away from her for a week (III. iv. 173).  Cassio and the rest have therefore been more than a week in Cyprus, and, we should naturally infer, considerably more. (b) The ground on which Iago builds throughout is the probability of Desdemona’s having got tired of the Moor; she is accused of having repeatedly committed adultery with Cassio (e.g. V. ii. 210); these facts and a great many others, such as Othello’s language in III. iii. 338 ff., are utterly absurd on the supposition that he murders his wife within a day or two of the night when he consummated his marriage. (c) Iago’s account of Cassio’s dream implies (and indeed states) that he had been sleeping with Cassio ‘lately,’ i.e. after arriving at Cyprus:  yet, according to A, he had only spent one night in Cyprus, and we are expressly told that Cassio never went to bed on that night.  Iago doubtless was a liar, but Othello was not an absolute idiot.

* * * * *

Thus (1) one set of time-indications clearly shows that Othello murdered his wife within a few days, probably a day and a half, of his arrival in Cyprus and the consummation of his marriage; (2) another set of time-indications implies quite as clearly that some little time must have elapsed, probably a few weeks; and this last is certainly the impression of a reader who has not closely examined the play.

It is impossible to escape this result.  The suggestion that the imputed intrigue of Cassio and Desdemona took place at Venice before the marriage, not at Cyprus after it, is quite futile.  There is no positive evidence whatever for it; if the reader will merely refer to the difficulties mentioned under B above, he will see that it leaves almost all of them absolutely untouched; and Iago’s accusation is uniformly one of adultery.

How then is this extraordinary contradiction to be explained?  It can hardly be one of the casual inconsistencies, due to forgetfulness, which are found in Shakespeare’s other tragedies; for the scheme of time indicated under A seems deliberate and self-consistent, and the scheme indicated under B seems, if less deliberate, equally self-consistent.  This does not look as if a single scheme had been so vaguely imagined that inconsistencies arose in working it out; it points to some other source of contradiction.

‘Christopher North,’ who dealt very fully with the question, elaborated a doctrine of Double Time, Short and Long.  To do justice to this theory in a few words is impossible, but its essence is the notion that Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, wanted to produce on the spectator (for he did not aim at readers) two impressions.  He wanted the spectator to feel a passionate and vehement haste in the action; but he also wanted him to feel that the action was fairly probable.  Consciously or unconsciously he used Short Time (the scheme of A) for the first purpose, and Long Time (the scheme of B) for the second.  The spectator is affected in the required manner by both, though without distinctly noticing the indications of the two schemes.