Samuel Johnson
“The character of lago is so conducted that he is from the first scene to the last hated and despised”
Charles Lamb
Shakespeare’s criminal characters: “we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity”
WH Auden
“Joker in the pack” “practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind”
Harold Goddard
“Highest intellectual gifts”
S T Coleridge
“The motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”
“passionless character, all will in intellect”
Neville Coghill
‘Psychologically lago is a slighted man, powerfully possessed by hatred against a master who (as he thinks) has kept him down, and by envy for a man he despises who has been promoted over him.’
Jacob de Villiers
‘Iago has no respect for fellow human beings’
A C Bradley
‘The almost superhuman art of Iago’
‘Goodness annoys Iago because he has been overlooked’
Bernard Spivak
lago is best understood as a version of the stock character Vice, a personification of evil with a dangerously privileged relationship with the audience.
Anna Jameson
To the brutish coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection… only a perversion of taste; her bashful modesty only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to listen to him.”
Kenneth Muir
“the story of a melodramatic villain entrapping a credulous fool.”
Janet Suzman
“Othello’s dreadful humiliation… at the hands of a plausible white thug.”
William Empson
“The fifty-two uses of honest and honesty in Othello are a very queer business:
there is no other play in which Shakespeare worries a word like that… everybody calls lago honest once or twice, but with Othello it becomes an obsession; at the crucial moment just before Emilia exposes lago he keeps howling the word out.”
Helen Gardner
‘He is monstrous because, faced with the manifold richness of experience, his only reaction is calculation and the desire to manipulate … Ultimately, whatever its proximate motives, malice is motiveless; that is the secret of its power and its horror, why it can go unsuspected and why its revelation always shocks.’
Germaine Greer
‘We no longer feel, as Shakespeare’s contemporaries did, the ubiquity of Satan, but lago is still serviceable to us, as an objective correlative of the mindless inventiveness of racist aggression. lago is still alive and kicking and filling migrants’ letterboxes with excrement.’
Sean McEvoy
‘The audience becomes complicit in lago’s intention and, like it or not, is soon involved in his vengeful plotting. He actually asks them what he should do … Many actors who have played the
part have been capable of getting members of the audience to share lago’s delight in his own powers of evil invention!
J R Andreas
‘Iago is not motiveless but clearly motivated by racism and hatred…’
William Hazlitt
‘Iago is “motivated by power”, something “natural to man”’
Marilyn French
‘All characters who slightly encourage female independence are destroyed by Iago’
F R Leavis
‘The mind that undoes him (Othello) is not Iago’s but his own’
Kott
‘Iago is a diabolical stage manager’
Empsom
‘A good deal of the ‘motive hunting’ of the soliloquies must, I think, be seen as part of Iago’s ‘honesty’; he is quite open to his own motives or preferences and interested to find out what they are’
