“Drown Cats and Blind Puppies…”
While Shakespeare may have written “enterprises of great pitch and moment,” his strength was not doling out advice.
This occurred to me tonight while watching Othello. Every so often I’ll get the urge to watch one of the adaptations of an Early Modern play (Okay, so it’s more often than not. I can’t help it! I’ll shrivel and die without hearing iambic pentameter and glorious prose at least once a week). It isn’t always centered around any particular mood, but often I find myself drawn to specific plays for dealing with particular emotions, moods, or profound moments. Tonight’s mood prompted me to watch Othello for various reasons
I was reminded of the comical and popular notion that The Godfather contains all the answers to life’s questions (Incidentally, I’d be taking The Godfather–part 1 of course–on that little island escapade we discussed a while back). Surely the Bard, whose work has persisted in the minds of the audience for over 400 years, had more to say, right? Not so much. It would seem that Master Shakespeare’s major solution to every difficulty in life is Death. Well, suicide, murder, or (in the case of the comedies) running away to some enchanted forest (social death, if you will). I’m not really seeing any of these as viable options.
As a Tragedian, this shouldn’t surprise me–it’s not like I didn’t know this before. Any high school student worth his salt could tell you Shakespeare was full of death: Want all of your father’s inheritance? Kill folks. Want to be king? Kill your friend(s). Drive your husband to murder? Kill yourself (oh, but do go insane first). Someone took the position you feel was rightfully yours? Destroy their lives, plot their deaths, and then they’ll kill themselves to boot. The Empress destroyed your family bit by painstaking bit because you took her throne and killed her son? Hack off your sword arm, Kill your daughter, then cook the empress’ sons in a pie and feed it to her. Yeah, we know all this. For some reason, though, tonight’s realization was profound.
It had to do with Iago in particular. By far, he is my favorite villain in literature. Iago systematically plots and executes the downfall of no less than four people (five if you want to count Brabantio’s broken hearted death) with the precision of a Swiss watch. Every possible obstacle he encountered, he managed to use to his advantage through quick strategy, logic, and even humor. He understood how people thought, what motivated them, and played the puppet-master to terrifying effect. What makes Iago so brilliant is his methodology. He didn’t just rush in and slaughter those who “wronged” him. He poisoned their minds and let them destroy themselves.
Of course, he was discovered. But when, after killing Desdemona and watching Iago kill Emilia, Othello asks Lodovico to “Demand this demi-devil why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body,” Iago speaks his final lines: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know: From this time forth, I never will speak word.”
And he doesn’t. Ever. Lodovico charges Cassio to punish Iago as he sees fit, but there is no indication of how or whether it was ever done (many could argue that Cassio’s “soft” nature would lead him to take pity on his one time friend, “honest Iago”). It’s not the punishment that’s so troubling, though. It’s that Iago takes his reasoning with him and locks it away. It’s never made clear exactly why Iago does what he does. He alludes to a handful of possible reasons, but never proclaims any of them as his motivation. Even those reasons are made as soliloquies and meant only for the audience, so no one in Cypress (except Iago himself) has any inkling of reasoning. Othello, on the other hand, explains in painful detail why he killed Desdemona (even to her while doing it), and then why he kills himself. By not answering “Why” Iago retains complete control, even to the end.
So my troubled thinking comes from the fact that Iago doesn’t lose in the end. Yes, he’s “caught,” but his power is in his manipulation and control over the thoughts and actions of others. By refusing to explain himself, he forces everyone else to posit questions, to wonder. Only he has the final answer and he refuses to give it. His soul isn’t laid bare. He retains his pride. He may have destroyed others, but to him it was a successful enterprise. He accomplished what he set out to do, and at no point suggests that his own well being mattered a whit in the long run as long as the others were destroyed. So where’s the justice? There is none. None at all. That is why Othello is, in my opinion, Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. It’s not fair. There’s sad, then there’s tragic. Sad things have resolution and things go wrong anyway. It’s a pity. Tragic things are without resolution, without excuse and reason, and they aren’t at all fair.
I’ve often considered writing an adaptation of Othello, much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is of Hamlet, but rather than the work running concurrently with the play, I wanted to set it either before or after the play. Iago fascinates me in so many ways that I don’t have much of a choice but to write them.
Can you think of any other tragedies that are as profound? I’d love to hear them.
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Ahh, tragedy. One has not measured one’s own pace through life without measuring it against the shining example of classical tragedy. My personal favorite is Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrranus, aka Oedipus the King. It wasn’t enough that he when he was born, his ankles were pinned and he was set out in the woods to die, that he inadvertently killed his father, that he inadvertantly married his mother (the wife of the former king–who turned out to be his father), that his children were effectively his sisters, that his mother hung herself from the palace rafters. He then had to blind himself with his wife/mother’s brooch pins, and doom himself to old-age with self-induced blindness. Of course, that his daughters had to lead him about, care for their father/brother was a tragedy in itself, not unlike the fate of many women down through the ages of history, but for that, see Antigone… I frequently compare myself with oedipal tragedy…and consider my lot in life to be lucky in the extreme, comparatively.