Syntactically Honest

Iago's Character as Reflected in János Ács's 1989 Play-text

Abstract

As Professor Géza Kállay once remarked, "the price of precision is the need for reduction," so in this paper the field of examination will be scaled down to one part of one Othello performance: Iago's character in János Ács's 1989 Kaposvár production. This article is an experiment. It leaves behind nearly all the traditional elements of performance criticism to concentrate solely on the role of the cut text in Iago's characterization. In what ways does the transformation of Shakespeare's text change Iago's character? What is Iago in János Kulka's interpretation like? And, lastly, what does a theatrical play-text add to our understanding of Iago? These are the questions to be discussed in this essay with an introduction to a less-known field of Shakespeare research: play-text analysis.