The audience is given special insight to Iago's wickedness through his soliloquies. An especially poignant soliloquy is found in Act II, Scene III. After Iago helps Cassio become drunk and belligerent, which leads to Cassio's dismissal from Othello's ranks, Iago urges Cassio to ask kind Desdemona for assistance. Once Cassio is gone, and Iago is left alone with the audience, he confesses his true motive: to "turn [Desdemona's] virtue into pitch, /And out of her own goodness make the net/That shall enmesh them all. (p.105)" He knows Desdemona will gladly help Cassio, and he plans to use this to inspire doubt and jealousy in her husband. What makes this speech remarkable is the careful method to his villainy. He opens the speech by stating that he cannot be judged badly for the advice he gives Cassio, because it is honest advice and will likely lead to Cassio getting his position back; however, even a reader can sense the conniving smile on Iago's lips when he makes this statement: he is fully aware that he is only playing innocent. He proceeds to inform us that he plans to poison Othello's mind with pestilent insinuations. His strong, precise language acts as a clue that not only is he aware of his guilt, he revels in it.
This criminal revelry is epitomized in
Titus Andronicus' Aaron. If this is Shakespeare's first play, as is hypothesized by most scholars, he introduced his villains with tremendous power. Aaron, like Iago, serves as a councilor to the violent perpetrators. Tamora and her sons are more ready to harm Titus than Othello is to kill Desdemona, but Aaron still serves as the final barrier between sanity and total violence. It is Aaron's goading words which incite Demetrius and Chiron to rape Lavinia. He goes a step further than suggestion: he details the forest and circumstance which will allow the boys to take what they desire. He has no motivation to harm those who he harms, except for the pleasure he gets from watching their pain.
By
Elizabeth Sparenberg -
I have been writing creatively since age five and I now hold a degree in English/Creative Writing from Seattle University. I enjoy writing on almost any subject, but I am especially interested in writing f...
