correctness of Iago's belief. If this belief be well-founded it
must greatly modify his character as a purely wanton and mischievous
criminal, a supreme villain, and lower correspondingly the character
of Othello as an honourable and high-minded man. If it be a morbid
suspicion, having no ground in fact, a mental obsession, then Iago
becomes abnormal and consequently more or less irresponsible. But this
suggestion of Emilia's faithlessness made in the early part of the play
is never followed up by the dramatist, and the spectator is left in
complete uncertainty as to whether there be any truth or not in
Iago's suspicion. If Othello has played his Ancient false, that is an
extenuating circumstance in the otherwise extraordinary guilt of Iago,
and would no doubt be accorded to him as such, were he on trial before a
French jury.

The most successful, and therefore perhaps the greatest, criminal in
Shakespeare is King Claudius of Denmark. His murder of his brother by
pouring a deadly poison into his ear while sleeping, is so skilfully
perpetrated as to leave no suspicion of foul play. But for a
supernatural intervention, a contingency against which no murderer could
be expected to have provided, the crime of Claudius would never have
been discovered. Smiling, jovial, genial as M. Derues or Dr. Palmer,
King Claudius might have gone down to his grave in peace as the bluff
hearty man of action, while his introspective nephew would in all
probability have ended his days in the cloister, regarded with amiable
contempt by his bustling fellowmen. How Claudius got over the great
difficulty of all poisoners, that of procuring the necessary poison
without detection, we are not told; by what means he distilled the
"juice of cursed hebenon"; how the strange appearance of the late
King's body, which "an instant tetter" had barked about with "vile and
loathsome crust," was explained to the multitude we are left to imagine.
There is no real evidence to show that Queen Gertrude was her lover's
accomplice in her husband's murder. If that had been so, she would
no doubt have been of considerable assistance to Claudius in the
preparation of the crime. But in the absence of more definite proof
we must assume Claudius' murder of his brother to have been a solitary
achievement, skilfully carried out by one whose genial good-fellowship
and convivial habits gave the lie to any suggestion of criminality.
Whatever may have been his inward feelings