nted by a woman dressed below the waist in an inverted
gauze saucer, and above the waist in a perverted gauze nothing; but to
see Lear's Fool thus unbedecked is more amazing than Bottom's brutal
translation was to his fellow actors. This Fool is a man of middle age,
one who has watched the world and grown sad over it. His jesting has a
touch of heart-break in it which is prevented from becoming pathetic
only by the cynicism which pertains partly to his personal character and
partly to his office. He and Kent are about of an age--Kent, who when
asked his age, as he comes back disguised to his old master, says, "Not
so young as to love a woman for her singing, nor so old as to dote on
her for anything; I have years on my back forty-eight"--a speech which
contains one of the finest of Shakespeare's minor touches of
worldly-wise character drawing. The German artist Retsch in his fine
outline illustrations of this play has conceived this Fool with fine
appreciation of Shakespeare's meaning. He makes him a mature man, with a
wan face and a sad, eager eye. The misrepresentation of the character
has its origin in Lear's calling the Fool "boy"--a term partly of
endearment and partly of patronage, which has been so used in all
countries and in all times. A similar misunderstanding of a similar word
_fool_, which Lear touchingly applies to Cordelia in the last
scene--"and my poor fool is hanged"--caused the misapprehension until of
late years[G] that Lear's court Fool was hanged--although why Edmund's
creatures should have been at the trouble in the stress of their
disaster to hang a Fool it would puzzle any one to tell.

"Othello" bears throughout the marks of the same maturity of intellect,
and the same mastery of dramatic effect, that appear in "Hamlet" and in
"King Lear"; but from the nature of its subject it is not so profoundly
thoughtful as the others. It is a drama of action, which "Hamlet" is not
in a high degree; and although a grand example of the imaginative
dramatic style, it has the distinction of being the most actable of all
Shakespeare's tragedies. It is difficult to conceive any age or any
country in which "Othello" would not be an impressive and a welcome play
to any intelligent audience. Highly poetical in its treatment, it is
intensely real in its interest; and it must continue so until there is a
radical change in human nature.

In the first of these articles I proposed to analyze and compare the
jealousy of