It is pitifully ludicrous to see him staged to the show
like a member--and a very inefficient member--of the secret police. But
it would seem impossible for actors to understand that he is not a would-
be detective, an aspirant for the honours of a Vidocq, a candidate for
the laurels of a Vautrin: that he is no less than Lepidus, or than
Antony's horse, "a tried and valiant soldier." It is perhaps natural
that the two deepest and subtlest of all Shakespeare's intellectual
studies in good and evil should be the two most painfully misused and
misunderstood alike by his commentators and his fellows of the stage: it
is certainly undeniable that no third figure of his creation has ever
been on both sides as persistently misconceived and misrepresented with
such desperate pertinacity as Hamlet and Iago.
And it is only when Iago is justly appreciated that we can justly
appreciate either Othello or Desdemona. This again should surely be no
more than the truism that it sounds; but practically it would seem to be
no less than an adventurous and audacious paradox. Remove or deform or
diminish or modify the dominant features of the destroyer, and we have
but the eternal and vulgar figures of jealousy and innocence, newly
vamped and veneered and padded and patched up for the stalest purposes of
puppetry.
Pages:
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188