Othello

Nancy and I went to the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis performance of Othello* this past summer. And just this past week I finally actually read the play for myself. Boy, what a portrait of pure evil Iago—“honest Iago”— is! And for what? To what end? Just because he’s ancient instead of lieutenant to Othello? To get Roderigo’s money? Seriously?

No. Not seriously. It’s even simpler than that. He’s just supposed to be a depiction of evil. He’s not motivated by anything. He’s unmotivatable, even. (Unmotivatable??) He’s just there so we can put a face on evil. So we can see how it’s tricky. It’s untrue. It may look beautiful. Friendly. Loving, even. And honest. Honest. Each main character at some point speaks of “good Iago” or “honest Iago” or even “honest, honest Iago.” Everyone is duped by this devil.

Except us. We readers and audience members get to see it all. And it ain’t pretty. We just have to sit helplessly by and watch everyone be taken by this scoundrel. To the bitter end. The bitter, bitter end.

I guess it’s kind of nice, though, that Shakespeare doesn’t give us any reason to like Iago. Sometimes that burden is too painful: recognizing the humanity or goodness that exists in what we want to see as just evil. That’s not easy. But it’s real.

Everything’s not black or white, good or evil. People aren’t doing things we think are evil for the pure pleasure of doing evil or because they’re simply evil themselves. Heck, the people or things we think are evil, under more scrutiny, might prove to be quite the opposite. That’s hard to accept. That’s hard to even consider most of the time.

So thank you, Shakespeare, for making it easy for us in this play. For taking us out of this real world for a few hours and letting us see things how we want to see them. And for letting us come back to this real word thankful that at least there aren’t a bunch of real Iagos running around.