the highest and the sweetest, were for a time in abeyance.  In other plays, notably in the Tempest, we are constantly aware of the presence of this power; and in such cases we seem to be peculiarly near to Shakespeare himself.  Now this is so in Hamlet and King Lear, and, in a slighter degree, in Macbeth; but it is much less so in Othello.  I do not mean that in Othello the suppression is marked, or that, as in Troilus and Cressida, it strikes us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to follow simply from the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly mundane subject.  Still it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to indicate, and it leaves an impression that in Othello we are not in contact with the whole of Shakespeare.  And it is perhaps significant in this respect that the hero himself strikes us as having, probably, less of the poet’s personality in him than many characters far inferior both as dramatic creations and as men.

2

The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable to show how essentially the success of Iago’s plot is connected with this character.  Othello’s description of himself as

              one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
     Perplexed in the extreme,

is perfectly just.  His tragedy lies in this—­that his whole nature was indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.

Let me first set aside a mistaken view.  I do not mean the ridiculous notion that Othello was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has some little plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a noble barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the civilisation of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness regarding female chastity common among Oriental peoples, and that the last three Acts depict the outburst of these original feelings through the thin crust of Venetian culture.  It would take too long to discuss this idea,[94] and it would perhaps be useless to do so, for all arguments against it must end in an appeal to the reader’s understanding of Shakespeare.  If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied himself with problems of ‘Culturgeschichte’; that he laboured to make his Romans perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days of Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will also think this interpretation of Othello probable.  To me it appears hopelessly un-Shakespearean.  I could as easily