Iago
The Strategies of Evil
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
From one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, Harold Bloom presents Othello’s Iago, perhaps the Bard’s most compelling villain—the fourth in a series of five short books about the great playwright’s most significant personalities.
Few antagonists in all of literature have displayed the ruthless cunning and deceit of Iago. Denied the promotion he believes he deserves, Iago takes vengeance on Othello and destroys him.
One of William Shakespeare’s most provocative and culturally relevant plays, Othello is widely studied for its complex and enduring themes of race and racism, love, trust, betrayal, and repentance. It remains widely performed across professional and community theatre alike and has been the source for many film and literary adaptations. Now award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Iago’s motives and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. Why and how does Iago use lies and deception—the fake news of the 15th century—to destroy Othello and several other characters in his path? What can Othello tell us about racism?
Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, treating Shakespeare’s characters like people he has known all his life. He delivers exhilarating intimacy and clarity in these pages, writing about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that Iago also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. “There are few readers more astute than Bloom” (Publishers Weekly), and his Iago is a provocative study for our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There are few readers more astute than Bloom (Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air), as is proven once more in this perceptive study of Othello. The fourth entry in a series devoted to "Shakespeare's personalities" finds Bloom wrestling with Iago, "a pyromaniac who wishes to set fire to everything and everyone." Consisting of lengthy quotations from the play interspersed with Bloom's reactions, the book evokes the experience of reading Shakespeare's text along with Bloom. He pays close attention to the rhythms of Shakespeare's language, occasionally takes issue with other critics ("W.H. Auden considered Iago to be the apotheosis of the practical joker. I do not find that helpful"), and augments his reading with recollections of past performances of the play (especially a 1964 version staged in London, with Laurence Olivier as Othello and Frank Finlay as Iago, who, Bloom recalls, acted Olivier "quite off the stage"). The true value of Bloom's sensitive reading lies in his ability to articulate his emotional response to the play. He leaves readers with a memorable new perspective on Othello, concluding with the observation that none of Shakespeare's other plays is as disturbing, not even the "apocalyptic" King Lear and Macbeth, thanks to the "infernal intelligence" manifested in the character of Iago.
