152 Ideals in the Modern World
Later, Iago will take another step forward in laying out the
plot— and again sound rather like the playwright talking to himself
about his next move. “So will I turn her virtue into pitch, / And out
of her own goodness make the net / That shall enmesh them all”
(II.iii.360–362). With some foresight, but not too much (not enough
to inhibit his capacity for improvisation), Iago is weaving the tragic
net that will catch Desdemona and Othello, and while he does so,
Iago and his author almost seem to plot in tandem.
Is Shakespeare Iago? Both delight in impersonation, in play-
making, in creating scenes. Both are versatile, both protean, both
accomplished actors. Both are capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason, to think back to Keats’s memorable lines. But Shakespeare’s
objective, one suspects, is not the destruction of an individual fi gure,
like Othello. Shakespeare’s objective is the destruction of an ideal.
His is the force of mobility that attacks too- solid, monolithic Othello.
Shakespeare’s, at least in this play, is the energy that undoes heroic
perfection.
At the end of the play, after Othello has killed Desdemona and
destroyed his reputation, as well as scorching the reputation of the
hero proper, Othello reaches his most horrible moment. He tries
again to be the poet of his own life and to write himself an epic
epitaph. Before he dies in the noble Roman fashion— thrusting a
dagger into his chest— Othello seeks to have the last word: he as-
pires again to be both heroic actor and heroic poet. “Speak of me as
I am,” he says, “nothing extenuate.” But immediately he off ers a
litany of extenuations. “Then must you speak,” he says, “of one that
lov’d not wisely but too well; / Of one not easily jealous, but being
wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme” (V.ii.343–346). Not easily
jealous! Loved too well? Othello still but slenderly knows himself—
or rather he cannot understand the force that he has met with
in Iago.