also think this interpretation of _Othello_ probable. To me it appears
hopelessly un-Shakespearean. I could as easily believe that Chaucer
meant the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of
Somersetshire. I do not mean that Othello's race is a matter of no
account. It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play.
It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the
action and catastrophe. But in regard to the essentials of his character
it is not important; and if anyone had told Shakespeare that no
Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on
the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.

Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure
among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of
war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong
to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence--almost as if
from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men
of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous
peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in
the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in
which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in
chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn
in Aleppo.

And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He
has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet;
but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet.
Indeed, if one recalls Othello's most famous speeches--those that begin,
'Her father loved me,' 'O now for ever,' 'Never, Iago,' 'Had it pleased
Heaven,' 'It is the cause,' 'Behold, I have a weapon,' 'Soft you, a word
or two before you go'--and if one places side by side with these
speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that
Othello is the greatest poet of them all. There is the same poetry in
his casual phrases--like 'These nine moons wasted,' 'Keep up your bright
swords, for the dew will rust them,' 'You chaste stars,' 'It is a sword
of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' 'It is the very error of the
moon'--and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever
since have been taken as the absolute expression, like

If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy; for, I