o gives of the causes of his action the true
account? The answer of the most popular view will be, 'Yes. Iago was, as
he says, chiefly incited by two things, the desire of advancement, and a
hatred of Othello due principally to the affair of the lieutenancy.
These are perfectly intelligible causes; we have only to add to them
unusual ability and cruelty, and all is explained. Why should Coleridge
and Hazlitt and Swinburne go further afield?' To which last question I
will at once oppose these: If your view is correct, why should Iago be
considered an extraordinary creation; and is it not odd that the people
who reject it are the people who elsewhere show an exceptional
understanding of Shakespeare?

The difficulty about this popular view is, in the first place, that it
attributes to Iago what cannot be found in the Iago of the play. Its
Iago is impelled by _passions_, a passion of ambition and a passion of
hatred; for no ambition or hatred short of passion could drive a man who
is evidently so clear-sighted, and who must hitherto have been so
prudent, into a plot so extremely hazardous. Why, then, in the Iago of
the play do we find no sign of these passions or of anything approaching
to them? Why, if Shakespeare meant that Iago was impelled by them, does
he suppress the signs of them? Surely not from want of ability to
display them. The poet who painted Macbeth and Shylock understood his
business. Who ever doubted Macbeth's ambition or Shylock's hate? And
what resemblance is there between these passions and any feeling that we
can trace in Iago? The resemblance between a volcano in eruption and a
flameless fire of coke; the resemblance between a consuming desire to
hack and hew your enemy's flesh, and the resentful wish, only too
familiar in common life, to inflict pain in return for a slight.
Passion, in Shakespeare's plays, is perfectly easy to recognise. What
vestige of it, of passion unsatisfied or of 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 these frightful things.
The only ground for attributing to him, I do not say a 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.

But the popular view, beside attributing to Iago what he does not show,
ignores what he does show. It selects from his own account of his
motives one or tw