“
Roderigo: I will incontinently drown myself. [...]
What should I do? I confess it is my shame
to be so fond, but it is not in my virtue to amend it.
Iago: Virtue? A fig! ’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or
thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our
wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles
or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme,
supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it
with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or
manured with industry, why the power and corrigible
authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance
of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise
another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our
natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous
conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging
motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts—
whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect, or
scion.
Roderigo: It canot be.
Iago: It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission
of the will. Come, be a man! Drown thyself? Drown
cats and blind puppies. [...] Put money in thy purse.
Follow thou the wars; defeat thy favor with an
usurped beard. I say, put money in thy purse. It
cannot be that Desdemona should long continue
her love to the Moor—put money in thy purse—
nor he his to her. It was a violent commencement in
her, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration
—put but money in thy purse. These Moors are
changeable in their wills. Fill thy purse with money.
The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts
shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida.
She must change for youth. When she is sated
with his body she will find the error of her choice.
Therefore, put money in thy purse. If thou wilt
needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way than
drowning.
”
”