You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Some years ago Dr. Martin Wangh (9) discussed Shakespeare's Iago as a paranoiac who disdains women, who loathes Desdemona for usurping the place he coveted in Othello's affections, and who rationalizes with incompatible excuses his conscious hatred (unconscious love) for Othello and Cassio. Wangh suggested homosexual panic in Iago precipitated by Othello's marriage, pointed out how three times Iago interrupts what he imagines to be Othello's connubial proceedings, and showed how Iago's behavior illustrates two of the four masks of homosexuality described by Freud (3). Wangh also discussed the raging tooth dream as a fantasy of fellatio and the strawberry handkerchief as a breast symbol.
Aside from automatic listing in the standard annual Shakespeare bibliographies, Dr. Wangh's article has gone unnoticed or at least uncommented upon by Shakespearean scholars. Perhaps the chief reason lies in the disinclination of most literary historians to acquaint themselves with psychoanalytic theory, for which phenomenon there are in turn many other reasons. A second reason may lie in certain undemonstrated assumptions of “historical” literary criticism in recent decades, namely, that Shakespeare was bookish and disinclined to use his own direct observation; although Hardin Craig (2) recently remarked that “An unimpeded observation of life” seems to have been Shakespeare's habit of mind. Professor Craig's view has not yet been generally accepted by conservative editors or professors of literature.
Three further reasons for the general lack of notice are that Dr. Wangh's essay (a) did not cite all of the textual evidence that will support his point of view, (b) did not distinguish explicitly enough between evidence and inference,