A man's greatest works differ from his lesser works in degree, not in kind. They may be more perfect, but they express similar ideas. "A man grows, he does not become a different man." In this play of Othello the ideas are those that inspire nearly all the plays, that life seeks to preserve a balance, and that obsessions, which upset the balance, betray life to evil.
These ideas are in the earliest work of all, in Venus and Adonis. In Othello they are expressed with the variety and power of the great period. The obsession chosen for illustration is that of jealous suspicion. It is displayed at work in a mean mind and in a generous mind. The varying quality of its working makes the action of the play.
As in The Merchant of Venice, the chief character is a man of intellect who has been warped out of humanity by the world's injustice. Iago is a man of fine natural intellect who has not been trained in the personal qualities that bring preferment. An educated man is advanced above him, as in life it happens. He broods over the injustice and schemes to be revenged. A groundless suspicion that the Moor has wronged him further, determines him to be revenged upon his employer as well as upon his supplanter. A weak intellect who comes to him for help serves him as a tool. He begins to persuade his employer that the supplanter and the newly-married wife are lovers.
He succeeds in this, through his natural adroitness, the working of chance, and the generosity of Othello, who has too much passion to be anything but blind under passionate influence like love or jealousy. The mean man's want of emotion keeps always the conduct of the vengeance precise and clear. Cassio is disgraced. Roderigo, having been fooled to the top of his bent, is killed. Desdemona is smothered. Othello is ruined.
That working of an invisible judge, which we call Chance, "life's justicer," lays the villainy bare at the instant of its perfection. Emilia, Iago's wife, a common nature, with no more intelligence than a want of illusion, enters a moment too late to stay the slaughter, but too soon for Iago's purpose. She is the one person in the play certain to be loyal to Desdemona. She is the one person in the play who, judging from her feelings, will judge rightly. The finest part of the play is that scene in which her passionate instinct sees through the web woven about Othello by an intellect that has put aside all that is passionate and instinctive.
The influence and importance of the little thing in the great event is marked in this scene as in half-a-dozen other scenes in the greater tragedies. We are all or may at any time become immensely important to the play of the world. Had Emilia come a minute sooner or a minute later the end of the play would have been very different. Desdemona would have lived to repent her marriage at leisure, or she would have gone to her grave branded.
Shakespeare brooded much upon all the tragedies of intellect. In this play, as in Richard III and The Merchant of Venice, he brooded upon the power of a warped intellect to destroy generous life. When he created Iago he wrote in a cooler spirit than when he created the earlier characters. Iago is therefore much more perfectly a living being but much less passionately alive than the soul burnt out at Bosworth, or the soul flouted in the Duke's Court. He is drawn with a sharp and wiry line. Like all sinister men, he tells nothing of himself. We see only his intellect. What he is in himself is as mysterious as life. Life is clear, up to a point, but beyond that point it is always baffling. Shakespeare's task was to look at life clearly. Looking at it clearly he was as baffled by what he saw, as we, who only see by his aid. He found in Iago an image like life itself, a power and an activity, prompted by something secret and silent.
Much ink has been wasted about the "duration of time" in this play. The action of the play is one. It matters not if the time be divided into ten or fifty. In London and the University towns where writing is mostly practised, the play is seldom played. It is almost never played as Shakespeare meant it to be played. Those who write about it write after reading it. This is a reading age. Shakespeare's was an active age. That those who care most for his tragedies should be ignorant of the laws under which he worked is our misfortune and our fault and our disgrace.
The point is not insisted on; but some passages in the play suggest that when Shakespeare began to write it he was minded to make the action the falling of a judgment upon Desdemona for her treachery to her father. The treachery caused the old man's death. The too passionate and hasty things always bring death in these plays. Violent delights have violent ends and bring violent ends to others.
The poetry of Othello is nearly as well known as that of Hamlet. Many quotations from the play have passed into the speech of the people. A play of intrigue does not give the fullest opportunity for great poetry; but supreme things are spoken throughout the action. Othello's cry—