from Satan down to Mephistopheles could be
matched for danger and for dread against the good bluff soldierly
trustworthy figure of honest Iago? The rough license of his tongue at
once takes warrant from his good soldiership and again gives warrant for
his honesty: so that in a double sense it does him yeoman's service, and
that twice told. 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. As it is, when Coleridge asks "which do we pity the most" at
the fall of the curtain, we can surely answer, Othello. Noble as are the
"most blessed conditions" of "the gentle Desdemona," he is yet the nobler
of the two; and has suffered more in one single pang than she could
suffer in life or in death.

But if _Othello_ be the most pathetic, _King Lear_ the most terrible,
_Hamlet_ the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest in
abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is _Macbeth_. There needs no
ghost come from the grave, any reader may too probably remark, to tell us
this. But in the present generation such novelties have been unearthed
regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem to
have upon it some glittering reflection from the brazen brightn