Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among
poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same
way, as Malone pointed out, Othello's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!'
(IV. i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words at III. iii.
403.]
LECTURE VI
OTHELLO
1
Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the
character of Iago. Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly
conceived, is a far greater figure and a less repellent. His physical
deformity, separating him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for
his egoism. In spite of his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a
mere individual: he is the representative of his family, the Fury of the
House of York. Nor is he so negative as Iago: he has strong passions, he
has admirations, and his conscience disturbs him. There is the glory of
power about him. Though an excellent actor, he prefers force to fraud,
and in his world there is no general illusion as to his true nature.
Again, to compare Iago with the Satan of _Paradise Lost_ seems almost
absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's man exceed Milton's Fiend in
evil. That mighty Spirit, whose
form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined and the excess
Of glory obscured;
who knew loyalty to comrades and pity for victims; who
felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined
His loss;
who could still weep--how much further distant is he than Iago from
spiritual death, even when, in procuring the fall of Man, he completes
his own fall! It is only in Goethe's Mephistopheles that a fit companion
for Iago can be found.
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