What Is Motiveless Malignity?

May 16, 1989. Samuel Taylor Coleridgehad a phrase for it: "motiveless malignity." He wasn't talking about the Central Park jogger rape but about Iago in Shakespeare's "Othello." It's a sonorous phrase that explains nothing; and yet somehow it helps, as if the thing has been given its right name.

Who has been termed as motiveless malignity?

Iago's 'motiveless Malignity' (page between p. 1050 and p. 1051) Coleridge's well-known remarks on Iago are provoked by the villain's final speech of Act 1.

What does the motive hunting of motiveless malignity mean?

Thus Coleridge asserts that Iago's motives (in our sense) were his "keen sense of his intellectual superiority" and his "love of exerting power." And so Iago's malignity is "motiveless" because his motives (in Coleridge's sense) — revenge for being passed over for promotion, and for being cuckolded by both Othello and ...