Part 15 (1/2)

[Footnote 98: To represent that Venetian women do not regard adultery so seriously as Oth.e.l.lo does, and again that Oth.e.l.lo would be wise to accept the situation like an Italian husband, is one of Iago's most artful and most maddening devices.]

[Footnote 99: If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss he was to interpret those bodily expressions of pa.s.sion which in a fellow-countryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner with somewhat less certainty. The effect of difference in blood in increasing Oth.e.l.lo's bewilderment regarding his wife is not sufficiently realised. The same effect has to be remembered in regard to Desdemona's mistakes in dealing with Oth.e.l.lo in his anger.]

[Footnote 100: See Note M.]

[Footnote 101: Cf. _Winter's Tale_, I. ii. 137 ff.:

Can thy dam?--may't be?-- Affection! thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicatest with dreams;--how can this be?

With what's unreal thou coactive art, And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent Thou may'st cojoin with something; and thou dost, And that beyond commission, and I find it, And that to the infection of my brains And hardening of my brows.]

[Footnote 102: See Note O.]

[Footnote 103: New Ill.u.s.trations, ii. 281.]

[Footnote 104: _Lectures on Shakespeare_, ed. Ashe, p. 386.]

[Footnote 105: I will not discuss the further question whether, granted that to Shakespeare Oth.e.l.lo was a black, he should be represented as a black in our theatres now. I dare say not. We do not like the real Shakespeare. We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds. And even if we were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes, to imagine is one thing and to see is another. Perhaps if we saw Oth.e.l.lo coal-black with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower our imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

As I have mentioned Lamb, I may observe that he differed from Coleridge as to Oth.e.l.lo's colour, but, I am sorry to add, thought Desdemona to stand in need of excuse. 'This n.o.ble lady, with a singularity rather to be wondered at than imitated, had chosen for the object of her affections a Moor, a black.... Neither is Desdemona to be altogether condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected for her lover' (_Tales from Shakespeare_). Others, of course, have gone much further and have treated all the calamities of the tragedy as a sort of judgment on Desdemona's rashness, wilfulness and undutifulness. There is no arguing with opinions like this; but I cannot believe that even Lamb is true to Shakespeare in implying that Desdemona is in some degree to be condemned. What is there in the play to show that Shakespeare regarded her marriage differently from Imogen's?]

[Footnote 106: When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her brain,

Let n.o.body blame him: his scorn I approve.

Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same way, as Malone pointed out, Oth.e.l.lo's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!'

(IV. i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words at III. iii.

403.]

LECTURE VI

OTh.e.l.lO

1

Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the character of Iago. Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly conceived, is a far greater figure and a less repellent. His physical deformity, separating him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for his egoism. In spite of his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a mere individual: he is the representative of his family, the Fury of the House of York. Nor is he so negative as Iago: he has strong pa.s.sions, he has admirations, and his conscience disturbs him. There is the glory of power about him. Though an excellent actor, he prefers force to fraud, and in his world there is no general illusion as to his true nature.

Again, to compare Iago with the Satan of _Paradise Lost_ seems almost absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's man exceed Milton's Fiend in evil. That mighty Spirit, whose

form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined and the excess Of glory obscured;

who knew loyalty to comrades and pity for victims; who

felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined His loss;

who could still weep--how much further distant is he than Iago from spiritual death, even when, in procuring the fall of Man, he completes his own fall! It is only in Goethe's Mephistopheles that a fit companion for Iago can be found. Here there is something of the same deadly coldness, the same gaiety in destruction. But then Mephistopheles, like so many scores of literary villains, has Iago for his father. And Mephistopheles, besides, is not, in the strict sense, a character. He is half person, half symbol. A metaphysical idea speaks through him. He is earthy, but could never live upon the earth.

Of Shakespeare's characters Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra (I name them in the order of their births) are probably the most wonderful.

Of these, again, Hamlet and Iago, whose births come nearest together, are perhaps the most subtle. And if Iago had been a person as attractive as Hamlet, as many thousands of pages might have been written about him, containing as much criticism good and bad. As it is, the majority of interpretations of his character are inadequate not only to Shakespeare's conception, but, I believe, to the impressions of most readers of taste who are unbewildered by a.n.a.lysis. These false interpretations, if we set aside the usual lunacies,[107] fall into two groups. The first contains views which reduce Shakespeare to commonplace. In different ways and degrees they convert his Iago into an ordinary villain. Their Iago is simply a man who has been slighted and revenges himself; or a husband who believes he has been wronged, and will make his enemy suffer a jealousy worse than his own; or an ambitious man determined to ruin his successful rival--one of these, or a combination of these, endowed with unusual ability and cruelty. These are the more popular views. The second group of false interpretations is much smaller, but it contains much weightier matter than the first. Here Iago is a being who hates good simply because it is good, and loves evil purely for itself. His action is not prompted by any plain motive like revenge, jealousy or ambition. It springs from a 'motiveless malignity,'

or a disinterested delight in the pain of others; and Oth.e.l.lo, Ca.s.sio and Desdemona are scarcely more than the material requisite for the full attainment of this delight. This second Iago, evidently, is no conventional villain, and he is much nearer to Shakespeare's Iago than the first. Only he is, if not a psychological impossibility, at any rate not a _human_ being. He might be in place, therefore, in a symbolical poem like _Faust_, but in a purely human drama like _Oth.e.l.lo_ he would be a ruinous blunder. Moreover, he is not in _Oth.e.l.lo_: he is a product of imperfect observation and a.n.a.lysis.

Coleridge, the author of that misleading phrase 'motiveless malignity,'