Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the character of Iago.  Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly conceived, is a far greater figure and a less repellent.  His physical deformity, separating him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for his egoism.  In spite of his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a mere individual:  he is the representative of his family, the Fury of the House of York.  Nor is he so negative as Iago:  he has strong passions, he has admirations, and his conscience disturbs him.  There is the glory of power about him.  Though an excellent actor, he prefers force to fraud, and in his world there is no general illusion as to his true nature.  Again, to compare Iago with the Satan of Paradise Lost seems almost absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare’s man exceed Milton’s Fiend in evil.  That mighty Spirit, whose

                   form had yet not lost
     All her original brightness, nor appeared
     Less than archangel ruined and the excess
     Of glory obscured;

who knew loyalty to comrades and pity for victims; who

felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined
His loss;

who could still weep—­how much further distant is he than Iago from spiritual death, even when, in procuring the fall of Man, he completes his own fall!  It is only in Goethe’s Mephistopheles that a fit companion for Iago can be found.  Here there is something of the same deadly coldness, the same gaiety in destruction.  But then Mephistopheles, like so many scores of literary villains, has Iago for his father.  And Mephistopheles, besides, is not, in the strict sense, a character.  He is half person, half symbol.  A metaphysical idea speaks through him.  He is earthy, but could never live upon the earth.

Of Shakespeare’s characters Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra (I name them in the order of their births) are probably the most wonderful.  Of these, again, Hamlet and Iago, whose births come nearest together, are perhaps the most subtle.  And if Iago had been a person as attractive as Hamlet, as many thousands of pages might have been written about him, containing as much criticism good and bad.  As it is, the majority of interpretations of his character are inadequate not only to Shakespeare’s conception, but, I believe, to the impressions of most readers of taste who are unbewildered by analysis.  These false interpretations, if we set aside the usual lunacies,[107] fall into two groups.  The first contains views which reduce Shakespeare to commonplace.  In different ways and degrees they convert his Iago into an ordinary villain.  Their Iago is simply a man who has been slighted and revenges himself; or a husband who believes he has been wronged, and will make his enemy suffer a jealousy worse than his own; or an ambitious man determined to ruin his successful rival—­one of these, or a combination of these, endowed with