The character of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello is certainly an evil character, but to label him as simply a symbol of evil or a vice archetype is doing an injustice to Iago, who is a human being, with as much wills and desires as the rest of the characters in Othello. In Fred West’s article Iago The Psychopath West discusses the fact that Shakespeare actually has been critically renowned by many contemporary psychologists for his studies into the more bizarre workings of the human personality. In fact, during the English Renaissance, the public became very interested in the study that contemporary science has dubbed: “psychology.” Therefore, to simply blanket Iago as a pure evil would be too easy and would discredit Shakespeare as the genius he truly was. Iago has been likened by West to be strikingly similar to the character of Aaron in Titus Andronicus as the: “stock character of evil,” as West calls Aaron. West believes that the qualities and characteristics of Aaron in Shakespeare’s: Titus Andronicus predicts the character of Iago in Othello, but Iago instead is not that of a “true evil” stand in, and just like Aaron has many human desires and wishes just like Iago. The two characters also seem to have no religious affiliation and could be a stand in for the Devil, in these lines we see Aaron’s anti religious sentiments:

LUCIUS. What shall I swear by? Thou believest no good:                                                             That granted, how canst thou believe an oath?

AARON. What if I do not? As indeed I do not;                                                                                   Yet, for I know thou art religious,                                                                                       And hast a thing within thee called a conscience.                                                                                                                       (V.i.71-75)

Compare Aaron’s anti religious feelings with that of Iago’s in the final act of Othello:

IAGO. Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.                                                   From this time forth I never will speak a word.

LODOVICO. What, not even to pray?

From these examples we can clearly see both of these characters’ aversion to religion, Aaron even favoring the conscience over morality. This would suggest a Machiavellian type character who favors practicality over morality visible in both Aaron and Iago. What then becomes interesting is the lack of remorse that Iago feels, he doesn’t even see his actions as being evil or wrong, whereas Aaron in fact does understand that the evil he has committed is wrong when he says, “If there be devils, would I were a devil” (V.i.147). Here Aaron is wishing that he could be a devil and cause even more torment to the characters of the play. A literary critic by the name of A.C Bradley, West writes, also came close to diagnosing Iago as a psychopath in the turn of the twentieth century, before the term psychopath was even discovered, and made a definitive mental disorder by Harvey Cleckley in his study of the psychopath called: The Mask of Sanity published in 1941. It seems that unlike Aaron recognizing his own conscience, Iago has a guiltless nature unable to recognize the evil he has committed to Desdemona and Othello. This guiltless nature is one of the prime symptoms of psychopathy.

West, Fred. “Iago the Psychopath.” South Atlantic Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 2, 1978, pp. 27–35. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3198785.