We are a long way off Shakespeare in this powerfully dramatic and realistic scene of butchery: it is a far cry from Othello, a nature made up of love and honor, of resolute righteousness and heroic pity, to the relentless and deliberate ruffian whose justice is as brutal in its ferocity as his caution is cold-blooded in its foresight. The sacrificial murder of Desdemona is no butchery, but tragedy—terrible as ever tragedy may be, but not more terrible than beautiful; from the first kiss to the last stab, when the sacrificing priest of retribution immolates the victim whose blood he had forborne to shed for pity of her beauty till impelled to forget his first impulse and shed it for pity of her suffering. His words can bear no other meaning, can imply no other action, that would not be burlesque rather than grotesque in its horror. And the commentators or annotators who cannot understand or will not allow that a man in almost unimaginable passion of anguish may not be perfectly and sedately mindful of consistency and master of himself must explain how Desdemona manages to regain her breath so as to speak three times, and utter the most heavenly falsehood that ever put truth to shame, after being stifled to death. To recover breath enough to speak, to think, and to lie in defence of her slayer, can hardly be less than to recover breath enough to revive and live, if undespatched by some sharper and more summary method of homicide. The fitful and intermittent lack of stage directions which has caused and perpetuated this somewhat short-sighted oversight is not a more obvious evidence of the fact that Shakespeare's text has lost more than any other and lesser poet's for want of the author's revision than is the misplacing of a letter which, as far as I know, has never yet been set right. When Othello hears that Iago has instigated Roderigo to assassinate Cassio, he exclaims, "O villain!" and Cassio ejaculates "Most heathenish, and most gross!" The sense is improved and the metre is rectified when we perceive that the original printer mistook the word "villanie" for the word "villaine." Such corrections of an unrevised text may seem slight and trivial matters to Englishmen who give thanks for the like labor when lavished on second-rate or third-rate poets of classical antiquity: the toil bestowed by a Bentley or a Porson on Euripides or Horace must naturally, in the judgment of universities, seem wasted on Shakespeare or on Shelley.
One of the very few poets to be named with these has left on everlasting record the deliberate expression of his judgment that Othello combines and unites the qualities of King Lear, "the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare as a poet" (a verdict with which I may venture to express my full and absolute agreement), and of Hamlet, his most tremendous effort "as a philosopher or meditator." It may be so: and Coleridge may be right in his estimate that "Othello is the union of the two." I should say myself, but with no thought of setting my opinion against that of the man who at his best was now and then the greatest of all poets and all critics, that the fusion of thought and passion, inspiration and meditation, was at its height in King Lear. But in Othello we get the pure poetry of natural and personal emotion, unqualified by the righteous doubt and conscientious intelligence which instigate and impede the will and the action of Hamlet. The collision and the contrast of passion and intellect, of noble passion and infernal intellect, was never before and can never be again presented and verified as in this most tragic of all tragedies that ever the supreme student of humanity bequeathed for the study of all time. As a poet and a thinker Æschylus was the equal, if not the superior, of Shakespeare; as a creator, a revealer, and an interpreter, infinite in his insight and his truthfulness, his tenderness and his wisdom, his justice and his mercy, no man who ever lived can stand beside the author of Othello.
