My wife!  My wife!  What wife?  I have no wife. 
     Oh insupportable!  Oh heavy hour!

This happens before he is assured of her innocence; but afterwards his remorse is as dreadful as his revenge has been, and yields only to fixed and death like despair.  His farewell speech, before he kills himself, in which he conveys his reasons to the senate for the murder of his wife, is equal to the first speech in which he gave them an account of his courtship of her, and ’his whole course of love’.  Such an ending was alone worthy of such a commencement.

If anything could add to the force of our sympathy with Othello, or compassion for his fate, it would be the frankness and generosity of his nature, which so little deserve it.  When Iago first begins to practise upon his unsuspecting friendship, he answers: 

             —­Tis not to make me jealous,
     To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
     Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well;
     Where virtue is, these are most virtuous. 
     Nor from my own weak merits will I draw
     The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt,
     For she had eyes and chose me.

This character is beautifully (and with affecting simplicity) confirmed by what Desdemona herself says of him to Aemilia after she has lost the handkerchief, the first pledge of his love to her: 

     Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse
     Full of cruzadoes.  And but my noble Moor
     Is true of mind, and made of no such baseness,
     As jealous creatures are, it were enough
     To put him to ill thinking.

   Aemilia.  Is he not jealous?

   Desdemona.  Who he?  I think the sun where he was
     born drew all such humours from him.

In a short speech of Aemilia’s there occurs one of those side-intimations of the fluctuations of passion which we seldom meet with but in Shakespeare.  After Othello has resolved upon the death of his wife, and bids her dismiss her attendant for the night, she answers: 

     I will, my Lord.

   Aemilia.  How goes it now?  He looks gentler than he did.

Shakespeare has here put into half a line what some authors would have spun out into ten set speeches.

The character of Desdemona herself is inimitable both in itself, and as it contrasts with Othello’s groundless jealousy, and with the foul conspiracy of which she is the innocent victim.  Her beauty and external graces are only indirectly glanced at; we see ’her visage in her mind’; her character everywhere predominates over her person: 

     A maiden never bold: 
     Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion
     Blushed at itself.

There is one fine compliment paid to her by Cassio, who exclaims triumphantly when she comes ashore at Cyprus after the storm: