Now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by Iago’s communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous.  But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed, Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy.  His confidence is shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word.  In his soliloquy (III. iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays hold of him.  Even then, however, and indeed to the very end, he is quite unlike the essentially jealous man, quite unlike Leontes.  No doubt the thought of another man’s possessing the woman he loves is intolerable to him; no doubt the sense of insult and the impulse of revenge are at times most violent; and these are the feelings of jealousy proper.  But these are not the chief or the deepest source of Othello’s suffering.  It is the wreck of his faith and his love.  It is the feeling,

     If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;

the feeling,

     O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!

the feeling,

     But there where I have garner’d up my heart,
     Where either I must live, or bear no life;
     The fountain from the which my current runs,
     Or else dries up—­to be discarded thence....

You will find nothing like this in Leontes.

Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said against Othello.  But the play is a tragedy, and from this point we may abandon the ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame.  When Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters (III. iii. 330), we see at once that the poison has been at work and ’burns like the mines of sulphur.’

     Look where he comes!  Not poppy, nor mandragora,
     Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
     Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
     Which thou owedst yesterday.

He is ‘on the rack,’ in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the sight of Iago.  Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his ‘occupation gone’ with all its glories.  But he has not abandoned hope.  The bare possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving him—­though such a deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that he can hardly conceive it credible—­is a kind of hope.  He furiously demands proof, ocular proof.  And when he is compelled to see that he is demanding an impossibility he still demands evidence.  He forces it from the unwilling witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio’s dream.  It is enough.  And if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife’s hand?  Yes, it was his first gift to her.