thou coactive art,
     And fellow’st nothing:  then ’tis very credent
     Thou may’st cojoin with something; and thou dost,
     And that beyond commission, and I find it,
     And that to the infection of my brains
     And hardening of my brows.]

[Footnote 102:  See Note O.]

[Footnote 103:  New Illustrations, ii. 281.]

[Footnote 104:  Lectures on Shakespeare, ed.  Ashe, p. 386.]

[Footnote 105:  I will not discuss the further question whether, granted that to Shakespeare Othello was a black, he should be represented as a black in our theatres now.  I dare say not.  We do not like the real Shakespeare.  We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds.  And even if we were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes, to imagine is one thing and to see is another.  Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower our imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

As I have mentioned Lamb, I may observe that he differed from Coleridge as to Othello’s colour, but, I am sorry to add, thought Desdemona to stand in need of excuse.  ’This noble lady, with a singularity rather to be wondered at than imitated, had chosen for the object of her affections a Moor, a black....  Neither is Desdemona to be altogether condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected for her lover’ (Tales from Shakespeare).  Others, of course, have gone much further and have treated all the calamities of the tragedy as a sort of judgment on Desdemona’s rashness, wilfulness and undutifulness.  There is no arguing with opinions like this; but I cannot believe that even Lamb is true to Shakespeare in implying that Desdemona is in some degree to be condemned.  What is there in the play to show that Shakespeare regarded her marriage differently from Imogen’s?]

[Footnote 106:  When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her brain,

     Let nobody blame him:  his scorn I approve.

Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature.  In the same way, as Malone pointed out, Othello’s exclamation, ‘Goats and monkeys!’ (IV. i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago’s words at III. iii. 403.]

LECTURE VI

OTHELLO

1