As crimes thicken round him, and he still despairs of the reward for which he sold himself, conscience awakes:
I have lived
Riotously ill, like some that live in court,
And sometimes when my face was full of smiles Have felt the
maze of conscience in my breast.
The scholar's scepticism, which lies at the root of his perversity, finds utterance in this meditation upon death:
Whither shall I go now? O Lucian, thy ridiculous purgatory! to find Alexander the Great cobbling shoes, Pompey tagging points, and Julius Cæsar making hair-buttons!
Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, or all the elements by scruples, I know not, nor greatly care.
At the last moment he yet can say:
We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune's slaves,
Nay, cease to die, by dying.
And again, with the very yielding of his spirit:
My life was a black charnel.
It will be seen that in no sense does Flamineo resemble Iago. He is not a traitor working by craft and calculating ability to well-considered ends. He is the desperado frantically clutching at an uncertain and impossible satisfaction. Webster conceives him as a self-abandoned atheist, who, maddened by poverty and tainted by vicious living, takes a fury to his heart, and, because the goodness of the world has been for ever lost to him, recklessly seeks the bad.