The fascinations of Othello are many; perhaps most essential and foundational is Iago’s corruption of Othello’s mind, mainly by inflaming his erotic fantasies. This happens the more readily because Othello is a very passionate man, a man of appetites for battle and sexual play. He loves “not wisely but too well” he says poignantly but incorrectly, proving the side of the Renaissance debate that insists that erotic love undermines the warlike manly spirit.

But the main point for our studies of Western poiesis, particularly the link between idealization, image-weaving and the wasteland is that Iago functions in the play (with Roderigo, Cassio and others as well as Othello) like Lady Macbeth and Macbeth’s own ambitions: he displaces fact by plausible fictions embedded in erotic desires. The conquest of life by images, like Macbeth’s “fatal dagger” or Edmund’s vision of being Earl of Gloucester and even King of Britain is the core fact of Western creativity and culture; it is the antechamber and womb of virtual reality, the displacement of life by phantoms. (more…)