"Iago" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Now, by Saint Iago! thou art some juggling knave—some impish charlatan, who seeks to conceal his imposture in the garb of mystery and terror. Little knowest thou the mettle of a ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... the Shakespearean influences is the jealousy theme in which Don Antonio is modelled on Othello, Caelia on Desdemona, and Jasper on Iago. My colleague, Professor E.L. Hubler, who has a vast deal of the Shakespearean text in his memory, finds twenty-two possible echoes or parallels. Of these we agree that at least fourteen are certain. The influences strike ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... common sense, her spirit of justice, when she herself is not concerned, and her good-nature, when it could cost her nothing—all this is unfailing, inimitable, never to be forgotten. Some good people cry out that she is so wicked. Of course she is wicked: so were Iago and Blifil. The only question is, if she be real? Most certainly she is, as real as anything in the whole range of fiction, as real as Tartuffe, or Gil Blas, Wilhelm Meister, or Rob Roy. No one doubts ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... parish priests of old, now princes' companions; what would he say? Coelum ipsum petitur stultitia. Had he met some of our devout pilgrims going barefoot to Jerusalem, our lady of Lauretto, Rome, S. Iago, S. Thomas' Shrine, to creep to those counterfeit and maggot-eaten relics; had he been present at a mass, and seen such kissing of paxes, crucifixes, cringes, duckings, their several attires and ceremonies, pictures of saints, [274]indulgences, pardons, vigils, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... nature. While we do not doubt that depravity and intelligence can make an unholy alliance, we do doubt that the intelligence thus prompted can exhibit, to an eye that discerns spirits, all the vital signs of benevolence. If, in the logic of character, Iago or Jerry Sneak be in the premises, it is impossible to find Bacon ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... and crown him during the dance with wreaths of victory. Finally appears king George the third, who declares his horror for the tyrant, his affection to the virtuous and native monarch; and who is entertained by St. Iago and the virgin Mary, or by figures representing the genius of Spain, and that of Christianity, with a performance in full chorus of "God ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... Harry Esmond or Maggie Tulliver?" The SERIOUS characters—they are seldom very familiar or definite to us in any kind of literature. One might say, to be sure, that he knows Hotspur a good deal more intimately than he knows Mr. Henry Esmond, and that he has a pretty definite idea of Iago, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, as definite as he has (to follow Mr. Austin) of Tito Melema. But we cannot reckon Othello, or Macbeth, or King Lear as FRIENDS; nay, we would rather drink with the honest ancient. All heroes and the heroines are usually too august, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... remarked Dic, speaking softly to the black waves of lustrous hair, "I must take Iago's advice and put money in my purse. I have always hoped to be something more than I am. Billy Little, who has been almost a father to me, has burned the ambition into me. But with all my yearning, life ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... tripping through a doorway, in the same satin gown, had just arrived from a long and perilous voyage? "The riches of the ship" had "come on shore," but for all we knew, it had been in the next room, taking a nap, all the while. In the crucial scene between Cassio and Iago, we got the impression that one was as drunk as the other, and that Cassio acted the better man of the two, chiefly because of his grandiloquent apostrophe relative to the thieving of brains. We approved of that, and looked meaningly round at old Cap'n Fuller, who ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... reads. Schiller certainly has great dramatic genius; only I agree with Goethe that there is always a longing for exhibiting cruelty in its most monstrous form, and refinement of cruelty and depravity overstepping almost the natural conditions of humanity. I always thought Iago about the most awful character in Shakspeare; but Schiller's Philip II. is something beyond even this, without perhaps so much necessity for the exhibition of this absolute delight in evil. It is long since I have ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—it has no character—it enjoys light and shade—it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... in this Valhalla of his soul To love, nor ever finds 'Love's Labor Lost.' No two-faced Falstaff proffers double suit; No Desdemona mourns Iago's art; And every Romeo finds ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... there is to be found in musical annals such diversity of aptitudes as that displayed by this French baritone. Is there an actor on any stage to-day who can portray both the grossness of Falstaff and the subtlety of Iago? Making allowance for the different art medium that the singing actor must work in, and despite the larger curves of operatic pose and gesture, Maurel kept astonishingly near to the characters he assumed. He was Shakespearian; his Falstaff was the ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... already there conversing in low tones with Venia by the window, while Mr. Turnbull, sitting opposite in an oaken armchair, regarded him with an expression which would have shocked Iago. ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... of good, but to whom the sight of depravity and baseness was welcome, inasmuch as it afforded him me occasion to wreak his own scorn and pride. His ambition was to be the English Juvenal; and it must be conceded that he had the true Iago-like disposition "to spy out abuses." Accordingly, in 1598, he published a series of venomous satires called "The Scourge of Villanie," rough in versification, condensed in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more than a caustic spirit, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... my acquaintance ever since. I always did say that there is nothing like amateur theatricals for bringing out all the worst vices of humanity. If a Shakespearian revival ever reaches the heavenly host, Gabriel and Michael will have to play Othello and Iago turn and turn ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... of Venice. Othello was one of the first plays to be revived at the Restoration, and was, perhaps, the most frequently seen of all Shakespeare. On 11 October, 1660, Burt acted Othello at the Cockpit. Downes gives Mohun as Iago; Hart, Cassio; Cartwright, Brabantio; Beeston, Roderigo; Mrs. Hughes, Desdemona; Mrs. Rutter, Emilia. But it is certain Clun had also acted Iago—(Pepys, 6 February, 1668). Hart soon gave up Cassio to Kynaston for the title role ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... of the companions of the celebrated Cortez in his Mexican conquest. After having given an account of a great victory over extreme odds, he mentions the report inserted in the contemporary Chronicle of Gomara, that Saint Iago had appeared on a white horse in van of the combat, and led on his beloved Spaniards to victory. It is very curious to observe the Castilian cavalier's internal conviction that the rumour arose out of a mistake, the cause of which he explains from his own observation; ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... words on two of his Shakespearian impersonations, and I shall have indicated enough, in advance of Mr. Fechter's presentation of himself. That quality of picturesqueness, on which I have already laid stress, is strikingly developed in his Iago, and yet it is so judiciously governed that his Iago is not in the least picturesque according to the conventional ways of frowning, sneering, diabolically grinning, and elaborately doing everything else that would induce Othello to run him ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... Iago feels the necessity of obtaining motives for his conduct. He tries to find them in the supposed infidelity of his wife with Othello and in his supersession by Cassio. Neither is sufficient, but he partly believes in them, and ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... her bed, prayed her prayer to her God, and in five minutes was asleep. Zachariah ten minutes afterwards prayed his prayer to HIS God, and lay down, but not to sleep. No sooner was his head on his pillow than the play was before his eyes, and Othello, Desdemona, and Iago moved and spoke again for hours. Then came the thoughts with which he had left the theatre and the revulsion on reaching home. Burning with excitement at what was a discovery to him, he had entered his house with even an enthusiasm for his wife, and an impatient desire to try upon her ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... discriminated by Diana Vernon, in one of those "Beatrix moods" which Scott did not always admire, when they were displayed by "Lady Anne" and other girls of flesh and blood. Rashleigh is of a nature unusual in Scott. He is, perhaps, Sir Walter's nearest approach, for malignant egotism, to an Iago. Of Bailie Nicol Jarvie commendation were impertinent. All Scotland arose, called him hers, laughed at and applauded her civic child. Concerning Andrew Fairservice, the first edition tells us what the final edition leaves us to guess—that Tresham "may recollect him as gardener at Osbaldistone ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... waddies, wallabies' skins, owls, fly-flappers, red ochre, and numerous other minor valuables. These we brought in triumph to the camp. It always distressed me to have to fire at these savages, and it was only when our lives were in most imminent danger that we did so, for, as Iago says, though in the trade of war I have slain men, yet do I hold it very stuff o' the conscience to do no contrived murder. I lack iniquity, sometimes, to do me service. We then went on with our work, though expecting our foes to return, but we were not again molested, as they now ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... or separate passage that we think when we speak of it; it is to the whole masterpiece that the mind turns at mention of its name. The one entire and perfect chrysolite of Othello is neither Othello nor Desdemona nor Iago, but each and all; the play of Hamlet is more than Hamlet himself, the poem even here is too great to be resumed in the person. But Constance is the jewel of King John, and Katherine is the crowning ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... him, all that time—Macbeth in disguise; Richard the Third grown straight; Hamlet as he appeared on his seavoyage to England. What an artful villain he must be, never to have made any sign of the melodrama that was in him! What a wicked-minded and remorseless Iago to have seen you doing Kitely night after night! raging to murder you and seize the part! Oh fancy Miss Kelly 'getting him up' in Macbeth. Good Heaven! what a mass of absurdity must be shut up sometimes within the walls of that small theatre in Dean-street! FIREWORKS will come out ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... subtilty of analysis, and sympathy with mental finesse, must also specially adapt this actor to the correct assumption of the character of Iago. Those who have never seen him in it may know by analogy that his merits are not exaggerated. We take it that Iago is a sharply intellectual personage, though his logic, warped by grovelling purpose, becomes sophistry, while lustful and envious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... human heart has expatiated upon this great source of worry—jealousy. Shakspere refers to it again and again. The whole play of Othello rests upon the Moor's jealousy of his fair, sweet, and loyally faithful Desdemona. How the fiendish Iago plays upon Othello's jealous heart until ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... audiences. It might be supposed that his reputation as a terrorist would have interfered with his attempts to ingratiate himself with his young favorites. But the tragedian who is fearful as Richard or as Iago finds that no hindrance to his success in the part of Romeo. Indeed, women rather take to terrible people; prize-fighters, pirates, highwaymen, rebel generals, Grand Turks, and Bluebeards generally have a fascination ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... end of the island of St Iago bore S.W. by W. distant four leagues; and the north end N.W. distant five leagues. At half an hour after three we anchored in Port Praya, in that island, in company with the Swallow and Prince Frederick, in eight fathom water, upon sandy ground. We had much rain and lightning in the night, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... mistaken, a touch of imaginative poetry in the part of Flamineo: his passion, excitable on occasion and vehement enough is as prosaic in its homely and cynical eloquence as the most fervent emotions of a Napoleon or an Iago when warmed or goaded into elocution. The one is a human snake, the other is a human wolf. Webster could not with equal propriety have put into the mouth of Flamineo such magnificent lyric poetry as seems to fall naturally, however suddenly and strangely, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... statement is scrutinised and tested. The imaginative historian cannot lay on his colours, or fill up his canvas, by effective and lively touches without finding his work placed under the microscope of erudite analysts, some of whom, like Iago, are nothing if not critical, are not only exact but very exacting. In these days a writer who endeavours to illuminate some scene of ages past, to show us, as by a magic lantern, the moving figures brought ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... OTHELLO.—"IAGO tells me you've been flirting with Lieutenant CASSIO. Now that won't do. Remember that under the Fifteenth Amendment I have the right, being a colored man, of doing pretty much as I choose. If this flirtation isn't ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... and a dying lady," said he, "and I'll be pathetic myself. But Richardson had picked the kernel of life," he said, "while Fielding was contented with the husk." It was not King Lear cursing his daughters, or deprecating the storm, that I remember his commendations of; but Iago's ingenious malice and subtle revenge; or Prince Hal's gay compliance with the vices of Falstaff, whom he all along despised. Those plays had indeed no rivals in Johnson's favour: "No man but Shakespeare," he said, "could have drawn ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Lear, even the humours in Love's Labour Lost and The Merchant of Venice have offended. I avow myself an impenitent Shakesperian in this respect also. The constant or almost constant presence of that humour which ranges from the sarcastic quintessence of Iago, and the genial quintessence of Falstaff, through the fantasies of Feste and Edgar, down to the sheer nonsense which not unfrequently occurs, seems to me not only delightful in itself, but, as I have hinted already, one of the chief of those spells by which Shakespere has differentiated his ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... individual there is a better and a worse self, so in each age there are conflicting tendencies; but it is the part of enlightened minds and generous hearts to see what is true, and to love what is good. The fault-finder is hateful both in life and in literature; and it is Iago, the most despicable of characters, whom Shakespeare makes say, "I am nothing if not critical." A Christian of all men is without excuse for being fretful and sour, for thinking and acting as though this were a devil's ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... theatres, and some of whose gay and spirited verses still live in the memory of hundreds of thousands. From Henry Carey descended that Edmund Kean, who, in our time, transformed himself so marvellously into Shylock, Iago and Othello. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lately promoted Cassio to be the lieutenant, a place of trust, and nearest to the general's person. This promotion gave great offence to Iago, an older officer who thought he had a better claim than Cassio, and would often ridicule Cassio as a fellow fit only for the company of ladies, and one that knew no more of the art of war or how to set an army in array for battle, than a girl. Iago hated Cassio, and he hated Othello, as well ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a distant resemblance to "honest Iago" in Othello, though Molire has only faintly shadowed forth what Shakespeare has worked out in so ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... with the varying demands of his subjects, and often glides from the tingling concussion of antithesis into the softest music, or rises from sarcastic brevity and stinging emphasis into rich and sonorous amplification. The analysis of Iago, and the analysis of the Weird Sisters, indicate, perhaps, the extremes of his manner. Throughout the volumes, whether the subject be comic or tragic, humorous or sublime, there is never any lack of verbal felicities. These seem to grow spontaneously in the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... Punch Show. In M. MAETERLINCK's version, Ponsch becomes the Prince of Half-seas-over-Holland; he is the victim of hereditary homicidal mania, complicated by neurotic hysteria. Inflamed by the insinuations of Mynheer Olenikke—a kind of Dutch Mephistopheles and Iago combined—he is secretly jealous of his consort the Princess Joedi's preference for the society of Djoe, the Court Jester and Society Clown. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... veteran; but women and their motives are to him an uncharted sea. Suddenly a beautiful young heiress falls in love with him, and leaves home and friends to marry him. He stands on the threshold of a new realm, happy but bewildered. Then comes Iago, his trusted subordinate, —who, as Othello knows, possesses that knowledge of women and of civilian life which he himself lacks,—and whispers in his ear that his bride is false to him; that under this fair veneer lurks ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... and is told, either in phrases of well-conceived irony, or by the exhibition of facts and reasonings which take him by surprise, that he is not altogether the person he deemed himself to be. But he does not mind it. Like Iago in the play, he "knows his price, and, by the faith of man, that he is worth no worse a place" than that which he occupies. He finds out the value of the check he receives, and lets it "pass by him like the idle wind"—a mastery, which the schoolboy, however he ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin |
