“Honest Iago”

Abstract

Othello is a domestic tragedy of the English Renaissance—Renaissance in its source as well as in the dramatist's conception, and therefore a reflection of Renaissance concepts of marriage, infidelity, and personal honor; and, from this background, the present paper proposes to interpret the character of Iago. Since Rymer's day, Iago has been cursorily dismissed as a villain of the deepest dye: so thought Johnson, Lord Kames, and Twining in the eighteenth century; so thought Coleridge, Mrs. Jamieson, Clarke, Campbell, Dowden, Swinburne, Hudson, and George Bernard Shaw in the nineteenth; so, Herford, Canning, Bradley, Stoll, and Miss Winstanley in the twentieth. In general agreement are Schlegel, Ulrici, Bodenstedt, von Friesen, Bulthaupt, Brandi, and Schücking in Germany; and Guizot, de Vigny, Hugo, and Taine in France. One difficulty, however, with such an attitude is that it proves too much; and many of its proponents, Swinburne, Hudson, Herford, and Schücking, for example, find that it takes Iago quite out of human reality. As Herford remarks, Shakespeare has deepened and given verisimilitude to most of the figures in Cinthio's novel; but, in Iago, he “deliberately set aside what was normal and plausible in his prototype.” Is Iago, then, the great exception to Shakespeare's supreme dramatic reality? The critics, moreover, who impute to the dramatist so extra-human a creation must either explain how an Elizabethan audience could have understood it, or else put Iago, as would Professor Stoll, into the class of mere dramatic conventions, pious frauds of stagecraft easily recognized and understood by the audience, but without counterpart in contemporary life. The present study escapes both horns of this dilemma by denying the initial premise and contending that the character of Iago and all his major acts are woven of the very warp and woof of Elizabethan conditions and ideals.