the
persons rouse little interest and are never in serious danger, a
skilfully-worked intrigue will excite eager attention and suspense. And
where, as in _Othello_, the persons inspire the keenest sympathy and
antipathy, and life and death depend on the intrigue, it becomes the
source of a tension in which pain almost overpowers pleasure. Nowhere
else in Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so
long a time as in the later Acts of _Othello_.

(5) One result of the prominence of the element of intrigue is that
_Othello_ is less unlike a story of private life than any other of the
great tragedies. And this impression is strengthened in further ways. In
the other great tragedies the action is placed in a distant period, so
that its general significance is perceived through a thin veil which
separates the persons from ourselves and our own world. But _Othello_ is
a drama of modern life; when it first appeared it was a drama almost of
contemporary life, for the date of the Turkish attack on Cyprus is 1570.
The characters come close to us, and the application of the drama to
ourselves (if the phrase may be pardoned) is more immediate than it can
be in _Hamlet_ or _Lear_. Besides this, their fortunes affect us as
those of private individuals more than is possible in any of the later
tragedies with the exception of _Timon_. I have not forgotten the
Senate, nor Othello's position, nor his service to the State;[87] but
his deed and his death have not that influence on the interests of a
nation or an empire which serves to idealise, and to remove far from our
own sphere, the stories of Hamlet and Macbeth, of Coriolanus and Antony.
Indeed he is already superseded at Cyprus when his fate is consummated,
and as we leave him no vision rises on us, as in other tragedies, of
peace descending on a distracted land.

(6) The peculiarities so far considered combine with others to produce
those feelings of oppression, of confinement to a comparatively narrow
world, and of dark fatality, which haunt us in reading _Othello_. In
_Macbeth_ the fate which works itself out alike in the external conflict
and in the hero's soul, is obviously hostile to evil; and the
imagination is dilated both by the consciousness of its presence and by
the appearance of supernatural agencies. These, as we have seen, produce
in _Hamlet_ a somewhat similar effect, which is increased by the hero's
acceptance of the accidents as a providential shapi