Iago
- Created by: xelario
- Created on: 22-05-19 18:15
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- Iago
- Soliloquies reveal true intentions to audience, who become complicit
- He is established as a liar in the opening scene: 'I am not what I am'- Satan
- 'us the villain's accomplices... we watch his plot unfolding from his point of view' - Honigmann
- Stesienko says Iago 'actively seeks to corrupt his surroundings and exhibits remorselessness'
- with as little a web as this I will ensnare as great a fly as Cassio
- motive-hunting of motiveless malignity- Coleridge (evil for evil's sake, human nature)
- Charming nature + cruelty - complex relationship with audience, sublimely evil
- Samuel Johnson believed Iago was 'so conducted, that he is from the first scene to the last hated and despised'
- counterargue: we think not so much of the crimes they commit..as of the ambition (Lamb)
- Iago's enterprising ways are used by S to conflict audience experience + enamour them
- counterargue: we think not so much of the crimes they commit..as of the ambition (Lamb)
- Stesienko: "the audience can admire Iago for his charisma and efficaciousness...while simultaneously despising him for his amorality"
- Samuel Johnson believed Iago was 'so conducted, that he is from the first scene to the last hated and despised'
- Racism
- Postcolonial theorists would argue that Iago is motivated by racial hatred- after all, he chooses to destroy Othello's life and not that of any of the white characters
- Loomba says the play is 'a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence'
- Othello is an outsider yet he is also sexist
- 'an old black ram is tupping your white ewe' - hypersexualisation of Black men
- 'the devil will make a grandsire of you'
- association of Blackness with evil and satanic forces
- S. facilitates this by making the 'most villainous character a Venetian and its hero an outsider' -VMV
- Loomba says the play is 'a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence'
- Postcolonial theorists would argue that Iago is motivated by racial hatred- after all, he chooses to destroy Othello's life and not that of any of the white characters
- Soliloquies reveal true intentions to audience, who become complicit
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