Iago damages Othello both on the level of intimate relationship and the public level. Indeed, at the same time he calls Othello’s military decisions into question (‘‘and what was he? Forsooth, a great arithmetician, one Michael Cassio, a Florentine’’) and tries to ruin his marriage with Desdemona (‘’your daughter [..] hath made a gross revolt, tying her duty, beauty, wit and fortunes in an extravagant and wheeling stranger’’).

Looking at Iago first exchanges, the reader may recognize the two different semantic field of intimate relationship and public image. Words like ‘fair’, ‘wife’, ‘spinster’ belong to the first semantic field, on the other side ‘city’,‘lieutenant’, ‘war’.. belong to the second one.

As the reader can notice, in the first scene the majority of words are connected to the military and public semantic field, but going forward, words belonging to the semantic field of intimate relationship outnumber the others ones, culminating into Iago’s last monologue (‘sheets’, ‘familiar’, ‘woman false’..).

It’s intresting to notice how Iago’s exchange is build up: up to line 33 (‘his Moorship’s ancient’), Iago doesn’t unveil who he’s talking about; this choice makes the reader focus on the process of damage, based on the two aspect above mentioned, instead of a possible characterization, and so it contributes to reinforce this process.