be Othello’s second as his lieutenant. Battle-tested, with tactical experience and proven abilities, nevertheless, he is passed over for promotion in favor of Michael Cassio, and must remain Othello’s ancient, or ensign. His response then, to what is a common enough occurrence in our workaday world, and which will fill the sorrowful ship Tragedy’s sails with wrathful winds, will be to go postal, that most modern reaction to being slighted at work, to being butt hurt on the job for not getting what you must assuredly deserve. To my mind, Iago is Shakespeare’s most modern villain, and the most chilling for his nihilistic and grudging pursuit of anything and everything he wants at any cost.
Or, to another degree, Iago feels thoroughly modern for so thoroughly occupying the modern role of the unencumbered id. From this perspective, Iago functions entirely to satisfy his own desires. Whether it is for sport or for gain, to spite a slight or avenge being passed over in preferment of someone else, Iago regards everyone else in his world as nothing more than utilitarian tools to employ in gaining what he desires. His self-service is total, and whatever ruin he precipitates matters to him not at all. He couldn’t care less about the harm he inflicts upon the world, so long as he achieves his desired aims. And all his motivations, tragically, seem to come out of little more than a sense of hurt. In the end, Iago proves to be the weakest sort of person, bent on destruction for its own pleasure, because he understand himself in the end to be so utterly small and insignificant.
Shakespeare’s characters refer to him regularly as “honest Iago,” revealing how easily the intentions and malignancy of the human heart can lie concealed beneath outward appearances. Our words mean nothing in this sense, for they can be brought to bear to fashion worlds of deceit and dissimulation, of smoke and mirrors. Human actions reveal fraudulence and culpability, and yet such observations require careful vigilance and, sadly perhaps, a measure of skepticism in order to make them. Until the end, Iago remains above suspicion, so skillfully does he set his snares.
Curiously, there is little to restrain Iago. There is no countervailing ego, and he dismisses the structures of the super-ego, those great constraining institutions that only the powerful can hope to manipulate with any success. Only after he wreaks havoc do things catch up to him, and he will be ceremoniously slain to compensate for the deaths he causes.
Roderigo, a gentleman, succumbs entirely to this sexual lusts and gives over all his wealth to attain their desires. Othello, tactician and man of action, goes blind with jealousy, and wears upon himself in the darkness of his skin his blind jealousy. And Desdemona, like Iago’s wife Emilia, and like so many women, reprises the role of hapless victim. Her mere existence incites three very different but equally raging lusts—in Roderigo, in Othello, in Iago—and the flames of these lusts wrap themselves around and consume the central characters in its conflagration.
Whether as psychopathy or as symbolic representation of the id, without mediating forces to create and maintain balance, annihilation threatens. Indeed, as a nihilistic force pursuing solely the destruction that incites his particular form of lust, Iago reaps a harvest of calamity everywhere he sows, reveling in the things that fall to ruin around him. In this respect as well, at a time when we see so many people hoping gleefully “to burn it all down,” Iago feels surprisingly modern.