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THE RENAISSANCE.

BOOK II

"It

How shall a demon be made to look as real as a man? Iago is a soldier of fortune who has roved the world from Syria to England, who, nursed in the lowest ranks, having had close acquaintance with the horrors of the wars of the sixteenth century, had drawn thence the maxims of a Turk and the philosophy of a butcher; principles he has none left. "O my reputation, my reputation!" cries the dishonoured Cassio. "As I am an honest man," says Iago, "I thought you had received some bodily wound; there is more sense in that than in reputation.' As for woman's virtue, he looks upon it like a man who has kept company with slave-dealers. He estimates Desdemona's love as he would estimate a mare's that sort of thing lasts so long-then. And then he airs an experimental theory with precise details and nasty expressions like a stud doctor. cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor, nor he his to her. . . . These Moors are changeable in their wills; . . . the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice." 2 Desdemona on the shore, trying to forget her cares, begs him to sing the praises of her sex. For every portrait he finds the most insulting insinuations. She insists, and bids him take the case of a deserving woman. "Indeed" he replies, "She was a wight, if ever such wight were, . . to suckle fools and chronicle small beer." 3 He also says, when Desdemona asks him what he would write in praise of her: "O gentle lady do not put me to't; for I am nothing, if not critical." This is the key to his char

4

1 Othello, ii. 3.

2 Ibid. i. 3.

3 Ibid. ii. 1.

4 Ibid.

acter. He despises man; to him Desdemona is a little wanton wench, Cassio an elegant word-shaper, Othello a mad bull, Roderigo an ass to be basted, thumped, made to go. He diverts himself by setting these passions at issue; he laughs at it as at a play. When Othello, swooning, shakes in his convulsions, he rejoices at this capital result: "Work on, my medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught." You would take him

for one of the poisoners of the time, studying the effect of a new potion on a dying dog. He only speaks in sarcasms he has them ready for every one, even for those whom he does not know. When he wakes Brabantio to inform him of the elopement of his daughter, he tells him the matter in coarse terms, sharpening the sting of the bitter pleasantry, like a conscientious executioner, rubbing his hands when he hears the culprit groan under the knife. "Thou art a villain!" cries Brabantio. "You are a senator!" answers Iago. But the feature which really completes him, and makes him take rank with Mephistopheles, is the atrocious truth and the cogent reasoning by which he likens his crime to virtue.2 Cassio, under his advice, goes to see Desdemona, to obtain her intercession for him; this visit is to be the ruin of Desdemona and Cassio. Iago, left alone, hums for an instant quietly, then cries:

"And what's he then that says I play the villain?
When this advice is free I give and honest,

Probal to thinking and indeed the course

To win the Moor again.'

1 Othello, iv. 1.

"13

2 See the like cynicism and scepticism in Richard III. Both begin by slandering human nature, and both are misanthropical of malice

prepense.

3 Othello, ii. 3.

To all these features must be added a diabolical energy, an inexhaustible inventiveness in images, caricatures, obscenity, the manners of a guard-room, the brutal bearing and tastes of a trooper, habits of dissimulation, coolness, hatred, and patience, contracted amid the perils and devices of a military life, and the continuous miseries of long degradation and frustrated hope; you will understand how Shakspeare could transform abstract treachery into a concrete form, and how Iago's atrocious vengeance is only the natural consequence of his character, life, and training.

VIII.

How much more visible is this impassioned and unfettered genius of Shakspeare in the great characters which sustain the whole weight of the drama! The startling imagination, the furious velocity of the manifold and exuberant ideas, passion let loose, rushing upon death and crime, hallucinations, madness, all the ravages of delirium bursting through will and reason: such are the forces and ravings which engender them. Shall I speak of dazzling Cleopatra, who holds Antony in the whirlwind of her devices and caprices, who fascinates and kills, who scatters to the winds the lives of men as a handful of desert dust, the fatal Eastern sorceress who sports with love and death, impetuous, irresistible, child of air and fire, whose life is but a tempest, whose thought, ever barbed and broken, is like the crackling of a lightning flash? Of Othello, who, beset by the graphic picture of physical adultery, cries at every word of Iago like a man on the rack

1 See his conversation with Brabantio, then with Roderigo, Act i.

who, his nerves hardened by twenty years of war and shipwreck, grows mad and swoons for grief, and whose soul, poisoned by jealousy, is distracted and disorganised in convulsions and in stupor? Or of old King Lear, violent and weak, whose half-unseated reason is gradually toppled over under the shocks of incredible treacheries, who presents the frightful spectacle of madness, first increasing, then complete, of curses, howlings, superhuman sorrows, into which the transport of the first access of fury carries him, and then of peaceful incoherence, chattering imbecility, into which the shattered man subsides; a marvellous creation, the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason, which reason could never have conceived? 1 Amid so many portraitures let us choose two or three to indicate the depth and nature of them all. The critic is lost in Shakspeare, as in an immense town; he will describe a couple of monuments, and entreat the reader to imagine the city.

1

Plutarch's Coriolanus is an austere, coldly haughty patrician, a general of the army. In Shakspeare's hands he becomes a coarse soldier, a man of the people as to his language and manners, an athlete of war, with a voice like a trumpet; whose eyes by contradiction are filled with a rush of blood and anger, proud and terrible in mood, a lion's soul in the body of a bull. The philosopher Plutarch told of him a lofty philosophic action, saying that he had been at pains to save his landlord in the sack of Corioli. Shakspeare's Coriolanus has indeed the same disposition, for he is really a good fellow; but when Lartius asks him the name

1 See again, in Timon, and Hotspur more particularly, perfect examples of vehement and unreasoning imagination.

of this poor Volscian, in order to secure his liberty, he yawns out:

"By Jupiter! forgot.

I am weary; yea, my memory is tired.

Have we no wine here?"1

He is hot, he has been fighting, he must drink; he leaves his Volscian in chains, and thinks no more of him. He fights like a porter, with shouts and insults, and the cries from that deep chest are heard above the din of the battle like the sounds from a brazen trumpet. He has scaled the walls of Corioli, he has butchered till he is gorged with slaughter. Instantly he turns to the army of Cominius, and arrives red with blood, as he were flay'd." "Come I too late?" Cominius begins to compliment him. "Come I too late?" he repeats. The battle is not yet finished: he embraces Cominius:

"O! let me clip ye

In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart

As merry as when our nuptial day was done." 2

Such senses,

For the battle is a real holiday to him. such a strong frame, need the outcry, the din of battle, the excitement of death and wounds. This haughty and indomitable heart needs the joy of victory and destruction. Mark the display of his patrician arrogance and his soldier's bearing, when he is offered the tenth of the spoils :

"I thank you, general;

But cannot make my heart consent to take

A bribe to pay my sword.'

1 Coriolanus, i. 9.

2 Ibid. i. 6.

3 Ibid. i. 9.

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