iago

• N. Sanders - can “reduce imaginatively all he contemplates”, this cynical outlook on life contrasts Othello’s “romantic vision”
• N. Sanders - “His speech habitually degrades human activities to the level of the doings of despicable animals”
• N. Sanders - “Driven by a Machiavellian materialism and self-interest”
• N. Sanders - “A devil creating his own hell on earth and effecting the damnation of others”
• N. Sanders - "Darkness is his natural element"
• Curie - Iago represents the discourse of white patriarchal values
• Coleridge - Argues he is driven by “motiveless malignity”
• Bradley - Iago has a “keen sense of superiority”
• Hart - an "eternal villian"
• N. Sanders - his speech is “ingenious” and a “conscious calculation of effect”
• O'Toole - Iago is the "Machiavellian villain"
• Rymer - “a close, dissembling, false, insinuating rascal, instead of an open-hearted, frank, plain-dealing Soldier”
• Draper - Iago “would have been regarded as a kind of central figure in a thesis play on the military code of martial honour”
• Moore - "stupid and dull"
• Empson (morality) - Certainly wicked and not to be defended, but also human and credible
• Wilson (morality) - “The consummate mimetic artistry of a wholly amoral will”
• Brooke (morality) - “Shakespeare imagined Iago a man of warm, sympathetic qualities…through no real fault of his own, goes wrong”
• Heilman (morality) - Iago “might almost serve as an example of the Aristotelian hero, a good man brought, like Oedipus, to commit enormities unforeseen”
• Wilson (morality) - "a malevolent author"
• Wain (love) - Iago does not foresee "the holocaust" at the end, because he doesn't understand his own tendencies or Othello's love for Desdemona
• Wain (love) - Iago is “less than a complete human being because love has been left out of his composition”
• Bradley (love) - “Iago was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him.”
• Wilson (love) - lacks the "honest love" of Desdemona
• Toole (love) - “Cannot believe in the kind of love which Desdemona has for Othello”
• Wain - "a patchwork of motives"
• Draper - “Iago…is a pitiful plaything of circumstance; there is, after all, something pitiful in this man’s final doom”
• Smith - a repressed homosexual
• Olivier - Played Iago as being motivated by a “subconscious affection for the Moor, the homosexual foundation of which he himself does not understand.”
• Curie - represents the discourse of white patriarchal values
• Raatzch - "phonetic affinity between 'ego' and 'Iago'"
• Wilson - Argues that Iago’s jealousy towards his “more successful male rivals” is both “sexual” and “social”
• Sanders - he employs euphuism, Iago’s speech is “ingenious” and a “conscious calculation of effect”