Style>Substance

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I hate that theory so much, firstly because it blames Iago’s horrendous, despicable actions on homosexuality, but principally because it blames them on love.

Iago is generally considered to be Shakespeare’s most terrifying villain. He’s fantastically complex. He’s charming. He’s manipulative. He is cruel and obsessive. He lacks empathy. He’s jealous. He’s two-faced, he’s honey-tongued.

And do you want to know what motivates him? Do you want to know what makes this awful, terrifying man act the way he does? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not love.

It’s hatred. Specifically, racism.

That’s right, Shakespeare’s worst - and best - villain is a racist white man, and his racism is what makes him so terrible.

Iago functions as a mouthpiece for the prejudices and stereotypes of Venetian society. He resents that he, a white man, is inferior to a black man; that he must serve a black man; that he can only be promoted at a black man’s leisure. The play begins with Iago and Roderigo talking about Othello, viciously insulting him, describing him with racial stereotypes, and evoking lurid images of him having sex with Desdemona. He is “thicklips”, “the devil”, “an old black ram… topping your white ewe”, “Barbary horse”, “making the beast with two backs.” Between the two of them they evoke most of the reigning stereotypes about Africans in Elizabethan England. Blackness connoted bestiality, ugliness, lust, treachery, and the demonic. Desdemona’s father Brabantio summons a similar image of Othello, and accuses him of using witchcraft to seduce his daughter - why else would she marry him? Furthermore, Othello’s blackness is a taint - he is “sooty”, and Desdemona is soiled by sleeping with him.

But when we meet Othello and he speaks, he is nothing like those gross stereotypes the Venetians dragged up. He is noble, honest and honourable, with a distinctive, almost musical, and slightly exotic speech pattern. His language is profound and beautiful, and he himself is compelling and complex. The Venetians are wrong about him - we see it clear as day. But Iago is nevertheless set on tearing him down, and continues to treat him as though he is a devil or a beast.

As he puts his foul plans into motion, Iago speaks directly to the audience, revealing his state of mind in asides and monologues, and it makes audience members hugely uncomfortable because they feel complicit in his plans. He’s standing up there revealing these awful schemes, pronouncing how much he loathes Othello, and speaking in unequivocally racist terms, and we do nothing to stop him. It makes us feel like we’re agreeing with him, like we’re agreeing that we should victimise this black man and the white woman he married. And we hate it. We want to stop him, we want to save Othello, we feel so strongly for him. There’s a famous story about an audience member in the 19th century who actually shot an actor playing Iago because he couldn’t bear it any longer. 

If you consider the time period Othello was written in, this becomes incredible. Here is a probably very racist audience suddenly confronted with the ugliness of their racism through the character of Iago, and they are subsequently overcome with sympathy and empathy for a black man.

Othello is a black man living in white Venetian society. Through valour and victory he has earned respect and prestige, but despite his good character and all he has done for Venice, he is still treated as an outsider and is a constant victim of racial prejudice. Throughout the play he is abused or insulted for his blackness, and even comes to internalise some of those prejudices. The anxieties caused by these societal pressures, the need to fit in with Venetian society, and the martial culture of toxic masculinity, are all explicitly referenced and explored, so it is no wonder that Othello becomes his own worst enemy and destroys what he loves. Venetian society tore him down, and tore Desdemona down for marrying him; is it really so strange that he ended up finishing the job?

Othello is the victim of a racist society and toxic masculinity, and Iago is that society’s primary agent, the embodiment of those racist and sexist ideals that make monsters of their own victims. If you take all these nuances and brush them aside to argue that Iago’s villainy comes from him struggling with repressed desires for Othello, or from latent homosexuality, then you are ignoring or downplaying the horrors of racism that this play so brutally confronts. Homosexuality does not make Iago a villain, and love for Othello does not motivate him. He hates Othello, and he hates him because he is black.