The Importance of Iago in Othello

In Othello the motivation of Iago is clearly removed from what Shakespeare found in his sources in Chintheo the n sign. In that flirtation between Iago and Desdemona on the key side as they wait for Othello to come back to Cyprus there may be just a slight vestige of that at play. The play may draw us unwittingly into racist assumptions about Othello by its clever creation of closeness and sympathy with Iago, who never really acknowledges that we're there.