The standard opinion about poetic images involving money is that they are conventional devices to depict the crass, prosaic details of existence. Robert B. Heilman, for instance, in ‘The Economics of Iago and Others', writes of such words as riches, gold, buy, and gain that these economic terms ‘constitute a precise, unsentimental vocabulary for keeping before us the problem of values, especially in terms of an always possible gain and loss’.W. L. Clemen, another student of Shakespeare's imagery who examines the figures of speech used by Iago, makes this observation: ‘lago's imagery teems with repulsive animals of a low order; with references to eating and drinking and bodily functions and with technical and commercial terms.’ Here we see the language of commerce placed in a vocabulary of metaphors that shouts of earthy things.
