David Tennant as Hamlet in a 2008 stage production.
Shakespeare was interested in the ways people are horrible to each other, often not through malice or cruelty but just by pursuing their own ends without worrying about the consequences for other people.
Who among us never does that? Macbeth didn’t hate Duncan or wish him harm, he simply wanted what Duncan had, and the fastest way to get it was by murdering him. People don’t wish chickens harm, they just want to eat them.
But Shakespeare was also interested in deliberate harm, in personal destruction carried out for reasons. He was interested in it when done for “good” reasons – reasons widely seen as good in Elizabethan and Jacobean England – and when done for bad ones.
It’s often tricky to figure out whether he thought a particular “good” reason really was good or not. This is one of the core mysteries in Hamlet, a play full of unanswered questions – literally so: it’s packed with sentences ending in question marks, starting with the deceptively simple opening line, “Who’s there?” Is the Ghost’s instruction to Hamlet to kill the king really a good reason? Is revenge a good reason? Is the Ghost even really Hamlet’s father?
At one point Hamlet says it could be the devil, who can wear any disguise, just as villains can (“the devil hath power t’assume a pleasing shape”) – if the Ghost is the devil then the reason it gives Hamlet can’t possibly be a good one. Hamlet is in some ways a Christian play, and certainly written for a Christian audience – but in theory, revenge was not a Christian virtue.
Despite that, revenge plays were hugely popular with Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, and the impression the play as a whole leaves us with is that Hamlet was wrong to haver about killing Claudius, and right to do it at the last even though the remaining characters die with him. That’s the impression, but if you dig into the play you find it undermined at every step. That is, of course, one of the reasons it’s such a blisteringly good play.
There’s one Shakespeare character, though, who stands out for the flimsiness of his stated reasons compared to the malice and cruelty of what he does. He’s pissed off that he didn’t get a promotion, maybe possibly his wife has the hots for Othello. Othello is a good guy and that makes Iago look bad – blah blah. He claims all these at different times, so they cancel each other out, and seem like rationalizations instead of reasons. Really he just does it because he wants to, and he can. Desdemona and Othello are happy, so he’ll make them not happy, and not alive either.
It’s interesting how he goes about it, because it’s a classic literary theme, especially popular in Shakespeare’s time but still pervasive. It’s the theme that’s behind the phenomenon of “honour” killings. It’s all that, except that Shakespeare does what no one else does, and turns the theme on its head.
The theme is the happily married man who discovers that his wife is a whore. Remember the frame narrative of The 1001 Nights? It’s that. The Agamemnon? That. Most of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies? That.
Shakespeare used the theme in several of his plays, but in nearly all of his, the jealous husband is wrong. The later the play, the more wrong the jealous husband is. By the time we get to A Winter’s Tale, he’s such a jackass that he makes up the story that his wife is cheating on him out of thin air.
Othello is nudged into it by Iago, but he’s nearly as bad. He believes the poison Iago tells him, and he refuses to trust Desdemona – and that’s bad.
It’s so bad that Shakespeare gives the job of telling him off to a woman, Iago’s wife. It’s a violation of every possible Jacobean convention: she is officially Othello’s inferior in every way – married to his subordinate, and a woman. Yet she denounces him, and not only that, she addresses him as “thou” – the most insultingly outrageous thing a subordinate can do. She goes from “you” to “thou” in an instant, when he calls Desdemona a whore.
OTHELLO: She’s, like a liar, gone to burning hell:
‘Twas I that kill’d her.
EMILIA: O, the more angel she,
And you the blacker devil!
OTHELLO: She turn’d to folly, and she was a whore.
EMILIA: Thou dost belie her, and thou art a devil.
– Act 5, scene 2
Arguably the flimsiness and incoherence of Iago’s motivation is a flaw in the play. Nevertheless it’s part of reality that there just are people who destroy others for sport. You can meet them any time on Twitter, carving people up because they can. The Internet is many things, and one of them is a paradise for the Iagos of the world.