Iago

Who He Is

Ensign to Othello, passed over for the rank of lieutenant in favor of Cassio, and the character who acts the most in the play: nearly everything the others do is a reaction to what he sets in motion. He is the villain who does all the damage with nothing supernatural, only with words, which first insinuate and then lie to one's face. He serves Othello only out of convenience, lives off Roderigo's purse, receives from Emilia, his own wife, the handkerchief of Desdemona, and plants it in Cassio's room. Captured at the end, he falls silent, and Venice sentences him to torture.

Trajectory

In Act I, Scene 1, Iago announces his own nature in the very first scene, and only to Roderigo, before putting on any mask in front of the others. He says he hates Othello for giving the lieutenancy to Cassio, and that he serves him only out of convenience.

Then, with Roderigo, he shouts under the window of Brabantio to denounce his daughter's flight with Othello, in degrading images of animal mating, and slips away before the father returns. In Act I, Scene 2, he warns Othello that Brabantio is powerful and can undo the marriage.

In Act I, Scene 3, Othello names Iago as Desdemona's escort to Cyprus, the Duke approves, and Othello entrusts her to honest Iago. Alone with Roderigo, who is thinking of drowning himself, Iago persuades him to sell his lands and follow to Cyprus, promising to help him win Desdemona, and the act closes with the plan already formed:

In Act II, Scene 1, in Cyprus, Iago trades misogynist couplets with Desdemona and, while the couple kiss, comments on the harmony of their reunion in an aside. He does not fabricate discord out of nothing: the image he himself chooses is musical, that of loosening tuned strings.

He persuades Roderigo to provoke Cassio on the watch and, in a soliloquy, reveals his plan to incriminate Cassio in Othello's eyes for supposed closeness to Desdemona, fed by an unconfirmed suspicion that Othello himself slept with Emilia. In Act II, Scene 3, he gets Cassio and the Cypriots drunk, lets Roderigo provoke him, and, after Cassio's fall, advises him to ask Desdemona to intercede for him, and says alone what the advice prepares:

In Act III, Scene 3, the next step is the echo: repeating Othello's word back to him as a question, at first without asserting anything, and letting him draw the conclusion himself; later in the scene he moves on to the direct lie, with the dream and the handkerchief seen on Cassio's beard.

The sentence from the first scene returns inverted, when he offers Othello, as wisdom, exactly the principle he violates.

He warns Othello against jealousy, receives from Emilia the handkerchief Desdemona dropped, and when Othello demands ocular proof he answers with a dream attributed to Cassio and with the handkerchief with which he claims to have seen Cassio wipe his beard. Othello names him lieutenant. In Act III, Scene 4, he tells Cassio to keep pressing Desdemona while Othello is away.

In Act IV, Scene 1, he speaks to Othello of the handkerchief and of "lying" with her until Othello, repeating "the handkerchief, confessions," falls into a fit, and he stages the scene in which Cassio laughs about Bianca and Othello hears the laughter as a confession about his wife. From then on the instrument changes: he proposes the method of death, and begins to act on his own.

In Act IV, Scene 2, he consoles Desdemona, who asks him what to do to win her husband back, and holds off Roderigo, who demands the jewels, by promising him a night of action against Cassio. When Emilia says that some scoundrel has manipulated the Moor, he tells her to speak low and calls her a fool.

In Act V, Scene 1, he posts Roderigo to kill Cassio and admits, in an aside, that the death of either one suits him. He wounds Cassio from behind and, returning as a rescuer, stabs Roderigo and accuses Bianca.

In Act V, Scene 2, Emilia unmasks him, and he kills her and flees. Captured, he says he will answer nothing. Lodovico reads Roderigo's letters and hands the command of Cyprus to Cassio, and decrees for Iago the exquisite cruelty of keeping him alive.

Themes Embodied

Iago does not hide his method, he states it twice: to Roderigo, in Act I, Scene 1, and in an aside, in Act II, Scene 1, where no one on stage hears him. The warning works as a confession addressed to the audience, which is the only one to know what is coming, and this asymmetry is what produces the tension of the whole of Act III, Scene 3.

The mechanism begins with not being the author of the accusation. Iago supplies the stage, the pause, and the insinuation, and the text of the slander is largely written by the jealous man himself (the direct lie comes little by little: the "Nothing, my lord" of l. 37, then, when Othello demands proof, the dream and the handkerchief on Cassio's beard), and this is why Othello cannot locate the origin of the suspicion in order to undo it.

The chosen target is not a weakness of Othello's, it is a virtue of his: the frankness that convinced the whole Senate in Act I, Scene 3 is the same one that betrays him in Act III, Scene 3. Iago exploits the credit that honesty gives to the appearance of honesty.

Roderigo dies because he knows too much and Emilia because she speaks, and Roderigo's death comes by surprise, consistent with someone who avoids direct confrontation. The plan collapses not through investigation, but because a witness decides to pay the price of speaking.

How He Is Read

The joker in the deck takes Iago out of the register of revenge and puts him in that of the prankster, whose pleasure is to reveal to others that they were acting as puppets without knowing it. In this reading, revenge ceases to be Iago's motive.

Relationships

• Othello: the general who passed him over and whom he leads, with the echo and the insinuation, from trust to murder.
• Cassio: the lieutenant who got the post, the stated reason for the resentment and the unwitting instrument of the slander.
• Desdemona: the general's wife, whom he exploits through her generous mediation on Cassio's behalf.
• Emilia: his wife, who hands him the handkerchief and is the only one to bring down the plan, by speaking.
• Roderigo: the partner in the purse, used as a pawn and killed before he can speak.
• Brabantio: the father he wakes in Act I, Scene 1 to set the scandal in motion.