life, for the date of the Turkish attack on Cyprus is 1570.  The characters come close to us, and the application of the drama to ourselves (if the phrase may be pardoned) is more immediate than it can be in Hamlet or Lear.  Besides this, their fortunes affect us as those of private individuals more than is possible in any of the later tragedies with the exception of Timon.  I have not forgotten the Senate, nor Othello’s position, nor his service to the State;[87] but his deed and his death have not that influence on the interests of a nation or an empire which serves to idealise, and to remove far from our own sphere, the stories of Hamlet and Macbeth, of Coriolanus and Antony.  Indeed he is already superseded at Cyprus when his fate is consummated, and as we leave him no vision rises on us, as in other tragedies, of peace descending on a distracted land.

(6) The peculiarities so far considered combine with others to produce those feelings of oppression, of confinement to a comparatively narrow world, and of dark fatality, which haunt us in reading Othello.  In Macbeth the fate which works itself out alike in the external conflict and in the hero’s soul, is obviously hostile to evil; and the imagination is dilated both by the consciousness of its presence and by the appearance of supernatural agencies.  These, as we have seen, produce in Hamlet a somewhat similar effect, which is increased by the hero’s acceptance of the accidents as a providential shaping of his end. King Lear is undoubtedly the tragedy which comes nearest to Othello in the impression of darkness and fatefulness, and in the absence of direct indications of any guiding power.[88] But in King Lear, apart from other differences to be considered later, the conflict assumes proportions so vast that the imagination seems, as in Paradise Lost, to traverse spaces wider than the earth.  In reading Othello the mind is not thus distended.  It is more bound down to the spectacle of noble beings caught in toils from which there is no escape; while the prominence of the intrigue diminishes the sense of the dependence of the catastrophe on character, and the part played by accident[89] in this catastrophe accentuates the feeling of fate.  This influence of accident is keenly felt in King Lear only once, and at the very end of the play.  In Othello, after the temptation has begun, it is incessant and terrible.  The skill of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good fortune.  Again and again a chance word from Desdemona, a chance meeting of Othello and Cassio, a question which starts to our lips and which anyone but Othello would have asked, would have destroyed Iago’s plot and ended his life.  In their stead, Desdemona drops her handkerchief at the moment most favourable to him,[90] Cassio blunders into the presence of Othello only to find him in a swoon, Bianca arrives precisely when she is wanted