On the significance of the imagery of “words” to the play Othello

The idea of words and indeed how language can be manipulated to obscure and alter the truth is crucial to the play, in particular the character of Iago. The magic of the yarns Iago spins in order to create a reality that serves his purpose is reflected in the mimicry that occurs between him and Othello, the word games that occur, and his eventual silence. Firstly, with respect to mimicry, at first we see the immediate repetition of Iago of words like “Honest”, “Think”, and “Indeed”. These are not particularly important words to the dialogue and because of this, it makes the mirroring more subtle, we do not immediately notice the fact it is occurring and in this way the audience are lulled into the spell of Iago’s words as closely as Othello. Later in the play, Othello replaces Iago in echoing phrases; Iago becomes the principal speaker and thus in this reversal, the roles are reversed and a new micro politics of power emerges. Word games, puns, and the use of alternate meanings of words and the ambiguities that emerge are central to the double talk and duplicity of Iago. We might take for example the poetic lyricism of the exchange between Desdemona and Iago. Act 2, Scene 1, Lines 122-158, Iago takes on a gentle melodic iambic metre, and plays with his language by constructing rather indulgent rhyming couplets, like “Frail” and “Tail”, “Loud” and “Proud”, “May” and “Gay” and in use of chiasmata like “If she be black and thereto have a wit: she’ll find a white that shall her blackness fit”. Desdemona reciprocates with cryptic challenges such as “I am not merry but do beguile the thing I am by seeing otherwise”. In this way the dialogue is constantly turning around how things appear and the effect of words in representing them. The lyricism and word play obscure what they are really saying, which could be interpreted as a form of flirtation between Desdemona and Iago and a debate of Iago’s ideas of misogyny and the idea that all are but appearances. In the end, Iago is not filled with hatred or desperate to confront Othello with a moment of revelation of his acts as a form of revenge. He simply resigns his speech and declines to explain his motives “From this time forth I will never speak a word”. In this the spell of his words is broken and the final scene of the play begins to come to a close.