Between Iago and Othello the position of Desdemona is precisely that defined with such quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English byword—­“between the devil and the deep sea.”  Deep and pure and strong and adorable always and terrible and pitiless on occasion as the sea is the great soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given herself; and what likeness of man’s enemy from Satan down to Mephistopheles could be matched for danger and for dread against the good bluff soldierly trustworthy figure of honest Iago?  The rough license of his tongue at once takes warrant from his good soldiership and again gives warrant for his honesty:  so that in a double sense it does him yeoman’s service, and that twice told.  It is pitifully ludicrous to see him staged to the show like a member—­and a very inefficient member—­of the secret police.  But it would seem impossible for actors to understand that he is not a would-be detective, an aspirant for the honours of a Vidocq, a candidate for the laurels of a Vautrin:  that he is no less than Lepidus, or than Antony’s horse, “a tried and valiant soldier.”  It is perhaps natural that the two deepest and subtlest of all Shakespeare’s intellectual studies in good and evil should be the two most painfully misused and misunderstood alike by his commentators and his fellows of the stage:  it is certainly undeniable that no third figure of his creation has ever been on both sides as persistently misconceived and misrepresented with such desperate pertinacity as Hamlet and Iago.

And it is only when Iago is justly appreciated that we can justly appreciate either Othello or Desdemona.  This again should surely be no more than the truism that it sounds; but practically it would seem to be no less than an adventurous and audacious paradox.  Remove or deform or diminish or modify the dominant features of the destroyer, and we have but the eternal and vulgar figures of jealousy and innocence, newly vamped and veneered and padded and patched up for the stalest purposes of puppetry.  As it is, when Coleridge asks “which do we pity the most” at the fall of the curtain, we can surely answer, Othello.  Noble as are the “most blessed conditions” of “the gentle Desdemona,” he is yet the nobler of the two; and has suffered more in one single pang than she could suffer in life or in death.

But if Othello be the most pathetic, King Lear the most terrible, Hamlet the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest in abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is Macbeth.  There needs no ghost come from the grave, any reader may too probably remark, to tell us this.  But in the present generation such novelties have been unearthed regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem to have upon it some glittering reflection from the brazen brightness of a brand-new lie.  Have not certain wise men of the east of England—­Cantabrigian Magi, led by the star of their goddess Mathesis ("mad Mathesis,” as a daring poet was once ill-advised enough to dub her doubtful deity in defiance of scansion rather than of truth)—­have they not detected in the very heart of this tragedy the “paddling palms and pinching fingers” of Thomas Middleton?