The title of this book accurately represents Jane Adamson’s approach to Othello, her view of the play, and her critical achievement. Rejecting from the outset the ‘conventionalist’ approach, which would have us discount our own responses and treat the play as ‘artificial’, a ‘purely dramatic phenomenon’ (ars gratia artis: the old lie), she bases her critical judgment on a systematic consideration of the feelings it arouses. This leads her to the view that. the connection (or disconnection) between the characters’ feelings and their judgments is at the heart of the play, and at the heart of the tragedy.

The foundation of her argument lies in her strong sense of the sheer painfulness of the drama, and the vulnerability of the characters. Because she has the capacity to write with power and precision, she makes us feel these things with a peculiar immediacy, while at the same time showing how each character in his anguish, or in efforts to avoid anguish, deceives himself, or others, or both. All the main characters feel obliged to repress, or oversimplify, or otherwise distort their feelings. She shows this process to be most surprisingly and comprehensively at work in the case of Iago, who (she says) ‘never loses his conviction that his will can protect him from any and every human susceptibility’. His apparent control of feelings, and his contempt of other characters who cannot ‘control’ theirs, is not the sign of superiority he takes it for, but of his need for emotional self-protection: he will not wear his heart upon his sleeve, ‘for daws to peck at’. Iago prefers not to take the risks of feeling, not to expose himself to the possibility of pain or disappointment or treachery by submitting himself to the direction of his emotional instincts above all, by opening himself for the gift and receipt of love. Thus, he ensures that his emotional life, by being repressed, must become deformed, furtive, lurid and corrupt. As a result, ‘in Iago’s accent, relish is so hotly mated with scorn and revulsion that the product is obscene as well as grotesque’.