W. H. Auden on Iago

Iago is a wicked man. The wicked man, the stage villain, as a subject of serious dramatic interest does not, so far as I know, appear in the drama of Western Europe before the Elizabethans. In the mystery plays, the wicked characters, like Satan or Herod, are treated comically, but the theme of the triumphant villain cannot be treated comically because the suffering he inflicts is real.

A distinction must be made between the villain—figures like Don John in Much Ado, Richard III, Edmund in Lear, Iachimo in Cymbeline—and the merely criminal characters—figures like Duke Antonio in The Tempest, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Macbeth, or Claudius in Hamlet. The criminal is a person who finds himself in a situation where he is tempted to break the law and succumbs to the temptation: he ought, of course, to have resisted the temptation, but everyone, both on the stage and in the audience, must admit that, had they been placed in the same situation, they too would have been tempted . . .

The villain, on the other hand, is shown from the beginning as being a malcontent, a person with a general grudge against life and society. In most cases, this grudge is comprehensible because the villain has, in fact, been wronged by nature or Society: Richard III is hunchback, Don John and Edmund are bastards. What distinguishes their actions from those of the criminal is that, even when they have something tangible to gain, this is a secondary satisfaction; their primary satisfaction is the infliction of suffering on others or the exercise of power over others against their will . . . Coleridge’s description of Iago’s actions as “motiveless malignancy” applies in some degree to all Shakespeare’s villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are not the principal motive, and secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge upon another for a personal motive . . .

To me, the clue to . . . all Iago’s conduct is to be found in Emilia’s comment when she picks up the handkerchief.

“My wayward husband hath an hundred times Wooed me to steal it . . . what he’ll do with it Heaven knows, not I, I nothing know, but for his fantasy.”

As his wife, Emilia must know Iago better than anybody else does. She does not know, any more than the others, that he is malevolent, but she does know that her husband is addicted to practical jokes. What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a Practical Joker of a peculiarly appalling kind . . .

The practical joker must not only deceive but also, when he has succeeded, unmask and reveal the truth to his victims. The satisfaction of the practical joker is the look of astonishment on the faces of others when they learn that, all the time they were convinced that they were thinking and acting on their own initiative, they were actually the puppets of another’s will. Thus, though his jokes may be harmless in themselves and extremely funny, there is something slightly sinister about every practical joker, for they betray him as someone who likes to play God behind the scenes . . .

The success of a practical joker depends on his accurate estimate of the weaknesses of others, their ignorances, their social reflexes, their unquestioned presuppositions, their obsessive desires, and even the most harmless practical joke is an expression of the joker’s contempt for those he deceives.

But, in most cases, behind the joker’s contempt for others lies something else, a feeling of self- insufficiency, of a self lacking in authentic feelings and desires of its own . . . He manipulates others, but when he finally reveals his identity, his victims learn nothing about his nature, only something about their own; they know how it was possible for them to be deceived, but not why he chose to deceive them. The only answer that any practical joker can give to the question—“Why did you do this?”—is Iago’s: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know . . .”

The practical joker despises his victims, but at the same time he envies them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can call his own. His goal, to make game of others; when he is alone, he is a nullity. Iago’s self-description “I am not what I am” is correct and the negation of the Divine “I am that I am.” If the word motive is given its normal meaning of a positive purpose of the self like sex, money, glory, etc., then the practical joker is without motive. Yet the professional joker is certainly driven, like a gambler, to his activity, but the drive is negative, a fear of lacking a concrete self, of being nobody. In any practical joker to whom playing such jokes is a passion, there is always an element of malice, a projection of his self-hatred on to others, and in the ultimate case of the absolute practical joker, this is projected on to all created things . . .

To his first audience and even, maybe, to his creator, Iago appeared to be just another Machiavellian villain who might exist in real life but with whom one would never dream of identifying oneself. To us, I think, he is a much more alarming figure; we cannot hiss at him when he appears as we can hiss at the villain in a Western movie because none of us can honestly say that he does not understand how such a wicked person can exist. For is not Iago, the practical joker, a parabolic figure for the autonomous pursuit of scientific knowledge through experiment which we all, whether we are scientists or not, take for granted as natural and right? . . .

Iago’s treatment of Othello conforms to Bacon’s definition of scientific enquiry as putting Nature to the question. If a member of the audience were to interrupt the play and ask him: “What are you doing?”—could not Iago answer with a boyish giggle: “Nothing. I’m only trying to find out what Othello is really like.” And we must admit that his experiment is highly successful. By the end of the play he does know the scientific truth about the object to which he has reduced Othello. That is what makes his parting shot—“What you know, you know”—so terrifying, for by then Othello has become a thing, incapable of knowing anything . . .

“The final scene of Othello is patently sexual. There is tremendous sex in the murder scene, in the bedroom, in Desdemona’s long combed hair. There is sex in the scene that precedes it where Emilia is getting Desdemona ready for bed, and the two women talk of cuckoldry and sheets and nether lips and Desdemona sings her willow song. The murder itself is certainly a sexual act. There are two Desdemonas in Othello’s mind, and he can only restore the first, innocent Desdemona by killing the other one. –Mary McCarthy