Honest Iago Quotes

O wretched fool / That lov’st to make thine honesty a vice! / O monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world: / To be direct and honest is not safe.

A halter pardon him! and hell gnaw his bones! Why should he call her whore? who keeps her company? What place? what time? what form? what likelihood? The Moor’s abused by some most villainous knave, Some base notorious knave, some scurvy fellow:— O heaven, that such companions thou’dst unfold, And put in every honest hand a whip To lash the rascals naked through the world Even from the east to the west! IAGO Speak within door. EMILIA O, fie upon them! some such squire he was That turn’d your wit the seamy side without, And made you to suspect me with the Moor.

She is innocent! Why is it so easy to believe she would betray him?” I was truly appalled. Samuel looked up at me calmly and replied, “Because it’s always easier to believe the worst.” I looked at him in disbelief. “It is not!” I sputtered. “I can’t believe you would say that! Wouldn’t you give the benefit of the doubt to someone you claimed to love?” The ease in which Othello accepted her betrayal was completely foreign to me. “And why would Othello believe Iago over Desdemona? I don’t care how honest they think Iago is! Emilia even told Othello she thought he was being manipulated and tricked!” Samuel sighed and tried to read to the end of the scene. I jumped in again. I couldn’t help it. My sense of outrage was on overdrive. “But he said, ‘I loved not wisely, but too well!’” I was dismayed. “He had it totally backwards! He did love wisely-she was worthy of his love…she was a wise choice! But he didn’t love well enough! If he had loved Desdemona more, trusted her more, Iago wouldn’t have been able to divide them.” I longed once again for Jane Eyre, where righteousness and principle won out in the end. Jane got her man, and she did it with style. Desdemona got her man, and he smothered her.

Hamlet later plays at being mad, as Iago plays at being honest, and Viola and the other cross-dressed heroines play at masculinity. The presentation of the self in everyday life is a kind of theater. “All the world’s a stage,” observes the melancholic Jaques in As You Like It. “And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts.” It is not just that the theater mirrors life, but that our lives themselves are full of seeming.