The Virtuoso’s Veil
Term 2: Play or Be Played; Module 2
Thesis statement: Some people master many trades; the virtuoso masters one. For the virtuoso, this singular mastery defines their identity and carefully constructed reputation. Art, performance, and illusion are not simply tools but weapons of deception, wielded to shape how others perceive them. This essay explores how virtuosity itself becomes a long con, where illusions hinge on a moment of revelation—a “prestige”—that redefines the characters’ deepest truths, leaving us to grapple with the weight of deception long after the curtain falls.
I. Iago No Ragrets
For the virtuosos in this module, reputation is not just a fragile construct but a weapon. A weapon wielded by those who understand its creation lies in their own hands. In Othello, reputation is the cornerstone of Iago’s manipulative genius. “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving,” Iago muses (Act 2.3), understanding how easily one can write their own reputation. He offers this philosophy to Cassio as a game of appearances, to which he plays with devastating precision. In exploiting Othello, Iago proves that one’s reputation can always be rewritten by those bold enough.
Othello, by contrast, clings desperately to the reputation others prescribe him–it’s all he has against the scrutiny of his station. After all, he’s a guy that was never supposed to get the hot-girl-senator’s-daughter Desdemona. But love, as so often does in Shakespeare, defied his odds. But this purity stands no chance against Iago’s deceptions. “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul/Shall manifest me rightly,” he declares (Act 1.2), naively clinging to the hope that his virtue will protect him–that justice will reign.
II. Dudes Doing Too Much
RIP Iago, you would have loved Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan movies. The Prestige gives us two rival magicians, played by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, who stumble upon a Tesla cloning device (this is pre Cyber truck). Their mentor tells Bale that what makes a magician great isn’t the act of disappearance. There’s another crucial step that amateurs fail to grasp. “Because making something disappear isn’t enough,” Michael Caine explains in his British lilt, “you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call ‘The Prestige’” Revelation, they determine, is an essential act in the art of illusion.
Of course, as the magicians take turns one-upping each other in increasingly elaborate stage performances, their true acts of “Prestige” permeate their lives in the wings. Is Bale truly cloning himself? Is it still murder if the people you kill are clones of yourself? The answers become the story’s ultimate tricks, revelations that reframe everything that preceded. The acts of prestige redefine the cost of virtuosity itself. As their illusions extend beyond the stage, the “Prestige” act becomes a reckoning.
III. Oliver’s Tragic Hero Era
If The Secret History is the Old Testament of the dark academia genre, then If We Were Villains is the New. And hell if I wasn’t going to force my students to read it! “There were seven of us then,” Oliver begins ominously. Seven theater kids in a Shakespearean silo somewhere up in Illinois? Target audience reached.
The seven students lived four years studying Shakespeare and the roles they’ve been repeatedly type-casted to play. There’s Alexander, the villain; James, the hero. Richard, ”aggressive, unpredictable, and totally deranged…he played anyone else the audience needed to be impressed by or afraid of.” (Rio, p.15). Then there’s Oliver, “average in every imaginable way,” the perennial sidekick both onstage and off.
“For us, everything was a performance,” Oliver reflects, explaining how their lives became an endless stage, extensions of the roles they performed in script. “I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else’s story.”
Oliver’s story is perhaps the most devastating. Not a spoiler: a student is murdered and Oliver takes the fall. Did his obsession with Shakespeare absorb Oliver’s identity so far that, by sacrificing himself for his classmates, Oliver enacts his own version of heroism? He effectively steps into a new role: the protagonist of his own tragedy. “There is no comfort like complicity,” he says, his ultimate act of complicity being one that is arguably less selfless than performative. By doing so he reclaims a narrative where he has always been sidelined. What drama! What flair! His final act–his prestige–a reveal that rewrites his reputation and cements his heroism in their story.
IV. Donna’s Trust the Process
Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch introduces Theo (an angel-faced Ansel Elgort in the 2019 film adaptation) who performs his own illusion through forging antique furniture. We’re talking tea stains and crisping receipts in the oven to age them back to the 1960s. “I had discovered I possessed [an] opposite knack: of obfuscation and mystery, the ability to talk about inferior articles in ways that made people want them.” (Tartt, p. 457-458). In the highest level of smoke and mirrors, Theo learns how to not sell items, but fantasies, crafting narratives that appeal to his customers’ idealized selves. Like Iago, Theo’s deception is not just in his forgeries (that fool very serious collectors), but also in his persona. As he notes, “Dealers live by their reputation” (Tartt, p. 496).
But the novel’s true act of prestige is a spoiler I cannot in good conscience reveal in its entirety. This I’ll say: like Bale and Jackman in The Prestige and Oliver in Villains, this novel’s reveal reframed the characters’ entire histories! Cementing prestige and rewriting reputation!
Tartt herself performs a kind of “Prestige” act, separate from her novel’s plot line. At 700+ pages, I might consider this tome it’s own “long con,” if you get what I mean. Her “Prestige” is in withholding information even as events unfold. Tartt brilliantly keeps information from eschewing the narrator’s words, using literary techniques to build intricate layers of deception. Tartt manipulates her reader as deftly as Theo does his clients, using narrative structure to mirror the artifice that defines her character’s lives.
But what was Iago’s “Prestige?” He successfully manipulated Cassio’s death and pushed Othello to doubt Desdemona’s love. But when it comes time for his reveal, Iago remains tight-lipped. Iago’s refusal to explain his motives—“Demand me nothing. What you know, you know”—becomes the ultimate cruelty, denying Othello closure and turning his destruction into a masterpiece of ambiguity.
For each of our virtuosos, their craft is not just a skill but a way of shaping reality, a means of controlling how they are perceived. Yet this obsession consumes them, blurring the lines between their identities and their deceptions. Their acts of prestige are more than plot twists; they unveil the characters’ deepest truths. Whether or not you want them to, deceptions linger long after the curtain falls.
Lit Girl always does *the most* + I'm so here for it. Read The Secret History for the first time this year and devoured it. Officially adding If We Were Villians to the list.