It is only, I think, in this most tragic of tragedies that the sovereign
lord and incarnate god of pity and terror can be said to have struck with
all his strength a chord of which the resonance could excite such angry
agony and heartbreak of wrath as that of the brother kings when they
smote their staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguish of
agonised and rebellious compassion, at the oracular cry of Calchas for
the innocent blood of Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemona seems as
much less morally intolerable as it is more logically inevitable than the
doom of Cordelia. But doubtless the fatalism of _Othello_ is as much
darker and harder than that of any third among the plays of Shakespeare,
as it is less dark and hard than the fatalism of _King Lear_. For upon
the head of the very noblest man whom even omnipotence or Shakespeare
could ever call to life he has laid a burden in one sense yet heavier
than the burden of Lear, insomuch as the sufferer can with somewhat less
confidence of universal appeal proclaim himself a man more sinned against
than sinning.
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