Iago Characterisation Quotes

Iago shrugged his furry shoulders. As you like. Saves me the work of picking the lock with my incisor. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Evil is such a simplistic way to describe any character, be it Iago or Caliban, or any character from history. ~ Denis O'Hare

In scenes like these, any man could be Iago. ~ Stephen King

Shakespeare will not allow Falstaff to die upon stage. We see and hear the deaths of Hamlet, Cleopatra, Antony, Othello, and Lear. Iago is led away to die silently under torture. Macbeth dies offstage but he goes down fighting. Falstaff dies singing the Twenty-third Psalm, smiling upon his fingertips, playing with flowers, and crying aloud to God three or four times. That sounds more like pain than prayer.
We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself. ~ Harold Bloom

I'm not good at dialogue. I'm not good at holding a mirror up at a real world. I'm not good at believable characterisation. ~ Jim Crace

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next. ~ David Mamet

You can't say the public likes generic characters. Give others a chance, go for a more rooted and honest characterisation, take some risk, and then let the public choose. ~ Randeep Hooda

[Talking about Othello] His dying words are about the service he has done to the state -not what he has done to Desdemona. (...) He acknowledges not love but the power structure (...). Othello believes his fellow officer [Iago] rather than his wife, believes death is suitable punishment for infidelity (...).
It makes me uneasy that we so easily state that Othello is a play about race. Race is one of its ingredients, but the most pervasive subject that Shakespeare is tackling is sexism. The two women [Desdemona and Emilia, Iago's wife] end up dead. Bianca, the third woman in the play, Cassio's mistress, ends up in jail for something she never did, and nobody bothers to get her out. Iago, the symbol of evil, remains alive. Brabantio, Desdemona's father, dies of a broken heart because of his daughter's disobedience. And everyone is very regretful about what has happened. But no one, other than Emilia, has pointed out that there is a terrible double standard, something rotten in the system itself. ~ Tina Packer

Maybe at the very bottom of it ... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will ... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him. ~ Steven Weinberg

The Magyars were claimed to be descendants of the hideous Asiatic Scythians of legend, half men and half apes, a witches' brood begotten by devils. The sources - chronicles and annals - were all copied from one another, not on the basis of eyewitness accounts but following the characterisation of older chroniclers. Soon the "new barbarians" became identified with the Huns, who are remembered only too well in Europe. Attila had, after all, become in Western eyes the embodiment of barbarism, the anti-Christ, and at the time of the Renaissance he already appeared in Italian legends as the king of the Hungarians, constantly hatching plots, and depicted with dog ears, the bestial offspring of a greyhound and a princess locked up in a tower.12 ~ Paul Lendvai

IAGO
Can't help it? Nonsense! What we are is up to us. Our bodies are like gardens and our willpower is like the gardener. Depending on what we plant - weeds or lettuce, or one kind of herb rather than a variety, the garden will either be barren and useless, or rich and productive. If we didn't have rational minds to counterbalance our emotions and desires, our bodily urges would take over. We'd end up in ridiculous situations. Thankfully, we have reason to cool our raging lusts. In my opinion, what you call love is just an offshoot of lust. ~ William Shakespeare

I am apt to think she was too artful to rail at me, but rather pretended to have a kindness for me, and like Iago gave, as she saw occasion, wounds in the dark. ~ Anne Somerset

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands. ~ Harold Bloom

DESDEMONA
Come, how wouldst thou praise me?

IAGO
I am about it; but indeed my invention
Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze;
It plucks out brains and all: but my Muse labours,
And thus she is deliver'd.
If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit,
The one's for use, the other useth it.

DESDEMONA
Well praised! How if she be black and witty?

IAGO
If she be black, and thereto have a wit,
She'll find a white that shall her blackness fit.

DESDEMONA
Worse and worse.

EMILIA
How if fair and foolish?

IAGO
She never yet was foolish that was fair;
For even her folly help'd her to an heir.

DESDEMONA
These are old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i'
the alehouse. What miserable praise hast thou for
her that's foul and foolish?

IAGO
There's none so foul and foolish thereunto,
But does foul pranks which fair and wise ones do. ~ William Shakespeare

Iago, on the other hand, seems to be malice personified, a manifestation of manifold vice with no discernible vestiges of grace. ~ Williiam Shakespeare

We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago. ~ Oscar Wilde

The most interesting characters keep us hooked. Not likeable ones! Iago, Shylock, Darth Vader - are they likeable? Do you want to invite them to dinner? ~ Alison Owen

And what's he then that says I play the villain? ~ William Shakespeare

When devils will the blackest sins put on
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows ~ William Shakespeare

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing. ~ Sarah Waters

Mirabelle and Vesta have plenty in common because they are facing descrimination in different ways, but they're also a nice contrast. ~ Sara Sheridan

I'd like to do more Shakespeare. I'd like to do Iago in Othello. I look so benign. It would be interesting to see that black evil come out of my soul. ~ Kyle MacLachlan

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When I was a kid, growing up during the 1970s, I used to read a lot of horror and science fiction. I graduated from comic books to paperbacks around the time I first entered my teens. And I want to say that what 99% of that stuff tells you about supposed encounters with the unknown is a formulaic convention. No one faints like a chicken-shit or else reaches for their weapon like Arnie Schwarzenegger in the face of something so utterly terrifying there isn't even a name for it. What those writers don't know is what happens in an encounter with the outside is this: that the moment slows down to such an extent that time itself simply stands still in your head. I suppose that fact doesn't make for good characterisation. It's incommunicable. I think they call it the numinous.

I once did a semester in creative writing back after graduating, around the decade King was outselling every other author on the planet, but could never make the grade. Still, I read a lot of the best attempts. Maybe that's why someone like Lovecraft, or Machen, or one of the old-school writers of that stuff I used to read had almost pulled it off. They were no good at characterisation and tended to use ciphers, presenting the phenomenon itself as the main protagonist, because it was the way things are when you encounter it. The thing empties you, draining out any semblance of normalcy, no matter what your history is, or what you think you're all about. Real horror consists not of the worst thing i ~ Mark Samuels

She's not sensual. She doesn't want affairs. It's just cold-blooded experiment on her part and the fun of stirring people up and setting them against each other. She dabbled in that too. She's the sort of woman who's never had a row with anyone in her life
but rows always happen where she is! She makes them happen. She's kind of female Iago. She must have drama. But she doesn't want to be involved herself. She's always outside pulling strings
looking on
enjoying it! ~ Agatha Christie

When I'm given a role, the first thing I do is read the play over and over again. I scour the script and write down everything the character says about himself and everything that everyone else says about him. I immerse myself in my character and imagine what it might be like to be that person.
When I played Cassio in Othello I imagined what it would be like to be a lieutenant in the Venetian navy in 1604. I sat down with Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor and together we decided that Othello, Iago and Cassio had soldiery in their bones.
I took from the script that Cassio was talented and ambitious, with no emotional or physical guard - and that's how I played the part.
For me, acting is about recreating the circumstances that would make me feel how my character is feeling. In the dressing room, I practise recreating those circumstances in my head and I try to not get in the way of myself. For example, in act two of Othello, when Cassio is manipulated to fight Roderigo and loses his rank, some nights I would burst into tears; other nights I wouldn't but I would still feel the same emotion, night after night. Just as in life, the way we respond to catastrophe or death will be different every time because the process is unconscious.
By comparison, in Chekhov's Ivanov I played the young doctor, Lvov. Lvov was described as "a prig and a bigot … uprightness in boots … tiresome … completely sincere". His emotions were locked away. I worked around the key phrase: ~ Tom Hiddleston

For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity - that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man - that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. ~ Hannah Arendt

He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons. ~ Vasily Grossman

WHAT WAS JANE AUSTEN'S LAST FINISHED NOVEL?"
"Vaginas and Virginity."
"WHO IS THE LAST PERSON IAGO KILLS IN OTHELLO?"
"His manservant Retardio, for forgetting to change the Brita filter!"
"WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LITTLE MERMAID AT THE END OF CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN'S THE LITTLE MERMAID?"
"She turns into a fish and marries Nemo!"
"Fuck you! ~ David Levithan

Both Othello and Iago seem a bit cracked. If you spend 15 years being responsible for death and destruction, that sense of suppressed horror is strong. ~ Rory Kinnear

A character I would love to play is Iago, from Othello. ~ Tim Roth

I am glad I have found this napkin.
This was her first remembrance from the Moor,
My wayward husband hath a hundred times
Wooed me to steal it, but she so loves the token
For he conjured her she should ever keep it
That she reserves it evermore about her
To kiss and talk to. I'll ha' the work ta'en out,
And give't Iago. What he will do with it,
Heaven knows, not I.
I nothing, but to please his fantasy. ~ William Shakespeare

As for Iago's jealousy, one cannot believe that a seriously jealous man could behave towards his wife as Iago behaves towards Emilia, for the wife of a jealous husband is the first person to suffer. Not only is the relation of Iago and Emilia, as we see it on stage, without emotional tension, but also Emilia openly refers to a rumor of her infidelity as something already disposed of.

Some such squire it was
That turned your wit, the seamy side without
And made you to suspect me with the Moor.

At one point Iago states that, in order to revenge himself on Othello, he will not rest till he is even with him, wife for wife, but, in the play, no attempt at Desdemona's seduction is made. Iago does not encourage Cassio to make one, and he even prevents Roderigo from getting anywhere near her.

Finally, one who seriously desires personal revenge desires to reveal himself. The revenger's greatest satisfaction is to be able to tell his victim to his face – "You thought you were all-powerful and untouchable and could injure me with impunity. Now you see that you were wrong. Perhaps you have forgotten what you did; let me have the pleasure of reminding you."

When at the end of the play, Othello asks Iago in bewilderment why he has thus ensnared his soul and body, if his real motive were revenge for having been cuckolded or unjustly denied promotion, he could have said so, instead of refusing to explain. ~ W.H. Auden

I do feel that literature should be demystified. What I object to is what is happening in our era: literature is only something you get at school as an assignment. No one reads for fun, or to be subversive or to get turned on to something. It's just like doing math at school. I mean, how often do we sit down and do trigonometry for fun, to relax. I've thought about this, the domination of the literary arts by theory over the past 25 years -- which I detest -- and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterisation, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level -- moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it. ~ T. Coraghessan Boyle

Methinks the lady doth protest too much," said Iago.

"Methinks the lady protests just the right amount," said Emilia. "Methinks the lady is just getting fucking started protesting. ~ Christopher Moore