Steve Watson

Shakespeare – Othello

The central question of the tragedy of Othello is: what is Iago’s motivation? Here is the usual list of possibilities:

1. He resents that Othello has given position to Cassio, for which he, Iago, is better qualified
2. He suspects that Othello has cuckolded him
3. He resents that Othello’s virtues make him, Iago, seem a lesser man
4. He finds Othello’s colour disgusting
5. He resents Othello’s possession of Desdemona, whom he desires

Yet, as presented in the play, these seem not to be at the front of Iago’s mind; they are rather mentioned almost in passing, and not even necessarily taken seriously. Certainly, for example, he never shows the same degree of anger towards his suspect wife as he does towards Othello, and he even says that he doesn’t care enough to establish the suspicion’s certain truth or falsity. For another example, his supposed objection to Othello’s race looks most like a pose to agitate others who do harbour that bias. Most people, I think, conclude that these are not the real reasons for his malice.

The puzzle deepens when we consider that Shakespeare took the story of Othello from Cinthio’s 1563 ‘Story of Disdemona of Venice and the Moorish Captain’ (in Gli Hecatommithi,) in which a perfectly reasonable set of motives is provided to the villain. In this story the motive of the Ensign is clearly described as lust for the lady turning to bitter hate as she ignores his efforts to seduce her. As mentioned above, this is one of the motives proposed for Iago in Shakespeare’s play, and is clearly sufficient to drive the action of the play.

We seem to be left with two options: either there is a motive for Iago’s actions, but it is not one of the expressed ones; or there is no motive at all. The latter option has proven popular. Commenting on one of the justificatory speeches of Iago, Coleridge famously spoke of “the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity” (Foakes, R. A. (ed.) (1987) Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature vol. 2, Princeton:PUP, p. 315) and many have been satisfied with the idea that Iago does what he does as a spirit of malice rather like the character of Vice in the Mediaeval Mystery Plays, or perhaps like Augustine’s evil-doers who do evil just because they can and because they take pleasure in acting according to their own self-governed will (Conf. 2.4.9.)

Despite the ready acceptance, however, of that motiveless malignity, it creates a problem for the play quâ play, for it represents the actions as having arisen without cause, and the plot, as an imitation of an action, is a series of causally connected events – or it is nothing. This was recognised by Aristotle, who wrote in his Poetics that

[T]ragedy represents action and is acted by living persons, who must of necessity have certain qualities of character and thought—for it is these which determine the quality of an action; indeed thought and character are the natural causes of any action … (1449^b f.)

Now, Shakespeare is no great respecter of Aristotelian rules on tragedy, but the intuition that we feel that actions have to be explicable in order to be at all interesting or to form an organic whole in a dramatic representation does not really depend on Aristotle, who merely described the fact first. In this respect then, Shakespeare has nodded.