Possessed by Memory

by Harold Bloom

  Act 1, Scene 3

  Is there anyone Iago loves except for himself? Certainly not his wife, Emilia, and he chooses to be without friends. For him the overwhelming figure is his captain-general, Othello, whom he has served as ancient or flag officer, always the third in command. As the ancient, he is pledged to give up his life rather than to allow Othello’s personal colors to be captured in battle.

  Iago’s relation to Othello before the tragedy opens was one of religious veneration. The African warrior had been Iago’s mortal god, the incarnation of war. And Iago knows only one religion: the worship of Mars and of Othello as the god’s earthly representative. When Othello passed over Iago and chose Cassio as his lieutenant, he transformed his ancient into a chaos, a man on the verge of losing any sense of his own being. John Milton founded his own concept of Satan’s “sense of injured merit” upon Iago’s pathos of outrage at what he judged to be Othello’s betrayal of his follower’s absolute dedication to the Moor, who cared only for the honor of arms. We can surmise that Othello passed over Iago because he saw that the ancient was always at war and could not live in the camp of peace.

  Iago asserts he has spent the twenty-eight years of his life looking upon the world, and his otherseeing has resulted in a vision that values only self-love, whether in himself or in others. His exaltation of the will demystifies love as merely a lust of the blood and the will’s becoming permissive. From Emilia’s later remarks in the play, it would seem that Iago’s vastation at having been passed over has ensued in sexual impotence. When he says that Othello’s weak function, or supposed impotence, will turn Desdemona away from her marriage, we hear his own involuntary confession. Shakespeare is supple and turbulent in charting the stages of Iago’s plot, the initial formulation of which is inchoate:

  I hate the Moor

  And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets

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

  But I for mere suspicion in that kind

  Will do as if for surety. He holds me well,

  The better shall my purpose work on him.

  Cassio’s a proper man: let me see now,

  To get his place, and to plume up my will

  In double knavery. How? How? let’s see:

  After some time to abuse Othello’s ear

  That he is too familiar with his wife.

  He hath a person and a smooth dispose

  To be suspected, framed to make women false.

  The Moor is of a free and open nature

  That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,

  And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose

  As asses are.

  I have’t, it is engendered! Hell and night

  Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.

  Exit.

  Act 1, Scene 3

  Iago grows perpetually in a sense of triumphalism that energizes him and yet prepares a final downfall. When he cries aloud, “I have’t, it is engendered!,” he is overstating, and is too wise not to know this. He knows also, though, that his onward drive as a plotter depends upon the audacity of prolepsis. His next soliloquy confesses the formlessness of his plot but vows to persist, in a diabolic mode of negative transcendence:

  That Cassio loves her, I do well believe it,

  That she loves him, ’tis apt and of great credit.

  The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not,

  Is of a constant, loving, noble nature,

  And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona

  A most dear husband. Now I do love her too,

  Not out of absolute lust—though peradventure

  I stand accountant for as great a sin—

  But partly led to diet my revenge,

  For that I do suspect the lusty Moor

  Hath leaped into my seat, the thought whereof

  Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards…

  And nothing can or shall content my soul

  Till I am evened with him, wife for wife….

  Or, failing so, yet that I put the Moor

  At least into a jealousy so strong

  That judgement cannot cure; which thing to do,

  If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trash

  For his quick hunting, stand the putting on,

  I’ll have our Michael Cassio on the hip,

  Abuse him to the Moor in the rank garb—

  For I fear Cassio with my night-cap too—

  Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me

  For making him egregiously an ass,

  And practising upon his peace and quiet

  Even to madness. ’Tis here, but yet confused:

  Knavery’s plain face is never seen, till used.

  Exit.

  Act 2, Scene 1

  At first this may seem as obscurantist as Shakespeare’s Richard III can be, yet Iago’s dark design is gestating in the abyss of his hatred. His obsessive imputation of unappeasable lust to all others betrays his own unspoken realization that Othello’s ontological attack upon him (as he sees it) has resulted in an alarming impotence. His third soliloquy achieves a superb emergence into the frightening eminence of a free artist of himself:

  And what’s he then that says I play the villain?

  When this advice is free I give and honest,

  Probal to thinking and indeed the course

  To win the Moor again? For ’tis most easy

  Th’inclining Desdemona to subdue

  In any honest suit. She’s framed as fruitful

  As the free elements: and then for her

  To win the Moor, were’t to renounce his baptism,

  All seals and symbols of redeemed sin,

  His soul is so enfettered to her love

  That she may make, unmake, do what she list,

  Even as her appetite shall play the god

  With his weak function. How am I then a villain

  To counsel Cassio to this parallel course

  Directly to his good? Divinity of hell!

  When devils will the blackest sins put on

  They do suggest at first with heavenly shows

  As I do now. For whiles this honest fool

  Plies Desdemona to repair his fortune,

  And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,

  I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear:

  That she repeals him for her body’s lust.

  And by how much she strives to do him good

  She shall undo her credit with the Moor—

  So will I turn her virtue into pitch

  And out of her own goodness make the net

  That shall enmesh them all.

  Act 2, Scene 3

  Iago mounts to the sublime of zest, exultant in his burgeoning powers. When he cries out in his ecstasy, “Divinity of hell!,” he both enlists in a theology of the Inferno and directly invokes Satan. Iago disarms us by placing himself among the devils and wins us by the exuberance of his rhetorical questions and theatrical self-awareness: “As I do now.” The Globe audience would remember Hamlet’s The Mousetrap, in which the surrogate for Claudius pours poison into the ear of his sleeping brother. Triumphalism sounds forth as Iago concludes, rancidly turning Desdemona’s virtue into foulness. The vivid coinage “enmesh” which Shakespeare employs only here in all his works, catches the tangled web, shockingly turned out of Desdemona’s goodness into a net that will doom Othello, Desdemona, Emilia, and, ironically at last, Iago himself.

  Overhearing himself in this grand soliloquy, Iago breaks also into the mode of self-otherseeing. We behold with him the birth of a new Iago, at one with his daemon or genius, heretofore unexplored but now masterly i
n writing drama with the lives of others. The cognitive music of this soliloquy rings with the accents of glorious emergence, a coming into possession of the insight that is the Shakespearean truth: every woman and every man is her or his own most dangerous enemy. The ease of Iago’s consciousness as it leaps from point to point, always driving toward a pyromaniac destruction of all others, delights the ancient himself. Freedom and honesty indeed constitute Iago’s self-praise, yet this ironic “honest Iago,” supposedly plain-spoken, is intricate in the evasions that play at truth. Chant this soliloquy out loud to yourself, giving it the gusto it deserves. It should frighten you, and yet something in each of us rejoices in the power of Iago’s newly revealed potential.

  His fifth soliloquy is the most dangerous, for in it he becomes an aesthetician of the abyss of jealousy metamorphosing into madness:

  I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin

  And let him find it. Trifles light as air

  Are to the jealous confirmations strong

  As proofs of holy writ. This may do something.

  The Moor already changes with my poison:

  Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons

  Which at the first are scarce found to distaste

  But with a little art upon the blood

  Burn like the mines of sulphur.

  Enter Othello.

  I did say so:

  Look where he comes. Not poppy nor mandragora

  Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world

  Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

  Which thou owedst yesterday.

  Act 3, Scene 3

  The handkerchief or napkin was given to Othello’s mother by an Egyptian enchanter. The Moor, dangerously receiving the news that Desdemona no longer possesses it, reacts with a curious music:

  ’Tis true, there’s magic in the web of it.

  A sibyl that had numbered in the world

  The sun to course two hundred compasses,

  In her prophetic fury sewed the work;

  The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,

  And it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful

  Conserved of maidens’ hearts.

  Act 3, Scene 4

  The web ironically echoes Iago’s enmeshing net, and the virgin hearts that provide the stuff to be woven remind us, yet more ironically, of Shakespeare’s most crucial ellipsis in this tragedy, which is that we cannot be sure the marriage of Desdemona and Othello ever has been consummated. Iago’s fifth soliloquy, with a kind of uncanny charm, tells us that a lost handkerchief can serve as holy writ in the religion of jealousy. My students and I thrill to Iago’s tasting of his anticipated triumph: “This may do something.” When the crazed Othello enters, the ancient’s true triumph begins with marvelous pride: “I did say so.” Iago anticipates the entire Aesthetic Movement that goes from the “Ode to a Nightingale” of John Keats (which begins with a palpable allusion to this soliloquy) and passes on to the religion of art in John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

  Iago’s crooning, as he lingers over the serenity he has devastated, is charged with an extraordinary infusion of nostalgia for the war god Othello, now dispersed into chaos. This nostalgia merely enhances the self-overseeing of the ancient’s triumphalism, which none of us can hope to dispute. A. C. Bradley once remarked that, had Iago encountered Hamlet, he would have been driven to suicide by the Prince’s immediate realization of Iago’s inward nature. Hamlet’s mockery would have been beyond Iago’s powers of self-preservation. Falstaff also would have scorned and rapidly demolished Iago. But Shakespeare exercised discretion in the tragedy of Othello, and only Emilia is capable, belatedly, of seeing through her diabolic husband.

  Unlike Edmund in King Lear, Iago is incapable of change either through self-overhearing or self-otherseeing. He ends so outraged by his blindness in underestimating Emilia’s finally suicidal love for Desdemona that all he can vow is to die silently under judicial torture:

  Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.

  From this time forth I never will speak word.

  Act 5, Scene 2

  I myself have shared the general critical guilt of being so fascinated by Iago that I somewhat neglected the grandeur of Othello, whose relation to his undoing ancient is one of point-counterpoint. Iago’s triumphant ruining of his war god would not have its terrifying magnitude if the divinity that is brought down had not first glowed in the firmament as a fixed star among Shakespeare’s sublime masters of battle: Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Coriolanus, and, in a different mode, Hotspur and Henry V.

  One might begin with the single line spoken by the Moor that ends what could have been a fatal street brawl: “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.” That voice of authority belongs to the fastest sword in Europe and shows a ruthless economy. Othello’s initial declaration of his own worth has the same quality:

  Let him do his spite;

  My services, which I have done the signiory,

  Shall out-tongue his complaints. ’Tis yet to know—

  Which, when I know that boasting is an honour,

  I shall promulgate—I fetch my life and being

  From men of royal siege, and my demerits

  May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune

  As this that I have reached. For know, Iago,

  But that I love the gentle Desdemona

  I would not my unhoused free condition

  Put into circumscription and confine

  For the sea’s worth.

  Act 1, Scene 2

  His pride is heartening and legitimate, yet the palpable sadness he still feels at his loss of freedom when he married intimates the gathering disaster. We tend to undervalue Othello, because of his double deficiency, as to both his inability to overhear himself and his startling failure at all self-otherseeing.

  Her father loved me, oft invited me,

  Still questioned me the story of my life

  From year to year—the battles, sieges, fortunes

  That I have passed.

  I ran it through, even from my boyish days

  To th’ very moment that he bade me tell it,

  Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,

  Of moving accidents by flood and field,

  Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach,

  Of being taken by the insolent foe

  And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence

  And portance in my travailous history;

  Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

  Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven

  It was my hint to speak—such was my process—

  And of the cannibals that each other eat,

  The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

  Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear

  Would Desdemona seriously incline,

  But still the house affairs would draw her thence,

  Which ever as she could with haste dispatch

  She’d come again, and with a greedy ear

  Devour up my discourse; which I, observing,

  Took once a pliant hour and found good means

  To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart

  That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,

  Whereof by parcels she had something heard

  But not intentively. I did consent,

  And often did beguile her of her tears

  When I did speak of some distressful stroke

  That my youth suffered. My story being done

  She gave me for my pains a world of sighs,

  She swore in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange,


  ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wonderous pitiful;

  She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished

  That heaven had made her such a man. She thanked me

  And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,

  I should but teach him how to tell my story

  And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:

  She loved me for the dangers I had passed

  And I loved her that she did pity them.

  This only is the witchcraft I have used….

  Act 1, Scene 3

  This fabulous narrative of astonishing dangers and remarkable survivals is summarized by Othello in a way that only seems to be a naïve recital of the marvelous. He values his own living romance even as he glories in his military eminence. Shakespeare artfully varies the Moor’s double use of “hint,” which initially means “opportunity” (“It was my hint to speak—such was my process—”) and then dilates into the use of “hint” as indirect suggestion (“Upon this hint I spake”). The calamity that will be their marriage is ironically prophesied in:

  She loved me for the dangers I had passed

  And I loved her that she did pity them.

  We wince, or ought to, at his inability to overhear himself when he contrasts his mistaken understanding of Desdemona’s love for him with his own supposed reason for returning her passion, which plainly he does not fully share. Ironically, there is no witchcraft on either side, but only the deep sadness of the perpetual Shakespearean natural superiority of women in the sphere of eros. Othello’s greatness, not just at leadership but also at sustaining the honor of arms by cleanly dividing the camp of peace from that of war, becomes a hopeless blank for receiving a love so rare and admirable as Desdemona’s.

  To define precisely his love for her is not entirely possible, because Shakespeare does not care to tell us as much as we would like. Sexual desire would appear to be a minor element at best in Othello’s regard for his wife. The central enigma of The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, is, as I remarked in discussing Iago, the ambiguity of consummation. Nearly every critic believes that it must have been performed, but a closer reading—indeed, a ransacking of the text—convinces me that this is unlikely. Does that explain part of the context of Iago’s triumph? It may add to the terrifying poignance of the mutual catastrophe of Desdemona and the Moor. Consider the aura of their lovely reunion on Cyprus: