Othello 957Unlike Romeo and Juliet, though, Othello does
not rely on chance or the influence of the stars to
guide the romantic alliance to destruction. Instead,
Othello and Desdemona are undone by a profound
and unprecedented villain. Where other Shake-
spearean villains, such as Shylock from The Mer-
chant of Venice and Claudius from Hamlet, are made
compelling by being more human, Iago is strikingly
lacking in human nature. He never expresses doubt
or remorse, and he has an uncanny ability to main-
tain, with convincing vigor, whatever position most
serves his immediate needs. Indeed, Iago—perhaps
the only Shakespearean character who lies in solilo-
quies—has no genuine convictions at all. When
he tells Roderigo early in the play, “I am not what
I am” (1.1.65), he may be using an early modern
commonplace for “I am not what I seem to be,” but
in the mouth of the most vicious of Shakespearean
characters, the lines have an eerie literalness to them.
There is no real Iago; he is not what he is. There is
no man, no soul, only a provisional Iago, or, rather, a
series of provisional Iagos. That characteristic, that
Iago is finally unbound to truth of any kind, is per-
haps what makes him most terrifying.
Todd Pettigrew
JuStIce in Othello
When Othello contemplates poisoning the falsely
accused Desdemona, his ensign, Iago, suggests an
alternative means of execution: that she be strangled
in the marriage bed, “the bed she hath contaminated”
(4.1.200–201). Othello agrees to the alternative not
because of the practical benefits of this method of
execution—indeed, he has already worried that he
may not have the heart to murder her face-to-face—
but because “the justice of it pleases” (4.1.202). For
the Moor, strangulation emphasizes the way in
which his wife’s death will effect a moral balanc-
ing—Desdemona’s swift end weighing against her
protracted sin. This notion of sacrificial justice, and
especially its profound weakness as a moral system,
is basic to the thematic structure of Othello.
Central to the play’s exploration of this theme
is Iago, whose actions seem to stem, in large mea-
sure, from a sense that crime must answer crime.
He believes, for instance, that his wife has been
unfaithful with Othello, and such an unpunished
transgression, he says, “Doth, like a poisonous
mineral, gnaw my inwards / And nothing can or
shall content my soul / Till I am evened with him,
wife for wife” (2.1.288–290, my emphasis). Desde-
mona’s frequently praised virtue, Iago holds, must
be sacrificed to atone for the sins of his own wife
and the Moor.
Even more seriously, when Othello enters, ready
to kill Desdemona, his earlier fears that her “body
and beauty” might “unprovide” his mind are shown
to be reasonable, for, he says, her “balmy breath. . . dost almost persuade / Justice to break her
sword” (5.2.16–17). Later in the same scene, Othello
becomes enraged when Desdemona seems unwilling
to acknowledge her sins, labelling her a “perjured
woman” who “makes me call what I intend to do /
A murder, which I thought a sacrifice” (5.2.65–67).
Soon, of course, Othello will “roar” over the gross
injustice of his own actions, but before his final
suicide, he seeks to rebalance his own moral state
by insisting it be set down that “in Aleppo once” he
killed “a malignant and a turbaned Turk” who had
attacked a Venetian (5.2.351–353). The tale is so
apparently unconnected to the play’s other events
that it may seem irrelevant, but it accords with
the play’s underlying notions of sacrificial justice.
Othello hopes that his murder of Desdemona—and
he must acknowledge that it really has been a mur-
der—can be balanced by the earlier killing, allowing
the slaying of the turbaned Turk to serve as a sort of
retroactive sacrifice. More precisely, he believes that
that death, combined with his own, will strike the
appropriate balance, for he murders himself just as
he did the unnamed Turk in Aleppo.
The enduring irony of the play’s final act is that
the apparent, darkly elegant justice of Desdemona
paying for her lust in the very bed whose symbolism
she had profaned cannot please in any case, because
the original crime is illusory. There can be no genu-
ine sacrifice here because there has been no genuine
sin. Emilia’s supposed dalliances with Cassio and
the Moor, Desdemona’s supposed affair with Cas-
sio—they all come to naught, and Othello, for all his
talk of justice, is shown to be, as Emilia says, “as rash
as fire” (5.2.134). Strangely enough, it is Iago’s disin-
genuous advice to Roderigo that sums up Othello’s
error: “If the balance of our lives had not / one scale