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FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 85: One instance is worth pointing out, because the passage in
Othello has, oddly enough, given trouble. Desdemona says of the maid
Barbara: 'She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake
her.' Theobald changed 'mad' to 'bad.' Warburton read 'and he she loved
forsook her, And she proved mad'! Johnson said 'mad' meant only 'wild,
frantic, uncertain.' But what Desdemona says of Barbara is just what
Ophelia might have said of herself.]
[Footnote 86: The whole force of the passages referred to can be felt
only by a reader. The Othello of our stage can never be Shakespeare's
Othello, any more than the Cleopatra of our stage can be his Cleopatra.]
[Footnote 87: See p. 9.]
[Footnote 88: Even here, however, there is a great difference; for
although the idea of such a power is not suggested by King Lear as it
is by Hamlet and Macbeth, it is repeatedly expressed by persons
in
the drama. Of such references there are very few in Othello. But for
somewhat frequent allusions to hell and the devil the view of the
characters is almost strictly secular. Desdemona's sweetness and
forgivingness are not based on religion, and her only way of accounting
for her undeserved suffering is by an appeal to Fortune: 'It is my
wretched fortune' (IV. ii. 128). In like manner Othello can only appeal
to Fate (V. ii. 264):
but, oh vain boast!
Who can control his fate?]
[Footnote 89: Ulrici has good remarks, though he exaggerates, on this
point and the element of intrigue.]
[Footnote 90: And neither she nor Othello observes what handkerchief it
is. Else she would have remembered how she came to lose it, and would
have told Othello; and Othello, too, would at once have detected Iago's
lie (III. iii. 438) that he had seen Cassio wipe his beard with the
handkerchief 'to-day.' For in fact the handkerchief had been lost not
an hour before Iago told that lie (line 288 of the same scene), and
it was at that moment in his pocket. He lied therefore most rashly, but
with his usual luck.]
[Footnote 91: For those who know the end of the story there is a
terrible irony in the enthusiasm with which Cassio greets the arrival of
Desdemona in Cyprus. Her ship (which is also Iago's) sets out from
Venice a week later than the others, but reaches Cyprus on the same day
with them:
Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,
The gutter'd rocks and congregated sands--
Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel--
As having sense of beauty, do omit
Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
The divine Desdemona.
So swiftly does Fate conduct her to her doom.]
[Footnote 92: The dead bodies are not carried out at the end, as they
must have been if the bed had been on the main stage (for this had no
front curtain). The curtains within which the bed stood were drawn
together at the words, 'Let it be hid' (V. ii. 365).]
[Footnote 93: Against which may be set the scene of the blinding of
Gloster in King Lear.]
[Footnote 94: The reader who is tempted by it should, however, first ask
himself whether Othello does act like a barbarian, or like a man who,
though wrought almost to madness, does 'all in honour.']
[Footnote 95: For the actor, then, to represent him as violently angry
when he cashiers Cassio is an utter mistake.]
[Footnote 96: I cannot deal fully with this point in the lecture. See
Note L.]
[Footnote 97: It is important to observe that, in his attempt to arrive
at the facts about Cassio's drunken misdemeanour, Othello had just had
an example of Iago's unwillingness to tell the whole truth where it must
injure a friend. No wonder he feels in the Temptation-scene that 'this
honest creature doubtless Sees and knows more, much more, than he
unfolds.']
[Footnote 98: To represent that Venetian women do not regard adultery so
seriously as Othello does, and again that Othello would be wise to
accept the situation like an Italian husband, is one of Iago's most
artful and most maddening devices.]
[Footnote 99: If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently
excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss
he was to interpret those bodily expressions of passion which in a
fellow-countryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner
with somewhat less certainty. The effect of difference in blood in
increasing Othello's bewilderment regarding his wife is not sufficiently
realised. The same effect has to be remembered in regard to Desdemona's
mistakes in dealing with Othello in his anger.]
[Footnote 100: See Note M.]
[Footnote 101: Cf. Winter's Tale, I. ii. 137 ff.:
Can thy dam?--may't be?--
Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicatest with dreams;--how can this be?
With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
Thou may'st cojoin with something; and thou dost,
And that beyond commission, and I find it,
And that to the infection of my brains
And hardening of my brows.]
[Footnote 102: See Note O.]
[Footnote 103: New Illustrations, ii. 281.]
[Footnote 104: Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Ashe, p. 386.]
[Footnote 105: I will not discuss the further question whether, granted
that to Shakespeare Othello was a black, he should be represented as a
black in our theatres now. I dare say not. We do not like the real
Shakespeare. We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions
flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds. And even if we
were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes, to imagine is
one thing and to see is another. Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black
with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes
as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower
our imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As I have mentioned Lamb, I may observe that he differed from Coleridge
as to Othello's colour, but, I am sorry to add, thought Desdemona to
stand in need of excuse. 'This noble lady, with a singularity rather to
be wondered at than imitated, had chosen for the object of her
affections a Moor, a black.... Neither is Desdemona to be altogether
condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected for her
lover' (Tales from Shakespeare). Others, of course, have gone much
further and have treated all the calamities of the tragedy as a sort of
judgment on Desdemona's rashness, wilfulness and undutifulness. There is
no arguing with opinions like this; but I cannot believe that even Lamb
is true to Shakespeare in implying that Desdemona is in some degree to
be condemned. What is there in the play to show that Shakespeare
regarded her marriage differently from Imogen's?]
[Footnote 106: When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of
the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her
brain,
Let nobody blame him: his scorn I approve.
Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among
poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same
way, as Malone pointed out, Othello's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!'
-
i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words at III. iii.
403.]
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