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 two, and drops the rest; and so it makes everything natural.  But it fails to perceive how unnatural, how strange and suspicious, his own account is.  Certainly he assigns motives enough; the difficulty is that he assigns so many.  A man moved by simple passions due to simple causes does not stand fingering his feelings, industriously enumerating their sources, and groping about for new ones.  But this is what Iago does.  And this is not all.  These motives appear and disappear in the most extraordinary manner.  Resentment at Cassio’s appointment is expressed in the first conversation with Roderigo, and from that moment is never once mentioned again in the whole play.  Hatred of Othello is expressed in the First Act alone.  Desire to get Cassio’s place scarcely appears after the first soliloquy, and when it is gratified Iago does not refer to it by a single word.  The suspicion of Cassio’s intrigue with Emilia emerges suddenly, as an after-thought, not in the first soliloquy but the second, and then disappears for ever.[113] Iago’s ‘love’ of Desdemona is alluded to in the second soliloquy; there is not the faintest trace of it in word or deed either before or after.  The mention of jealousy of Othello is followed by declarations that Othello is infatuated about Desdemona and is of a constant nature, and during Othello’s sufferings Iago never shows a sign of the idea that he is now paying his rival in his own coin.  In the second soliloquy he declares that he quite believes Cassio to be in love with Desdemona; it is obvious that he believes no such thing, for he never alludes to the idea again, and within a few hours describes Cassio in soliloquy as an honest fool.  His final reason for ill-will to Cassio never appears till the Fifth Act.