Plagued by Kindness

Closely following the discussion of the previous chapter, this chapter focuses solely on Othello, where Iago’s contagiously sympathetic attentions, his poisonous ‘medicine’, are shown to operate with the duplicitous efficacy of the pharmakon, and via the subtle insinuations of plague, just as period treatises on the medicinal capacity of the friend and the detrimental effects of the flatterer would have warned his vulnerable victim-patients. This chapter shows how Iago employs his poisonous ‘medicine’ to plague his victims with bitter poison. The chapter contains one section on the medicinal force of Timon of Athens’s curative councillor, an antithetical figure to that of Iago.