SHAKSPEARE PAPERS.-No. VIII. IAGO. I HAVE been accused by some who have taken the trouble of reading these papers, that I am fond of paradoxes, and write not to comment upon Shakspeare, but to display logical dexterity in maintaining the untenable side of every question. To maintain that Falstaff was in heart melancholy and Jaques gay, to contrast the fortunes of Romeo and Bottom, or to plead the cause of Lady Macbeth, is certainly not in accordance with the ordinary course of criticism; but I have given my reasons, sound or unsound as they may be, for my opinions, which I have said with old Montaigne, I do not pretend to be good, but to be mine. What appears to me to be the distinguishing feature of Shakspeare is, that his characters are real men and women, not mere abstractions. In the best of us all there are many blots, in the worst there are many traces of goodness. There is no such thing as angels or devils in the world. We have passions and feelings, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, pretty equally distributed among us; and that which actuates the highest and the lowest, the most virtuous and the most profligate, the bravest and meanest, must, in its original elements, be the same. People do not commit wicked actions from the mere love of wickedness; there must always be an incentive of precisely the same kind as that which stimulates to the noblest actions--ambition, love of adventure, passion, necessity. All our virtues closely border upon vices, and are not unfrequently blended. The robber may be generous-the miser, just-the cruel man, conscientious-the rake, honourable the fop, brave. In various relations of life, the same man may play many characters as distinct from one another as day from night. I venture to say that the creatures of Boz's fancy, Fagin or Sikes, did not appear in every circle as the unmitigated scoundrels we see them in Oliver Twist. It is, I necessary to the exigencies of the tale, that no other part of their characters should be exhibited; but, after all, the Jew only carries the commercial, and the housebreaker the military principle, to an extent which society cannot tolerate. In element, the feeling is the same that covers the ocean with the merchant-flags of England, and sends forth the hapless boys to the trade of picking pockets-that inspires the highwayman to stop a traveller on Hounslow, and spirits the soldier to face a cannon at Waterloo. Robber, soldier, thief, merchant, are all equally men. It is necessary for a critical investigation of character, not to be content with taking things merely as they seem. We must endeavour to strip off the covering with which habit or necessity has enveloped the human mind, and to inquire after motives as well as look at actions. It would not be an unamusing task to analyze the career of two persons starting under similar circumstances, and placed in situations not in essence materially different, one ending at the debtors' suppose, door of Newgate amid hootings and execrations, and the other borne to his final resting-place in Westminster Abbey, graced by all the pomps that heraldry can bestow. As Shakspeare therefore draws men, and not one-side sketches of character, it is always possible to treat his personages as if they were actually existing people; and there is always some redeeming point. The bloody Macbeth is kind and gentle to his wife; the gore-stained Richard, gallant and daring; Shylock is an affectionate father, and a good-natured master; Claudius, in Hamlet, is fond of his foully-won queen, and exhibits, at least, remorse for his deed in heart-rending soliloquies; Angelo is upright in public life, though yielding to sore temptation in private; Colton is brutal and insult. ing, but brave; the ladies are either wholly without blemishes, or have merits to redeem them in some plays, as Julius Cæsar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and several others, no decidedly vicious character is introduced at all. The personages introduced are exposed to the frailties of our nature, but escape from its grosser crimes and vices. But Iago! Ay! there's the rub. Well may poor Othello look down to his feet, and not seeing them different from those of others, feel convinced that it is a fable which attributes a cloven hoof to the devil. His next test, "If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee"* affords a proof that Iago is not actually a fiend, for he wounds him; but still he cannot think him anything less than a "demi-devil," being bled, not killed. Nor is it wonderful that the parting instruction of Lodovico to Cassio, should be to enforce the most cun. ning cruelty of torture on the hellish villain, or that all the party should vie with each other in heaping upon him words of contumely and execration. He richly deserved them. He had ensnared the soul and body of Othello to do the most damnable actions; he had been the cause of the cruel murder of Desdemona; he had killed his own wife, had plotted the assassination of Cassio, had betrayed and murdered Roderigo. His determination to keep silence when questioned, was at least judicious: "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know; for with his utmost ingenuity he could hardly find anything to say for himself. Is there nothing, then, to be said for him by anybody else? No more than this. He is the sole exemplar of studied personal revenge in the plays. The philosophical mind of Hamlet ponders too deeply, and sees both sides of the question too clearly, to be able to carry any plan of vengeance into execution. Romeo's revenge on Tybalt for the death of Mercutio is a sudden gust of ungovernable rage. The vengeances in the historical plays are those of war or statecraft. In Shylock, the passion is hardly personal against his intended victim. A swaggering Christian is at the After this line he wounds Iago. Then follows: Lod. Wrench his sword from him. Iago. I bleed, sir, but not killed. This is strange language. Should it not be "I, [i. e. Ay, as usual in Shakspeare, bled, sir, but not killed?" mercy of a despised and insulted Jew. The hatred is national and sectarian. Had Bassanio or Gratiano, or any other of their creed, been in his power, he would have been equally relentless. He is only retorting the wrongs and insults of his tribe, in demanding full satisfaction, and imitating the hated Christians in their own practices. "And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will A Christian, what is his humility? Revenge! [And] if a Christian wrong a Jew, what should Why, [sir,] revenge! The villany you teach me I'll execute, and it shall go hard, but I'll better the instruction." * It is, on the whole, a passion remarkably seldom exhibited in Shakspeare in any form. Iago, as I have said, is its only example, as directed against an individual. Iago had been affronted in the tenderest point. He felt that he had strong claims on the office of lieutenant to Othello, who had witnessed his soldierly abilities. "At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds, Christian and heathen." The greatest exertion was made to procure it for him, and yet he is refused. What is still worse, the grounds of the refusal are military: Othello evades the request of the bowing magnificoes "with a bombast circumstance, Horribly stuffed with epithets of war." He assigns to the civilians reasons for passing over Iago, drawn from his own trade, of which they, of course, could not pretend to be adequate judges. And worst of all, when this practised military man, is, for military reasons, set aside, who is appointed? Some man of greater renown and skill in arms? That might be borne; but it is no such thing. The choice of Othello lights upon "Forsooth, a great arithmetician, One Michael Cassio, a Florentine, * Printed as prose in the editions. The insertion of and before if, where it may serve as the ordinary copulative-or as the common form, an if, perpetually recurring, as in Romeo, "an if a man did need a poison now;" [on which form I may remark, in passing, Horne Tooke talks ignorantly enough, in his Diversions of Purley,]—and of a monosyllable between why and revenge, makes the whole passage metrical. I am inclined to think that revenge should be repeated in the concluding lines. "If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? REVENGE!" If, on the contrary, a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be? As an editor I might scruple to exhibit the text thus. I should recommend it to an actor in place of the prosaic and unmetrical-Why, revenge. + This is one of the most puzzling lines in Shakspeare. All the explanations are forced. Cassio had no wife, and his treatment of Bianca, who stands in place Nor the division of a battle knows, More than a spinster; unless the bookish theoric, As masterly as he; mere prattle, without practice, It is an insult hard to be borne, as many an H. P. will be ready to testify. We will find in many professional periodical works the com. plaint reiterated, that "There's no remedy, 'tis the curse of service: Preferment goes by letter and affection, Not by old gradation, where each second Stood heir to the first :" and many a curse, loud and deep, is inflicted, on that account, upon the Horse Guards and Admiralty, who fortunately have no indi vidual responsibilities on which the disappointed ancients can fasten. -I am sure that no British soldier or sailor would carry his anger farther than a passing growl, but the example of Bellingham shows, that even in our assassin-hating nation, a feeling of injustice done of one, is contemptuous; nor does he let her stand in the way of his duty. She tenderly reproaches him for his long absence, and he hastily sends her home, harshly saying, "I do attend here on the general, And think it no addition, nor my wish To have him see me woman'd." Tyrwhitt reads, damned in a fair life; interpreting it as an allusion to the judg ment denounced in the Gospel against those of whom all men speak well, which is very far-fetched indeed. If life were the reading, it might signify that Cassio was damned for the rough life of a soldier by the fair, i. e., the easy life he had hitherto led. Johnson gives it up, as a passage "which, for the present, must be resigned to corruption and obscurity." A writer in one of the early volumes of Blackwood's Magazine, proposed somewhat ingeniously "A great arithmetician, A fellow almost damned: in a fair wise, But this is not satisfactory. Why is Cassio a fellow almost damned? Like Dr. Johnson, I have nothing that I can, with any approach to confidence, propose," but 1 think that the word "damned" is a corruption of some word which signi fied delicate, soft, dainty, or something of the kind, and that for "in" we should read "as." "A fellow almost as soft and delicate as a fair wife," as dainty as a woman. I am not fortunate to supply it, but I have somewhat thought it was 66 Such a fellow as the "neat and trimly dressed" courtier, "perfumed as a milliner," who excited the impatience of Hotspur. As a fair wife, corresponds to more than a spinster, in the conclusion of the sentence. I throw out my hint for the leading or misleading of future editors. I cannot help remarking that Colonel Mitchell, in his noble life of Wallenstein, seems to have no better opinion of the "arithmeticians" of Shakspeare's day than Iago. George Basta, the celebrated tactician, was contemporary with Shakspeare. Wallenstein served under him, and Colonel Mitchell makes somewhat the same complaint of the want of preferment of his hero as the disappointed ancient. "As to George Basta," he says, "if we may judge of him by his system of tactics, which was then exactly what Saldera's is now, and which, when the object of such a system is considered, must be looked upon as second only, in feebleness and insufficiency, to the one followed in our own time, he was not a likely person to ap. preciate talent, or to encourage and call forth genius." Nor, indeed, is the Colonel very complimentary to the army to which Iago belongs. He calls them "the worthless mercenaries of Venice, troops constantly kept in a state of mutiny and insufficiency, by the ignorant fears of their despicable government.” by a superior, will drive a man to satiate his vengeance even upon those who have not done him wrong. In the country of Iago, whether from his name we conclude it to be Spain, or from his service, Italy, none of the scruples, or rather principles, which actuate or restrain English gentlemen, existed. Least of all were they to be found in the motley armies of adventurers gathered from all quarters, the outcasts and Iago could not be expected to be very scrupulous as to his method of compassing his revenge. But how effect it? He is obliged to admit that Othello's standing in the state is too important to render it possible that public injury could be done to him. He is well aware that "the state * Cannot with safety cast him; he's embarked To lead their business." In his unhoused condition no point of vantage presented itself whence harm could be wrought. Just then, when Iago's heart was filled with rage, and his head busily but vainly occupied in devising means for avenging himself on the man by whom that rage was excited, just then Até, the Goddess of Mischief, supplies him with all that deepest malignity could desire, by the hasty, ill-mated, and unlooked-for marriage of Othello. It was a devil-send that the most sanguine spirit could not have anticipated, and lago clutched it accordingly with passionate eagerness. He was tempted, and he fell. When he first conceived his hatred against Othello, he had no notion that it would be pushed to such dire extremity. Revenge is generally accompanied by vanity, indeed there must be always a spice of vanity in a revengeful disposition. He who so keenly feels and deeply resents personal injury or affront, must set no small value upon himself. The proud are seldom revengeful-the great, never. We accordingly find that Iago engages in his hostilities against Othello, more to show his talents than for any other purpose. He proudly lauds his own powers of dissimulation, which are to be now displayed with so much ability. "When my outward action doth demonstrate In compliment extern, 'tis not long after He fancies himself superior to all around in art and knowledge of the world. Roderigo is a mere gull : Schiller. The Piccolomini, Act iv. sc. 5. + Can these last words be intended as a somewhat profane allusion to the title by which the Almighty reveals himself to Moses? Exod. iii. 14. I AM THAT I AM is the name of the God of truth. I am not what I am is therefore a fitting description of a premeditated liar. |