Iago: a little boy who torments frogs?

The literary critic A. C. Bradley discusses Iago's motivations and suggests that far from being a Machiavellian genius Iago is ‘moved by forces which he does not understand’.

‘Passion, in Shakespeare’s plays, is perfectly easy to recognize. What vestige of it, of passion unsatisfied or passion gratified, is visible in Iago? None: that is the very horror of him. He has less passion than an ordinary man, and yet he does things, frightful things. The only ground for attributing to him, I do not say passionate hatred, but anything deserving the name of hatred at all, is his own statement, ‘I hate Othello’, and we know what his statements are worth.

Iago is moved by forces which he does not understand.

So what are Iago’s motivations? A disinterested love of evil? A delight in the pain of others?

The boy who torments another boy, as we say, 'for no reason,' or who without any hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with his victim’s pain, not from any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly because this pain is the unmistakable proof of his own power over his victim. So it is with Iago.

Iago’s thwarted sense of superiority wants satisfaction. What fuller satisfaction could it find than the consciousness that he is the master of the General who has undervalued him and of the rival who has been preferred to him, that these worthy people, who are so successful and popular and stupid, are mere puppets in his hands, but living puppets, who at the motion of this finger must contort themselves in agony, while all the times they believe that he is their one true friend and comforter. It must have been an ecstasy of bliss to him. And this, granted a most abnormal deadness of human feeling, is however horrible, perfectly understandable. There is no mystery in the psychology of Iago; the mystery lies in a further question, which the drama has not to answer, the question why such a being should exist.'

To continue reading this discussion follow the link below to p.150-151 of 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.