(1) One of these has been already mentioned in our discussion of Shakespeare’s technique. Othello is not only the most masterly of the tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is unusual.  And this method, by which the conflict begins late, and advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension just described.  To this may be added that, after the conflict has begun, there is very little relief by way of the ridiculous.  Henceforward at any rate Iago’s humour never raises a smile.  The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if asked whether there is a clown in Othello, would answer No.

(2) In the second place, there is no subject more exciting than sexual jealousy rising to the pitch of passion; and there can hardly be any spectacle at once so engrossing and so painful as that of a great nature suffering the torment of this passion, and driven by it to a crime which is also a hideous blunder.  Such a passion as ambition, however terrible its results, is not itself ignoble; if we separate it in thought from the conditions which make it guilty, it does not appear despicable; it is not a kind of suffering, its nature is active; and therefore we can watch its course without shrinking.  But jealousy, and especially sexual jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and humiliation.  For this reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it we ourselves are ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not hidden it commonly stirs contempt as well as pity.  Nor is this all.  Such jealousy as Othello’s converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in man; and it does this in relation to one of the most intense and also the most ideal of human feelings.  What spectacle can be more painful than that of this feeling turned into a tortured mixture of longing and loathing, the ‘golden purity’ of passion split by poison into fragments, the animal in man forcing itself into his consciousness in naked grossness, and he writhing before it but powerless to deny it entrance, gasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief only in a bestial thirst for blood?  This is what we have to witness in one who was indeed ‘great of heart’ and no less pure and tender than he was great.  And this, with what it leads to, the blow to Desdemona, and the scene where she is treated as the inmate of a brothel, a scene far more painful than the murder scene, is another cause of the special effect of this tragedy.[86]