This post is a continuation of the critic A. C. Bradley's discussion of Iago's motivations, so read the post Iago: a boy who torments frogs before reading this post.
'Iago's longing to satisfy the sense of power is, I think, the strongest of the forces that drive him on. But there are two others to be noticed.
One is the pleasure in an action very difficult and perilous and, therefore, intensely exciting. This action sets all his powers on the strain. He feels the delight of one who executes successfully a feat thoroughly congenial to his special aptitude, and only just within his compass; and, as he is fearless by nature, the fact that a single slip will cost him his life only increases his pleasure. His exhilaration breaks out in the ghastly words with which he greets the sunrise after the night of the drunken tumult which has led to Cassio's disgrace: 'By the mass, 'tis morning. Pleasure and action make the hours seems short.' Here, however, the joy in exciting action is quickened by other feelings. It appears more simply elsewhere in such a way as to suggest that nothing but such actions gave him happiness, and that his happiness was greater if the action was destructive as well as exciting. We find it, for instance, in his gleeful cry to Roderigo, who proposes to shout to Brabantio in order to wake him and tell him of his daughter's flight:
Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell
As when, by night and negligence, the fire
Is spied in populous cities.
All through that scene; again, in the scene where Cassio is attached and Roderigo murdered; everywhere where Iago is in physical action, we catch this sound of almost feverish enjoyment. His blood, usually so cold and slow, is racing through his veins.
But Iago, finally is not simply a man of action; he is an artist. His action is a plot, the intricate plot of a drama, and in the conception and execution of it he experiences the tension and the joy of artistic creation.'
In comparing Iago to a dramatist A. C. Bradley says 'Shakespeare put a good deal of himself into Iago'. Bradley points to Iago's soliloquies where he broods over his plot, drawing out an outline and puzzling how to develop it and then gradually clarifying it as he works upon it or lets it unfold. Bradley says Iago's musings are similar to the musings a playwright has in the early stages of dramatic composition.
'Such, then, seems to be the chief ingredients of the force which, liberated by his resentment at Cassio's promotion, drives Iago from inactivity into action, and sustains him through it. And, to pass to a new point, this force completely possesses him; it is his fate. It is like the passion with which a tragic hero wholly identifies himself, and which bears him on to his doom.'
Bradley believes that Iago is caught in his own web, and 'could not liberate himself if he would'. He notes that Iago 'never shows a trace of wishing to do so, not a trace of hesitation, of looking back, or of fear, any more than of remorse'.
Bradley states: 'Iago's fate - which is himself - has completely mastered him: so that in the later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design built on so many different lies forces itself on the reader, Iago appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man absolutely infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.'
To continue reading this discussion follow the link below to p.154 of "Othello" from A. C. Bradley's book Shakespearean Tragedy available to read online.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33323542/Othello
A. C. Bradley (1851-1935) was a professor at Oxford. His book Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) was one of the most significant works of Shakespearean criticism of the twentieth century. Bradley has sometimes been criticised for writing of Shakespeare's characters as though they were real people.
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