s. He broods over the injustice and
schemes to be revenged. A groundless suspicion that the Moor has wronged
him further, determines him to be revenged upon his employer as well as
upon his supplanter. A weak intellect who comes to him for help serves
him as a tool. He begins to persuade his employer that the supplanter
and the newly-married wife are lovers.

He succeeds in this, through his natural adroitness, the working of
chance, and the generosity of Othello, who has too much passion to be
anything but blind under passionate influence like love or jealousy. The
mean man's want of emotion keeps always the conduct of the vengeance
precise and clear. Cassio is disgraced. Roderigo, having been fooled to
the top of his bent, is killed. Desdemona is smothered. Othello is
ruined.

That working of an invisible judge, which we call Chance, "life's
justicer," lays the villainy bare at the instant of its perfection.
Emilia, Iago's wife, a common nature, with no more intelligence than a
want of illusion, enters a moment too late to stay the slaughter, but
too soon for Iago's purpose. She is the one person in the play certain
to be loyal to Desdemona. She is the one person in the play who, judging
from her feelings, will judge rightly. The finest part of the play is
that scene in which her passionate instinct sees through the web woven
about Othello by an intellect that has put aside all that is passionate
and instinctive.

The influence and importance of the little thing in the great event is
marked in this scene as in half-a-dozen other scenes in the greater
tragedies. We are all or may at any time become immensely important to
the play of the world. Had Emilia come a minute sooner or a minute
later the end of the play would have been very different. Desdemona
would have lived to repent her marriage at leisure, or she would have
gone to her grave branded.

Shakespeare brooded much upon all the tragedies of intellect. In this
play, as in _Richard III_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, he brooded upon
the power of a warped intellect to destroy generous life. When he
created Iago he wrote in a cooler spirit than when he created the
earlier characters. Iago is therefore much more perfectly a living being
but much less passionately alive than the soul burnt out at Bosworth, or
the soul flouted in the Duke's Court. He is drawn with a sharp and wiry
line. Like all sinister men, he tells nothing of himself. We see only
his intellect