Iago & Othello, Part I

In Scene Four, Act One of William Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Iago leads Othello in a train of thought that causes him to mimic Iago’s pattern of rhetoric. Iago is the villain of the story and has vowed revenge against General Othello, whom he feels overlooked him with respect for a promotion in the service of the military. Othello is known for his valiant and honest disposition, but these characteristics have made him credulous to Iago’s scheming. The two of them have known each other for many years, a span of time that has allowed a bond of trust to form, but for Othello, the trusting nature of this bond is what provides the medium for Iago to enact his vengeance upon him for what he feels was an unfair exchange of duty in friendship. That Iago is wholly trusted by Othello is Iago’s power to deceive him with near impunity.

By the time this scene appears, Iago has already met with success concerning the outcome of his destructive plans thus far, and appears to have developed a rhythm in his pattern of deceit. When Othello mimics Iago’s words, Othello is unwittingly allowing Iago’s manipulative tactics to flood his thoughts with appalling and intolerable revelations that fuel his suspicion. The mimicry is charged with apprehension, where each heightened response to Iago’s suggestions are loaded with Othello’s reaction to the alleged situation of his wife’s infidelity. For Othello, the very hint of such a situation is to be deplored. Othello has known Desdemona for a considerable amount of time so that a deep, emotional attachment has formed; their love is more than one of lovers infatuated by the flesh, rather, their love has taken on characteristics of devotion, honor and sincerity for one another. “I cannot speak enough of this content,” declares Othello in Act Two, Scene One, speaking on the joy of seeing his wife after being separated during their journeys. These deeply seated feelings lie at the root of Othello’s flare in listening to Iago unsettling implications.

Iago, on the contrary, is fueled by the notion that Othello is succumbing to the charms of his nefarious work. His behavior has already shown him to be a feisty, industrious person. He has expended clever, zealous effort to make sure Roderigo and Cassio fight, and has even taken the initiative to perform the risky task of planting evidence in Cassio’s room. Having these incidents already panned out for him have allowed the force of his intentions to propel his scheming right along. When he gets Othello alone, he utilizes the platonic intimacy that spans between them to play him, where Iago’s feistiness drives his tactical use of rhetoric to incite suspicion and anger in Othello. Iago is intellectually quick, and with each spoken confirmation of Othello’s excited thoughts, Iago quickly fills in the spaces with inflammatory suggestions that further Othello’s distrust in Desdemona.

To expound on the character of Iago, the soliloquy following his moment with Roderigo at the beginning of the play reveals something of a supercilious person enraptured by the power that his diminished sense of self has created. After being looked over for a promotion in Othello’s service, he capitalizes on his suspicion of Othello having once slept with his wife to further justify his hatred of him. This is Iago utilizing what he can to heighten the vengeful emotions that blanket his underlying feelings of inferiority. He admits to using Roderigo for his money, an admission that presents his inclination for abnormal thinking. That he is unwilling to suggest a healthy way for Roderigo to accept he will never have Desdemona, and that he seeks to use these frustrations to his advantage, playing on Roderigo’s naiveté to plot small portions of a larger scheme to bring Othello down, make Iago unstable. These aspects and intentions incline his personality toward the sociopathic; he is truly uncaring of another’s feelings and emotions.

Later, the true monster in Iago is revealed through literal acts of physical aggression. During an ambush to end Cassio’s life, Iago sneaks from the shadows to slash his leg when he figures out that matters aren’t going as planned. The act is cowardly but decisive, and is representative of the sociopathology working within him, making him adaptable to such unforeseen circumstances in the most heinous of ways. As soon as he calculates the risk of having his plot uncovered by the mishap in what should have been Cassio’s death, he commits his most depraved act: he murders Roderigo. This hasty and callous behavior is Iago the megalomaniac out of control. The act of murder with no hesitation nor conscience is the culminating result of Iago’s mentally disfigured way of thinking.

Iago & Othello, Part II

The character of Othello stands in contrast to Iago, but only to a certain degree before both of their behaviors become similar in methodology. Othello is a general in the Venetian Military, a worthy accomplishment that extends from the days when he was a foot soldier, a time when he was even taken captive during battle and sold into slavery. He speaks of “distressful strokes” that occurred in his childhood to Desdemona, details that add to the tale of his path to glory through struggle and hardship. Othello is also moor, meaning he is from a land where the people have darker skin color, a fact that implies the specter of racism he has had to contend with through the years. In spite of his proclivity for struggle, Desdemona’s father is a senator who once loved Othello, as this was the chance circumstance by which the two lovers met. That this senator loved Othello, and that Othello ultimately became a general, are honors that show Othello was able to face daunting challenges and overcome them, all the while earning his fair share of respect in the process.

Standing in opposition to Othello’s valiance as a distinguished individual are the shadows of his aggravations that have made him who he is. Othello’s path to becoming a general was embroiled in conflict and tactical toiling. The ability of a general is to make critical and expedient decisions in the face of these often trying situations, a trait that Othello appears to have possessed, but one that does not serve him well in his personal affairs. Not long after Iago begins to coax him into believing Desdemona is sleeping with Cassio, does his ability to think critically dissipate into curious, irrational behavior. Othello’s demand for results on the battlefield is such an ingrained component of his ego, that when he is not able to compute the meaning of Desdemona‘s platonic affection for Cassio, the soldier and general in him perceives an enemy and demands for a resolution. In battle, he may have acted on impulse with regard to an impacting, devastating event; in the case of his wife championing Cassio, he impulsively hits her across the face. This preview into the realm of domestic violence is a preview into the demise of Othello. That Othello is subject to this type of behavior makes him unstable, and not far in disposition from that of his enemy, Iago.

By the end of the play, Othello and Iago have developed similar behaviors that signal the success of Iago’s devilish machinations. Both have become servants to the sin of murder. The sad irony is the drastic change that evolved in Othello’s disposition as a person. Where he was once able to negotiate conflict, he is now a part of the conflict. Where he was once communicable and enjoined with the love of his life, he is now the one who is to plot her murder. Where he was once of the type to be recognized as a voice of authority, he is now the subject of authority. The change speaks volumes in the overall personality of Othello, of whose trials and tribulations of soldiering and problems of racism have seeped to the surface of his temperament as impatience and the incapability and unwillingness to seek out, validate, and truly understand his wife’s behavior. Though Iago’s revenge lies at the foundation of Othello’s madness, Othello himself is ultimately and truly the one responsible for the malaise that is his enraged jealousy.

Both Iago and Othello have dealt with issues that have caused them to experience inner conflict, character traits that make them alike as much as they are different. Othello’s aspect of skin color juxtaposes Iago’s situation of inferiority: Iago’s struggle with being a second rate individual as a common soldier to that of Cassio’s elitist standing, is similar to Othello’s life as a colored person among a largely non-colored populous. Othello’s jealousy at Desdemona is also not far from different to Iago’s jealousy of Cassio: to be jealous in general is a symptom of pent-up, life-circumstantial struggle. Therefore, the verdict is that both Othello and Iago are guilty of themselves, where either of them could have faced their situations with level-headedness and rationale. Though Iago’s mental instability was observable throughout the entire play, Othello’s rapid change from a relatively calm individual to a person willing to commit murder is confirmation of unresolved issues that consequently, as is evident in the both of them, have manifested themselves in negative, volatile behavior.

The Edge of Love & Dylan Thomas

The Edge of Love is a high priced, finely crafted film drawing upon the tragedies of the London Bombing Blitz during the early part of WWII, while at the same time recounting a portion of the life of famous poet Dylan Thomas. The film makers grace the viewer with a barrage of elegant smiles and seductive charms endowed by none other than the highly fashionable, Ms. Keira Knightly, and her high class antics come freshly augmented and seasoned by the all-out swinging, Ms. Sienna Miller. But aside from watching these two lovely ladies flirt with the camera for nearly two hours, the story underlies the journey of a man gone to war and back as a sidelining distraction to the situation of the famous poet during his attempt to win out in a seeming love triangle.

With the use of clever and witty dialog craftily used early on, the somewhat gloomily filmed movie eventually morphs into a pall of seriousness. A soldier has fallen in love with the red lipped singer only to marry her and then venture off to war. In this regard a slice of the horror of war is brought to the screen in conjunction with scenes of pastoral life at home, where the domestic situation of child rearing and scandalous love-making unfold. Sitting at the helm of such dramatics lies the figure of Dylan Thomas, portrayed here as somewhat of a mild-mannered alpha male with a tinge of lacking in the morality department.   

Played by Matthew Rhys, the suave but flagrant Dylan Thomas marches through the world pounding whiskey, sexing women, and touting some of the best poetry ever written, all the while depicting himself as an honorable man. The accuracy is not far from the truth, as the real life poet would tell those he knew, “An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, someone who drinks as much as you.” While we learn of Dylan’s bad behavior in the movie, we fail to learn of the countless hours he wrote and toured, nor do we learn much of his life as a child much less the incidents surrounding his untimely death.

Overall, the movie is a film about love, though one would have to ultimately decide upon where this love is falling, and this would have to be the allure of the story. He loves her, but he is married; the two girls become best friends and sleep together, but he wants them both; a soldier wants to get married and stands third wheel to the triangle, yet the need to mature and grow up surfaces as the necessity to make critical life decisions arise. The film has been crafted by the screenwriter with excellent talent, and research would have to be conducted as to the entirety of the truth lying at its base.

pic by wiki

As for literary heroes, Dylan Thomas stands gargantuan and needs no validation: he was one of the greats. Renowned for his passionate recitals, the man could have written poetry in his sleep;  the enhancement of a common phrase came so natural that to engage conversation with him, one would have noticed rarely a misplacement of thought. Unfortunately for people graced with the gift of startling creativity and genius, the fabled story of misfortune seems to go hand in hand with the course of their lives, and the life of Dylan Thomas was no exception.

Lord Bryron 1788-1824

 

George Gordon Byron, if known for anything in the entire span of late history, is renowned for his status, by today’s common standard, as the world’s first followed mega-star. Described by Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Byron is none other than “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Byron’s reputation for being a dashing, charismatic, elegant, scandalous, blunt, womanizing, rebellious, talented yet moody young man is unparalleled. His lifetime stands at the apex of a time when some of the greatest literature was ever written, an epoch of literary output that includes a chance summer rendezvous upon the shores of Lake Geneva that provided the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

While Byron’s talent incited a passionate flare in young women, Byron’s attitude toward the establishment incited a range of socialite and political men to dislike him. For Byron, this fact was irrelevant to the impetus that drove him, but not immune to consequences. Exiled from England, Byron came to know a rich life abroad amid the countries of Europe, an experience that only enhanced his vivaciousness and made him all the more appealing to the women he seduced. He was a man of moderate principle with a knack for scandal, and his witty conversation combined with his uncontrollable mood swings and powerful good looks made him the subject (intentionally or not) of his own work, as well as the work of other famous authors. The characters in his poetry resemble himself, an aspect of his career that drew so much attention, yet his life is fictitiously portrayed in other works that are anything but humble. In John Polidori’s Vampyre, vampiric folk tales are introduced into British lore by depicting a vampire who frequents English social circles, a work of fiction that today, still echoes the elegance and charisma that accompanies the vampire model. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray bears an undeniable resemblance to Byron, a man who seemingly never turns old or ugly, of whose notoriety extends from a long line of wealth.

Byron’s life incurred the existence of the Byronic hero, a self-destructive man hiding an undesirable past, whose cockiness and iconoclastic tastes are abhorred by contemporaries; a man abounding with promiscuity, yet perputually unsuccessful with love; a man paradoxically exiled yet desired, of whom, in the same vein of paradox, withholds such talent that his ego makes him unutterably bored with life.

Byron did not pass without leaving the world with a sense of his ability to understand his own faults, where often times he openly admitted his inability to control his sprightly and sardonic pronouncements no matter the mood, and he is known for having engaged the most bizarre twist of endeavors by leaping from a person meticulously scribing great poetic works, to organizing rebellions against the most ill-intended powers that threaten, and it is for this reason that Lord Byron is renowned as a hero in present day Greece.

The heroic acts did not prevent Byron’s early death, nor did it relinquish the aftertaste he left in England after his blatant exile, at least not until about 150years later when a memorial was finally erected to him by sheer force of pervading fame, at Westminster Abbey.      

William Blake 1757-1827

Little may many know that the bizzare figure appearing tattooed on the back of the infamous protagonist, Dolarhyde, in the newer movie version of Thomas Harris’ novel, Red Dragon, is an abstract painting by William Blake. Yet Blake’s work as a painter does not wholly represent the extent of his creativity and influence upon aestheticism proceeding the great age of the Early Romantics. Blake wrote many poems, and he drew, painted and plated pictures to accompany the drama unfolding within every poem, with extras to consider. Aside and beneath these cursory references to the man Blake, lies the deeper man, the inconclastic and cognitively intuitive rebel.

Blake was the type of person whom, as a child, would speak of visions of angels in trees. He was intellectually eccentric, and the world within his mind abounded with concepts of, as the bible would call it, “principalities.” A mixed assortment of emotions collected within his frame of thinking, for on the one hand, he was known to have spent hours and hours making sketches of old churches to the sound of chanting monks in the background, where on the other hand, he possessed a vital passion for equality among humans, with such convictions as hatred of slavery.  Being aware of such frightful events such as the Reign of Terror occurring during his day, and possessing such great predisposition for in-depth thought on elevated subjects of spirituality and the human condition, it is no small wonder his works strike an odd chord to the common observer and reader. The conglomerataion of darkness/death, light/love of humanity, and biblical influence unfolding in Blake’s mind could only explain a portion of the vast volumes of complicated poetry that comprise the enormous total of Blake’s work. Upon a reading of Blake, Coleridge once commented the man was none other than a genius.  

Blake was obsessed with the notion of control, or better phrased, the notion of being controlled. He strongly voiced his antagonism toward the opression of society’s leadership at the time through his veiled form of writing. He also felt strongly about the influence of religious dogma, and was torn by his split opinion concerning the French Revolution. Through these emotions emerges the world of Blake, the product of his angelic visions that seem to speak to him the prospect of men being blinded men and the nature of truth he believes lies within the spirit of every human. Blake is a visionary whose inclination toward the arts prevents him from being a societal leader, but rather, a prophet writing on behalf of what the world could or should be. In a famous poem, he is known for reciting the deplorable life state of a young child who is doomed to the job of cleaning chimneys while aristocrats and political nobility live affluent, opulence abounding in spite of the sordid and decrepit reality of child neglect.

As he had spent much of his life as an artist, his poems are recognized as existing in symbiosis with the art he drew for them, for it has been stated that without the images he so tediously created, reading Blake simply doesn’t work. The effort Blake put into these books of poems limited the amount of his self-published works, with copies ranging in numbers below 28, 16, & 9 for each print, such that to own one such book would be to own a book worth millions of dollars in value.

Though Blake is recognized as standing among the stars of the Early Romantics, his work his long and drawn out with extensive even grueling proportion, and touches on subjects that not only differ in aesthetic quality from his contemporaries, but are immensely complex, a cumbersome fact that for the most part, diverts the average reader. Blake was not well accepted during his time for this reason, but like many others, of whom their talent transcends the day and age of their surroundings, he has become widely known as a man praised for his tedious artistic labor and ability to think, and his accomplishments, unique unto themselves, make William Blake more of a singular enigma rather than a realized member of the Romantic Era.

Charlotte Smith 1749-1806

In 1784, Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets received great praise from the literary establishment, thus establishing her worth as a writer. Smith’s ability to depict scenes of  natural beauty combined with the melancholy led her to be recognized as influential in the birth of Romanticism. Drawing on these scenes of beauty and the sublime, her work is known to have influenced novelists and poets such as Radcliffe and Wordsworth. Though her early works draw lightly upon the Gothic type, she strayed from dwelling upon subjects of the supernatural, partaking more of an interest in the political and social issues of the day. She possessed a measurable amount of knowledge concerning the nature of geology and botany, and her love of landscape and painting further added to her avoidance of the Gothic genre. 

Though Smith preferred to compose poetry, the unfortunate state of her financial affairs led her to write novels with blazing speed for the purpose of supporting her large family. Smith is known for bringing the sense of aesthetic beauty into scenes within her novels that proved to be a sensation among the readership. These talents of vivid description, alongside the ever-pervading influence of the French Revolution providing a sense of tragic realism, contributed to her ability to capture the imagination of her readers. Unfortunately for Smith, the trend of frowning upon women and their liberalist views portrayed in fictional, printed form led to her dishonor among the political elite of the time.

Smith blazed a trail for the Romantics in that she capitalized upon the reinstitution of the sonnet when composing much of her poetry, a form that Wordsworth and Coleridge among others, would soon utilize for themselves. For these two towers of the Romantic age, much is owed to the influence of Charlotte Smith, where the scenes of the melancholy and the sublime are used in conjunction with the sonnet to produce a mesmerizing sense of awe and pleasure for the reader, and to evoke a sense of connection between the self and nature.  

Anna Laetitia Barbauld 1743-1825

 The lifetime of Anna Laetitia Barbauld stands at the hallmark of not only the age of Romanticism, but at the advent of the pursuit of women’s rights and Feminism. While not directly linked to any specific event of women’s rights advancement, no doubt can be taken that her personal philosophy of equality must have inspired many women to realize the same. Her primary influence in the world was that of her literary achievements, where her works are heralded as some of the most eloquent prose writings of the time. The earlier part of her life was spent defining herself as a breakthrough poet among literary circles, and with the publishing of her Poems (1773-1777), she became renowned as a leader in the contemporary world of English literature.

Barbauld’s achievements are not limited to her literary works alone. Her work as a teacher of children is famous, and she is known for having redefined the methodology of teaching children, changes that range from breaking free from some of the bizarre forms of discipline, to initiating a practical study program where a broader range of specialized subjects were included into the curriculum.

 Barbauld possessed a unique way of brandishing her literary skills for not only creative purposes, but for arguments within the political spectrum. Her embolden ideas were often received with shock, not only by the nature of the material, but by the fact they were designed by a woman. The demise of her career as a published author arrived when she pushed her opposition to governmental policy to the limit by publishing a controversial satire pertaining to British involvement in the Napoleonic endeavor. The essence of the piece essentially defines the difference between the psychology of people who are vehemently opposed to war and the state of mind of those who opinionate the need for war, yet further, the piece is sharply negative and pessimistic with regard to the future of England. Meeting with shock on both sides of the political aisle, the negative criticism received in return, ignited and flared her sensitivities enough to cause a self-initiated exile from the world of publishing.  

 By modern day standards her viewpoint would undoubtedly fall into that of the liberal party, with her views on rights for Dissenters and her brute, anti-war attitude pervading the landscape of her thought. The legacy of her career was shadowed by the specter of disdain held by Wordsworth and Coleridge: once fond admirers of her, the growing nature of their conservatism grew to place them at odds with her liberalist point of view. Only within the last twenty years has an introspective examination of Romanticism, and the role of growing Feminism at the time, has her place in history been properly claimed.