Iago, Our First Supervillain

All semester long we have studdied heroes and their journeys.  While the names have changed, for the most part our heroes have triumphed in every story.  None of them have achieved all of their goals and all have fallen short of perfection, but they have all been heroic.  Finally in Othello we run into the one thing we have been missing--a supervillain.  Sure, we've had the Green Giant and he did some nice villainous things, but he relied on the supernatural for his power.  Ditto for Grendel and Grendel's mother.  Iago is our first true supervillain and because of that, my interest is already peaked for the rest of the story.

Despite the setting of the story, this is the first one that really feels more like a comic book to me.  Even though the play is called Othello, he isn't even mentioned until quite a ways into the play, at least not by name.  Iago refers to Othello as he or him.  He also uses paints a more derogatory racial picture by using "thick lips" or "the Moor" to show us that Othello is dark skinned.  As a reader, I was already becoming sympathetic to Othello just because of the way Iago was describing him.  Iago takes on villain qualities right from the start of the story.  Like all great villains, he has an axe to grind with the hero.  Iago thinks he should have been promoted and blames Othello for passing him over.

Iago takes great pride in being the villain.  Like all great supervillains, he thinks that he is smarter than everybody else in the story.  He loves to demonstrate his intellect by showing the reader that he knows exactly what will happen.  He has everything all figured out.  Because of the way he is plotting his revenge, we have another situation of dramatic irony just like in Oedipus.  Iago is proud of his plotting and it is clear he will let nothing stand in his way in his quest for power.  He practically delivers Othello to Brabanzio after he gets Brabanzio worked up enough.  I just knew that there was going to be a huge fight when Othello and Brabanzio met up.  Imagine my surprise when Othello becomes a different kind of hero.  After being labelled as a savage and a barbarian, Othello has a kind of quiet calmness about it.  He is the personification of restraint.  Instead of the conflict I felt like I had been promised, Othello is skillfully able to avoid it because he is such a natural authoritarian.  Rather than a great fight scence, instead we have to settle for the two men to take their case to the Duke.  Iago, our supervillain, has had his initial plan thwarted.  But anybody who has ever read a comic book knows that he has more plans that he is still waiting to unleash.  The play may be called Othello, but so far it is Iago's story that has drawn my interest.