The Properties of the Play
1. Iago and Inbetweenness
S
ince at least 1817, when Hazlitt called Iago “an amateur of tragedy in real life,” critics have remarked on the theatrical artistry of Othello’s ancient.1 Stanley Edgar Hyman makes the most concentrated case, picking up on Bradley’s claim that “Shakespeare put a good deal of himself into Iago”and arguing that “for Shakespeare, Iago is a merciless self-portrait as artist-criminal . . . and a therapeutic symbolic action of purging away the guilt of Shakespeare’s Faustian craft.”2 What this means in Hyman’s subsequent discussion is that Iago mimics the playwright’s craft in staging scenes and manipulating people, in creating illusions, in improvising to meet occasions, and in exhibiting a full repertory of lies ranging from the “flat untruth” to the “artistic suggestion-in-non-suggestion.”
Cataloging Iago’s stage practices is less meaningful, however, than regis-tering their staginess. In the tradition of the theatrical villain he takes a showy pleasure in sharing with the audience his knavery, his many motives, his manipulative cleverness, even the labor pains of his creative plotting—“How, how?—Let’s see” (1.3.395). By staginess, then, I mean mediation. Situated between two idealists, Othello and Desdemona, who believe they communi-cate not in but through words and bodies—that is, who think signs and ref-erents (and signifiers and signifieds) are so fast married that communication
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is virtually intuitive—Iago stands for mediation, for inbetweenness and the shaped made-up-ness of things.
The logocentric assumption of Othello and Desdemona that signifiers and signifieds are covertly married is emblematized by their own covert mar-riage, by the fact that they themselves appear on stage as husband and wife sans signifier—without any declarative ceremony. On the other hand, when Iago “marries” Othello at the end of Act 3, Scene 3, he insists on ceremony:
Do not rise yet.
[Kneels] Witness, you ever-burning lights above, You elements that clip us round about,
Witness that here Iago doth give up The execution of his wit, hands, heart,
To wronged Othello’s service! Let him command, And to obey shall be in me remorse,
What bloody business ever. [They rise.]
Although much of his insidious wooing is accomplished without words, relying on the suspiciousness of silence, when it comes to murder, Iago, like a bride marrying above her rank, is especially anxious to seal his good fortune in ritual. Or, rather, in a parody of ritual, for his business is to sub-vert mediation in all its forms, to set down the pegs that make not merely music but traditional ceremonies, honest words, gestures, facial expres-sions—signs, in short.
Indeed en-signs.
. . . [I]t is no accident that Iago is Othello’s ancient or ensign, his flag-carrier. He himself makes a point of it as he prepares to leave the streets and join the Moor:
Though I do hate him as I do hell-pains, Yet for necessity of present life,
I must show out a flag and sign of love,
Which is indeed but sign. That you shall surely find him, Lead to the Sagittary the raised search,
And there I will be with him. (1.1.156)
Iago’s stress on signs here draws attention to mediation, to signs as signs, to false signs that are indeed “but signs”—those in which the shadow of evil intent falls between sign and referent to fashion a lie, as Iago’s shadow will fall between Othello and the truth of Desdemona to fashion a murder. It draws attention also to the centaurian sign of the Sagittary which shows out
The Properties of the Play 23 a flag of barbarism, which is indeed but sign, before the inn where the Moor and his bride are presumably attempting to consummate a marriage.
But Iago’s inbetweenness is manifested not only within the play, in Ven-ice. His puns on his emblematic military rank also get in between the audi-ence and the Bradley-like illusion of Iago the Venetian. He is literally, he reminds us, a flag or sign of a man—in short, a character, not a person.
Or, rather, he is a metacharacter. As such, he undoes what is usually regarded as the business of the actor: to create a convincing illusion of reality by converting dialogue into speech, script into natural behavior. Instead, Iago turns his own seemingly impromptu speech back into dialogue and script, into the stuff of the stage. For him to say “I am not what I am” (1.1.66) and swear “by Janus” (1.2.33) is appropriate not merely because his Janus-like profile reveals knavery to us in the Globe while exhibiting “honesty” to his fellows in Venice but also because it reveals artifice to us and “reality” to them.
As a walking lie he emblematizes the pervasive doubleness of Shakespeare’s task, simultaneously to make and match: to make a play that matches life.
Iago’s soliloquies illustrate this perfectly. In them he at once muses silently in Venice and speaks publicly in the Globe. Insofar as soliloquy is a means of suggesting depth and inwardness of character, his soliloquies lend him a certain substance as a real “person” in Venice, the only person with an articulate inner life; but insofar as soliloquy is a device to keep an audience informed, they sabotage his reality and declare him an artificial stage figure, a nephew of the old Vice, the only character who knows and unabashedly admits he is a character in a play—hence, a metacharacter. When Iago comes forward to address the audience in soliloquy, he denies his equality with the other characters. He strides into the mirror of art, only to pause in half-out and assert both his metadramatic discreteness from the realities of Venice and his illusionistic discreteness from the realities of London. This violation of the realistic “rules” of the play observed by the other characters on stage is a theatrical equivalent to his violation of the communal mores observed by other “people” in Venice.3 To him, rules, norms, and principles, wherever they exist, are items of blind faith to which he issues a devilish non serviam. Only fools like Othello have such faith, and they pay dearly for it.4
Iago’s doubleness is in the Freudian sense uncanny—the familiar given an eerie turn. For doubleness on stage is familiar enough. As Bert O. States points out, the actor never quite fully invests his role:
He is always slightly quoting his character. . . . No matter how he acts, there is always the ghost of a self in his performance (not to be confused with egotism). Even the most unsophisticated theatergoer can detect something else in the characterization, a
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superconsciousness that could be nothing other than the actor’s awareness of his own self-sufficiency as he moves between the contradictory zones of the illusory and the real, vraisemblance and vrai, seeming and being. . . . 5
I wonder, however, if Iago may not invert this slight divestiture. In his case, is it not the character rather than the actor who is the ghost, so that instead of an actor quoting Iago’s lines we have Iago speaking his own lines through the voice of the actor? In other words, does Iago the demonic character take parasitic possession of the actor who plays him? Well, of course that’s fanciful. But surely not unactable. To gain such an impression, the actor would have to play not just Iago but himself as well—himself in the role of an actor possessed by a character, compelled at times almost against his will, somewhat puppetlike, to say what he says and do what he does. At the end of Act 3, Scene 3, when Iago says to Othello “I am your own forever,”
the diabolic spirit would pass like ectoplasm from the actor playing Iago to him who plays Othello. Thus exorcised, the actor would now be free to play his role as Iago like everyone else, and Iago would return to being merely a character. Now it is Othello who becomes possessed and driven by an alien spirit, who turns Janus-faced and double, who in his worst moments—say, in the dialogue leading up to his epilepsy—finds his voice uncannily taking on the accents of Iago.
In any event, just as Iago gets in between and destroys the marriage of Othello and Desdemona, so he gets in between and deconstructs the audi-ence’s theatrical marriage to the illusion of reality in Venice. As a johannes factotum of the theater himself—actor, director, playwright, prompter—Iago is the antithesis of realism. Of course as a tempter to evil he relies on the realistic appearance of honesty, and philosophically his view of the world is crudely realistic. Metadramatically, however, he makes it clear that the emperor of Realism is clothed in highly visible quotation marks when he is around. Without him, we would religiously indulge our Coleridgean poetic faith, our natural talent for seeing through signs and suspending disbelief.
Taking a cue from the idealistic Othello and Desdemona, we might well assume that our epistemological marriage to the events in Venice were made in heaven, not fashioned by vulgar theatrical ceremonies on the boards of the Globe. But Iago intervenes—the impediment to the marriage of true minds in the theater as well as in Venice. Instead of saying “the perfect ceremony of love’s rite,” which is the poet’s proper function (Sonnet 23), Iago the poet manqué substitutes an imperfect ceremony, a black mass parody of a wedding in which he takes Desdemona’s place and speaks fair words with devilish meanings. Had Desdemona played the interior playwright, surely we should
The Properties of the Play 25 have had a true troth plighted betwixt us and the depicted world. But in between us and the light of her truth appears Iago, to cast the shadow of a lie across Shakespeare’s stage.
Not that Shakespeare is defining his craft as a lie. Rather, I should think, he is defining it in this case as a tragedy. To say “the perfect ceremony of love’s rite” is the proper function of the comic rather than the tragic poet, and in that role Shakespeare does more than his share of haling young lovers before the altar of his hymeneal art. The perfect ceremony of tragedy, however, is not a wedding but a killing, and as a participant in that ceremony Iago is functional in the extreme: Shakespeare wields him like a ritual knife in an action that drives straight to the heart. Thus in creating Iago, Shakespeare had no need to purge himself of the “guilt of his Faustian craft,” as Hyman suggests. His craft is the tragic craft; it calls for Iago to do as he murderously does and for Shakespeare to write as he murderously writes. It is no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.