llo_. I do not mean that in _Othello_ the
suppression is marked, or that, as in _Troilus and Cressida_, it strikes
us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to follow simply from
the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly mundane subject. Still
it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to indicate, and it
leaves an impression that in _Othello_ we are not in contact with the
whole of Shakespeare. And it is perhaps significant in this respect that
the hero himself strikes us as having, probably, less of the poet's
personality in him than many characters far inferior both as dramatic
creations and as men.

2

The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt
on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable
to show how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with
this character. Othello's description of himself as

one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme,

is perfectly just. His tragedy lies in this--that his whole nature was
indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to
deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little
reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.

Let me first set aside a mistaken view. I do not mean the ridiculous
notion that Othello was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has
some little plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a noble
barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the
civilisation of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the
savage passions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness
regarding female chastity common among Oriental peoples, and that the
last three Acts depict the outburst of these original feelings through
the thin crust of Venetian culture. It would take too long to discuss
this idea,[94] and it would perhaps be useless to do so, for all
arguments against it must end in an appeal to the reader's understanding
of Shakespeare. If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in
this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied himself with
problems of 'Culturgeschichte'; that he laboured to make his Romans
perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days of
Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral
consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will