... superiority, and haunted by the love of exerting power on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moral excellence. Thus Coleridge asserts that Iago's impulses are simply to carry out evil acts - he has an inner malignancy that drives his "keen sense of his intellectual superiority" and his "love of exerting power". And so Iago's malignity is "motiveless" because his motives - being passed over for promotion, his suspicion that Othello and later Cassio are having affairs with Emelia - are merely rationalisations for his impulses; his drive to do evil. There is much evidence in the text to support this theory of Iago. Shakespeare does much to allude to the fact that Iago loves evil for his own sake and thus has his own inner malignancy. At the end of his first soliloquy Iago pledges himself to the demonic in his last two lines:- "I have't. It ...

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