The Burdens of Mind Reading in Shakespeare’s Othello: A Cognitive and Psychoanalytic Approach to Iago’s Theory of Mind

TH E R E I S A L O N G T R A D I T I O N among Shakespeare scholars of attributing canny psychological powers to Iago. For A. C. Bradley, Iago’s most remarkable gift is his insight into human nature, a gift that, according to Stephen Greenblatt, manifests as improvisational power, the “role-player’s ability to imagine his nonexistence so that he can exist for another and as another.”1 Iago’s evil seems to lie in his talent for what cognitive theorists would describe as mind reading, the relative ability to access imaginatively another’s mental world and, in Iago’s case, to manipulate cruelly that world. Inversely proportional to Iago’s mind-reading ability would be the mindblindness or at least metacognitive deficits of Othello, who seems too obtuse and closed off from others to fathom Iago’s unimaginable designs.2