IAGO - FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
All quotes are taken from the pages of the book “SHAKESPEARE – The Invention of the Human” by Harold Bloom published in 1998.
Harold Bloom - (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is often cited as the most influential critic of the late 20th century. Following the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. During his lifetime, he edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. Bloom had a deep appreciation for William Shakespeare and considers him to be the supreme center of the Western canon. (Wikipedia)
DO ANY OF THESE STATEMENTS SPARK YOUR CURIOSITY, OPINION, AGREEMENT, DISAGREEMENT? Share your thoughts in class.
1. “As with everyone else in Venice and in the immediate world beyond Iago has always recognized Othello’s dignity and glory; Othello’s greatness demands recognition and respect despite his inadequacies of language and of spirit; he is the heroic Moor commanding the armed forces of Venice, sophisticated in its decadence then as now.”
2. “As the play opens, Iago assures his gull, Roderigo, that he hates Othello, and he states the only true motive for his hatred, which is what Milton’s Satan calls “a Sense of Injured Merit”; he has been passed over for promotion, and Cassio has become Othello’s lieutenant. Iago’s position as flag officer, vowed to die rather than let Othello’s colors be captured in battle, testifies both to Othello’s trust and to Iago’s former devotion.”
3. “Othello, the skilled professional who maintains the purity of arms by sharply dividing the camp of war from that of peace, would have seen in his brave and zealous ancient someone who could not replace him were he to be killed or wounded; Iago cannot stop fighting, and so cannot be preferred to Cassio who is relatively inexperienced but who is courteous and diplomatic and knows the limits of war.”
4. “Othello was everything to Iago because war was everything; passed over, Iago is nothing, and in warring against Othello, his war is against his nature of being; Othello’s fall becomes the appropriate revenge for Iago’s evidently sickening ‘loss of being’ in rejection; ….to maim, to kill, to humiliate, to destroy the godlike in another, the war god who betrayed his worship and his trust….this is all.”
5. “Othello’s conversion to Christianity measures deeply in his psyche from the start.”
6. “Iago’s pride in his achievement as psychologist, dramatist and aesthete in the ruination of the war god Othello means he will die under torture, silently, but he will have left a mutilated reality as his monument.”
7. “Iago recognizes that ‘The Moor is of a free and open nature / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.’ “
8. “Iago is a genius….an inventor, an improviser, an experimenter always striving to perfect the arts of disinformation, disorientation and derangement; neither merely course nor merely subtle, Iago constantly re-creates his own personality and character: ‘I am not what I am.’ ”
9. “ ‘Ha, I like not that’ – five small words that together form the turning point of the play.”
10. “Othello is a great soul hopelessly outclassed in intellect and drive by Iago.”
11. “Iago clearly warns Othello with ‘As I confess it is my nature’s plague / To spy into abuses, and of my jealousy / Shape faults that are not’ (III, iii, 148-50) which quite obviously goes unheard.”
12. “Nothing can exceed Iago’s power of contamination once he truly begins his campaign.”
13. “Iago’s genius ‘is to persuade others that something they had not thought was something they had not wanted to think.’ (Bradshaw) “
14. “Iago has an obsessive concern with marriage as a damnation; he is filled with “mere suspicion” of both Othello and Cassio; of Othello he says ‘And it is thought abroad that “twixt my sheets He’s done my office’; of Cassio he says ‘For I fear Cassio with my night- cap too.’ “
15. “Iago warns Othello: ‘O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.’ (III,iii,167-69) – the Moor shares with the jealous God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, a barely repressed vulnerability to betrayal.”
16. “Despite his consistent ill treatment of his own wife, Emilia, it is she who becomes the ironic instrument that undoes his triumphalism at the cost of her life – surely one of Shakespeare’s grandest ironies appropriately constituting the play’s most surprising dramatic moment.”
17. “Emilia’s sudden loss of worldly wisdom becoming as free as the north wind was the only eventuality that Iago could not foresee; the superb psychologist who unseamed Othello and who deftly manipulated Desdemona, Cassio, Roderigo and all others angrily falls into the fate he arranged for his prime victim, the Moor, and becomes another wife murderer; he has, at last set fire to himself.”
18. “Othello is Shakespeare’s most wounding representation of male vanity and fear of female sexuality, and so of the mail equation that makes the fear of cuckoldry and the fear of mortality into a single dread.”
19. “ ‘Why did I marry!’ exclaims Othello and Iago shrewdly pursues.”
20. “Othello is amazingly reluctant to make love to his wife; why does he so avoid consummating the marriage?; why does he not “test” Iago’s claims of Cassio’s foul acts?”
21. “Desdemona dies in her virginity; after her murder Othello refers to her as ‘Cold, cold, my girl / Even like thy chastity.’ “ (V,ii,273-74)
22. “ ‘Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word.’; the villain is self-silenced.”
23. “Shakespeare had something of a tragic obsession with the idea of a good name living on after his protagonists’ deaths; he was much preoccupied with his own evidently blemished name.”
24. “OTHELLO is surely Shakespeare’s most painful play.” (More so that LEAR, MACBETH and HAMLET?)