believe that Chaucer meant the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of Somersetshire.  I do not mean that Othello’s race is a matter of no account.  It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play.  It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the action and catastrophe.  But in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important; and if anyone had told Shakespeare that no Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.

Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from childhood.  He does not belong to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence—­almost as if from wonderland.  There is something mysterious in his descent from men of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn in Aleppo.

And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic.  He has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet; but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet.  Indeed, if one recalls Othello’s most famous speeches—­those that begin, ‘Her father loved me,’ ‘O now for ever,’ ‘Never, Iago,’ ’Had it pleased Heaven,’ ‘It is the cause,’ ‘Behold, I have a weapon,’ ’Soft you, a word or two before you go’—­and if one places side by side with these speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that Othello is the greatest poet of them all.  There is the same poetry in his casual phrases—­like ‘These nine moons wasted,’ ’Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,’ ‘You chaste stars,’ ’It is a sword of Spain, the ice-brook’s temper,’ ’It is the very error of the moon’—­and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever since have been taken as the absolute expression, like

                      If it were now to die,
     ’Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
     My soul hath her content so absolute
     That not another comfort like to this
     Succeeds in unknown fate,

or

If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself. 
I’ll not believe it;

or

No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,

or

But yet the pity of it, Iago!  O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!

or

                                 O thou weed,
     Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet
     That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born.