Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille

by Benedetto Croce

"Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears
Were like a better day."

There are other personages in the play, who affirm the reality of good against the false assertion of it: the pure and faithful Kent, the loyal though unintelligent Gloucester, the brave Edgar, the weak but honest Duke of Albany, the husband of Goneril, who says:

"Where I could not be honest,
I never yet was valiant."

Finally the perfidious Edmund, when he sees himself near death, hastens to accomplish a good action and to pay homage to virtue. But all these belong to the earth: Cordelia is on the earth, earthly herself and mortal, but she is made of celestial substance, of purest humanity, which is therefore divine. It has occurred to me to compare her with the Soul, whom Friar Jacob likened to the only daughter and heiress of the King of France, and whom her father, for that he loved her infinitely, had adorned "with a white stole," and her fame flew "to every land."

No greater spiritual triumph can be conceived than that of Cordelia, throughout the drama, from the first scene to the last, although she first appears as denied and rejected by her father, and later, when she comes with arms to the aid of the unfortunate Lear against the infernal sisters and the treacherous Edmund, is conquered, thrown into prison and there strangled by the hangman. Why? Why does not goodness triumph in the material world? And, why, thus conquered, does she increase in beauty, evoke ever more disconsolate desire, until she is finally adored as something sacred? The tragedy of King Lear is penetrated throughout with this unexpressed yet anguished interrogation, so full of the sense of the misery of life. The king, acquiring new sensibility in his madness, as though a veil had been withdrawn from before his eyes, sees and receives for the first time in himself, suffering humanity, weeping and trembling, like a child, defenceless, ill-treated. The fool, who accompanies him, sings, along with much else, his prophecy to the effect that when calumnies cease, when kings are punished, and usurers and thieves give up their trade, then all the kingdom of Albion will be in great confusion. But the sorrow of sorrows is that of Lear, when, having found Cordelia, he dreams of being ever after at her side, adoring, and sees the prison transformed into a paradise: they will sing, he will kneel before her, they will pray, and tell one another ancient tales. But she is brutally slain before his eyes and her dead body lies in his arms, as he vainly strives to reanimate it, and he too dies, uttering the last cry of desperation:

"Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never!—"

In the tragedy of Othello, evil takes on another face, and here the sentiment that answers to it, is not condemnation mixed with pity, not horror for hypocrisy and cruelty, but astonishment. Iago does not represent evil done through a dream of greatness, or evil for the egoistic satisfaction of his own desires, but evil for evil's sake, done almost as though through an artistic need, in order to realise his own being and feel it strong, dominating and destructive, even in the subordinate social condition in which he is placed. Certainly, Iago, in what he says, wishes it to be believed or makes himself believe that he is aiming only at his "own advantage," as Guicciardini would have said, and that he despises those who have different rule of conduct and manage to live honestly, the honest knaves. But the truth is that he does not obtain any material advantage for himself, and that the path he has selected was not necessary for that object and does not lead to it. Feelings of vengeance for injustices and affronts suffered lead to it still less, though at times he says they do, and wishes it to be believed or tries to believe it himself. What results from his acts is evil as an end in itself, arising from a turbid desire to prove himself superior to the rest of the world, to delude and to make it dance to the tune of his own mind, and in proof of this to bring it to ruin. The fact that he gives various reasons, with the object of justifying and of explaining his acts, demonstrates that he himself failed to understand that peculiar form of evil which possessed his spirit. None of those about him suspect him: not Othello, a simple, impetuous soldier, who understands open strife and plotting, but both in war and between one enemy and another. He is quite unable to conceive this refined and intellectual degradation. Desdemona, too, a young woman newly married, rejoicing in the happiness of realized affection and disposed to find everyone about her good and to make everyone happy, is unsuspicious, as also is Cassio, who trusts Iago, as a brave and loyal comrade, and his wife, the experienced Emilia, who knows him from long habit. The epithets of "good Iago," of "honest Iago" ring through the whole play and are a bitter and ironical comment underlining the illusion that possesses them all. He is weaving, without reason, and as it were for amusement, a horrible web of calumnies, of moral and physical tortures and of death: a good and generous man, rendered blind and mad with jealousy and injured honour, is thus led to murder his innocent and beloved wife. Pity and terror arise together in the soul, as we see Othello poisoned drop by drop, excited, changed Into a wild beast: one feels that in Desdemona the warrior possessed all the sweetness and all the force of life, the happiness on which reposed all the rest, and that in her person he had found all that one can conceive as most noble, most gentle and most pure in the world. When he suspects that she has betrayed him, not only is he pierced with sensual jealousy, (this too there is, certainly), but injured in what he holds sacred, and therefore the death that he deals to Desdemona is not simply vengeance for the shame done him, but above all expiation and purification, as though he wished to purify the world of such impurity, and to cleanse her from a stain, which irremediably defiled her. "O, the pity of all this, Iago! O, Iago, the pity of all this!" He kisses her before he kills her, kissing his own ideal, which he lays at that moment in the sepulchre. But he still trembles with love, and perhaps hopes somehow to get her back and to be united with her forever, by means of that bloody sacrifice. Desdemona is not aware of the fury raging around her, sure as she is of her love and of Othello's. Owing to her very innocence, she affords involuntary incentives to the jealousy of Othello and easy occasion to the artifice of Iago. Her very unconsciousness makes her fate the more moving. Such is the infamy of the crime thus accomplished against her, that the prosaic, shifty wife of Iago becomes sublime with indignation and courage, when she sees her dying, rising to poetic nobility and defying every menace. Transpierced by her husband, she falls at the side of her mistress and dying sings the willow song, which she had caught from the lips of Desdemona. Othello also dies, when the deceit has been revealed to him. The leader whom Venice had held in great honour and in whom she had reposed complete faith, charging him with commands and governments, is now nothing but a wretch deserving punishment. But in slaying himself, he returns in memory to what he was, substituting that image of himself for his present misery, and using the memory of the warrior that he was, to drive the sword deeper into his throat.

On the other hand, the rallying-point or centre of the whole play is not the ruin of the valiant Othello, not the cruel fate of the gentle Desdemona, but the work, of Iago, of that demidevil, of whom one might ask in vain, why, as Othello asked, why he had thus noosed the bodies and souls of those men, who had never nourished any suspicion of him?

"Demand me nothing; what you know, you know
From this time forth I never will speak word."

This was the answer to the poet from that most mysterious form of evil, when he met with it, as he was contemplating the universe: perversity, which is an end and a joy to itself.