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We want to call attention here to something lago says again and again to Roderigo in the play's first act.
The plot circumstances surrounding the utterance are as follows: The confrontation of Brabantio and Othello before the Venetian Signiory has just concluded—Brabantio has laid his charges, Othello has successfully refuted them; Desdemona has been summoned from the inn and has substantiated her husband's claims; the newlyweds have decided, with the consent of the elders of Venice, to go to Cyprus together, and Roderigo, alone on the stage with lago and convinced that he has lost Desdemona forever, has just decided to commit suicide. “I will incontinently drown myself” (I.iii.306), 1 he says, to which lago replies, “If thou dost, I shall never love thee after. Why, thou silly gentleman.” And lago goes on, in one of his most famous speeches, to dissuade Roderigo from suicide, and even to steer him in another, quite specific, direction.
Come, be a man! Drown thyself? drown cats and blind puppiesl I have profess'd me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdurable toughness; I could never better stead thee than now. Put money in thy purse; follow thou the wars: defeat thy favour with an usurp'd beard. I say, put money in thy purse. It cannot be long that Desdemona should continue her love to the Moor,—put money in thy purse,—nor he his to her. It was a violent commencement in her, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration. Put but money in thy purse. These Moors are changeable in their wills—fills thy purse with money;—the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth; when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice; she must have change, she must: therefore put money in thy purse.