The paradox or riddle that the speech creates is emblematic of Iago’s power throughout the play: his smallest sentences (“Think, my lord?” in III.iii.109) or gestures (beckoning Othello closer in Act IV, scene i) open up whole worlds of interpretation. Iago is continually playing a game of deception, even with Roderigo and the audience. Phrases such as “Were I the Moor I would not be Iago” and “I am not what I am” hide as much as, if not more than, they reveal. This speech exemplifies Iago’s cryptic and elliptical manner of speaking. The day he decides to demonstrate outwardly what he feels inwardly, Iago explains, will be the day he makes himself most vulnerable: “I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at.” His implication, of course, is that such a day will never come. Iago finds that people who are what they seem are foolish. He follows Othello not out of “love” or “duty,” but because he feels he can exploit and dupe his master, thereby revenging himself upon the man he suspects of having slept with his wife. In this early speech, Iago explains his tactics to Roderigo. In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters how well, they understood Its human position how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
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