And yet, if ever man after Lear might lift up his voice in that protest,
it would assuredly be none other than Othello. He is in all the
prosperous days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and wholly
nobler than the self-centred and wayward king, that the capture of his
soul and body in the unimaginable snare of Iago seems a yet blinder and
more unrighteous blow
Struck by the envious wrath of man or God
than ever fell on the old white head of that child-changed father. But
at least he is destroyed by the stroke of a mightier hand than theirs who
struck down Lear. As surely as Othello is the noblest man of man's
making, Iago is the most perfect evildoer, the most potent demi-devil. It
is of course the merest commonplace to say as much, and would be no less
a waste of speech to add the half comfortable reflection that it is in
any case no shame to fall by such a hand. But this subtlest and
strangest work of Shakespeare's admits and requires some closer than
common scrutiny. Coleridge has admirably described the first great
soliloquy which opens to us the pit of hell within as "the motive-hunting
of a motiveless malignity.
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