ABSTRACT
Let us begin with a textual crux. At the threshold of the great temptation scene which is often described as the hinge of the entire play, Iago begins to set Othello “on the rack” through those pauses, single words and pregnant phrases which seem to suggest something secret or withheld, a withholding which fills the Moor with the desire to hear more: I heard thee say even now, thou lik'st not that, When Cassio left my wife. What didst not like? And when I told thee he was of my counsel In my whole course of wooing, thou criedst, “Indeed!” And didst contract and purse thy brow together, As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain Some horrible conceit. If thou dost love me, Show me thy thought. (III. iii.109-16) In the lines that follow in this scene, what Kenneth Burke has called Iago's rhetorical technique of “Say the Word” is, in the Folio version, referred to as “close dilations, working from the heart,/That passion cannot rule” (123–4). The fact of the appearance of these “close dilations” in F, and in all the authoritative texts of the play but one, might justify our pausing for a moment over this enigmatic phrase, if only because of the length and puzzlement of the commentary it has occasioned. 1
