(3) The mere mention of these scenes will remind us painfully of a third cause; and perhaps it is the most potent of all.  I mean the suffering of Desdemona.  This is, unless I mistake, the most nearly intolerable spectacle that Shakespeare offers us.  For one thing, it is mere suffering; and, ceteris paribus, that is much worse to witness than suffering that issues in action.  Desdemona is helplessly passive.  She can do nothing whatever.  She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not even in silent feeling.  And the chief reason of her helplessness only makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful.  She is helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute.  I would not challenge Mr. Swinburne’s statement that we pity Othello even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated distress.  We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that Othello is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona’s suffering is like that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by the being he adores.

(4) Turning from the hero and heroine to the third principal character, we observe (what has often been pointed out) that the action and catastrophe of Othello depend largely on intrigue.  We must not say more than this.  We must not call the play a tragedy of intrigue as distinguished from a tragedy of character.  Iago’s plot is Iago’s character in action; and it is built on his knowledge of Othello’s character, and could not otherwise have succeeded.  Still it remains true that an elaborate plot was necessary to elicit the catastrophe; for Othello was no Leontes, and his was the last nature to engender such jealousy from itself.  Accordingly Iago’s intrigue occupies a position in the drama for which no parallel can be found in the other tragedies; the only approach, and that a distant one, being the intrigue of Edmund in the secondary plot of King Lear.  Now in any novel or play, even if the persons rouse little interest and are never in serious danger, a skilfully-worked intrigue will excite eager attention and suspense.  And where, as in Othello, the persons inspire the keenest sympathy and antipathy, and life and death depend on the intrigue, it becomes the source of a tension in which pain almost overpowers pleasure.  Nowhere else in Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so long a time as in the later Acts of Othello.

(5) One result of the prominence of the element of intrigue is that Othello is less unlike a story of private life than any other of the great tragedies.  And this impression is strengthened in further ways.  In the other great tragedies the action is placed in a distant period, so that its general significance is perceived through a thin veil which separates the persons from ourselves and our own world.  But Othello is a drama of modern life; when it first appeared it was a drama almost of contemporary