Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
and, instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters or
long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more dangerous course
of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his
newest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest,
with steady nerves and unabated resolution.' Mr. Swinburne lays even
greater stress on this aspect of Iago's character, and even declares
that 'the very subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature'
is 'the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an inarticulate poet.'
And those to whom this idea is unfamiliar, and who may suspect it at
first sight of being fanciful, will find, if they examine the play in
the light of Mr. Swinburne's exposition, that it rests on a true and
deep perception, will stand scrutiny, and might easily be illustrated.
They may observe, to take only one point, the curious analogy between
the early stages of dramatic composition and those soliloquies in which
Iago broods over his plot, drawing at first only an outline, puzzled how
to fix more than the main idea, and gradually seeing it develop and
clarify as he works upon it or lets it work. Here at any rate
Shakespeare put a good deal of himself into Iago. But the tragedian in
real life was not the equal of the tragic poet. His psychology, as we
shall see, was at fault at a critical point, as Shakespeare's never was.
And so his catastrophe came out wrong, and his piece was ruined.
Such, then, seem to be the chief ingredients of the force which,
liberated by his resentment at Cassio's promotion, drives Iago from
inactivity into action, and sustains him through it. And, to pass to a
new point, this force completely possesses him; it is his fate. It is
like the passion with which a tragic hero wholly identifies himself, and
which bears him on to his doom. It is true that, once embarked on his
course, Iago _could_ not turn back, even if this passion did abate; and
it is also true that he is compelled, by his success in convincing
Othello, to advance to conclusions of which at the outset he did not
dream. He is thus caught in his own web, and could not liberate himself
if he would. But, in fact, he never shows a trace of wishing to do so,
not a trace of hesitation, of looking back, or of fear, any more than of
remorse; there is no ebb in the tide. As the crisis approaches there
passes through his mind a fleeting doubt whether the deaths of Cassio
and Roderigo are indispensable; but that uncertainty, which does not
concern the main issue, is dismissed, and he goes forward with
undiminished zest. Not even in his sleep--as in Richard's before his
final battle--does any rebellion of outraged conscience or pity, or any
foreboding of despair, force itself into clear consciousness. His
fate--which is himself--has completely mastered him: so that, in the
later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design
built on so many different falsehoods forces itself on the reader, Iago
appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man absolutely
infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.
5
Iago stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the
greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone to his making,
and because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts
concerning evil which seem to have impressed Shakespeare most. The first
of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom
fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism
becomes possible to them, and with it those hard vices--such as
ingratitude and cruelty--which to Shakespeare were far the worst. The
second is that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself
easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect. In the latter
respect Iago is nearly or quite the equal of Richard, in egoism he is
the superior, and his inferiority in passion and massive force only
makes him more repulsive. How is it then that we can bear to contemplate
him; nay, that, if we really imagine him, we feel admiration and some
kind of sympathy? Henry the Fifth tells us:
There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out;
but here, it may be said, we are shown a thing absolutely evil,
and--what is more dreadful still--this absolute evil is united with
supreme intellectual power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why
do we not accuse its author either of untruth or of a desperate
pessimism?
To these questions it might at once be replied: Iago does not stand
alone; he is a factor in a whole; and we perceive him there and not in
isolation, acted upon as well as acting, destroyed as well as
destroying.[117] But, although this is true and important, I pass it by
and, continuing to regard him by himself, I would make three remarks in
answer to the questions.
In the first place, Iago is not merely negative or evil--far from it.
Those very forces that moved him and made his fate--sense of power,
delight in performing a difficult and dangerous action, delight in the
exercise of artistic skill--are not at all evil things. We sympathise
with one or other of them almost every day of our lives. And,
accordingly, though in Iago they are combined with something detestable
and so contribute to evil, our perception of them is accompanied with
sympathy. In the same way, Iago's insight, dexterity, quickness,
address, and the like, are in themselves admirable things; the perfect
man would possess them. And certainly he would possess also Iago's
courage and self-control, and, like Iago, would stand above the impulses
of mere feeling, lord of his inner world. All this goes to evil ends in
Iago, but in itself it has a great worth; and, although in reading, of
course, we do not sift it out and regard it separately, it inevitably
affects us and mingles admiration with our hatred or horror.
All this, however, might apparently co-exist with absolute egoism and
total want of humanity. But, in the second place, it is not true that in
Iago this egoism and this want are absolute, and that in this sense he
is a thing of mere evil. They are frightful, but if they were absolute
Iago would be a monster, not a man. The fact is, he _tries_ to make them
absolute and cannot succeed; and the traces of conscience, shame and
humanity, though faint, are discernible. If his egoism were absolute he
would be perfectly indifferent to the opinion of others; and he clearly
is not so. His very irritation at goodness, again, is a sign that his
faith in his creed is not entirely firm; and it is not entirely firm
because he himself has a perception, however dim, of the goodness of
goodness. What is the meaning of the last reason he gives himself for
killing Cassio:
He hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly?
Does he mean that he is ugly to others? Then he is not an absolute
egoist. Does he mean that he is ugly to himself? Then he makes an open
confession of moral sense. And, once more, if he really possessed no
moral sense, we should never have heard those soliloquies which so
clearly betray his uneasiness and his unconscious desire to persuade
himself that he has some excuse for the villainy he contemplates. These
seem to be indubitable proofs that, against his will, Iago is a little
better than his creed, and has failed to withdraw himself wholly from
the human atmosphere about him. And to these proofs I would add, though
with less confidence, two others. Iago's momentary doubt towards the end
whether Roderigo and Cassio must be killed has always surprised me. As a
mere matter of calculation it is perfectly obvious that they must; and I
believe his hesitation is not merely intellectual, it is another symptom
of the obscure working of conscience or humanity. Lastly, is it not
significant that, when once his plot has begun to develop, Iago never
seeks the presence of Desdemona; that he seems to leave her as quickly
as he can (III. iv. 138); and that, when he is fetched by
Emilia to see her in her distress (IV. ii. 110 ff.), we fail to
catch in his words any sign of the pleasure he shows in Othello's
misery, and seem rather to perceive a certain discomfort, and, if one
dare say it, a faint touch of shame or remorse? This interpretation of
the passage, I admit, is not inevitable, but to my mind (quite apart
from any theorising about Iago) it seems the natural one.[118] And if it
is right, Iago's discomfort is easily understood; for Desdemona is the
one person concerned against whom it is impossible for him even to
imagine a ground of resentment, and so an excuse for cruelty.[119]
There remains, thirdly, the idea that Iago is a man of supreme
intellect who is at the same time supremely wicked. That he is supremely
wicked nobody will doubt; and I have claimed for him nothing that will
interfere with his right to that title. But to say that his intellectual
power is supreme is to make a great mistake. Within certain limits he
has indeed extraordinary penetration, quickness, inventiveness,
adaptiveness; but the limits are defined with the hardest of lines, and
they are narrow limits. It would scarcely be unjust to call him simply
astonishingly clever, or simply a consummate master of intrigue. But
compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of
supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how small and negative
Iago's mind is, incapable of Napoleon's military achievements, and much
more incapable of his political constructions. Or, to keep within the
Shakespearean world, compare him with Hamlet, and you perceive how
miserably close is his intellectual horizon; that such a thing as a
thought beyond the reaches of his soul has never come near him; that he
is prosaic through and through, deaf and blind to all but a tiny
fragment of the meaning of things. Is it not quite absurd, then, to call
him a man of supreme intellect?
And observe, lastly, that his failure in perception is closely connected
with his badness. He 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.
Iago never meant his plot to be so dangerous to himself. He knew that
jealousy is painful, but the jealousy of a love like Othello's he could
not imagine, and he found himself involved in murders which were no part
of his original design. That difficulty he surmounted, and his changed
plot still seemed to prosper. Roderigo and Cassio and Desdemona once
dead, all will be well. Nay, when he fails to kill Cassio, all may still
be well. He will avow that he told Othello of the adultery, and persist
that he told the truth, and Cassio will deny it in vain. And then, in a
moment, his plot is shattered by a blow from a quarter where he never
dreamt of danger. He knows his wife, he thinks. She is not
over-scrupulous, she will do anything to please him, and she has learnt
obedience. But one thing in her he does not know--that she _loves_ her
mistress and would face a hundred deaths sooner than see her fair fame
darkened. There is genuine astonishment in his outburst 'What! Are you
mad?' as it dawns upon him that she means to speak the truth about the
handkerchief. But he might well have applied to himself the words she
flings at Othello,
O gull! O dolt!
As ignorant as dirt!
The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the
marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity.
To the thinking mind the divorce of unusual intellect from goodness is a
thing to startle; and Shakespeare clearly felt it so. The combination of
unusual intellect with extreme evil is more than startling, it is