othello and iago

• Leavis - Iago “sufficiently convincing as a person” but “subordinate and merely ancillary... a necessary piece of dramatic mechanism”
• Toole - there is no Othello without Iago
• Duthie - Othello’s egotism is egregious enough to make Iago’s work fairly easy
• Duthie - Tragedy caused by “'two forces working in conjunction: it is caused by an external force of evil deliberately bringing itself to bear on a noble figure which has within it a seed of evil”
• Stewart - Iago as an abstraction of the base side of Othello
• Stewart - “Othello is the human soul as it strives to be, and Iago is that which corrodes and subverts it from within”
• Bodkin - Iago is “the shadow side of Othello… the projected image of the submerged fears hidden deep within Othello.”
• Toole - renamed them 'Iagothello': the "imperfect submergence of Othello in Iago" or the "unnatural emergence of 'Iagothello'
• Toole - “Unnatural marriage of a true mind and a base spirit”
• Toole - Othello’s mind takes on the “dark emotional colouring of Iago’s character” as he “echoes” Iago’s “words and intonation”
• Wayne - Iago’s misogynistic discourse is specific to his character and then spreads, through a kind of oral/aural abuse to Othello
• Thompson - “Growing infection of his speech by Iago’s vocabulary”
• Heilman - “The metaphor of illness is thoroughly embedded in the play”
• Clemen - Othello and Iago have entirely different attitudes towards their images. Iago is consciously looking for those which best suit his purpose. With Othello, however, the images rise naturally out of his emotions. They come to him easily and unconsciously whenever he is talking”
• Malone - Othello repeating Iago’s “Goats and Monkeys” Act 4 scene 1

  “As prime as goats as hot as monkeys” Act 3 scene 3

  “These words we may suppose, still ring in the ears of Othello
• Sanders - Iago has “blinkered vision” and can “reduce imaginatively all he contemplates”, "all spiritual values are debased". This cyncical outlook contrasting Othello's "romantic vision"