Blow’ me about in winds! roast me in sulphur!
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
O Desdemona! Desdemona! dead?”
The strain had been too great to be borne, and he was himself nearly dead. He wore the aspect of one who felt that to live was calamity, and to die the sole happiness left. Collecting himself, he spoke the calm words of appeal that justice might be done to his memory, nothing extenuated nor aught set down in malice. He turned towards the breathless form, once so dear, with a look of tenderness slowly dissolving and freezing into despair. Then, with one stroke of his dagger, he fell dead without a groan or a shudder.
“This did I fear, but thought he had no weapon;
For he was great of heart.”
Some actors have made Othello feared and disliked; others have caused him to be regarded with moral curiosity or poetic interest. As Forrest impersonated him he was first warmly admired, then profoundly pitied. Of the tragedians most celebrated in the past, according to the best descriptions which have been given of their representations, it may be said that the Othello of Quin was a jealous plebeian; the Othello of Kean, in parts a jealous king, in parts a jealous savage; the Othello of Vandenhoff, a jealous general; the Othello of Macready, a jealous theatrical player; the Othello of Brooke, a jealous knight; the Othello of Salvini, a jealous lover transformed into a jealous tiger; but the Othello of Forrest was a jealous man carried truthfully through all the degrees of his passion. One of his predecessors in the rôle had veiled the woes of the man beneath the dignities of his rank and station as a martial commander; another had theatricized the part, with wondrous study and toil, elaborating posture, look, and emphasis, presenting a correctness of drawing which might secure admiring criticism but could never move feeling; yet another, fascinated with the romantic accessories and vicissitudes of the character, made a gorgeous picture of a gorgeous hero in a gorgeous time. Forrest analyzed away from his Othello all adventitious circumstances; took him from the picturesque scenes of Venice, stripped off his official robes, and placed him on the stage in the glories and tortures of his naked humanity, a living mirror to every one of the struggles of a master-passion tearing a great heart asunder, driving a powerful mind into the awful abyss of insanity, making a generous man a coward, an eavesdropper, a murderer, and a suicide.
The explicit contents and teaching of the part as Shakspeare wrote it and as Forrest acted it are the unspeakable privilege and preciousness of a supreme human love crowned with fulfilment, and the fearful nature and results of an ill-grounded jealousy. The deeper implicit meaning and lesson it bears is the animal degradation, the frightful ugliness and danger, the intrinsically immoral and murderous character of the passion of jealousy. This all-important revelation latent in the tragedy of Othello has not been illumined, emphasized, or brought into relief on the stage as yet. It ought to be done. The historical traditions of tyrannical selfishness, almost universally organized in the interests of the world, which make men feel that in sexual love the lover possesses the object of his love as an appanage and personal property, all whose free wishes are merged in his will and whose disloyalty is justly visited with merciless cruelty and even death itself, have blinded most persons to the inherent unworthiness and vulgarity, the inherent ferocity and peril, of the passion of jealousy. It is common among brutes, and belongs to the brutish stage in man. It cannot be imagined in heaven among the cherubim and seraphim. Freedom, the self-possession of each one in equilibrium with all others and in harmony with universal order, belongs to the divine stage of developed humanity. There can be no certainty against madness, crime, and self-immolation so long as an automatic passion in the lower regions of the organism enslaves the royal reason meant to reign by right from God. Happen what may, self-poise and the steady aim at progress towards perfection should be kept. This cannot be when love is degraded to physical pleasure sought as an end, instead of being consecrated to the fruitful purposes for which it was ordained. The only absolute pledge of blessedness and peace between those who love and would hope to love always is an adjustment of conduct based not on mere feeling, whether low or high, but on feeling as itself subdued and disciplined by reason, justice, and truth, first developed in the thinking mind and constituted as it were into the science of the subject, then appropriated by the sentiments and made habitual in the individual character. What details of conduct will result, what innovations on the present social state will be made, when a scientific morality shall have mastered the subject and formulated its principles into practical rules, it is premature to say. But it is certain that the leading of one life in the light and another one in the dark will be forbidden. It is certain that the discords, the diseases, the distresses, the crimes, which are now so profuse in this region of experience will be no longer tolerated. And it is safe to prophesy that such delirious expressions of hate and revenge as have hitherto usually been thought tragic and terrible will come to be thought bombastic and ludicrous:
“O that the slave had forty thousand lives;
One is too poor, too weak for my revenge!