Lines of Flight

1.1.19-26

Forsooth - masterly as he

Iago is at his most entertaining when attacking Cassio's character. Shakespeare gives him long words at the end of lines for Iago to roll around his tongue and spit out with sarcastic bile. A great arithmetician? Hardly a soldier at all. Iago riles Roderigo by characterising Cassio as a lightweight with no field experience and already married to boot. But the speech says much more than this. Every description is meant as an insult. Even if it does not look like an insult on the page, Iago makes it an insult to be a Florentine, to have a fair wife, to be bookish or even robed. With each one, Iago implicitly draws a contrast with himself, the wronged party. He is a solder, he has seen battle, he is a man of action and passion, not books and easy wives.

.1.16-18

For Certes - was he?

Iago breaks rhythm for rhetorical effect. He speaks as Othello, mimicking and mocking him (and ironically, it is through Iago that we have the first words, the first performance of Othello in the play). Iago is bitter and incredulous as he spits out l.18. At this point, it is uncertain how far Iago steps beyond his agenda (to influence Roderigo) and lets slip his resentment, his hatred.

1.1.12-16

'But he ..' - 'my mediators'.

It will be hard to perform these lines without sneering. Iago's bile infects the rhythm, in which the the first 2-3 syllables of each line are given extra stress - 'But he ...' he spits, 'Evades', he sneers, 'Horribly' etc. so that the eccentric three word line 15 comes of something of a relief, even if its rhetorical formality is out of kilter with Iago's hateful cariacture of Othello's popmosity. In conclusion? There's a conclusion, not just venom? Sometimes it is as easy to run on blank verse lines as if the metre made no difference between them, but these are lines in which the rhythm of stresses brings each one out. Iago starts with stress and the rest of the words tumble down from it. This is the closest one can get to verbal assault. Iago is clubbing Roderigo with words. Roderigo had better agree. L.16 'non-suits' is a typical Shakespeare neologism, but here works well as a pun, ghosted as it is by the word 'nonsense.' But spoken at this speed, with this level of intense, astonished anger, these lines may make no sense to the audience. But Roderigo may also struggle. Could this be a place for Roderigo to attempt to answer Iago's tirade? Iago does not let him. The briefest pause for breath at l.16 may give Roderigo an opportunity to speak, but Iago thunders on, 'For Certes ...' he says, renewing the onslaught, silencing Roderigo with polemnic.

1.1.7-10

'Three great ones ...'

Iago uses a well-worn trick to get Roderigo back on side -- he talks about his own enemy, Michael Cassio, and so shows how he too has cause to hate both Cassio and Othello. Iago's bitterness may well be sincere, but one should not lose sight of his agenda -- he is using Roderigo and this speech is made to that end.

And Shakespeare is using us too. From L.6, we know that the pair are talking about a man who both, apparently, hate, but the man is not named. Nor is the play based on a story famous enough for an audience unfamiliar with the play to guess who 'he' is. To emphasise the point, we quickly learn Iago's name, though in normal speech it would be more natural to name Othello and not Iago. This is a strategy to create dramatic tension and mystery. For the characters, Othello is dismissed in pronouns. He is too hated for his name to be spoken. He is he who should not be named.

l.7 Iago starts with what is probably an exagerration, some hyperbole for dramatic effect which will work well with corresponding gestures. 'Three great ones' Iago insists petitioned the General on his behalf. Othello has not just offended Iago, but the city as well.

L.9-10 Iago brings the topic back to himself. He is emphatic. He is also a gossip and a boaster. I know my worth, he pleads, I'm worth better than this, I deserved this job. To the audience, this may sound like the special pleading of a bad loser, but since Roderigo is a lifetime bad loser, he will be entirely gripped by Iago's self-serving, self-pitying story.

1.1.6-7

L.6 - Roderigo may say this aggressively, or passively, but either way he has little left to say. Even here, he is merely repeating Iago's own words back at him. We are getting nearer the reason for the argument. Roderigo feels let down, betrayed. Iago clinches his hold in the next line, 'Despise me ...' and a pause may be warranted afterwards, as Iago begins his long speech and commands Roderigo's silence.

1.i.6-32

'Thou toldst me' to end of Iago's long speech

Roderigo's next line is a prelude (as this little exchange has been) to the first long speech of the play. Iago has a lot of work to do here as he will speak for the next 60 lines with only brief interruptions from Roderigo who, calming down, will be listening and reacting. This is a potentially difficult scene to get right. Iago's speeches contains a lot of important exposition. They set up the general plot as well as the immediate action, and they also establish Iago's duplicitous character and his apparently vague motivation. Motivation is always a key issue for Iago and each company, each actor will have to make their own decisions about this. This is as clear a statement as we get (and it is neither clear nor consistent with the play). Iago shares with the Duke in Measure for Measure this vagueness about motive, a play that Shakespeare was writing at the same time. Perhaps Shakespeare never made up his own mind about these questions. Or possibly everything that Iago says is trustworthy -- after all (to borrow Brabantio's logic later) if Iago can lie to Othello, can he not lie to Roderigo too, or to us? Some acting styles will demand a clear narrative reason, but perhaps it is best not to ask this of the text. The problem is one of degree -- nothing that Iago says about his motives explains the force, the excess of hate which drives Iago and finally silences him. By leaving Iago alive at the end, Shakespeare even robs us of a death-bed confession. Iago is and will remain an unresolved character, and this is a good way to approach his malice: vague, shifting, beyond even his own understanding, but powerful all the same.

It will be tempting to cut these lines. If the full text is played, the actors might experiment with Roderigo's reactions to Iago's story to give more dimension to the speech. They have just been arguing -- perhaps Roderigo starts to say something and Iago interrupts him, or drawn in conspiratorially, or turning his back on Iago, having to be dragged back etc. Iago is a manipulator, and he establishes his power over Roderigo. At the same time, we learn quickly that Roderigo is a soft touch.

1.1 4-6

Sblood - abhor me.

Iago's reply is brisk and earthy. Like Roderigo he starts with an oath, but this one is defensive, even dissmissive. Although the lines seem short, the speech as a whole  is equivelant to two lines of iambic pentameter  and will not sound odd when spoken. L. 4 is seemingly assertive and there is no reason not to play the whole speech apace. They have been arguing after all, and Iago is trying to cool Roderigo's temper. Is Iago manipulating Roderigo here, or is he afraid that he is losing control of the situation? The lines will play well with physical action, which is implied although not required. L. 4 lends itself to a staging where Iago is chasing after Roderigo, pulling him back, clapping his shoulders, restraining him in some way. Why won't Roderigo hear him? Because he is talking too loud? Because he has his back to Iago, putting his hand up behind him? These are resistances that Iago forcefully overcomes because he is a seasoned soldier, Roderigo a hotheaded novice.

Although l.6 technically resolves the metre, on the page the two words stand out starkly and apparently full of significance. They are words that can be said quickly, that need not be dwelt on -- but it would be interesting to experiment with them. We will end up abhoring Iago after all, and the word is shadowed by 'whore', another key word for the character and the play.

1.1 continued

L.1 runs on a beat longer than it should and suggests a pause between me and I. It's perfectly possible to deliver the line in a more light-hearted way, but as we later learn, Rodergio is hot-headed and it is this that Iago exploits so well. He is affronted and is sulking. Quite what Roderigo and Iago are talking about, and why he is offended, is not clear and the actors are perhaps best playing on the emotional tension -- Rodergio's immature sense of offence, Iago's clever manipulation -- than worrying too much about the detail. But clearly they are talking about Othello's elopement plans. It's most likely that Roderigo means 'I'm upset you knew about their plans and didn't tell me before.'

Random thoughts on the everyday

Currently reading Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday life as part of my research for the next draft of a paper on a Manchester Othello. In the current draft I take issue with the notion that the 'everday' is necessarily ordinary and that it is misleading to seperate theatre from the everyday. De Certeau's problemaitc rests on the lack of ritual, codes, etc. in the everday, in this sense he establishes a technical meaning for the everday as that which is not characterised by repetition. In English, this makes 'everday' a distracting word because it's etymology actually implies a notion of cycle and repitition 'every day' that runs counter to de Certeau's conception of it. His chapter on the city riffs interestingly on the tension between the organised space of the city and the potentially random nature of walking. The everday acquires an unexpected mobility which gives it the status of a kind of resistance politics -- a little bit like Deleuze's notion of 'lines of flight', that which escapes but is also recaptured, but changes the captor in the process. I'm struck by the notion of nowhere and the fear of nowhere which the city, in its ordered space, in its mapping and naming of space, lives in fear of. The city obliterates space and organises itself. It's a hard read and that's partly because the chapter is not well-written, concepts are developed through assertation and striking observations rather than argument. The strong emphasis on a sort of Freudian phenomenology dates it. But de Certeau raises some important theoretical questions about the relationship between the everyday and the discourse which both organises it and loses it.

1.1-3

'Tush never tell me' to 'know of this.'

How do Roderigo and Iago enter? Together obviously, and in the middle of an argument clearly. What has Iago told Roderigo that has offended him? The play starts unusually with what is basically a swear word. At this point we do not know who Roderigo is, who Iago is or what their role in the play will be. We may expect modern audiences to know who Iago is and when Roderigo addresses him in l.2, the general contours of Iago's character will be known. As soon as 'Iago' is said and the audience recognise which of the two Iago is (assuming that few will know the text well enough to work that out from the start) a whole crowd of associations and expectations will cluster around the actor: for some the memory of past Iagos, or of their own readings, or lessons on Iagos, and of course anticipation about how this Iago will interpret such a well-known role. It's important to remember that Shakespeare did not have the same expectation of his audiences. The play is called Othello, not Iago, and the story (with these names) was not well-known. It is handy for us that Iago's name does appear in the second line, because the play is immediately anchored, the audience almost straight away engaged.

Whether good-natured or not, the lines will be delivered at some pace. We are not at the start but in the middle, and Iago's following line (you'll not hear me) suggests that Roderigo should be acting in a hot-headed, ill-tempered manner. But Iago may protest too much -- key to this scene is our later discovery that Iago is an arch manipulator. Is he in control here, is he prodding, provoking Roderigo for his own purposes and how much of his strategy should be apparent from the outset?