IAGO WAS AN HONEST MAN AFTER ALL (3)

            The third scene of the third act is the key scene of the play. In it Iago is successful in sowing fatal suspicion into Othello's mind about Cassio's and Desdemona's honesty. The words "honest" and "honesty" occur about fifty times in the play, 22 times in Act III and 19 times alone in Scene 3.  Indeed, the wily insinuations through which Iago progressively undoes Othello's composure center around the ambivalence of the term "honesty". Honesty need not but can be merely outward. As Iago remarks in I.3, to the open and free nature of Othello: he that seems honest is actually honest.

            The short Scene 1 of Act III (56 lines) between Cassio and the clown (29 lines), Cassio and Jago (11 lines) and Cassio and Iago's wife Emilia (16 lines) may be considered as an overture to Scene 3, the axis of the play; Scene 2 (6 lines) is a mere transition scene, an extended stage direction so to speak, to ensure the coherence of the narrative plot. Scene 1, however, is dramaturgically important. Shakespeare prepares the ground for Scene III. There is some irony in the exchange between Cassio and the clown. Cassio asks the clown: "Dost thou hear, my honest friend?" The clown replies: "No, I hear not your honest friend, I hear you." The clown possibly means that he hears Cassio, not his honest friend Iago. Then enters Iago for a brief spell; when he leaves, Cassio remarks: "I never knew/ A Florentine more kind and honest." In his birth city Florence, Cassio never knew anybody who would have been more kind and honest than the Venetian Jago. In the subsequent exchange between Othello and Iago the words "honest" and "honesty" are repeated at drumbeat rhythm. They occur no less than six times from line 104 to line 165, a rhythm accelerated from line 382 to 390 where they occur 5 times.  

            After an incident engineered by Iago in Act II, Scene 3, Cassio has fallen into disfavour with Othello. Upon Iago's advice Cassio seeks the intermediation of Desdemona to be restored as Othello's Lieutenant: "For 'tis most easy/The inclining Desdemona to subdue,/In any honest suit... and then for her to win the Moor."(II.3)  Scene 3 starts with Cassio requesting Desdemona's intercession. On Othello's coming, Cassio stealthily leaves the room.

                OTHE.   Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?
                IAGO.     Cassio, my lord! No, sure, I cannot think it,
                                That he would sneak away so guilty-like,
                                Seeing you coming.
                OTHE.    I do believe 'twas he.

The first seed of suspicion is planted into Othello's mind.

                OTHE.    Indeed? Ay, indeed. Discern'st thou aught in that?
                                Is he not honest?
                IAGO.     Honest, my lord?
                OTHE.    Honest? Ay, honest.
                IAGO.     My lord, for aught I know.
                OTHE.    What dost thou think?
                IAGO.     Think, my lord?
                OTHE.    Think, my lord? By heaven, he echoes me,
                                As if there were some monster in his thought.
"Honest" in this passage can mean several things at the same time: sincere, upright, morally irreproachable, respectable. But in the next use the meaning is restricted to "self-control,, "not subject to passion," "sober judgment." Because Iago outwardly seems all that, Othello trusts him:
                And weigh'st thy words before thou givest them breath,
                Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more;
                For such things in a false disloyal knave
                Are tricks of custom; but in a man that's just
                They're close dilations, working from the heart,
                That passion cannot rule.

                By returning to the subject, Iago creates the impression he has not settled his mind about Cassio's honesty, thereby entertaining and fuelling Othello's suspicions. He even expresses, hypocritically, his regret about the possible non-accordance of outward and inward honesty, to which he has emphatically pledged himself as a vital necessity for survival in a competitive social environment in the first scene of the first act:

                IAGO.     For Michael Cassio,
                                I dare be sworn I think that he is honest.
                OTHE.    I think so too.
                IAGO.     Men should be what they seem;
                                Or those that be not, would they might seem none!
                OTHE.    Certain, men should be what they seem.
                IAGO.     Why then I think Cassio's an honest man.
                OTHE.    Nay, yet there's more in this.
                                I prithee, speak to me as to thy thinkings,
                                As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts
                                The worst of words.

In his play Cynthia's Revels (1600), Ben Jonson describes Crites as an incarnation of reasonableness and rationality. "A creature of a most perfect and divine temper: One, in whom the Humours and Elements are peaceably met, ... he is neither too phantastically melancholic, too slowly phlegmatic, too lightly sanguine, or too rashly choleric, but in all, so composed and ordered, as it is clear Nature went about some full work, she did more than make a man when she made him. His discourse is like his behaviour, uncommon, but not unpleasing; he is prodigal of neither. He strives rather to be that which men call judicious, than to be thought so; and is so truly learned, that he affects not to show it. He will think, and speak his thought both freely; but as distant from depraving another man's merit, as proclaiming his own. For his valour, 'tis such, that he dares as little to offer an injury as receive one. In sum, he hath a most ingenuous and sweet spirit, a sharp and seasoned wit, a straight Judgment, and a strong mind." It is the role Iago plays in this scene.  "This fellow's of exceeding honesty, /And knows all qualities, with a learned spirit,/ Of human dealings," Othello concludes (III.3.262). Before confronting Othello with the handkerchief spotted with strawberries in Cassio's possession, he is cautious and feigns to withhold his judgment on Cassio, because he might err and would not like to wrong him. When Othello becomes threatening and requires an ocular proof, he wallows in self-pity, complaining that his honesty but earns him inconveniences and scorn:

                IAGO.     O grace! O heaven defend me!
                                Are you a man? have you a soul or sense?
                                God be wi' you; take mine office. O wretched fool,
                                That livest to make thine honesty a vice!
                                O monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world,
                                To be direct and honest is not safe.
                                I thank you for this profit, and from hence
                                I'll love no friend sith love breeds such offense.
                OTHE.    Nay, stay; thou shouldst be honest.
                IAGO.     I should be wise; for honesty's a fool,
                                And loses that it works for.
                OTHE.    By the world,
                                I think my wife be honest, and think she is not;
                                I think that thou art just, and think thou art not.

Othello is subjected to a brainwash by Iago.

                About Baldesar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier Peter Burke very aptly observes: "One way of summarizing its author's achievements in a sentence would be to say that he helped adapt humanism to the world of the court, and the court to the world of humanism."[1] The Book of the Courtier was published in 1528. But in the previous paper we have seen that in the 1580s Torquato Tasso had arrived at the conclusion that Castiglione's mainly aesthetic ideal had been displaced by one that required prudence and dissimulation. In 1653 the Spaniard Balthasar Gracián recommended prudence and the art of "moving people's wills". The application of Gracián's rule does not necessarily lead to the emergence of a man like Iago. But the possibility that a Iago emerged from the observance of those rules did exist. Already Castiglione's "ideal courtier" had met with moderate criticisms, for the sprezzatura, the nonchalance, the "studied spontaneity", which he highlights as the hallmark of the ideal courtier, was, in the final analysis, the product of dissimulation. Later, as Tasso and Gracián inform us, it is dissimulation itself that becomes the chief trump of the courtier. And so courtly humanism could inherently generate a Iago as its worst-case scenario. Shakespeare obviously deplored it. Hamlet's endearing friend is his former fellow student at the University of Wittenberg, Horatio, the humanist scholar, not his former fellow students at the same university, the opportunistic courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

© Robert Detobel 2011


[1] Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the Courtier, Cambridge, 1995, p. 34.