This beauty is all her own.  Something as beautiful may be found in Cordelia, but not the same beauty.  Desdemona, confronted with Lear’s foolish but pathetic demand for a profession of love, could have done, I think, what Cordelia could not do—­could have refused to compete with her sisters, and yet have made her father feel that she loved him well.  And I doubt if Cordelia, ‘falsely murdered,’ would have been capable of those last words of Desdemona—­her answer to Emilia’s ’O, who hath done this deed?’

               Nobody:  I myself.  Farewell. 
     Commend me to my kind lord.  O, farewell!

Were we intended to remember, as we hear this last ‘falsehood,’ that other falsehood, ‘It is not lost,’ and to feel that, alike in the momentary child’s fear and the deathless woman’s love, Desdemona is herself and herself alone?[106]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 85:  One instance is worth pointing out, because the passage in Othello has, oddly enough, given trouble.  Desdemona says of the maid Barbara:  ’She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her.’  Theobald changed ‘mad’ to ‘bad.’  Warburton read ’and he she loved forsook her, And she proved mad’!  Johnson said ‘mad’ meant only ’wild, frantic, uncertain.’  But what Desdemona says of Barbara is just what Ophelia might have said of herself.]

[Footnote 86:  The whole force of the passages referred to can be felt only by a reader.  The Othello of our stage can never be Shakespeare’s Othello, any more than the Cleopatra of our stage can be his Cleopatra.]

[Footnote 87:  See p. 9.]

[Footnote 88:  Even here, however, there is a great difference; for although the idea of such a power is not suggested by King Lear as it is by Hamlet and Macbeth, it is repeatedly expressed by persons in the drama.  Of such references there are very few in Othello.  But for somewhat frequent allusions to hell and the devil the view of the characters is almost strictly secular.  Desdemona’s sweetness and forgivingness are not based on religion, and her only way of accounting for her undeserved suffering is by an appeal to Fortune:  ’It is my wretched fortune’ (IV. ii. 128).  In like manner Othello can only appeal to Fate (V. ii. 264): 

           but, oh vain boast! 
     Who can control his fate?]

[Footnote 89:  Ulrici has good remarks, though he exaggerates, on this point and the element of intrigue.]

[Footnote 90:  And neither she nor Othello observes what handkerchief it is.  Else she would have remembered how she came to lose it, and would have told Othello; and Othello, too, would at once have detected Iago’s lie (III. iii. 438) that he had seen Cassio wipe his beard with the handkerchief ‘to-day.’  For in fact the handkerchief had been lost not an hour before Iago told that lie (line 288 of the same scene), and it was at that moment in his pocket.  He lied therefore most rashly, but with his usual luck.]