ABSTRACT
This paper argues that sceptical problems are central to Shakespeare’s Othello, but that where Descartes’ scepticism is completed in tandem with his notion of the evil deceiver, the scepticism in Othello arises from an evil truth teller, Iago. Iago’s success in disrupting the lives and reputations of the characters in the play stems in part from his lack of a good will (in the Kantian sense). But even more, it comes from the extent to which all of the characters live in one or another private world. Othello is akin to a Narcissus figure, Iago is akin to an Echo figure, and Emilia declares a desire to remake the world in her own image once she has committed the sin of infidelity to gain power for her husband. Iago has a method of using virtue to destroy virtue. He uses the techniques of echoing, implicature, and violations of conversational and community expectations in order to carry out his project. Because of the very nature of the privacy of Cartesian scepticism in the play, Iago’s techniques are unchecked against a shared world and shared meanings. The characters live in different timescapes, have deeply diverging concerns, and are doubled in echoing and mirroring and meaning. It is only at the end of the play when Emila declares her mandate to speak that the shared world returns and Iago is silenced. The answer to Cartesian scepticism, then, is this shared world where evil deceivers have no space for deception. The answer to the sceptical problems in Othello is, again, a shared world in which evil truth telling that lacks a good will is ineffective because the shared world tells a fuller truth.
