How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am bless'd for plaguing them;
I have as much coin as will buy the town.
But tell me now, how hast thou spent thy time?"

And the servant answers in sympathetic lines:

"Faith, master, in setting Christian villages on fire,
Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley slaves.
One time I was an ostler in an inn,
And in the night-time secretly would I steal
To travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats;
Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel'd,
I strewed powder on the marble stones,
And therewithal their knees would rankle so
That I have laughed a-good to see the cripples
Go limping home to Christendom on stilts."

Undoubtedly, the "groundlings" shouted with delight when this fiend was
plunged into the boiling caldron which he had heated for others. Barabas
dies, "in the midst of his crimes, with blasphemy and cursing on his
lips; everything is the same at the end as it was from the beginning."

To the unlearned reader, there is no "relation" between this wild drama
and the perfect art shown in Shakspere's Jew, who utters no curse when
the gentle Portia pronounces sentence, but retires with dignity from her
court, because "he is not well."

Professor Thorndike tells us that the "traces" of blood revenge in
"Hamlet" and "Lear" have been frequently "remarked." What those traces
are we are not informed, but he assures us that "they have not led to
any careful investigation of Shakspere's indebtedness to his
contemporaries." That investigation was reserved for his research, and
we hope to show how successfully he has performed his great task.
Meanwhile, we may be allowed to say that if "Lear" contains any "trace"
of the tragedy of blood, it is utterly undiscoverable to the ordinary
reader, in the action, character or fate of the victims; and as for
"Hamlet," so far is he from any idea of blood revenge, that he doubts
and disobeys the message from the other world, doubts indeed the
existence of any other world, and dies at last not a bloody death, but
by a foil "unbated and envenomed."

If Iago is but the development of the conventional stage villain, his
origin and some of the missing links of his evolution ought to be shown;
they have never been guessed, and no critic can produce a single member
of his kindred.

From such premises, Professor Thorndike concludes that "it is only
na