Iago’s World, Our World (Louis Petrich)

Thank you, please be seated. All things shall be well. [LAUGHTER] The music you heard from Guseppe Verdi's opera hotelo, summons the airing of an evil creed and character. I thought it would be opera poe tonight's fair. The words you sat down to, all things shall be well. Get said when things are not going well. Yago, to keep Desdemona from weeping, says them, at which point, late in the play, she airs her creed of unimpeded love. Two creeds of good and evil, act out their professions in Venice and Cyprus according to two clocks fast and slow. The satisfaction of such antithetical couplings on Shakespeare's stage provides the matter of this lecture. We shall try to experience Shakespeare's most satisfying tragic design by getting close to Yago, his maestro. You'll get to hear some Shakespeare. That's the silk. And my comments on the action. That's the straw. Sometimes things may get a little rough. Now, forget what you think you know and listen to the opening, Act I, Scene I. A well-dressed, finished youth enters the stage rapidly, determined to get away from a blunt soldier who pursues him on an urgent matter. "Tosh, never tell me. I take it much unkindly, the thaw, Yago, who has had my purse as if the strings with eyes should know of this." It's a broad, but you'll not hear me. If ever I did dream of such a matter, a poor me, thou told me thou didst hold him in thy hate, despise me if I do not." Yago, from the very start, uses God's name profanely to amplify his entrance to the world. Rodrigo shows him as someone to keep away from, not listen to, not employ for what he knows, his professions of hate, not credible, someone to censor, as from the folio edition of the play, his first words, God's blood, are cut, and many others. Or rather, we see from the start someone impossible to get away from, whose voice our hearing cannot escape, whose profanities remain in the corto edition, for which we can be grateful. "Despise him, he dares, if you find him short of knowing hate. "A poor him," he likes that word, "if you find him merely a dreamer of such a matter. "And what is this matter that solicits dreams and knowledge? "That is the question of the play. "She expert wants us to be eager for a satisfying answer. "Will we finally get one?" Asked at the end why he ensnared a fellow soul and body. Yago responds, "Demand me nothing. "What you know, you know. "From this time forth, I never will speak word." So, the action begins, insistent on speech that well-bred ears should seek to avoid, and it ends with holding speech that we must, with dread, supply ourselves. These coupled pressures, to air-prefane things and to smother their sources, come from his deeply human character as any in the breathing world of Shakespeare. He, Yago, has the reputation of a humorous critic of human failings. He puts everyone to the test of honesty. It's a hard test to pass. We will submit ourselves seven times to its crucibles. One, reputation. Let's observe Casio in crisis. Casio knows he cannot hold his liquor, but he agrees to drink the health of Blacka Fellow who recently promoted him lieutenant to celebrate his nub-shield with Desdemona, whom he, Casio, adores like a Madonna. He gets into a drunken brawl with another worshiper of the girl, Rodrigo, whom Yago has been tutoring at high tuition in the vicissitudes of love. Casio, by a fellow, Casio feels past all surgery, because what matters most to life, he now sees blood out. Reputation, reputation, reputation, oh! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself in what remains as bestial by reputation, Yago. My reputation. Casio repeats the word six times, but modulates its sound and feeling just as reputation itself, situationally informed, changes over time. Words like this one, aroused by painful feelings, look for objects to manipulate in the hope that the feelings will turn. Honesty, however, might better record with unobjectified feelings, left in articulate, such as Casio's, oh! A sound of anguish that is the key repetitive sound of Shakespeare's moaning and groaning play, as the fellow is reputed by performers. Fittingly, that sound fades away in the timely one's name, Yago. Shakespeare chose that name. He's known in the source only by the office of Ensign or Ancient, partly to invoke Santiago, St. James, disciple of Jesus, said by believers to have appeared on a white horse as the Morse layer in 9th century Spain. This choice of name implies that the domestic matter of the play has world historical significance. What truths are worth dying for? Does dying for something prove it true? What should one do when the proud presence of "I am" goes lost in the drunken abyss of a "go"? Casio, at a loss for answers despite being a bookish theorist, beckons to Yago, my reputation, Yago, my reputation, as if his immortal part were in the hands of the saint. As usual, Yago gives effective advice. Stop blaming the wine for being made of grapes, and think of lost reputation as but a broken joint in need of splintering. Casio loves the bodily imaged remedy, and agrees to import to Dessdemona, who, Yago says, is so free, so kind, so apt, so blessed that disposition that she holds its advice in her goodness not to do more than she is requested. She'll make the crack of your love grow stronger. Casio recovers at once by Yago's appeal to fantasy and plausibility. For that's Yago's genius to move people by the combination of dream and fact, broken people, like Casio, give themselves to fixes that go deeper than they dared to diagnose. To "ha." How fixed does Casio get? In Act V, Yago delivers him a bodily wound, almost passed all surgery, by cutting the femoral artery in the upper thigh and groin, leading Casio nearly to death, probably spoiling him for women, one of whom a screaming corticin adds to his reputation for beast-yield drinking and brawling a reputation for loud, horing. For Casio is a textbook case of that perversity by which a man worships one woman as Madonna, while he sleeps with another as whore. More than anything in the world. As Yago the fixer knows, Casio wants Desdemona to think him worthy of a place in her affection and it thrills him to hear her say, "Be merry, Casio, for the eyes of visitors, shall rather die than give thy cause away. These words cue a fellow and Iago, and remember queues are causes of action. To enter at just that moment, to catch Casio's ill at ease departure, like a pebble, dinging a windshield, Iago cracks ever so finally. A fellow's famous composure. Ha, I like not that. What does Thaussay, nothing my Lord, or riff? Oh, I know not what. Was not that Casio parted from my wife? Casio my Lord? No sure I cannot think it that he would steal away so guilty like seeing you coming. I do believe, was he? So begins the great seduction of three three, the longest and most exciting duet in Shakespeare. Who else could successfully hang the coming of chaos on a tiny, ha? Capable of half a dozen meanings. We hear at six more times and scenes to come, five by a fellow, each successive, ha, closer to chaos. His last ha will experience later. For now, consider Iago's answer to what does Thaussay say? Nothing my Lord, or if I know not what. Verse encourages us to change the position of words to satisfy the multiple demands of sense. I know not what inverted becomes not what I know. Which supplies the or if with a to be known thing. Now remember, in Shakespearean sex talk, nothing or no thing commonly pairs with a thing. A fellow himself posits the pairing, Casio and my wife. Iago's negation enables a fellow to affirm. This paired process by which raw sensations become, ha, objectified objects of experience, has acquired the reputation of being honest. This is a good place to thank Iago for presenting on stage with unprecedented frankness. What goes on off stage. Compare the sex talk of any contender to the waking of brebanchio with images shouted from the street of his gentile daughter being mounted for breeding now, now, very now, by a barbaric horse. Iago makes it plain that sexual realism and epistemological fancy can unite in a dramatic action of supreme beauty. Thing having by human animals is the place concern that springs from heady talk about knowing. This inversion of the erotic formula is Iago's contribution to modern realism. To hear the exact moment when this new voice of realism takes over from its ancient and medieval predecessors, listen to a fellow say farewell to a magical life of myth-making adjectives and hello to a generic life of base but certain nouns. Oh, now forever, farewell, the tranquil mind. Farewell content. Farewell, the plume troops and the big wars that make ambition virtue. Farewell. Farewell, the naying steed and the shrill trump. The spirit stirring drum, the ear piercing, the wife, the royal banner and all quality, pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war. Oh, you mortal engines whose rude throats the immortal joes dread clamors counterfeit. Farewell, a fellow's occupation's gone. Is it possible, my lord? Villain, be sure that I'll prove my love a whore. Be sure of it. Give me the actular proof or by the worth of man's eternal soul, thou hadst been better than have been born a dog than answer my waked wrath. I trust you heard the change of key in vocabulary when Iago signals the drop made possible from Rapsodotite's to crit to the critical plains of the sea for yourself, world. The words prove my love a whore and born a dog mark the takeover of shining prestigious days by faithless politics, grinding careerism, mythless machines, money plowed in purses and honesty urged by the certainties of animality. The ago's world are world. Answerless to why intricate in how a web of words and images triggering feelings that shake the frame. So someone suspect must be shaken in turn until pains turn to pleasures. Satisfaction. After the prelude, Ha, a marital conversation ensues in which a fellow promises his wiedling wife that he will reinstate Casio as soon as Casio comes to him. But Casio does not come. He continues to beg Desdemona to plead his case. Why? He wants the divine Desdemona to love him in lawful action while he sleeps with the disreputable Bianca. That perversity proves beautifully reliable to the modernist Iago for keeping Casio away from a fellow and near Desdemona. Moreover, it fits with something Iago overhears in that conversation about Casio's abilities on a fellow's behalf. That inspires the opening movement of a fellow's soul. My noble lord. What does Tastas say? Did Michael Casio, when you wooed my lady, know of your love? He did. From first to last. Why does Tastas? But for a satisfaction of my thought, no further harm. Why have thy thought, Iago? Why did not think he had been acquainted with her? Oh yes. And went between us very often. Indeed. Indeed. I, indeed. If the sereness thou art in that, is he not honest? Honest, my lord. Iago pauses after the quiet opening, my noble lord. To make a fellow ask a question that draws from Iago the question that a fellow answers, but also questions, that's the strategy. To make everything come from a fellow's curiosity about things. Notice that the proper answer to a fellow's second question, why does thou ask, gets postponed? I did not think he had been acquainted with her, to allow for the gratuitous interim answer. These words puzzle the fellow. Friago has always seemed outwardly constituted. He clinks canekens of liquor sings, rousing songs, tells dirty jokes, brawls in ale houses, harms enemy bodies by day, and visits brawls by night to keep up with things. Of such a man, a fellow must ask, why of thy thought, Iago? His answer, I did not think he had been acquainted with her, addresses the prior question, but in its postponed position it had certain implications for why thought seeks satisfaction. The implication is that Casio and Desdemona must be good at keeping secrets, keeping themselves out of thought. For Iago's unsurpassed noticing things didn't think they were even acquainted. A further implication is that some kind of harm has been done satisfiingly already, but no further harm should discourage a fellow from satisfying his friend further by letting him in on the secret. A fellow does. They were more than just acquainted. Catele says, "Want between us very often?" "Want between," here means Catele has spent time alone with Desdemona often, passing from one to some to the other. How quaint is that? The between part of the word "acquainted" has implications. Oh boy, does it. Which Iago cunningly inches out with one adverbial word formed probingly from the combination of place by thing. Indeed, words are moody and promiscuous. They can join, contract, turn and turn, and yet go on they'll turn again. Poets and liars find these playful turnings of tongue very satisfying. A fellow is a poet, but as a lover he wants his romantic story to turn out honest. That requires getting to know the off-stage turnings of friends in the story, and that's Iago's stated specialty, "For I am nothing, if not critical," he says. "I, or satisfaction, repeat six times in this one scene." What does it take to satisfy thought? For Iago it is bodily action that satisfies thought and makes the time seem short. It's the engendering of a new creation that makes hell and night miscedinate with day. If Amelia keeps her apocalyptic voice down at the end, then Desdemona goes down in the books as a whore, love goes down as a lust of the blood and a permission of the will, and Iago's lies confirm that the effectual truth indeed rules history and his reasoning about human nature, psychology. That's what it takes to satisfy thought in Iago's world. Pity. We must skip the intervening movements of a fellow's soul to experience the excruciating final movement. Here's the scene. A fellow eavesdrops as Iago teases Cassio about Bianca, a notable strumper, to arrives on the scene with the strawberry-spotted anchor chip that Cassio had given her to copy. Her perfectly timed appearance provides physical evidence to a fellow's eyes, nose, she's heavily perfumed, and ears. The anchor chip is in the hands of a stinking, valuable whore who gives it to Cassio. The most dialectical movement of a fellow begins upon Cassio and Bianca's exit. How shall I murder him, Iago? Did you perceive how he laughed at his vice? Oh, Iago. And did you see the anchor chip? Was that mine? Yours by this hand. And to see how he prizes the foolish woman your wife, she gave it him and he had given it his whore. I would have him nine years a killing. By a woman, a fair woman, a sweet woman, nay, you must forget that. I let her rot in a parish and be damned tonight for she shall not live. No, my heart is turned to stone. I strike it, and it hurts my hand. Oh, the world has not a sweeter creature. She might lie by an emperor's side and command him tasks nay. That's not your way. Hang her, I do but say what she is. So delicate with her needle, an admirable musician. Oh, she will sing the savageness out of a bear of so high and plenty of sweeten invention. She's the worst for all this. Oh, a thousand, thousand times. And then of so gentle a condition, I too gentle, nay, that's certain. But yet the pity of it, Iago, oh, Iago, the pity of it, Iago. If you are so fond over her iniquity, give her patent to a fend for the touch not you, it comes near nobody. I will chop her into messes, cuckled me. Bianca is said by Iago to be a whore, Desdemona to be foolish, two distinct women, one sweet, the other foul, precariously occupied in Athelos thinking the place of his wife. How is that possible? Desdemona to soothe and provoke the savage at the same time in the same Atelo. How can she command emperors but obey the lust of lieutenants? How can her gentleness harden hearts to stone? These are contradictions tested by his body. Always a deep feeler, Atelo is here in danger of becoming a deep thinker. And in the name of action, that must be stopped. Right now, this being the last time they talked to each other before the murder. So how is thinking stopped? Brutally by the stoppage of pity, the it that calls for pity is, as I've been saying, the contradictingness of embodied human being whose love is hate, whose mind is not mine, whose life is death, whose sweet and tender touch also stinks like meat left in the sun. To the call for pity, the agha responds with the cruelest line in the play. If you're so fond over her, an equity give her pain to offend, for if it touch not you, it comes there nobody. Athelos violent, meaty response maximizes the touch. I'll chop her into messes, cuckled me. All pieces of her are to be chopped and eaten. The good and bad made one in the handling, not the thinking about them. It is an in person, it goes with the self pity of someone avoiding the messes. For Athelos must serve them in the right dish, touched by the justly seasoned sauce. Strangle her in her bed, even the bed she have contaminated. That's the dish and the sauce. The fluent oes her parlayed eyes must be stopped by hands that serve the sacrificial offering of flesh for all to view as on a stage and all to taste in attention so palpable that one's mouth feels ready to discord the matterless matter by crying stop to the actors. Such a response from the touched audience. This play is famous for provoking. The events that happen next confirm the stoppage of pity and thought. Athelos strikes Desdemon in the face publicly, a shocking display of violence that has biblical residents, Jesus, struck before the Sanhedrin not long after his triumph, then comes Athelos taking of Desdemon as a whore in a brothel, like the abusive mocking of Christ as King by Roman soldiers. Perhaps he knows what he does as he later confesses in the image of the base Indian who threw a pearl away richer than of his tribe. These blessed associations, Iago would call pudding and point out that Athelos suicide follows as meat. If Iago makes any mistake, it's only this forced one. He spends the early evening of the murder giving reasons to Rodrigo to kill Casio and thus he does not have time to monitor the two wives. Rodrigo is complaining that the expensive education he purchased from Iago has left him jobless, ominous, penniless, and bound back to Venice to live with his parents or something like that. So Rodrigo needs a lot of attention from Iago, the career counselor. Just kill Casio and the place you covet will open. What is wrong with young people today? Meanwhile, Amelia and Dismona get to talk uninterrupted about love, sex, heartbreak, oh these men, these men, in the famous This willow scene, the only scene in the plate, and this is the point in which Iago does not appear. He is the most omnipresent monitor of action in Shakespeare. Absent from the willow scene, he misses the call on Amelia to love purity and truth more than life. For he is offstage, counseling Rodrigo, that when you kill a man for being in the way of your advancement, no worries. The council finally sinks in. But Iago still must supervise the internship in assassination. Where to strike home? Desdemona, meanwhile, is persuading Amelia onstage that she, Desdemona, is living proof of a woman who would not commit adultery for all the world and who moreover would turn bad to good, not repay bad with the bad. Let's see how these two women fare when they meet again with the Iago. First, Desdemona also pronounced Desdemona. What is the matter? The fellow enters the bedroom with a candle. Desdemona sleeps her wedding sheets put obediently on the bed by Amelia. In the short time scheme, the sheets blend into the white of her pure skin. In the long time scheme, they preserve the rows plucked by the man colored by Promethean fire. The bed is the place that matters, where the sounds of O issue ultimatums and premeditated strangling materializes in the motions of sex. The fellow supreme second sililically, it is the cause. It is the cause, my soul. Ends with repeated smelling of Desdemona's sweet breath and four kisses that wake her. She asks him to come to bed. An uninterrupted night of lovemaking and sleep, their first on the short time scheme, would dissipate any quarrel she thinks, probably rightly. He asks if she has prayed for unlife hamlet, he would not kill her soul. She rolls his eyes, gnaws his nether lip and she agitates the bed. Peace and peace still. I will. So what's the matter? This is the first time she has asked him the question of the play, though others have raised it six times before. It comes this late between them because the fellow must think that his bed's violator, Cassio, is dead when he answers the play's embedded question. That's what he means when he says, keep time in awe. Athello quickly provides a material answer. That hatred which I so loved and gave to Cassio. No, by my life and soul. Send for the man and ask him. Athello ignores her first call for Cassio because he wants her to give up life in a jointly performed sacrifice, her soul saved by timely confession and repentance. She refuses to perform that script and presents herself to the Lord and heaven. Then Lord have mercy on me. I say, amen. And have you mercy too? I never did offend you in my life. I never loved Cassio but with such general warranty of heaven as I might love. I never gave him token. Never, never, never. That's well opposed to the ever-dairness of Iago. Her appeal for mercy joined to justice is a strong refusal to die. The girl is doing well so far. When Athello twice asserts he saw the hand she insists a second time good girl on questioning him. He found it then. I never gave it. He said for him. Let him confess the truth. If earlier she had admitted to losing the hand. Her present claim that he found it might carry some weight but never mind. She knows that Cassio will honor his Madonna to the death. Athello, however, summons the death of God and the new order of Iago to turn her holy conviction into animal instinct for survival. He hath confessed what, my Lord, that he hath God's death used thee. How unlawfully. He will not say so. No. His mouth is stopped. Honesty Iago hath taken order for it. Oh, my fear interprets what is he dead? At all his hair's been lives, my great revenge had stomached for them all. Alas, he is betrayed and I am done. This is the moment of collapse for poor Desdemona. Notice that Athello rearranges three letters, UD apostrophe S, a contraction of God's, to enable him to speak the words he would not say to the Chase stars, used thee sexually. As Desdemona makes him specify for Cassio does use her lawfully to get his place again. Athello profanely invokes God's death as Iago did God's blood when he first entered the stage because saying what the matter is feels like the darkness and earthquake of Golgotha and like the God who numbers human hairs that Athello quantifies his capaciousness for revenge so precious are the uses of his Desdemona. When she hears Honest Iago, to whom she kneeled as a messenger of love, named as Cassio 's mouth stopper, she suddenly feels the presence of God killing evil. Her only hope would be to maintain her innocence with peaceful confidence and dignity, as Jesus did so impressively that Pilate wanted to release him, but her innocence behaves like guilt when fear interprets the new order of the world. We know that her fear interprets incorrectly if her Cassio is not dead. Athello also interprets incorrectly on his way to the bedroom in the previous scene, hearing the cries of two gravely wounded men. He concludes they come solely from Cassio killed by Iago. Why? Again, he can't sacrifice Desdemona with noble hands unless Cassio can't be sent forward to repute their nobility. This is dishonest thinking, born of vanity, but it would have worked if Amelia were to remain obedient to Iago's keeping of time and place. Desdemona interprets incorrectly because the love of danger that married her to Athello turns into a threesome with evil that undoes the modesty of her sheets. Cass do bodies, vain and wildly afraid, pin themselves in universal error to the bed of love and death. Out, strumpet weeps thou for him to my face. Oh, banish me, Lord, but kill me not, down strumpet. Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight. Nay, if you strive, but half an hour, the indon there is no pause, but while I say one prayer. It is too late. Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord, my Lord, my Lord, what hope, my Lord, my Lord? If Desdemona were able to maintain her truth with a backbone of steel, Athello would not get this continent that he needs to kill her. For I do believe every particle of his body and soul loves Desdemona body and soul incredibly for foul and condemned, he believes both to be. She asked him to come to bed, and he does, perversely equipped to fill the place with great ability and make the womb of time deliver its main event. Desdemona's last muffled words turn into shouts at the door, but in a different key. Her triple cry to the Lord God turns into a cry to an earthly Lord in the voice of Amelia, wife to the prince of this hour world. Desdemestic title is about to be enumerated among the elemental relations to water, fire, heaven, hell, crystallite, dirt, and husband. Shakespeare always invests minor characters with human dimensions that repay close attention, but it is also true. true that there's no minor character who weighs in at the end like Amelia. What do we know about Amelia? In her own words, she's nothing but to please Iago's fantasy. She tells the most direct consequential lie in the play when she professes to Desdemona not to know where the handkerchief could be. She advocates a humorous but low tit for tat morality between husbands and wives. She objects strongly to the unknown villain who turned Iago's wit, the seamy side without to suspect her in bed with the moor, but she doesn't exactly deny the charge. And when she's about to figure out that such a villain is still at work close to home, she's quiet down by Desdemona's kneeling to Iago for help. She arrives in the bedroom a minute too late. Let's join her there with the fellow and dead Desdemona. The word husband gets repeated ten times as Amelia stretches the elements of despair to the breaking point of certainty. She was as false as water, though I was as rash as fire to say that she was false, oh, she was heavenly true. Casio did top her. Ask thy husband else, oh, I were damned beneath all depth in hell, but then I did proceed upon just grounds to this extremity. Thy husband knew it all. Thy husband. Thy husband. That she was false. To wedlock. I, with Casio, had she been true. If heaven would make me such another world of one entire and perfect crystal light, I'd not have sold her for it. Thy husband. I, it was he that told me on her first. An honest man he is and hates the slime that sticks on filthy deeds. Thy husband. What needs this iterance woman? I say thy husband. Oh, Mistress Bellini has made marks with love. My husband say she was false. He, woman, I say thy husband, just understand the word. My friend, thy husband. Honest, honest, yago. Why? He say so. May his banishers soul right after grain of day. He lies to the heart. She was too fond of her most filthy bargain. Huh? Do thy worst, this deed of thine is no more worthy heaven than thou was worthy her. Peace your best. Thou hast not hath that power to do me harm as I have to be hurt. Oh, go, oh, don't this ignorant as dirt. The ten repetitions of husband would veer into comedy where it not for the possessive adjectives, thy and my, for it's not the neighbor's crawl space that wreaks of rotting human matter. Amelia is asking for some medicinal language to keep her from bleeding out with that word just as broken Casio rearticulates himself when Iago applies to him the cunningest of splinters. Her hope is to hear her husband deny it all. Hope or truth must she make a choice. Not yet. For a fellow's hot, the last of seven in the play, Mark's a vicious turn, Amelia feeling infinitely hurt, takes a fellow's word filthy and reapplies it at great risk to Desdemona's marriage bargain. Amelia salts his mentality by associating it with the color of his visage, dirt. The need to wipe away filth from body and mind implies the use of that spotted handkerchief, but the fellow's fierce hoth intervenes, along with his sword, drawn to take the place of the Iago's I like not that. Do thy worst, Amelia says, caught up in the guilty excitement of Iago's say it like it feels world. Amelia cries for help, but Iago bursts in with others. Amelia asks him directly if he told the fellow that Desdemona was false. He answers truthfully with uncharacteristic brevity I did. Her mind denied its crutch floods with suppressed brokenness I thought so then she admits, I'll kill myself for grief. She cries out on villainy, oh villainy as if saying the word six times will prompt a scapegoat to appear, what are you mad? Iago asserts, I charge you, get you home. This is her moment of eternity. I go quietly home safe among the fantasies that spice the oh, is that all of her marriage? Or disobediently speak at peril the madness of reality. She would juggle me and let me have leave this peak. She decides, disproper I obey him, but not now. Perchante Iago, I will nago home. Arriams take us far beyond domesticity. Iago, nago home. The fellow roars out a continuous stream of oh, oh, oh, oh, falling on the bed where all I stare, prompting Gratiano Desdemona's uncle to report that he's glad her father, Brabantio, is dead from grief at her match since this sight would make him kill himself and be damned. Pity for that father. A fellow feels, pronounces, and quickly suppresses as Iago taught him for the sake of their given committed work. It is bitterful. But yet Iago knows that she with Casio had the act of shame a thousand times committed. Casio confessed it, and she did gratify his amorous works with that recognisance and pledge of love which I first gave her. I sought in his hand. It was a hankerchief. An antique token my father gave my mother. Oh, God, oh, heavenly God. Amelia's repetitive words coming from an appalling background of knowledge, one dreads the right to say. They reprise words that Amelia heard earlier that evening, spoken by Desdemona, to her then trusted messenger of love, Iago. I referred to them at the start as Desdemona's creed. We should hear them now. To his suspicious wife, Iago says, "You are a fool. Go to." And before she can sniff him out further, Desdemona completes the line and stifles investigation with words that make the world seem overcome by heaven's presence. Oh, God, Iago. What shall I do to win my Lord again? Good friend, go to him. For by this light of heaven I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel, if air my will to trespass against his love, either in discourse of thought or actual deed, or that my eyes, my ears, or any sense delighted them in any other form, or that I do not yet ever did, and ever will, though he do shake me off the beggarly divorcement, love him dearly, comfort for swammy. And kindness may do much, and his unkindness may defeat my life but never taint my love. I cannot say, "Hore, it does abhor me now." I speak the word. To do the act that might the addition earn not the world's mass of vanity could make me. As I said, Amelia reprises the betrayal of light by substituting for Iago the name, oh, heavenly God. No one living will say the name Iago again. After this substitution, they call him dog, the letters of God reversed, befitting a man who pledges never more to speak word. Now, back to the handkerchief and the milleus, oh, God, oh, heavenly God. Iago tries to reassert himself as husband, whose words a wife obeys, be wise and get you home. I will not. Well, that no longer works. So ever adaptable, Iago tries to stab her. [LAUGHTER] "Fy or sword upon a woman?" "Oh, thou, thou more that hagerchief, thou speakst of. I found by fortune and did give my husband." "For often, with a solemn earnestness more than indeed belonged to such a trifle, he begged of me to steal it, villainous whore. She give it cash, you know alas, I found it, and I did give it my husband. Fills thou liest? By heaven I do not, I do not, gentlemen, oh murderous cacks, go watchers such a fool do with so good a wife. Are there no stones in heaven but what serves for the thunder, precious villain?" The implication of the authorial stage direction is that Iago escapes a fellow sword by killing his wife with his sword. His mortal hatred for her keeps him alive. A fellow questions whether there is heavenly justice or only loud, meaningless thunder. That question will get its own big tragedy. Iago, he calls precious because like the jewels he has bobbed from Rodrigo, Iago keeps himself intact from restitution, alone among Shakespeare's tragic villains he is intended by the author to outlive the play along with us. We can sense from Amelia's gratuitous word trifle that it wouldn't take much intervention for this plot to come crashing down in comic school and laughter where it not for Iago's mastery in weaving the web to emesh them all. As in a musical score. Every syllabic beat down to the very letters and sometimes their shapes, oh, a thousand times committed. Constitute by means of repetition, Shakespeare's most perfect tragic design. Everything else to notice. Amelia twice points out the role of fortune in her finding alas the handkerchief. A Machiavelle knows that fortune always at work in human affairs must be prepared for, as Iago prepares for the lost and found handkerchief by always begging Amelia to steal it. The Machiavelle having prepared himself changes his modes as the times change. Now let us suppose that Iago is one of the princely ones with the rare ability to change in sync with the times. Previous to the action of the play, I can imagine he was as honest as they say and as good a friend as one could want. But when a fellow passes him over and rumors spread about his wife, he becomes the honest Iago we see entirely in tune with time. Until the moment that Amelia says, I will not. And then the times change again. And so Iago must change again. In recognition of the power of Desdemona to make Amelia love her to fire him, sustain death and control the narrative of history. If you want to know what Iago becomes under this next dispensation of time, read measure for measure written probably right after a fellow. It's a darkly comic inversion of the tragedy. What you know you know is last part. These are Iago's last words. What is it that we know? Let's try to speak apropos. First, it takes two to lie, one to tell it and another to believe it and not necessarily in that sequence. The greatest liars rarely tell direct unequivocal lies subject to simple reputation. Rather, they create worlds in which willing people play apt parts in actions that satisfy thought. Desdemona's philanthropic lie and Amelia's white lie both serve the world-making lie of Iago. The hankerchief about which they lie winds up in Iago's hands. The lesson is clear. Either don't lie at all as Kant argues and takes satisfaction in truth alone, or prepared to fall into playful hands that are not God's hands when lies are told. It follows second that Iago's evil is not nihilistic. He destroys to create. It is precisely because Iago senses his honestness and a manoured world that he makes his beautiful web to enmesh them all. That bed filled with bodies is Iago's work made to wonder at. A fellow in his own words is wrought by Iago and most beautifully wrought in his pre-mertersaliliquy, it is the cause, it is the cause by soul. He does not name it, lest the music of a star cease to be composed of his heavenly sorrow. Third, this composition of evil is not slayable, and it is not subservient to political demands, but keeps the sounding of its source a living mystery. Three things more I think we know. Amelia clears Desdemona's reputation in the temple of memory, subject to times, administrations. Her dying for that purpose is impressive, but consider the motive. Amelia suicides guilty for fantasising and lying for her husband. I thought so then I'll kill myself a grief. Hopes that her final truth speaking will save her. She loved the cruel more. So come my soul to bliss as I speak true. So speaking as I think alas, I die. The Iago formula for knowledge speak, think true. She reverses to this formula, true, think, speak, but she prefaces her formula with bliss, her soul's hope, and she tax on to the end, I die, as if her dying or any martyrdom proves the truth of its cause. First comes hope, last comes death, motivated by a guilty, grieving, homeless, husbandless care for the reputation of her mistress who loved a cruel more. The truth of that love is a paradox for how can one love what is truly qualified as unlovable. Perhaps we know the answer to that too. Remember that pre-Banshoe dies pitiably from correct despair that his daughter's marriage is doomed, fearful and pitiful in the expressed terms of its bargain. She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them. Fear and pity, embraced as ends are the causes of tragedy. To bargain for a comedy of a marriage, let us apply Machiavellian handles to life's slippery couplings. Namely, their best conscience is not to leave it undone, but keep it unknown, and to lip a wanton in a secure couch and to suppose her chase. In other words, the one you love, whose secrets only God must know, enjoy in the stained glass light of heaven, or as Shakespeare's most famous prop copiously teaches, keep a close watch on your linens, a clean trim to your beards, and in one precious eye a darling wink for all the husbanded world. Finally, I think we know that hatred, like love, activates knowing. If Iago is the hater and a fellow the lover, then together as one, we have the complete and self-correcting knower. Many responders to the play have united these two in thought as one protagonist, and in many productions the actors of Athello and Iago have alternated roles on all successive nights. Shakespeare, they say, has divided two sides of himself for a clearer presentation of either, but in his own self-knowledge, they are one. In Athello's suicide speech, the two in one protagonist appears clearly in three respects. Listen. I pray you in your letters when you shall, these unlucky deeds relate. Speak of me as I am. Nothing extend your wake nor set down ought in malice. Then must you speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well, of one not easily jealous, but being wrought, perplexed in the extreme, of one whose hand, like the base to deen or Indian, threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe, set you down this, and say, "This size, that in a level once were I malignant and a turban Turk, beat of an Asian and treaded the state, I took by the throat the circumcising dog and smote him thus." First, nothing extenuating or set down ought in malice, the hateful spirit leaves nothing bad out of the picture, and the loving spirit makes sure that malice does not deform the criticism. Second, consider this famous textual crux that divides editors right down the middle. The folio's Judean Judas is evil and hateful, while the Cortos Indian merely ignorant and foolish, yet lovable. Which ever word Shakespeare wrote, maybe both, the printers captured the two personas of one protagonist. Third, the speech ends with a fellow playing a double role with a double effect. The bloody suicide of hate marrs the beauty of what is spoke in love, and consider the weird aptness of circumcised dog. Yago is the dog of the play, always following along man's declared best friend, licking the salt with a raging tooth. Athello takes the throat of this dog, his own throat. For like the circumcised Turk, he has malignantly beaten the Venetian desdemona, just as Yago, the dog, a secret mutilator of Cassio's groin, has slandered Venetian women hence the state, and as defender of that state and protectress of his wife, Athello slays the Turk dog and himself in one. There's no suicide in Shakespeare, so inclusively performative, so antithetically and knowingly coupled. As Yago listens to Athello occupy the deathbed, what does he feel? Perhaps he turns from the loaded bed his work to the audience, his accomplices, thinking, "I confided everything to you, either I, and you loved being in on it, didn't you?" Honestly. Diablo. The town will rise and they will call on us to answer a few questions. Where do you think Athello goes? To hell, heaven, or has he, like his occupation, simply gone? Pity is not for the damned, not for the saved, and not for the simply gone. What to do about lovers who flout all conventions because their downright affection should condition time and place to bless their exceptional qualities. What kind of a world do they think this is? One in which I am not what I am? I am your own forever. Thank you for measuring this hour with my two clocks. [Applause]