- To help visualize the characters,
to help keep them straight,
I'm going to use the actors' images
from the 1995 Castle Rock
production of Othello,
which stars Laurence Fishburne as Othello
and Kenneth Branagh as Iago.
And so, we have a decent number
of characters here to keep track of.
Othello is the title character,
and we can say he's the protagonist,
he's the one with whom we are to identify.
But clearly, he's not
the most active character
on the stage, the most active character,
that role is gonna go to Iago.
He is the one see the most,
he's the one we hear the most,
and he's the one who speaks
directly to the audience,
whereas Othello does not.
Iago is a new type of character
in the Renaissance, and with
Shakespeare in particular,
there have been, during the Middle Ages,
there was always a
character called the vice
is any kind of morality play.
A morality play would
travel around, you know,
try to put on a short production
that would teach the audience
some sort of moral lesson.
It would have one
character called the vice
who would try to cheat other people
and would act sinful and would
try to be sort of devilish,
and ultimately he would
get his in the end,
he would come to a downfall,
whereas the character who
represented the virtue
would always do the right thing,
and even though it would seem to put him
at a disadvantage, ultimately
he would be victorious,
and he would be rewarded in the end.
Iago is very similar
to this vice character,
but where he changes in the Renaissance
is with the recognition that
virtue doesn't always win,
the good guys don't always win,
virtue is not always going
to be ultimately successful.
And this is maybe somewhat
unfairly frequently associated
with the political philosopher
Niccolo Machiavelli,
who was a Florentine who wrote,
most famously, his work The Prince,
not necessarily advocating
but sort of describing
the realistic way politics works,
that if someone tries to,
and especially if a ruler
tries to win everyone over,
that they're actually less
likely to be successful,
they're more likely to
be taken advantage of
than someone who is very aggressive
in protecting their own interests.
And the character of Iago is perhaps
deceptively familiar to us today.
He's every Kevin Spacey character,
every sociopath who
out thinks and out wits
the sort of more naive but
more virtuous other characters.
He's the Petyr Baelish in Game of Thrones,
and I think the Petyr Baelish
and the Ned Stark dynamic
in the first season of Game of Thrones
is very similar to the
Iago and Othello dynamic.
But this is someone whose
thinking we see at work,
whose thinking's more
complicated, maybe uglier,
or definitely uglier,
but also it's a little
harder to figure out,
it takes a little more attention
than someone like Othello who
we know is gonna do the right thing.
He's very predictable,
and we admire that in the character,
that character is easier to
understand, easier to admire,
but can only really survive
if external forces are there to reward him
for his good behavior.
The Iago type of character is someone
who's very good at understanding
the way other people think.
So, with all the discussion
of theory of mind
we've had so far in this class,
obviously this is someone that
I'm going to want to trace
the way he represents to
himself and in his monologues
the way that other people think.
So, we see Iago thinking
about other people's thinking.
He's not the only one
that shows theory of mind
in the play of Othello,
but he's the one that understands
other people's thinking
well enough not just to
know the rules by which
they normally behave,
but how their behavior,
how their decision making
process will change
when a situation changes,
when the context,
when the environment forces them
to think quickly or defensively.
One of the earliest definitions I gave you
for theory of mind comes from
the anthropologist Robin Dunbar who said
having a theory of mind means
being able to understand
what another individual is thinking,
to ascribe beliefs, desires,
fears, hopes to someone else,
and to believe that they
really do experience
those feelings as mental states.
I bring up Robin Dunbar again because
he specifically uses Othello as an example
of the complexity of theory of mind
as it's represented in literature.
This is actually his slide on the top left
from the presentation he gave
at the Nobel conference
at Gustavus Adolphus College in 2008,
and he uses the same slide from
the 1995 Othello production
with Laurence Fishburne
and Kenneth Brannagh.
But he's trying to show that to understand
what's happening in Othello,
we can't just depend on character types
the way we would in a virtue
and vice morality play,
or if there were just stereotypes
in the text or on the stage,
we could just look at the type and say
I know how that character's gonna act
because this type of character
always acts this way.
In Othello, you can't do that.
And, we have to see Iago
looking beyond the types,
looking to see how to
manipulate the types,
how to change their
behavior from the usual
into what he wants those to be.
And so, Dunbar actually maps out
five levels of intentionality,
or five levels of theory of
mind here when he writes,
and then he describes this again
in his book The Human Story,
he says that in writing Othello,
Shakespeare intended
that his audience realize
that the eponymous Moor
believed that his servant Iago
was being honest when he claimed to know
that his beloved Desdemona loved Cassio.
So, Shakespeare has to
get us to think about
how Iago is thinking about Othello
thinking about Desdemona
thinking about Cassio.
That makes things
confusing, to say the least.
But just like anything
else that is difficult,
it actually exercises our
skill in that department.
So, I'm gonna reconstruct
Dunbar's theory of mind map
of Othello here in just a little bit.
It's already complicated,
but the play's actually
much more complicated.
The reason the play Othello
and the character of Iago
in particular are such good
examples of theory of mind
is due to the utility of
theory of mind in deception.
If you think someone else thinks that
someone else thinks something
that someone else thinks
something that's actually true,
it doesn't really matter how many levels
of theory of mind there are,
especially if you can
independently validate that thing.
So, there's this thought at the other end
of this chain of thinking,
and if the thought is true,
you don't actually have to keep in mind
all the different links in that chain,
all the different brains, you
could call it a brain chain,
all the different brains in that chain
between you and that ultimate idea.
But if any of those
mental links in that chain
is wrong or deliberately deceptive,
then it suddenly becomes very important
to be able to map out how
other peoples' mental representations
there are between you and this idea.
So, to understand Iago's lie,
and it's not just a
single statement of a lie,
it's the way he manipulates everyone,
to understand that, we
have to not only understand
how he is representing Othello
representing these other things,
but we have to compare that
to the way he represents other things.
In other words, he knows
that Desdemona loves Othello
and is not cheating on him with Cassio.
He knows that Cassio is loyal to Othello.
He keeps those mental representations,
he has a very accurate
theory of mind of Desdemona,
a very accurate theory of mind of Cassio.
But he has to keep those distinct
from the way he wants Othello to think
Desdemona thinks about
him and about Cassio.
In fact, he is the one
creating that difference.
So, for his deception to work,
he has to know how to separate
Othello's understanding
from the accurate representation
of Desdemona's thinking.
And Robin Dunbar has pointed out
that the evolutionary reason
for the size of the human brain
is a sort of cognitive arms
race between the ability
to deceive others and the
ability to catch deceivers.
When our pre human ancestors
began to live together
in larger and larger groups,
we were better able to share resources
to defend each other from
rival groups and that sort of thing,
so it was an evolutionary advantage
to be part of a larger group.
But, if you're part of a larger group,
that's more people who could
potentially sabotage you or cheat you,
or pretend to be part of the group
and pretend to be loyal,
pretend to help out,
but actually deceive you
and take your resources.
You know, not five anything back,
just promote themselves
and their own offspring
at the expense of you and your offspring.
So, as our groups got larger,
our brains had to become much better
at keeping track of other
individuals around us,
knowing what they knew,
and that made us better
able to deceive them,
but it also made us more suspicious,
better able to carefully keep
watch on potential cheaters.
And it's for that reason
that we're, you know,
just to lie to somebody,
if it was just a lie out of nowhere
probably wouldn't work very well.
Simply lying wouldn't be enough
if the lie didn't resemble
reality in some way.
Some lies work better than others,
and those who understand theory of mind
are better able to
create a convincing lie.
Iago's lies don't start with like
a blunt declarative statement
like Desdemona's having
an affair with Cassio.
You know, even if Othello didn't
immediately suspect Iago of lying,
he would still doubt the statement
because it comes out of
nowhere and it doesn't explain
anything in Othello's
experience up to that point.
So, what Iago has to
do is gradually direct
Othello's thinking in a
slower, more subtle way.
And what I wanna do now is look at
the ways that he does that in the text.
So, if I told you that I've
got a four letter word here,
and it's missing one letter,
and I want you to fill in that letter.
But I'm gonna preface it like this,
I'm gonna say before you eat,
fill in the missing letter below.
There are at least two
letters you could put there
to make an English word,
but I think if I start out
by saying before you eat,
fill in the missing letter,
I think I know which of those
two you're gonna choose.
This is called priming.
If I make you think of dinner,
if I make you think of
sitting down to eat a dinner,
make you think of appetizers,
something becoming before the dinner,
I like this picture
because it has a salad,
the kinda thing you would usually
be served before the entree.
Something else you
might normally be served
before the entree, something
that you would eat with spoons,
like the ones sitting next to the salad,
notice I'm not showing
you a picture of soup,
I'm just showing you things
that are associated with soup.
So, when you think about what letter
to fill in that word with,
you're probably thinking
of a U rather than an A.
But if I showed you this image and I said
after you wash your hands,
fill in the missing letter.
Even though, again, there's no
image of soap in this scene,
the scene is associated with soap,
we would normally expect to see soap,
whether a bar of soap or a soap dispenser
on one side or the other of that sink.
So, you're more likely
to look at this image
and add an A to the word.
So, priming is trying to active
a particular representation
or an association in memory
before then asking you
to carry out an action
or a task, or in this case,
just a fill in a word.
I'm trying to make you think of something
without actually saying that thing.
And I'm triggering associative coherence,
remember this term from all the way
in the beginning of the semester?
Associative coherence is when
you think a lot of things
ought to go together,
just mentioning one thing
makes you think of the other,
and so if I showed you all these words,
thread, pin, eye, sewing, sharp, point,
and then later I asked you
did I say the word needle?
Most people thought they
remembered the word needle,
the word needle wasn't actually said,
but it was activated in your mind
because all these other
things connect in your mind,
they cohere with the word needle.
So here's another little
psychological experiment,
this one comes from the behavioral
economist Daniel Kahneman
in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.
Which of these two events do
you think seems more likely?
Event number one, there's a massive flood
somewhere in North America next year
in which more than 1,000 people drown.
Or event number two, there's
an earthquake in California
sometime next year,
causing a flood in which
more than 1,000 people drown.
Now, most people look at this question,
and one of them just
seems really intuitive,
it just seems like the kind of
thing that typically happens.
And most people say I
think it's more likely
than an earthquake in California
will happen sometime next
year that causes a flood
in which more than 1,000 people drown.
The problem with that is the earthquake
is not actually that relevant.
Both of these options contain a flood
in which more than 1,000 people drown,
but one about the earthquake in California
adds and extra criteria,
or two extra criteria.
One extra criteria is
that there's an earthquake
in addition to the flood,
and the other criteria is that
it has to happen in California.
Well, California is in North America,
so if the second option was true,
then the first option would also be true,
and the earthquake has to cause a flood,
which means if the second option was true,
then the first option would also be true.
All that's required in the first one
is that it's in North America
and that there's a flood.
So, there's an associative coherence
with the ideas of
earthquakes in California,
that's the kind of thing that's familiar,
so we tend to assume that
that option's gonna be
more likely, and we
overlook the other part.
So, this coherence, this common idea,
this set of ideas in our heads
frames the actual logical decision.
Logically, it should
be obvious that because
the second alternative is contained
within the first alternative
that the first alternative
is the most likely,
but that whole thinking
process is framed by
this really loud and intuitive idea
that earthquakes happen in California,
earthquakes happen in California.
It makes it really hard to
specifically look at the logic
of the question and say that
the first answer's much more likely.
So, the coherent model frames
the specific thought that
we're trying to formulate.
And Kahneman points out that
coherence like this has a cost,
he says coherence means
that you're going to adopt
one interpretation in general.
Ambiguity tends to be suppressed.
This is part of the
mechanism that you have here
that ideas active other ideas
and the more coherent they are,
the more likely they are to
active each other in the mind,
notice, not more likely
they are to be true,
just the more likely they are to seem true
because they activate other
thoughts within your mind.
Other things that don't
fit into that frame,
into that coherent associative model,
fall by the wayside.
We're enforcing coherent interpretation.
We see the world as much
more coherent than it is.
The confidence that people
have in their beliefs
is not a measure of the
quality of the evidence,
but it is a judgment of the coherence
of the story that the mind
has managed to construct.
Quite often you can
construct very good stories
out of very little evidence.
People tend to have great belief,
and great faith in stories that are
based on very little evidence.
Another thought experiment
that comes from Kahneman's book
is this one, if you
look at let's call them
lines on the top box and compare them
to the lines on the bottom box,
the fact that I'm calling them lines
probably seems kind of odd,
obviously they're numbers in the top box
and they're letters in
the bottom box, but wait.
Look at the two lines in
the middle of both of those,
they're exactly the same,
but what looks like a
13 when it's in the top
looks like a B when it's
between an A and a C.
In both of these cases, these are framed,
these two lines, the one
relatively straight line
and the one sort of curved line,
either the three or the
right half of the B,
they're shaped the same,
but the shapes on either side of them
determine what associations
we have with them.
So, this is what we call framing,
this is placing information
in a specific and limited context,
and that influences how we
interpret the information,
limited specifically
because if you think about
the way a frame works with a picture,
it actually doesn't add
anything to the picture,
what it does is cut out some elements.
And this is very similar
to the sorts of framing
we talked about in Chaucer,
where we have a narrative frame.
The narrator decides what to
include, what to leave out,
how to connect different ideas together
within a particular frame.
But we also saw that when we
have an unreliable narrator
we need to be careful about
who's constructing the frame,
why are they constructing it that way,
what is being left outside of the frame
that we might want to ask about?
I wanna do one more thought experiment.
Back in the 1960s,
psychologist Peter Wiesen
came up with this test,
and in it, he asked students,
he would write these three numbers
on the board in front of a classroom,
and he would ask students
to guess the secret rule
that he used for selecting these numbers
and putting them in this order.
And rather than saying out
loud I think your rule is this,
the way they had to test that rule
was to give three other
numbers in a sequence
and ask him does this fit the rule?
And he would say either yes or no.
So, they couldn't just
ask what the rule was
or just guess what the rule was,
they actually had to test the rule.
And more people would
test this rule this way.
If Wiesen chose the
numbers two, four, six,
they would say okay, eight, 10, 12,
or 14, 16, 18, or 92, 94, 96.
And in all these cases,
Peter Wiesen would say yes,
those sequences follow the
rule that I'm following,
are you ready to guess what my rule is?
And everybody said yes, majority
of people would say yes,
I know what the rule is,
the rule is three numbers
increasing by two each time.
And then Wiesen would say
no, that's not the rule,
and people would be
surprised, wait a second,
that has to be the rule,
we've just confirmed it.
And they had confirmed something,
they had confirmed the rule
that was in their head,
the problem was confirming something
isn't actually testing it.
Every now and then, a student would guess
a sequence like one, two, three,
or six, four, two, the same
three numbers except backwards,
or something like one, 17, 133.
And when they did this,
they would sometimes
get a surprising answer.
One, two, three, actually
did fit the rule,
six, four, two, did not fit the rule,
and one, 17, 133 did fit the rule,
so the people that were thinking oh,
it's just increasing by two each time,
they would look at one, two, three,
and say well, that shouldn't be right,
it's almost as if Peter
Wiesen got the rule wrong.
Or one, 17, 133, that
can't possibly be right,
that's not increasing by two every time.
They were surprised that they were wrong
because they had just
confirmed three times,
or in this example, the
three times there had been
some sort of confirmation
of a different rule
that should not have been
confirmed by those other ones.
But in this case, all three
of those bottom numbers
are actually deliberately,
or people were trying to be wrong.
Instead of trying to confirm
the rule that they guessed,
they were trying to falsify it.
And this is what psychologists
call confirmation bias.
We're much more likely to test something
by trying to validate our rule
or the pattern we think we see
or the frame that we
believe is appropriate.
We rarely try to falsify our belief,
we rarely try to say I think
is gonna come out wrong,
but I need to try it just in case,
because when you have a rule in your head,
when you have a pattern
that you think you see,
and you look for evidence
that shouldn't be there
and it turns out that it is there,
that's just as important, or
actually much more important,
than confirming the pattern
you thought you saw.
So, falsification is the way
that modern science works.
And this, in one form or another,
goes back to Francis Bacon,
who I mentioned earlier as being
someone that people thought
may have written some
of Shakespeare's works.
The scientific method doesn't look to
find evidence that confirms a hypothesis,
it looks for ways to
disconfirm a hypothesis,
to falsify that hypothesis,
and if attempts to falsify
that hypothesis fail,
then you're doing pretty good,
you can go from being a
hypothesis to being a theory.
But notice, confirmation is not enough.
If we believe that the
sun orbits the Earth
rather than the other way around,
we can confirm that every morning,
walk outside, look east,
you'll see the sun coming up,
you'll watch the sun go over to the west
and settle there at the end of the day,
so that confirms the belief that
the sun moves and the Earth is still.
But of course, you know,
if you look up at the sky
at like the planet Venus
throughout the year,
it's never rising and
setting in the same place,
so that doesn't quite make sense.
So, if you look for counter evidence,
you're in a better position to be certain
than you are if you've never
looked for counter evidence.
So, I've introduced four
principles from psychology
to talk about Shakespeare.
And you may be thinking why
we have to do more psychology again,
but in this case I hope it
starts to become obvious,
we're going to look at this
psychology play itself out,
and we're gonna ask ourselves
why didn't Othello try falsification?
Why was Othello just
looking for ocular proof,
looking to just confirm
what he was already
led to believe by Iago?
Understanding these
quirks in human cognition,
and these are quirks that are just as true
in Shakespeare's time as they are in ours,
and were probably true 100,000 years
before Shakespeare's time.
These quirks in human cognition
create these framing effects,
and Kahneman defines framing effects
as large changes of preferences
that are sometimes caused by
inconsequential variations
in the wording of a choice problem.
So, remember what's more likely,
a California earthquake causing
a flood, or just a flood?
Choosing certain words
makes an illogical answer
seem more realistic.
Kahneman points out that different ways
of presenting the same information
often evoke different emotions,
we definitely see Iago able to manipulate
certain emotions by the
way he presents them.
Framing effects have an
unjustified influence
on the formation of
beliefs and preferences,
and unless there's an obvious
reason to do otherwise,
most of us passively accept
the decision problems as they are framed,
and therefore rarely have an opportunity
to discover the extent
to which our preferences
are frame bound rather than reality bound.
In other words, we rarely ask ourselves
how are we framing this new information,
or how are other people framing
that new information for us?
And one very common way the
information is framed for us,
even though we're thinking about
something in particular
for the first time,
that information may already be framed,
and that is by metaphors in the language.
Now, I haven't talked about
metaphor in a long time,
partly because nearly
everything we've read
has been in translation,
and that means a lot of the
original metaphors get lost,
and some English language
metaphors creep in the translation
that weren't actually there.
But in this case,
you're reading this in
the original language,
so we can notice certain metaphors,
certain figures of speech
in which comparison
is made or an identity is asserted between
two unrelated things or actions
without the use of like or as.
And the words like or
as are less important
than the fact that a metaphor
doesn't call attention to
itself as a comparison,
but it is a comparison.
We wanna distinguish between
the two components of a metaphor,
the tenor and the vehicle.
The tenor is the thing
that's being described,
the vehicle is the thing to
which it's being compared,
the imagery that's being
used to describe that thing.
And these sorts of things
creep into our language,
they creep into our associations,
they make different
things seem more coherent,
not because they actually
fit together in reality,
but because we're just used to
using these metaphors implicitly.
The example I used in the metaphor lecture
was thinking of a university education
as a trip to the store where
the students as customers,
and education is like a thing,
a commodity you can
just take off the shelf
and put in your basket
and go to the checkout
and pay your money and that's it.
But that's a bad metaphor
because in that metaphor,
students don't actually
have to do anything,
there's no effort required.
A customer, there's no effort required
from a customer except to show up,
and sometimes you could order it online,
you don't even have to do that,
you just pay the money,
that's not really effort.
So, if we compare the university to a gym,
you know, let's say it's a
gym that you have to pay for,
let's say that's not the Dugan Center,
that's actually you're going
to Gold's Gym across town,
you're actually having
to spend money on that,
but then spending the money
isn't going to make you stronger,
it's not gonna make you more healthy,
you actually have to show up,
you actually have to work for it.
So, if we change our metaphors,
all of a sudden there's a
whole sort of different frame
that we're using to look at our education.
But a lot of those frames are there
even though we don't notice them,
and this is why the linguist George Lakoff
and the philosopher Mark Johnson say that
because the metaphorical
concept is systematic,
the language we use to talk about
that aspect of the concept
is also systematic.
And this very systematicity that allows us
to comprehend one aspect of
a concept in terms of another
will necessarily hide other
aspects of that concept.
So, it's framing it, it's
saying focus on this,
but ignore this other thing.
In allowing us to focus on
one aspect of a concept,
metaphorical concept can keep us
from focusing on other
aspects of the concept
that are inconsistent with that metaphor.
So, metaphors are one way
that words can frame new information,
frame information by
focusing us on some aspects,
but actually hiding other aspects from us.
And it does it even when no one else
uses these metaphors to deceive us,
we can deceive ourselves
by the metaphors we use.
And it seems that nobody
knows this better than Iago.
Now, part of Shakespeare's genius
is his use of metaphors
throughout his works,
but remember, there's no
narration in Shakespeare play,
that means that all these metaphors
aren't necessarily Shakespeare saying
I think this is the way the world is,
but one of Shakespeare's characters saying
I think this is the way the world is.
And, as we'll see with Iago,
those metaphors can be used
to provoke emotional responses
and immediate, instinctual frames.
And there's probably no more
visceral and vulgar metaphor
in Othello, and who knows,
maybe not in Shakespeare either,
than when Iago and Roderigo
are standing outside Brabantio's window.
Remember that Brabantio
is Desdemona's father,
and Desdemona is off eloping with Othello,
they're getting married,
they're exchanging wedding vows,
but the way Iago describes it
is he yells to Desdemona's father
an old black ram is
tupping your white ewe.
In this metaphor, he
is making a comparison,
and it's a comparison that
frames what's actually happening,
but it does so in such a way
that takes this very innocent elopement,
this marriage between two people
who are in love with each other,
and it compares it to
two sheep having sex.
It makes it much more
animalistic, much more carnal,
much more vulgar than the
thing it's actually describing.
And of course, it brings in
the color difference here,
but that doesn't, as I mentioned earlier,
the distinctions about race
aren't exactly then what they are now.
But in this particular metaphor,
you don't want a black ram
and a white ewe copulating
if you're selling the wool.
You want the wool to be
as white as possible,
because it can take on
more colors that way,
it can be more easily dyed.
Whereas dark wool is only gonna be dark,
you can only dye it another dark shade.
So, if you're actually
thinking in economic terms,
then this white ewe, this female sheep,
is going to have lambs whose wool
is not gonna be marketable.
But the vulgarity here is clearly
very deliberate on Iago's part.
It is intended to get Brabantio angry,
emotional, and irrational.
He wants Brabantio angry at Othello,
and he doesn't stop with the
black ram, white ewe metaphor.
He says you'll have your daughter
covered with a Barbary horse,
covered in this case
means, again, breeding.
The Barbary horse, remember that
the Barbary Coast is where Othello's from,
this is the Northwest
African coast, so again,
he's making it very clear
that this is Othello
and Desdemona, but he finds
yet another animal metaphor.
And one of the most famous
vulgar lines in Shakespeare
is he says your daughter and the Moor
are now making the beast with two backs.
So, if you imagine two
people having sex, you know,
on one side is one of their backs,
and the other side is
another of their backs.
So, they're making one animal,
it's not like, you know,
a union of souls or something like that,
no, this is like the two of them
go together and just make this animal.
All three of these metaphors
describe an actual marriage,
but they're describing it
just in terms of animal sex.
You could imagine what
kind of emotional response
this is gonna have for Brabantio,
but not just the emotion, the
emotion is then going to frame
everything that happens next.
So, what Brabantio is about
to learn is the truth,
that is that his daughter is
married to his friend Othello,
we're gonna find out that
Brabantio and Othello
had great respect for each other.
So, this is the kind of thing
which if it was described
as exactly what it is,
as a marriage, as an elopement,
he might be angry that they
didn't make it a public affair,
that this is happening without
his immediate consent
or something like that.
But the way he's actually
gonna respond to it
when he's first shown this information,
when Othello actually does tell
him yes, we are now married,
he is already framing
everything with Iago's imagery,
the animal sex imagery that Iago chose,
that he's priming him with.
Not only is Iago framing this illicit
or secret marriage for Brabantio,
but Shakespeare is actually framing,
or Shakespeare is actually priming us
before we've met Othello
for the first time,
before we've seen him
speak on his own behalf.
But that is going to be completely upended
when we actually see Othello,
when we hear him speak for himself.
So, among his first lines are when
Brabantio is coming to find him,
and he's bringing these
armed guards with him.
Iago tells Othello that
he needs to go hide
because these men are coming after you,
and Othello says let him do his spite,
my services which I have done
the signatory, in other words,
the lords of Venice, shall
out-tongue his complaints.
In other words, my reputation
precedes me and speaks for me,
I don't need to hide, I
don't need to be deceptive,
they know who I am, and
that's enough to represent me
against whatever accusations
this person's making against me.
Tis yet yet know, which,
when I know that boasting is
an honor, I shall promulgate,
I fetch my life and being
from men of royal siege,
and my demerits may speak unbonneted to
as proud a fortune as
this that I have reached;
for know, Iago, but that I
love the gentle Desdemona.
What he's saying is if I needed to brag,
if I needed to explain myself,
I would remind people that
I do come from an aristocratic
background, and my demerits,
we use the term demerit now
just to mean like a negative mark,
but at this point it just
meant any kind of mark,
any kind of reputation.
And his reputation
happens to be very good,
my demerits speak unbonneted
to as proud a fortune
as this I have reached.
So, the marks, the things
by which I am known
will show that I'm an honorable person
and I'm not guilty of
whatever he seems to be
accusing me of, and that I love Desdemona,
and I'm not gonna hide that fact,
I'm not going to taint my relationship
with Desdemona with lies
and hiding and deceit.
He says I must be found, in other words,
I'm not going to hide, I must be found,
I want people to see me,
I want people to see that I am honest.
My parts, my title, my perfect soul
shall manifest me rightly.
Manifest being, you know, the
opposite of hiding, to show,
I need to be seen so that
who I am can show through.
This is the most honest person
and the most honest speech
from the most honest type
of person we can imagine,
and his confidence is such that, I mean,
we learn very quickly that's
he a very accomplished general,
that he is someone who's done a lot
for the Republic of Venice,
but we presume that Iago is someone
who's also part of the military of Venice
and has been in a lot of battles as well,
but we're going to see the distinction
between Iago's deceptiveness
and Othello's virtue.
And Othello's virtue
isn't just his honesty,
but it's also his gentleness,
his withholding force even when
he's confronted by these armed guards,
they're sticking their swords in his face,
and he says keep up your
bright swords, in other words,
you know, put them back in
the sheath, put them up.
Keep up your bright swords,
for the dew will rust them.
In other words, there's not
gonna be any fighting here.
He's not defensive,
he doesn't have the
look of a guilty person,
or even of a person who's worried.
He knows that there's
not going to be a fight
for whatever reason,
whether it's that he's
guilty of something,
and presumably because if there was
gonna be a fight he would win,
so there's just sort of
no chance of these guys
actually doing anything with those swords.
And he says to Brabantio good signior,
you shall more command with your years
than with your weapons, in other words,
you also should speak through who you are,
through your experience,
through the respect people have for you,
through the respect I have for you.
You will command me not because
you have these guards here,
but because I respect you, I
respect you for your years,
for your service,
for the friendship we've
had over the years.
Notice how much Othello
resembles Aeneas here,
this is someone with pietas,
this is someone who is loyal,
he is loyal to the people whom he serves,
the Republic of Venice, he is reserved,
he does not let his furor out.
He is very much in
control with his emotions
at a time when it would seem
that he has the opportunity
and the justification to react,
either be afraid or be
angry or be insulted,
he is none of those things.
He knows he's honest, he
knows his virtues are known,
and he's going to let his
reputation speak for himself,
and he's not at all worried about that.
This reputation and the impact it has
is very much connected
to this idea of kleos,
the idea of dom in Old English,
remember dom meaning judgment,
but it means the judgment of other people,
it's how you're known,
people know what you've done
in the past and they
use that to judge you,
and if you've done all
of these good things,
which Othello has, they're
gonna judge you well,
so you need not be afraid of dom,
of judgment, of what people say.
You've got the kleos, and in this case,
Othello has won his
kleos on the battlefield,
but remember kleos is also the thing said,
or what people say about you.
And he has earned it, now it's
sort of this social capital,
and now he's got plenty of it to spare
with whatever accusation
Brabantio wants to bring.
But it's for this reason it seems
because Othello is so honest,
because he's so upfront with everything,
he doesn't conceal anything,
this is why it seems that
he's the antithesis of Iago.
But it's also why he's
so vulnerable to Iago.
People a lot of times
will read Othello and say
oh, clearly this is showing
how naive this military general is,
or maybe this is showing that Shakespeare
thought people of African
descent were more emotional
and reactive and jealous
and that sort of thing.
But notice how when everybody
else at the beginning
is bursting with emotion,
Othello was very calm.
And this is the most virtuous person,
he's the one who most
resembles people like Aeneas,
he resembles people like El Cid,
remember when El Cid
should have been justified
in killed the Corrientes,
or even turning against King Alfonso,
when he had been wronged,
he didn't immediately
respond with violence,
even though he had the opportunity.
It was his honestly, his patience,
his sort of gentleness of character
that won out in the end.
And we would like to see
that happen with Othello,
but we have this new character
of Iago to deal with,
and this is very similar
to that line in the Aeneid
when Aeneas is telling the
story of the Trojan Horse,
and this Greek named Sinon
has to communicate this lie,
he has to hang around with the horse
and tell the Trojans that oh,
if you only take it
into the walls of Troy,
the gods will then be on your
side and the Greeks will lose.
And he's able to lie to them, I mean,
he does come up with a
pretty convincing story,
a pretty good use of theory of mind,
but he's able to lie to
them according to Aeneas.
Aeneas says that the Trojans,
we believed him because we were honest,
we were men of virtue, we
were not the kind of people
who would just lie to each other,
we would win our battles
on the battlefield,
not through deception.
Because we were honest, we
assumed other men were honest.
And that ends up being
the downfall of Troy,
but it's not something that's
criticized in the Aeneid.
Aeneas is still virtuous
because he opened himself up
to deception, because his
honesty made him vulnerable.
You have to be really
strong to be vulnerable
and to be open and still survive,
but what Shakespeare is
going to confront us with
is that that vulnerability is still there,
that virtue of character opens you up
to the maliciousness, to
the lies of other people,
especially when you depend on reputation,
you depend on other people
seeing you a certain way.
Other people see you framed
by certain good deeds,
rather than having that frame manipulated
by somebody like Iago.
But despite how open, honest,
and patient Othello is,
when Brabantio learns about this wedding,
he's not looking at it as a wedding,
he's not even looking
at it as an elopement.
The fact that it was secret
doesn't seem to be the problem he has,
he already has this frame
constructed in his mind
by Iago's animal sex
metaphors, and so he's angry,
and that anger is going to continue
to look for justification.
So, he starts to generate
his own narrative
to explain this marriage.
Rather than admitting that his daughter
could've fallen in love with Othello,
he says damned is thou art,
to Othello, thou hast enchanted her.
If she in chains of magic were not bound,
so opposed to marriage that she shunned,
the wealthy, curled
darlings of our nation.
This probably and palpable to thinking.
In other words, she
didn't wanna marry anyone,
otherwise she would have married
one of these young native Venetians,
one of these Venetian noblemen,
they're her age and her race
and her nationality, rather than you.
If she didn't want to marry them,
surely she wouldn't have
wanted to marry you,
she wouldn't have married you voluntarily.
He can't see that well, maybe
she didn't wanna marry them
because she wanted to marry Othello,
this is why she didn't wanna marry
the young Venetian noblemen,
she already had her ideal husband in mind.
We're going to see that explanation
come from both Othello and Desdemona,
but Brabantio can't see that,
Brabantio has already generated this idea
that she didn't wanna marry
these other younger guys,
she married Othello, therefore
Othello, being an African,
must know some magic that
he's used to brainwash her.
That means that Othello and Desdemona
have to compete with that frame,
they have to give an
alternative narrative,
an alternative explanation
for why the two of them got married.
And Othello tells Brabantio
and the rest of the nobles
of Venice that I have taken
away this old man's daughter,
it is most true, I have married her.
He admits yes, we have gotten married,
that part of it is true.
Her father loved me, oft invited me,
still questioned me in
the story of my life
from year to year, the battles,
the sieges, the fortunes
that I have passed.
He's saying that Brabantio
and I have been friends,
he loved me and he wanted
to hear the stories
about my past conquest in
battles and that sort of thing.
I ran it through, even
from my boyish days,
so he tells his life story
from the time he was a boy,
this to hear would
Desdemona seriously incline.
So, while he's telling Brabantio
this story of his life,
Desdemona, Brabantio's daughter,
is listening in to this story.
This to hear would
Desdemona seriously incline,
she thanked me, and bade
me if I had a friend
that loved her, I should but
teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her.
Upon this hint I spake, so
she tells him well, you know,
if you had a friend that
had stories like that,
all he'd have to do is
tell me those stories
and I'd fall in love with him.
So, you know, this is
again theory of mind,
she's saying not directly
I'm falling in love with you,
but you know, if you have a
friend that's exactly like you,
so she drops the hint,
he picks up on the hint.
And so upon this hint I spake,
she loved me for the dangers I had passed,
and I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used.
So, he takes that witchcraft priming,
that witchcraft metaphor, or
that witchcraft accusation
that has been primed by
Brabantio and says okay,
if I used witchcraft,
it was the witchcraft of telling my story.
And Desdemona confirms this frame,
and she extends this
frame to remind Brabantio
of the fact that he took
another man's daughter away
from her when he took
his wife, her mother.
She says my noble father, I do
perceive here a divided duty:
to you I am bound for life
and education, in other words,
bound to the fact that he gave her life,
and gave her an education.
My life and education both do learn me
how to respect you, so I have learned
the proper respect that
is due to a father.
You are the Lord of my duty,
I am hitherto your daughter,
but here's my husband,
and so much duty as my
mother showed to you,
preferring you before her father,
so much I challenge that I may profess
due to the Moor my lord.
She still refers to him as the Moor,
but I guess that's how people
are describing him there.
But she's reminding him
that now that I'm married,
my duty is to my husband
first and to my father second.
That I did love the Moor to live with him,
my downright violence and storm of fortune
may the trumpet to the
world; my heart's subdued
even to the very quality of my lord
I saw Othello's visage in his mind,
and to his honor and to his valiant parts
did I my soul and fortunes consecrate.
Some critics point out that at this point,
we have what looks like a comedy.
And in a Shakespearian comedy,
it usually ends in a marriage,
and that's where act one ends,
we have this trouble brewing
between these two newlyweds,
but the newlyweds, through their love,
are able to show everyone
that we're now married,
we love each other, here's
why let's all be happy
and live happily ever after.
Unfortunately, as we
know, this is not gonna be
a happily ever after type of marriage,
but it's through no fault of these two.
Othello and Desdemona right now
are this sort of ideal married couple.
The reason there's not gonna
be a happily ever after
is because of Iago.
Now, to understand Iago,
we get a lot more depth to this character,
he's a much more complex character,
maybe he's even more
interesting precisely because
Desdemona and Othello are
so easy to understand.
Their honesty as characters
actually makes them
a little bit less interesting
because we pretty much know
all we need to know about them.
We know that we would trust
them if they were actual people,
and we know that we would not trust Iago,
but as far as a puzzle
to sort of figure out,
and the one who's actually doing
and creating the majority of the action,
Iago actually has a lot more
development as a character.
The problem is we're never
really sure how to interpret him.
What's his motivation?
Why does he want to destroy
Othello and Desdemona?
Well, he says at first that it's because
he was going to become
Othello's lieutenant,
he was gonna be promoted,
but instead Cassio was
the one that was promoted.
In personal suit to
make me his lieutenant,
I know my price, I am
worth no worse a place.
So, he's angry about this,
being passed over by
Cassio who's this sort of,
you know, straight out of ROTC,
he's described as being all theory,
he's good at sort of the
mathematics of the battlefield,
but he doesn't have the experience
on the battlefield that Iago has.
But then later, he says I hate the Moor,
and it is though abroad
that twixt my sheets
he has done my office, in other words,
that he has been sleeping
with Emilia, Iago's wife.
Well, that's new, and he doesn't
say what he bases that on,
he just says that it is thought abroad,
that somebody somewhere thinks this.
And he says I know not if it be true,
but I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
will do as if for surety.
In other words, I don't know if it's true,
but just thinking about it,
I wanna get revenge on him.
And then later again he says
I do suspect the lusty Moor
hath leaped into my seat,
the thought whereof doth,
like a poisonous mineral,
gnaw my inwards.
So, just this idea that he
might have slept with Emilia
just enrages Iago's jealousy,
and this seems to be why he
knows how jealousy works.
He knows that just this idea
is just pushing him to do something awful,
he knows if he plants a
similar idea in Othello's head
that it's gonna push Othello
into a vulnerable position.
He admits a certain amount of his methods,
at least, to Roderigo.
Roderigo, who was in love with Desdemona,
or still is in love with Desdemona,
but has been rejected both by
Desdemona and by Brabantio.
Brabantio says, you know,
I've already told you,
you can't pursue my daughter.
And he wants to change that,
and Iago knows enough
about Roderigo's thinking
to sort of lead him along
and say well, if you do this,
you might be able to win Desdemona,
you might at least be able to
break up Othello and Desdemona,
and Roderigo says well,
don't you serve Othello?
And Iago says I follow Othello
to serve my turn upon him.
Though I do hate him as I do hell-pains,
I must show out a flag, a sign of love,
which is indeed but a sign.
And this showing signs
rather than showing realities
is sort of what Iago is,
it's what makes him deceptive.
But notice he's not just telling a lie,
he's giving little signs, little priming,
the signs that he's putting out there
are just signs to provoke,
to prime, to frame,
to set up Othello's thinking.
And he's able to do this
because, as Iago says,
he holds me well, the better
shall my purpose work on him.
Cassio's a proper man, let me see now:
to get his place and to plume up my will
in double knavery, how,
how am I gonna do this?
Let's see, after some time,
to abuse Othello's ear
that he is too familiar with his wife,
I'm gonna tell Othello that Cassio's
a little too familiar with Desdemona,
they're maybe getting
a little too friendly.
He hath a person and a smooth
dispose to be suspected,
framed to make women false.
In other words, Cassio's
a good looking guy,
or he's a ladies man, he's the kind of guy
who would cheat, or sleep
with another man's wife,
or it would be easy for him.
Notice how Iago is using types,
he's not necessarily getting too deep
into the theory of mind of the
people he's thinking about,
he knows that Othello might
fall for this stereotype,
if Othello thinks of
Cassio as this stereotype
who's kind of a ladies man,
who's the kind of guy who
could seduce Desdemona,
then that stereotype is
gonna have a lot of power
in Othello's mind, according to Iago.
The Moor is of a free and open nature,
that thinks men honest but seem to be so,
in other words, like Aeneas
said about the Trojans,
because he's honest, he thinks
other people are honest.
And will tenderly be led
by the nose as asses are.
As donkeys are, you just
lead them by, you know,
putting something they want
right in front of them.
I have't, this isn't I have
not, this is I have it,
I have't, it is ungendered,
hell and night must bring this
monstrous birth to world's light.
In that capping couplet he's talking about
how he's giving birth to a monster,
later he's gonna identify it
as the green eyed monster,
we still use that phrase today.
So again, we have our characters,
and these characters are becoming,
now that Iago has this idea,
these are almost sort of chess pieces
that are on a board that
he needs to position.
He can't just say Othello,
here's how you're supposed
to think about Cassio,
he has to actually put Cassio
in a position to be
interpreted a certain way,
the same way that knowing
that Othello and Desdemona
were going to be together
and that Brabantio
was going to learn this soon,
he was able to frame Brabantio's
view of that marriage,
now he's got to be even more clever
and create this even larger design.
So, the first act let us know how Iago
primes people with
metaphors and with images,
with just little hints of thoughts
rather than entire declarative sentences
so that that frames the things
that they actually do see.
He actually has to have these characters
witness something that
fits within this frame,
so there's two parts to his lie,
it's not just a sentence,
it is the priming that creates the frame,
but then they actually have
to see something in that frame
that they're able to
misinterpret to Iago's advantage.
So first, he has to get
Cassio and Desdemona
interacting together so
that that will be something
that Othello can see and be framed.
Well, he does this,
this is a very long game
that he starts in act
three when he gets Roderigo
to pick a fight with Cassio,
and he also gets Cassio drunk,
so Cassio is drunk, and then
he goes onto watch duty,
and he doesn't wanna
admit that he's drunk,
and he gets angry when
people say that he's drunk.
Then Roderigo says
something to him offstage,
but he picks a fight with him,
and when Montano, the governor of Cyprus,
steps in to break up this
fight, Cassio wounds Montano.
And then Iago tells Roderigo
to go raise an alarm,
so Roderigo starts yelling mutiny, mutiny.
That means that the soldiers,
the Venetian soldiers,
and turning against
their proper authority.
This brings Othello out,
so just yelling mutiny frames something
that wasn't actually a mutiny.
Cassio and Montano were
just sort of drunk guys
brawling with each other,
but when Othello sees that,
he sees that as his men are
fighting with each other,
that must confirm this charge of mutiny
that's just been yelled, he
doesn't even know who said it,
he doesn't know it was Roderigo,
he doesn't know how it started.
And once he asked people
what's happened here?
Cassio doesn't really wanna tell him,
Montano it seems doesn't
really wanna tell him,
so he asks Iago, honest Iago,
he keeps calling him honest Iago,
which we see is very ironic,
but Iago has this opportunity to say
that guy you promoted over me, Cassio,
he's actually a drunk,
he picked a fight with
the governor of Cyprus,
you should definitely kick
him out of this position,
give me the position.
Iago, if all he wanted
was Cassio's position,
he has an opportunity
to take that right now,
but notice that his lie depends
on continuing to be trusted,
and to be seen as the kind of person
who would not slander another person,
even if that other person
did something wrong.
And so, Iago is hesitant to actually say
that Cassio wounded
Montano because he's drunk,
or that it's in any way his fault.
And Othello falls for this,
Othello continues to think
of Iago as honest Iago,
he says I know, Iago,
thy honestly and thy love
doth mince this matter, in other words,
I know you wanna be honest
but I know you also are
a good friend to Cassio,
so you're making it light to Cassio,
you're trying to make Cassio look good
because you're such a good guy, Iago,
we all love you for that, but
I have to be the general here,
I have to institute discipline.
And he tells Cassio, Cassio, I love thee,
but never more be officer of mine.
So, Cassio has lost his rank.
And Cassio reminds us how
important reputation is,
and he says it three times,
reputation, reputation, reputation.
O, I have lost my reputation.
I have lost the immortal part of myself.
This should seem familiar,
the reputation, the dom,
the kleos that lives on after you're gone,
this is what these warriors from the Iliad
and from Hrolf Kraki's Saga and Beowulf,
this is what they fight and die for,
because after they die, if
they are remembered well,
if they are judged well after their death,
then that is the closest thing
to immortality they're gonna get.
Again, this doesn't take into
account any kind of afterlife,
it just says on Earth the
immortal part of myself
is my reputation, and I just lost that,
what remains is bestial.
In other words, I'm just an animal now,
I'm just this sort of
material, biological substance
that's gonna rot if I die because
I've lost this immortal part
of myself, my reputation.
And again he says it twice,
and notice what Iago says,
I'm gonna come back to
this at the very end
because it's an open question.
Iago says as I am an honest man,
and we know he's not an honest man,
but he needs Cassio to
think he's an honest man.
As I am an honest man,
I thought that you had
received some bodily wound.
There is more sense in
that than in reputation.
In other words, I thought you
were wounded or something,
you're just worried about your reputation?
That's no big deal.
He's framing this in
exactly the opposite way,
that losing your
reputation is no big deal,
but if your animal substance,
your biological substance,
if your body had been wounded,
that would be something to cry about.
But reputation is an idle
and a most false imposition,
oft got without merit and
lost without deserving.
You have lost no reputation at all,
unless you repute yourself such a loser.
In other words, you create
your own reputation.
It's almost as if Cassio can deny
that he's done anything wrong
and he will maintain that reputation.
We would like to think that's not true,
we would like to think
that people could see
the falsehood of a boasting
liar who makes himself
look like a better
person than he really is,
we would hope people could
tell the difference between
that and someone who had
actually earned their reputation,
but what Iago is telling Cassio is no,
you can just decide what your
reputation's going to be,
and you've never lost it
until you think you have.
But this is all leading up to his setup,
he needs to get Cassio
interacting not with Othello,
but with Desdemona.
So, this is when he tells him the plan
to get back his lieutenantship.
He says I'll tell you what you shall do.
Our general's wife, Othello's wife,
Desdemona, is now the general.
Confess yourself freely to her,
importune her help to put
you in your place again.
In other words, now that
Desdemona is married to Othello,
she can persuade him to do what she wants,
and if she wants you reinstated,
she can work on Othello
until he does that.
So, what Cassio's gonna
think with this idea
is that oh yes, that's a good idea,
I'll get her to change Othello's
mind and respect me again.
But of course what Iago
wants is for Desdemona
to be constantly talking
about Cassio to Othello
so that he could frame this interaction
as evidence, confirmation,
of an affair between the two.
So, Iago says in his soliloquy,
which is addressed to
the audience, you know,
his inner thoughts being expressed to us,
whiles this honest fool plies Desdemona
to repair his fortunes and she for him
pleads strongly to the Moor,
I'll pour this pestilence in his ear,
that she repeals him for her body's lust,
and by how much she
strives to do him good,
she shall undo her credit with the Moor.
In other words, he knows that
Desdemona is a good person,
that she's gonna wanna help Cassio.
He's gonna use her
compassionate disposition
to make her look guilty
of having an affair.
And we see this is a
really terrible person,
but we also know as soon as he says it
how likely that is to work.
So, Iago has to do two things,
he has to set in motion
a sort of chain reaction of
interactions between people,
and then also he has
to generate a narrative
to give to Othello that
Othello's then gonna use
to frame the things that
he sees happen before him.
So, he says two things are to be done,
my wife must move for
Cassio to her mistress,
I'll set her on it.
In other words, Emilia,
who is Desdemona's servant,
needs to try to get Desdemona
to try to persuade Othello
to reinstate Cassio.
Myself the while to draw the Moor apart,
and to bring him jump
when he may find Cassio
soliciting his wife, ay, that's the way
dull not device by coldness and delay.
In other words, I've got to get Othello
to see Cassio and Desdemona
interacting with each other
after I've led him to
believe something's going on.
And then there's the handkerchief,
we have this objective correlative,
I've used that term before,
but it's this object
like Tizon and Colada,
the swords in El Cid,
if we follow these objects
from person to person
and we see really the heart of the action
of what's taking place.
And there's this handkerchief
with these sort of
strawberries sewn onto it that
Othello got from his mother
and he gave it to Desdemona,
so this is something that he
would definitely recognize,
definitely have an
emotional attachment toward,
and if somehow Cassio
could get that and Othello
see Cassio in that possession of it,
that would frame these
actual interactions,
would frame it in this false
narrative of this affair.
So he says I will Cassio's
lodging lose this napkin,
he's talking about the handkerchief,
and let him find it.
It's very important that
Iago doesn't just run up
to Cassio and say here,
take this handkerchief.
Cassio can't know that this
thing belongs to Othello,
it needs to be something
that he's caught with.
And trifles light as
air are to the jealous
confirmations strong
as proofs of holy writ.
So, once primed, confirmation bias
is going to work in Iago's favor.
This handkerchief is
gonna be the confirmation,
the ocular proof that Othello
is later gonna demand,
and it's gonna be as
effective as holy writ,
in other words, the word of God,
it's gonna be as effective as
sort of reading in the Bible
that Cassio and Desdemona
aren't to be trusted.
The Moor already changes with my poison,
with the priming that I've given him.
Dangerous conceits are,
in their natures, poisons,
which at first are
scarce found to distaste,
but with a little act upon the blood,
burn like mines of sulfur, a metaphor,
but in this case, a
metaphor about a metaphor
that he's slipped in
these priming associations
that frame what Othello sees,
and each of these things
that's about to happen
is gonna confirm something
that's not actually true
but that Iago has sort of
set up in Othello's mind.
And this is what we see play
out over the last two acts.
Othello sees Cassio speaking to Desdemona
and then leaving when he approaches,
because in Cassio's mind,
we understand that he
doesn't want Othello to know
that he's asking Desdemona
to speak on his behalf,
that would seem underhanded.
But what Othello thinks is that
he's being even more underhanded,
that he's sneaking around with his wife.
Desdemona does want
Cassio to be reinstated,
and she speaks to Othello on his behalf,
but that again confirms what Othello
has been led to believe.
Iago claims that Cassio confessed
to sleeping with Desdemona,
he tells Othello that Cassio and I
were sleeping next to each other,
because it was very common
at this time for people
to share beds just 'cause
there weren't that many around,
beds were sort of a luxury,
but the two of them
were sleeping together,
and while Cassio was asleep,
he thought Iago was Desdemona
and he turns over to him
and says curse the Moor,
and you know, puts his leg
over him, that sort of thing.
Course Iago is making all this up,
and this is the only just
complete lie Iago gives.
Notice how that if Iago just
told this story by itself,
that probably wouldn't get
Othello as emotionally unstable,
and it wouldn't frame much of it,
it wouldn't have anything to frame,
it would just be this guy said
this happened, and you know,
maybe that's something to
pay attention to, maybe not.
But by the time he tells it,
that's just one drop in the bucket,
that's just one element in this frame
that has all of these other
sort of confirmations.
Then Othello sees Iago and
Cassio talking about a lover,
and he thinks they're
talking about Desdemona,
but they're actually talking about Bianca.
Othello doesn't know
anything about Bianca,
but Bianca's this courtesan with whom
Cassio's having this relationship,
and if he was saying the
things about Desdemona
that he's saying about Bianca,
then everything Othello
thinks is gonna be justified,
Othello just can't hear
that this is about Bianca.
Bianca is out of the frame.
And then, of course, Cassio
has Desdemona's handkerchief.
If none of the other things were set up,
that object seems to be the ocular proof,
but notice in this case it
follows all of these other things
that seem to confirm the
frame that Iago has set up.
And so, this is all
quite an impressive feat
of theory of mind on Iago's part,
he didn't just deceive Othello
into thinking that
Desdemona felt something,
he had to manipulate Cassio's
thinking about Othello,
he had to manipulate Emilia's thinking
about him thinking about Cassio,
he had to manipulate Desdemona's
thinking about Cassio
and thinking about how she was
going to change Othello's thinking.
He has to create a lot
of frames within frames
to convince people to do certain things
and say certain things
so that those things
can be misinterpreted by Othello.
So, we definitely don't wanna do
what some people seem to do and say well,
Iago is dishonest and
Othello was gullible,
so it was Othello's
gullibility or his jealousy
that were his tragic flaw,
and that term is a problematic term
because it comes from a mistranslation
of the Greek word hamartia.
When Aristotle describes
how tragedy works,
he says frequently the tragic
hero has this hamartia,
which means literally missing the mark,
like think of archery, you know,
if you shoot at an archery
target and you miss the mark,
you know, that might have
some sort of consequences.
If it's in a battle and you fire a shot
at your enemy and you miss,
then you're in grave danger.
And that's a single action,
that's the way Aristotle describes it,
but it gets mistranslated in
the 20th century to be like
this internal characteristic
that the hero always has.
So like, a defining characteristic,
as if Othello was defined by his jealousy,
or defined by gullibility.
But remember from act one,
Othello is not an emotional person,
he's a very patient person,
he is given the opportunity
to respond emotionally,
and he doesn't do it.
He's also a very honest person
and a very strategically
intelligent person
when it comes to battle.
But as a general, he
has to trust his troops,
and he's also shown that
he's not so gullible
that he would just trust anybody,
he cares very much about Michael Cassio,
Michael Cassio is somebody
that he's promoted,
but when it appears to him
that Cassio has done something wrong,
he is going to punish Cassio for that.
So, this is not just a pushover,
this is not somebody that's gullible,
this is not somebody who was
jealous before Iago's machinations.
All of this change in
people comes from Iago,
this slow gradual process of priming
and framing and setting
up these framing effects,
and then doing that with
people to position them
within a larger frame that
he's creating for Othello.
And within that frame, he
gives him these little pieces
of evidence to trigger
that confirmation bias.
These are things that work on all of us,
and even if Shakespeare didn't
have the psychological terms
that we have today, we see
that this is all part of this
long game that Iago plays
over the entire play.
So, this is all Iago,
this is not a weakness on Othello's part,
any of us could've been Othello.
In fact, the reason I
compared him to Aeneas
and to El Cid is because he
is this sort of ideal hero,
but even the ideal hero can
be led into this downfall.
And this is one of the things
that really makes Othello
this great tragedy, tragedy
in the Aristotelian sense
of containing these people
who were better than normal,
but they have this even larger fall
because they stand so
high above the rest of us,
because somebody like Othello
is really the kinda person
a lot of us aspire to be,
even he can be brought down
by this external
circumstance, namely Iago.
And that brings me back to that line
that Iago said to Cassio,
reputation is an idle and
most false imposition,
oft got without merit and
lost without deserving.
It's this kleos, this dom,
this thing that we've seen so many heroes
in so many narratives,
so many poems and plays that we've read,
this is the thing that they fight for,
this is the thing that once earned
is supposed to be your immortality.
This is the thing that ultimately tells us
who we can trust and who we can't,
what groups we want to be a part of,
who we can depend on, and what
kinda people we should be.
If we follow these other icons
and try to match their kleos,
even if it's the attempt,
it's supposed to make us a better person
in these other narratives.
But now Shakespeare is asking us well,
is that something we can actually do?
Can we achieve a reputation
that somebody else can't take away?
That line, it's important to remember,
comes from Iago, and we
should not trust Iago,
so we can't say Shakespeare
is saying that reputation
is an idle and most false imposition.
We can't say that this is
the moral of the story,
because Shakespeare
doesn't give us a moral,
or he gives us so many morals
that conflict with each other
that it's clear that it's
not gonna be that simple.
He puts on one side this
sort of honest virtue,
the kleos or the reputation of Othello,
the honesty and the
sort of martial prowess
matched with a patient,
gentle nature of Othello,
as well as the virtue of Desdemona.
Desdemona does everything right,
everything she's supposed to,
everything her culture's told her to be.
Emilia even is very intelligent.
One of the things I've
suggested that in your papers
you could compare Emilia
to the Wife of Bath,
because in her dialogues with Desdemona,
she's very much aware about
how women are treated,
and their reputations
are manipulated by men,
and women are held to a standard
that men are not held to.
She calls that double
standard that, you know,
men are allowed to go off and have affairs
and that sort of thing, you know,
that one thing would destroy
a woman's reputation.
Emilia's very intelligent, not naive.
If you wanted to say that Desdemona
was sweet but she was naive, well,
you can't say that about Emilia,
but even Emilia gets fooled by Iago.
She figures out it was Iago eventually,
but she still wants to get
along with her husband,
she wants to trust her husband,
and that is something that
Iago uses, manipulates,
and throws her away at the end,
he eventually kills her
trying to keep his secret.
So, Shakespeare takes that sort of
cunning social intelligence
theory of mind,
that sort of Machiavellian recognition
that the good guys don't always win
and sometimes you have to
resort to these measures
that somebody like Aeneas or
El Cid would never resort to.
But that doesn't mean
Shakespeare is advocating that,
but what he is definitely doing
is calling attention to a storyteller.
In this case, the storyteller
within Othello is Iago.
And in doing that,
he calls attention to the
dangers of storytelling,
the way stories can manipulate
reality, frame reality,
get us thinking about
things that aren't real,
the things that Daniel
Kahneman warned us about
at the beginning of the lecture,
but all the way at the
beginning of the semester
I mentioned what Nassim Nicholas Taleb
called the narrative fallacy,
when we take information and we add
this beginning, middle, and end,
and this assumption about cause and effect
without actually trying to falsify
those assumptions about cause and effect,
we create these narratives.
And those narratives can be deceptive,
but he says well, how are
we going to show people
the narratives are deceptive
unless we do it through narrative itself?
And so he says there may
be a way to use narrative
but for a good purpose.
Only a diamond can cut a diamond,
we can use our ability
to convince with a story
that conveys the right message,
and that's what storytellers do,
they use stories and
vignettes to illustrate
our gullibility about
stories and our preference
for the dangerous
compression of narrative.
You need a story to displace a story.
So, if Iago is using these stories
to bring this downfall
of these good people,
we could say that Shakespeare is using
the story of Othello to warn us
there are people like Iago
who use stories against you,
who shape your ability
to think about reality,
who shape your ability to see
what's right in front of you
using this narrative frame, be
careful of people like that.
And like Taleb says, good
storytellers do this a lot,
and this is defamiliarization.
They could use stereotypes,
they could, and that's what Iago does,
he primes these stereotypes,
like Michael Cassio's a ladies man,
he's the kind of guy who
would sleep with Desdemona,
that makes it more likely,
that makes Othello fall for
that a little more easily.
He also throws stereotypes
at people they don't fit,
like making Desdemona seem
like a slut, it doesn't fit,
but that stereotype is so threatening
to Othello that it takes over.
So, if somebody like Iago
is able to use stereotypes
and use narrative frames
to manipulate people,
good storytelling does the
opposite, it defamiliarizes,
it takes these stereotypes
and it tears them apart.
Even if it's a good stereotype
like Othello is the noble,
virtuous warrior with pietas or chivalry,
somebody like Aeneas or El Cid,
he still has a weakness, and of course,
the stereotype of the villain or the vice
isn't always so obvious.
The simple narratives, the simple scripts,
the simple stereotypes are manipulations
of reality that aren't accurate,
and people can use those against us,
but Shakespeare is defamiliarizing,
he's disrupting our expectations,
he's taking something
that we thought we knew.
He's challenging our illusion of knowledge
by taking something we thought we knew
and saying look at it this way,
what if this is happening
beneath the surface?
What if that person you
thought was your friend
is manipulating you in this way?
Now, that's not a nice thought,
we would like a happy ending
where you do the right thing
like Othello and Desdemona did
and everything works out in the end,
and that's one of the good
things about good literature
is it doesn't always give us what we want,
it doesn't always give us a happy ending,
it doesn't always give us
the easy concepts to follow,
the easy stories to follow,
the easy characters, the easy stereotypes.
It doesn't confirm our frames,
it doesn't confirm our preconceptions,
but by challenging those
preconceptions, those assumptions,
it actually makes us think more.
And when we leave the theater
and we close the book,
we go back out into the world,
it doesn't have to make us more cynical,
we don't have to worry
that all of our friends
are actually stabbing us in the back,
we don't have to worry
that no matter what we do
it's all gonna fall in the end.
I don't think that's what
Shakespeare's getting at at all,
but we finish this exercise
of this really complicated
awareness of narrative frames
within narrative frames
within narrative frames.
We're minds conceiving of
minds conceiving of minds,
and once we go back out
into the real world,
hopefully the real world
will be pretty simple.
The real world may be complicated,
but it's probably simpler than that,
and we've had this practice, this skill,
dealing with this really
complicated process
of mental manipulation,
and hopefully that's gonna make us
much more capable of dealing with
whatever reality can possibly throw at us.
