Iago

The Strategies of Evil

Harold Bloom

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501164248
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

From one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, Harold Bloom presents Othello 's Iago, perhaps the Bard's most compelling villain—the fourth in a series of five short books about the great playwright's most significant personalities. Few antagonists in all of literature have displayed the ruthless cunning and deceit of Iago. Denied the promotion he believes he deserves, Iago takes vengeance on Othello and destroys him.One of William Shakespeare's most provocative and culturally relevant plays, Othello is widely studied for its complex and enduring themes of race and racism, love, trust, betrayal, and repentance. It remains widely performed across professional and community theatre alike and has been the source for many film and literary adaptations. Now award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Iago's motives and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. Why and how does Iago use lies and deception—the fake news of the 15th century—to destroy Othello and several other characters in his path? What can Othello tell us about racism?Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, treating Shakespeare's characters like people he has known all his life. He delivers exhilarating intimacy and clarity in these pages, writing about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that Iago also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. "There are few readers more astute than Bloom" ( Publishers Weekly ), and his Iago is a provocative study for our time.

CHAPTER 1

Keep Up Your Bright Swords, for the Dew Will Rust Them

We do not know whether William Shakespeare was ever out of England. From 1585 to 1589 he is lost to public records and notice. Presumably he was making a start in the London theater but we can only surmise. I remember that when I went to Elsinore (Kronborg Castle in Helsingør, Denmark) and entered the Great Hall, I had a sense that Shakespeare must have seen it. There is a tradition of Hamlet performances in the Great Hall that includes John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Derek Jacobi, and David Tennant.

Even had Shakespeare gone to the Continent, perhaps with a company of actors, it seems unlikely that he ever saw Venice. Both Othello, the Moor of Venice and The Merchant of Venice convey the atmosphere of that once powerful city-state, whose decline was highly evident in the Age of Shakespeare.

Othello is the most painful play in all of Shakespeare and in some ways it is elliptical and strangely enigmatic. Othello’s race is never explicit. Is the Moor Othello an African black man or is he Berber or Arab? In our time there is a necessity that he must be played as and by a black actor. In the initial production in 1604, Othello was played by Shakespeare’s principal actor Richard Burbage while Iago was played by Robert Armin, who in 1600 had replaced the unruly Will Kemp as the company’s clown or fool. We do not know whether Burbage acted in blackface or was portrayed as Arab. A Moor might have been either in 1604, and Shakespeare must have observed the variety of African races when the ambassador of Morocco and his entourage were in London during 1601–2.

The incongruities in Othello are fascinating and crucial. Desdemona is probably fourteen or fifteen at the most. Othello is possibly about fifty. He seems to be rather absentminded or shortsighted and frequently asks Iago what is happening. At once a magnificent captain general of a mercenary army and a kind of child-man given to weeping, he defies any easy understanding.

Since Othello clearly is a devout Christian, we wonder whether he was baptized as such or whether he converted. If he was a convert, it was not from Islam but from paganism. That seems to argue he was an African black man descended from a pagan royal family. The Moors of Morocco had submitted to Islam. Most African blacks farther south were pagans. By his own account, Othello came of royal blood and had become a child-warrior. Having known captivity, he had fought his way free and then pursued a long military career until he attained the unquestioned leadership of the armed forces of Venice.

His worship of Desdemona is more aesthetic than lustful. Her wholesome desire for him far exceeds his carnal interest in her. At different times in this book I will address the highly controversial question of whether Desdemona dies a virgin. As I will show, the textual evidence is that neither Othello nor any other man ever brought her to consummation.

I have for nearly three-quarters of a century avidly attended performances of Othello. The first was in November 1943 in New York City with Paul Robeson as Othello, José Ferrer as Iago, and Uta Hagen as Desdemona. The director was Margaret Webster, who also powerfully played the part of Emilia.

By far the best Iago I have ever seen was the complex and frightening performance by Frank Finlay, which I saw in London in 1964. Laurence Olivier, acting in blackface, was a very inadequate Othello, acted quite off the stage by Finlay and indeed by the rest of the cast, Maggie Smith as Desdemona, Joyce Redman as Emilia, and Derek Jacobi as Cassio.

In more recent years I have seen several splendid performances of Iago, but none to match Frank Finlay. In different ways Kenneth Branagh, the wonderful Simon Russell Beale, and the comedian Rory Kinnear all augmented my apprehension of Iago, but not even Beale matched Finlay. I should add that not once have I seen an adequate Othello, except perhaps Orson Welles in his film version (1951).

Throughout this book, Iago: The Strategies of Evil, I will several times return to Frank Finlay’s performance. It possessed a tense fusion between hatred and love for Othello. Iago is the ancient or ensign of the Moor Othello, which means that he is Othello’s flag officer who has pledged to die rather than let his general’s colors be taken. He has fought Othello’s battles and worshipped the Moor as a virtual god. Before the tragedy commences, Iago has sustained a tremendous shock that has unmanned him and devastated his state of being. He has been passed over for promotion to Othello’s lieutenant and suffers from what John Milton’s Satan, who owes much to Iago, calls “a Sense of Injured Merit.”

Satan, in his unfallen form of Lucifer, was second only to God in the heavenly hierarchy. When God, rather belligerently, pronounces that this day he has begotten Christ, his only son, and that “Him who disobeys, Me disobeys,” the offended Satan begins his rebellion against God. Iago’s progeny begins with Milton’s Satan and passes on to such High Romantic heroes as Shelley’s Prometheus and Byron’s Cain, later manifesting as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Chillingworth, who torments Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter; Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, and his Claggart in Billy Budd; Thomas Sutpen in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!; and the two really horrifying descendants of Iago, the butcher-bird Shrike in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.

Othello lives by the honor of arms and has chosen Michael Cassio as his lieutenant because he intuits that Iago, though loyal and “honest” (meaning bluff and outspoken), does not know the limits that separate war from peace. He might be a stellar warrior, but he has no skills for peacetimes. Iago is a pyromaniac who wishes to set fire to everything and everyone.

The tragedy opens on a street in Venice, where a dialogue takes place between Iago and Roderigo, who is infatuated with Desdemona and who becomes the gull of Iago:

Roderigo: Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly

That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse

As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.

Iago: ’Sblood, but you’ll not hear me.

If ever I did dream of such a matter,

Abhor me.

Roderigo: Thou told’st me thou didst hold him in thy hate.

Iago: Despise me

If I do not. Three great ones of the city,

In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,

Off-capped to him; and by the faith of man,

I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.

But he, as loving his own pride and purposes,

Evades them with a bombast circumstance

Horribly stuffed with epithets of war,

I can still hear Frank Finlay fiercely intoning Iago’s contempt for Othello’s overstuffed bombast with its hidden uneasiness.

And in conclusion,

Nonsuits my mediators. For, “Certes,”...