Iago's twisted love

All apologies for the long wait between blog postings. After the previous instalment written about David Foster Wallace, I fell victim to a serious bout of the blues. I can be a little sensitive sometimes. There are some matters that are difficult to talk about, and the suicide of my favourite author is one of them. Occasionally I have considered writing interpretations of some of the songs off Nirvana’s album In Utero or Faith No More’s album King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime, but I suspect that they may be equally depressing and that there are anyway mysteries best left unexplained. (If a reader does want me to provide an interpretation of “All Apologies”, they can ask in the form of a comment and I might acquiesce.)

Today I thought I would write about a poet that everyone knows – Shakespeare. In particular, I thought I would write about Othello. “What for?” you might ask. “Hasn’t everything that has ever could be said about this play already been said?” To be sure, most of us studied this play in school and most of us feel that we have a good understanding of what the play is about. It’s about jealousy: jealousy is Othello’s fatal flaw (as alcohol is Cassio’s fatal flaw) and it is this flaw that Iago takes advantage of when scheming to drive Othello into murdering his bride. In fact, there is a lot more to the play than this – many years ago I worked out a fairly involved interpretation of the play, incorporating studies of the way it contrasts Chistianity and Paganism, human and animal, but for the life of me I can’t remember it. This essay will not be particularly profound but it may offer an unusual new perspective on the play.

Certainly Othello is about jealousy. Love has two aspects, the spiritual and the carnal – when Othello is assured of Desdemona’s love he is living within the temple of Christ but when he succumbs to jealousy his imagination becomes infected with images of animals. Jealousy does not admit the possibility that the unfaithful lover might genuinely love another; jealousy concerns itself only with the sordidness of illicit sex. In his later plays, not only in Othello but in Hamlet and King Lear, Shakespeare often presents women’s sexuality unflatteringly and this led, for instance, Joyce to propose, in Ulysses, that Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway had slept with Shakespeare’s brother. Othello (and Troilus and Cressida) are, however, the two plays that most directly deal with the theme of sexual jealousy.

There is a mystery to Othello though. Why does Iago commit himself to Othello’s destruction, a catastrophe that overwhelms him as well? Coleridge uses the phrase “the motive hunting of a motiveless malignancy”. Early in the play Iago himself gives this as a reason

                                                [..] I hate the Moor;

                        And it is thought abroad that ‘twixt the sheets

                        He’s done my office. I know not if’t be true;

                        Yet I for mere suspicion of that kind,

                        Will do as if for surety.

Iago’s suspicions are obviously baseless, Othello is plainly not someone capable of having an illicit affair with Iago’s wifef Emilia, and it makes one wonder if Iago’s sordid imaginings of Othello sleeping with his wife have another foundation. Iago is undoubtedly paranoid. Perhaps (and this is where I am going to propose my bizarre theory) Iago is not jealous of Emilia but of Othello himself. Perhaps Iago hates Othello because he loves him.

This admittedly screwy interpretation of the play occurred to me when watching Kenneth Branagh’s film adaption of it. In Act 3 scene 3, Iago successfully replaces Desdemona as the most important person in Othello’s life, as co-conspirator in his plan to murder her; Othello calls Iago “my lieutenant” and Iago replies “I am yours forever”. At this point -in the film- they embrace. Iago’s expression (he is portrayed by Branagh himself) points to the fact that he genuinely means what he says and the implication is patent. His wish to destroy Othelllo springs out of a kind of twisted passion. As  Lajos Egri summarizes Othello: “Jealousy destroys the thing it loves.”

At the end of the play, Iago refuses to give any explanation of his actions, saying “Demand of me nothing: what you know, you know; From this time forth I will never speak a word.”

Some literary critics, as some literary critics do, have wondered if Shakespeare was homosexual. It was Oscar Wilde, perhaps unsurprisingly, who opined that some of the Sonnets were addressed to a man. Personally I think this theory is bullshit. Shakespeare wrote too convincingly about sexual jealousy of the heterosexual sort for him not to have experienced it himself. (This does not mean that he might not have made the villain in Othello a crypto-homosexual.) The passage that, to me, proves Shakespeare straight does not come from Othello though, or even from Romeo and Juliet. It is this passage from Troilus and Cressida when Troilus finds out that Cressida has slept around him with Diomed.

                        This she? No; this is Diomed’s Cressida.

                        If beauty have a soul, this is not she;

                        If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,

                        If sanctimony be the gods’ delight,

                        If there be rule in unity itself,

                        This is not she. O madness of discourse,

                        That cause sets up with and against itself!

                        Bifold authority! Where reason can revolt

                        Without perdition, and loss assume all reason

                        Without revolt. This is, and is not, Cressid!

                        Within my soul here doth conduce a fight

                        Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate

                        Divides more wider than the sky and earth;

                        And yet the spacious breadth of this divison

                        Admits no orifex for a point as subtle

                        As Ariachne’s broken woof to enter.

                        Instance, O instance! strong as Plutos gates:

                        Cressid is mine, tied with bonds of heaven.

                        Instance, O instance! strong as heaven itself:

                        The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved and loosed,

                        And with another knot, five-finger-tied,

                        The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,

                        The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics

                        Of her ‘ereaten faith are given to Diomed.

Troilus and Cressida is, like Othello, about jealousy – with this difference. Othello’s jealousy is baseless but Triolus’s jealousy is justified. In Elizabethan times, cuckolds were figures of ridicule and this difference between the two plays, that Triolus is a true cuckold but Othello is not, is the reason why Othello is a genuine tragedy but Troilus and Cressida is not,  is in fact a satire – and why commentators on Shakespeare have had difficulty categorizing it. This is something that Joyce does not suggest. If Shakespeare himself was cuckolded, perhaps it was something too painful for him to directly address? And perhaps the only way he could attempt to do so was through satire?

In my next posting, I will get back to the business of my literary theory. I don’t know yet what book or film I will analyse but, hopefully, my gloom will lift and I can start to write something more normal.