'The Cool Malignity of Iago'

“As Shakespeare went on, however, he became interested in why people like evil, not for their own advantage but for its own sake.” 

In his lecture on Othello, W.H. Auden understands, as a growing number of our contemporaries do not, that evil is autonomous and self-justifying. Understanding it requires no sophisticated analysis of motives. Its perpetrators, in Auden’s words, “like evil.” You can’t explain it by speculating as to the motivations of evildoers. Psychology here is a pathetic joke. Hamas members slaughter innocents and enjoy doing so. Its enthusiasts are having a good time. They revel in evil as others revel in baseball or opera. They are heavily armed Iagos. It’s not about anti-colonialism or national sovereignty or any other rationalized cause.    

 

Dr. Johnson pointed to “the cool malignity of Iago, silent in his resentment, subtle in his designs, and studious at once of his interest and his vengeance.” In his copy of Shakespeare, writing in the margin at the end of Act I, Scene 3 of Othello, Coleridge identified “the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity.” In his Omniana (1812), in a chapter titled “Motives and Impulses,” Coleridge writes:

 

“[I]t is impossible to understand the character of Iago, who is represented as now assigning one, and then another, and again a third, motive for his conduct, all alike the mere fictions of his own restless nature, distempered by a keen sense of his intellectual superiority, and haunted by the love of exerting power, on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moral excellence.”

 

We expect our bad guys to look bad, relying on the convenience of Hollywood clichés. Auden writes::  

 

“Most Iagos on stage are impossible because they act sinister, like regular villains, so that no one will trust them. Iago must be plain and inconspicuous, absolutely ordinary, someone who could be chosen as a Secret Service man today, ‘honest’ because he is what he looks like. Yet he must dominate the play by his will. Iago also says nothing poetically or intellectually interesting.”

 

Othello was first staged on this date, November 1, in 1604 at Whitehall Palace in London.

 

[Auden’s thoughts on Othello can be found in Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, University of Princeton Press, 2000).]