have afforded to cancel the most graceful touch, to efface the loveliest feature, in the sketch of Cinthio's heroine. But Desdemona can dispense with even this.
The Moor's wife went often, as I have said, to the ancient's wife's house, and abode with her a good part of the day. Whence this man seeing that she sometimes bore about her a handkerchief which he knew that the Moor had given her, the which handkerchief was wrought in Moorish wise most subtly, and was most dear to the lady, and in like wise to the Moor, he bethought him to take it from her secretly, and thence to prepare against her her final ruin. And he having a girl of three years old, which child was much beloved of Disdemona, one day that the hapless lady had gone to stay at the house of this villain, he took the little girl in his arms and gave her to the lady, who took her and gathered her to her breast: (and) this deceiver, who was excellent at sleight of hand, reft from her girdlestead the handkerchief so cunningly that she was no whit aware of it, and departed from her right joyful. Disdemona, knowing not this, went home, and being busied with other thoughts took no heed of the handkerchief. But some days thence, seeking for it and not finding it, she was right fearful lest the Moor should ask it of her, as he was often wont to do.
No reader of this terribly beautiful passage can fail to ask himself why Shakespeare forbore to make use of it. The substituted incident is as much less probable as it is less tragic. The wife offers to bind the husband's aching forehead with this especially hallowed handkerchief: "he puts it from him, and it drops," unnoticed by either, for Emilia to pick up and reflect, "I am glad I have found this napkin."
What can be the explanation of what a dunce who knows better than Shakespeare might call an oversight? There is but one: but it is all-sufficient. In Shakespeare's world as in nature's it is impossible that monsters should propagate: that Iago should beget, or that Goneril or Regan should bring forth. Their children are creatures unimaginable by man. The old chronicles give sons to Goneril, who vanquish Cordelia in battle and drive her to suicide in prison: but Shakespeare knew that such a tradition was not less morally and physiologically incongruous than it was poetically and dramatically impossible. And Lear's daughters are not monsters in the proper sense: their unnatural nature is but the sublimation and exaggeration of common evil qualities, unalloyed, untempered, unqualified by any ordinary admixture of anything not ravenously, resolutely, mercilessly selfish. They are devils only by dint of being more utterly and exclusively animals—and animals of a lower and hatefuler type—than usual. But any one less thoroughly intoxicated with the poisonous drug of lifelong power upon all others within reach of his royal hand would have been safe from the convincing and subjugating influence of Goneril and Regan. That is plain enough: but who will be fool enough to imagine that he would have been safe against the more deadly and inevitable influence of Iago?
The most fearful evidence of his spiritual power—for it would have been easy for a more timid nature than his wife's to secure herself beforehand against his physical violence by a warning given betimes to either of his intended victims—was necessarily suppressed by Shakespeare as unfit for dramatic service. Emilia will not believe Othello's assurance of her husband's complicity in the murder of Desdemona: the ancient's wife in Cinthio's terrible story "knew all, seeing that her husband would fain have made use of her as an instrument in the lady's death, but she would never assent, and for dread of her husband durst not tell her anything." This is not more striking and satisfying in a tale than it would have been improper and ineffectual in a tragedy. So utter a prostration of spirit, so helpless an abjection of soul and abdication of conscience under the absolute pressure of sheer terror, would have been too purely dreadful and contemptible a phase of debased nature for Shakespeare to exhibit and to elaborate as he must needs have done throughout the scenes in which Iago's wife must needs have figured: even if they could have been as dramatic, as living, as convincing as those in which the light, unprincipled, untrustworthy, loving, lying, foolish, fearless and devoted woman is made actual and tangible to our imagination as none but Shakespeare could have made her: a little afraid, it may be, of
