Only five days ago, in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbors.  That there was no law of nature that men should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth before this, it was not owing to natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality.  Ivan added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up.  Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.  That's not all.  He ended by asserting that for every individual who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law.  He said that egoism, even to crime, must become, not only lawful but recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome.

The Brothers Karamazov

 

Saying that Shakespeare got his story intact because he borrowed most of the plot is like saying Beethoven got his symphonies intact because he borrowed themes.  Shakespeare's greatness as a dramatist (different from his greatness as a poet) is mainly his ability to take a plot and move the pieces (characters, setting, incidents) around, making alterations and adding details until the pieces fit together so well that the entire play has an air of inevitability.  Then, when the play has become a living, breathing whole, he goes at it like a dedicated mechanic goes at a racing engine, tuning it delicately until there is not the slightest hint that the movement is the result of thousands of moving parts.

Othello has as much of the atmosphere of fine tuning as any of Shakespeare's plays, primarily because its movement is all in one direction and because its intensity increases, at a painfully regular pace.  All of the tragedies have comic relief but Othello has less than any of the others.  The atmosphere is due as well to the fact that in this as in none of the other tragedies the problem and the protagonist are separate.  The other tragic heroes are complete (because they are flawed).  They have within themselves the seeds of their destruction.  Othello's problem is Iago, and because there are two separate beings moving together toward the climax the pieces must fit together better to be convincing.

Othello and Iago fit together exactly, so exactly that the critics have waged border wars over them.  If Othello is "one not easily jealous," then Iago is a super-manipulator.  If Iago simply cannot be that cunning, then Othello has had within him all the time a bent toward jealousy.  Critics have strenuously argued both points of view, and both sides have found enough internal evidence to construct what they obviously consider to be indestructible cases for their positions.

Attempting to prove or disprove either side would take as much time (since the cases, though not indestructible, are strong) as both sides together have already given to their causes, and does not really seem to be worth it all.  But the controversy is valuable as evidence of Shakespeare's skill in matching Iago and Othello against each other.  Iago is obviously cunning and Othello is obviously noble.  And Iago is cunning to exactly the same degree that Othello is noble.  The reader can see both the cunning and the nobility in the measure that he considers believable:  the antagonists balance each other no matter how heavily the scales are weighed.

Iago's side of the scale is more crucial to the play, since he initiates all of the action.  Some critics have been troubled by the fact that Iago has (even from his own point of view) no adequate justification for his crimes.  He says that he suspects both Othello and Cassio of cuckolding him, but he does not say it vehemently enough or repeat it often enough to be serious about it.  He is angry that Cassio has been promoted to lieutenant instead of himself, but he could easily have stopped pushing after he had gotten Cassio removed.  Destroying Othello made the lieutenancy a permanently open position.  The one motive that seems to run through the play is a simple one:  Iago says he hates Othello.  "I hate him as I do hell-pains."  Yet he says that he will serve Othello if it will help his own career.  And he is too dispassionate to hate anyone enough for hate to be an adequate motive for his actions.  Coleridge calls Iago's drive a "motiveless malignity," Iago being then almost an incarnation of evil.  Iago is more accurately the incarnation of Ivan Karamazov's hypothetical case, that man who does not believe in immortality and so reverses all the virtues.  Immortality is not at all the issue in Othello, but the rest of Ivan's argument is exactly to the point.  Iago has internalized the source of "virtue" ("Virtue! a fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.")  and from that point on merely has been consistent.  If the source of Iago's right and wrong is no more and no less than Iago himself, then Othello and Desdemona and Cassio and Roderigo can claim absolutely no hold over his actions or his sympathies.  Iago has simply taken that precept which many men would agree with in principle (that we are the source of our own morality) and has followed it--assisted, perhaps, by an absence of humanity--to its logical, inevitable conclusions"  "Egoism, even to crime, must become, not only lawful but recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome."

The irony of the "honest" in "honest Iago" goes one step further, then, than the fact that Iago is the least honest of men.  Iago is being most "honest" (true to his own precepts) when he is being most false to other people.  The virtues have been reversed and Iago really is the "honest Iago."

Iago's lack of humanity and twisted morality have warped his perception of other people's motives.  Iago really can believe that both Othello and Cassio have slept with his wife (or would if they could) because he would sleep with their wives if he could.  Since his own passion is merely sexual, he can believe that Desdemona's love for Othello is a desire for kinky sex and that it will inevitably be sated and diminish.  Perhaps he can even really believe that Desdemona will favor Roderigo if only he can put money in his purse.  Without a trace of human emotion himself he cannot comprehend those emotions in others.

Iago's morality also brings him (and this is the crux of the play) to expend most of his energy committing the most hideous of all crimes.  That Roderigo and Desdemona and Othello all die is after the fact.  That he kills Emelia is even more after the fact and stupid besides.  His real crime is that he has the inhuman inconceivable gall to play puppeteer with human beings dancing on the other end of the strings, that he assumes the right, merely to satisfy some craving for excitement, to maim a cosmic love and drive the lovers into nightmares of emotions they would never else have felt.  Iago is Iago is a villain because he violates the sanctity of the human soul.

But it is not just Iago's version of morality that drives him to contrive the emotion that fills the play.  If he were merely self-centered he would have stopped when he had achieved his practical goals, but he goes on.  There is an element in his character which drives him beyond self-interest:  he has the soul of an artist.  His interest in the play is pretty close to Shakespeare's interest.  Just as Shakespeare takes the pieces of the story and creates a perfect whole, so Iago takes the pieces that he can control and creates a drama.  The only differences are that Iago uses real people as the pieces and that Iago's interests in the play are self-serving.  But if he really does have an artist's soul, the drama he creates must be ultimately satisfying, far more satisfying (if morality really could remove all the qualms) than Shakespeare's drama could have been to him.

What, then, are the pieces that Iago has to work with?  There is first of all Roderigo, a foolish dandy, just as immoral as Iago, but infinitely smaller, and begging to be duped.  He serves for comic relief (what little there is) and intrigue, and little else.  He does not excite our sympathies.  Cassio does not really figure importantly either.  He is honest and trustworthy, and he is necessary as "the accused," but he is nearly always on the edge of the play, more talked about than talking.

Desdemona, to narrow the list even more, is naturally important as half of the pair of lovers, but she is a receiver rather than an actor.  She is a typical heroine:  beautiful, pure, faithful.  She has a secret but nagging longing for adventure and romance.  She falls for Othello as any romantic young maiden would.  Othello falls for her because she is not just any romantic young maiden, but a beautiful romantic young maiden, and because she is beyond the reach of his experience and he has an even more overpowering love of adventure than she does.  She is one of the few adventures he hasn't lived through.

It is Othello who will be the test of Iago's skill.  He is noble, gentle, brave, passionate, and he has a magnificent and poetic soul.  He has led a life of action and he is conditioned to make action follow conviction.  A conviction that Desdemona is lovely leads him to marry her, in spite of the gulf that separate them.  A conviction that she is false leads him to action more drastic and more final.  Whether or not he has a natural inclination to be jealous does not seem important.  What is important is that during the play he becomes truly convinced that Desdemona has been false.  For Desdemona he had altered the course of his life, had thrown away a life of adventure on the conviction that this single adventure would make the loss worthwhile:

But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth.

Othello is nearly forgivable.  Iago, the puppeteer, is barely thinkable.