Chicken Soup for the Angry Moore’s Soul

How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
Thou know’st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
And wit depends on dilatory time.
(Oth.II.3.376-379)

Maybe Shakespeare doesn’t spring to mind when you think of ways to deal with the emotional issues in your life. But, like all great works of art, Will’s works have a way of capturing the human condition in small, digestible spaces (in this case, manuscripts) that you can explore and learn from.

Take jealousy. It’s the double-edged companion to love and it affects us all. Feeling jealous is probably one of the worst emotional states to endure partially because it’s fueled and intensified by the freedom of our own imaginations. When you imagine your ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend, you imagine them holding hands and frolicking through daisy-dotted fields then winding down in front of a cozy fireplace and exchanging acts of perfect love and affection. Without us. Without needing us. And it’s maddening.

Here’s where I’d hand you a copy of Othello: The Moore of Venice. Hardly ever are our jealous imaginings founded in reality, and no better story demonstrates this than Shakespeare’s posthumously produced tragedy of love and betrayal. Iago, a soldier and confidant of Othello the general, spends most of his time onstage convincing Othello, misleadingly, that the Moore’s wife is having an affair. While the betrayal depicted in Othello is positively stomach-twisting, those of us who are suffering from jealousy can, I think, find some comfort in the idea that our worst fears about the people we love are not necessarily true, and even if those people have moved on from us or are betraying us, it’s probably not as wonderful for them (or bad for us) as we imagine.

One of the best parallels between Iago and our own personal Jealousy Demons is the fact that both of them have deep, ambiguous origins that we cannot always place. Here, Wikipedia lists several possible motivations for Iago’s character:

1. Failure to be promoted
2. Racism
3. Jealousy (of Emilia, of Desdemona or of Othello)
4. Sexual infidelity
5. Insecurity
6. Supreme intellect unregulated by emotion or conscience (sociopathy)
7. Sadism
8. Homosexuality

That’s a lot of possibilities. It could even be a combination of these reasons that drives Iago’s personal quest to fuel Othello’s jealous imagination. What’s fueling your Iago, and how can you get over those problems and move on with your life?