Character as Destiny: Part II

Allow a detour in this series into the realm of fiction before we return our real world heroes and villains.

Evil, and the failure of good, is a bit of a theme in Shakespeare. MacBeth was all about the titular character, and his wife, breaking bad in the service of raw ambition. Yet it was not the entire point of the play; the character MacBeth’s most famous soliloquy is less about his own wrongdoing and more about the ephemeral nature of the human species. Hamlet as a play, by contrast, didn’t dwell on the evil of Claudius, giving him a similar, simple and old-as-time motive; it dwells instead on the hero’s fatal temerity in facing this wrong-doing. Similarly, Lear’s two evil daughters are just who they are — the play is not about them; it’s made clear that Lear’s ruin is his own fault for not recognizing them for who they are. Shylock and his demand for a “pound of flesh” represented among the most complex of Shakespearean villains — the debate on how much Shylock was motivated by the other characters’ anti-Semitism vs. the writer’s own anti-Semitism is famously unsolvable; he’s a walking caricature, yet also delivered the “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” monologue.

Richard III was his first stab at pure, *elemental* evil. The title character comes out and declares himself the villain, after all, in just one of his many bangers of a soliloquy. But in the end, was his motivation all that different than Claudius’ or Big Mac’s? Rick 3, as with IRL people then and now who otherwise may have lived fairly normal lives, was driven to the depths of depravity by a lust of power — and receiving his just deserts as a result.

So Shakespeare later gave us the final word in simon-pure wickedness, the character whose evil is not borne of seeking a throne, but has absolutely no other motivation than itself: Iago.

The mystery of Iago’s malice in Othello has spawned countless theses and essays, from a procrastinating college freshman’s grammatically questionable desperations at achieving the minimum word count to the most grandiosely footnoted stemwinder to grace an Ivy professor’s CV. Why did he do all that villainy, anyway? Racism? No, he ruined or ended the lives of far more people than just the title character’s. Envy? While he was momentarily miffed at being passed over for promotion, that doesn’t explain all his actions either. In the end, everyone struggles with the fact that Iago has no clear motivations other than malice for the sake of malice; they can’t wrap their minds around it.

Thus, we get no less a towering figure than Samuel Taylor Coleridge coin the term “the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity” to describe the fruitless search of something, anything else, motivating Iago, two hundred years ago. He appended this note to Iago’s “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse” villain rant, where he not only reveals his ultimate plot to destroy Othello, but also makes his ultimately lethal contempt for Roderigo known to the audience.

Coleridge later extended his thoughts on Iago’s motivation to something that, I think, has been lost somewhere along the way: the futility of separating motivation from action in general.

“It is a matter of infinite difficulty, but fortunately of comparative indifference, to determine what a man’s motive may have been for this or that particular action. Rather seek to learn what his objects in general are!—What does he habitually wish? habitually pursue?—and thence deduce his impulses… Without the perception of this truth, it is impossible to understand the character of Iago, who is represented as now assigning one, and then another, and again a third, motive for his conduct, all alike the mere fictions of his own restless nature… Yet how many among our modern critics have attributed to the profound author this, the appropriate inconsistency of the character itself!”

Coleridge is asking us not to be fooled by Iago’s own ever-shifting rationalizations, but instead stay focused on his actions. Which, of course, can be extended to people today, as mentioned in the prior post in relation to real-life good people like Dolly Parton and real-life bad people like Dan Snyder. “Good” and “evil” are less estimations of a person’s mind and soul, and more predictors of their future behavior.

Why is this person failing our estimation and falling into wickedness when they had been such a better person before, or so we had thought? Are they just selling out? Blinded by racism/sexism/whatever-ism? Letting their own hate take over? Or were they just born evil? The answer, really: who knows! Don’t waste time asking what they “truly” think, or wonder how much of their behavior is just an “act.” Unless they’re reading from a script, it’s not an “act.”

Iago’s various explanations for his actions are horse manure meant to fool the audience, the other characters, and, likely, himself. In the end, we are faced with the fact that evil is an absolute, one as old as humanity itself; it can partially or even wholly take over a person’s soul; and that therefore, without wasting time trying to parse their supposed motivations or read their mind, it is ok to declare a person to be “bad” given sufficient evidence. Similarly, look to a person’s deeds before deciding they’re “good,” as there are few declarations more suspicious than someone declaring themselves to be a good person. And it doesn’t matter the time period. People are exactly the same whether they’re in Renaissance Venice, modern-day America, Imperial Rome, or neolithic Sumer. The unchanging nature of the human spirit is an absolute that’s been mostly overlooked, but remains why a Shakespearean character like Iago remains as relevant today as he did in Coleridge’s time and in Shakespeare’s.