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o Iago: A Deeply Flawed but Unique Character
IAGO: A DEEPLY FLAWED BUT UNIQUE CHARACTER
Iago is appreciated for his loyalty and is considered to be honest and straightforward. In point of fact, he is frequently greeted as ‘honest Iago’. He listens attentively to everyone as they vocalize their worries to him and seek his help. Even so, the qualities he displays are forged. He is, in truth, hypocritical, manipulative, unsympathetic, and ruthless. He spends loads of time establishing his nefarious plan to rain despair on the moor. Iago, in his iniquitous glory, transforms Othello’s love into suspicion and hate.
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Meanwhile, no character is fully aware of Iago’s cruelty. It is only the audience/ reader who sees his true self from the very beginning through his soliloquies.
Iago is introduced as an assemblage of unsolvable puzzles and contrasts. For instance, he maintains a reputation for honesty, yet he lies persistently in order to exploit others. He downgrades tender emotion, yet he is a married man, and so forth.
As Iago’s maleficent scheme starts gathering momentum, he goes on a rampage and ends up destroying Roderigo, Emilia, Desdemona, and eventually himself. Ironically, the only major character left standing at the end is Cassio.
William Hazlitt30 wrote: "Iago is an extreme instance . . . of diseased intellectual activity, with the most perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter, because it falls more readily in with his favorite propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts and scope to his actions. He is quite or nearly indifferent to his own fate as to that of others; he runs all risks for a trifling and doubtful advantage, and is himself the dupe and victim of ruling passion — an insatiable craving after action of the most difficult and dangerous kind."
30 William Hazlitt - (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell.
