Othello, Claudio, and Leontes; but I have abandoned the
design, partly because I find that it would require another article in
itself, and partly because it would necessarily lead me into a
psychological and physiological discussion which would hardly be in
keeping with the purpose with which I am now writing, which is merely to
offer such guidance and such help as I can give to intelligent and
somewhat inexperienced readers of Shakespeare. But I will remark that
Othello's jealousy is man's jealousy (so called) raised to the most
intense power by the race and the social position of the person who is
its subject. The feeling in man and that in woman, called jealousy, are
quite different in origin and in nature, although they have the same
name. In woman the feeling arises from a supposed slight of her person,
the _spretae injuria formae_ of Virgil, to which he attributes Juno's
enmity to Troy; and however it may be sentimentally developed, it has
this for its spring and its foundation. But a man, unless he is the
weakest of all coxcombs, and unworthy to wear his beard, does not
trouble himself because a woman admires another man's person more than
his own. His feeling has its origin in the motherhood of woman, a
recognition of which is latent in all social arrangements touching the
sex, and in all man's feeling toward her. Man's jealousy is a mingled
feeling of resentment of personal disloyalty, and of grief at unchastity
on the part of the woman that he loves. Man is jealous much in the same
sense in which it is said, "The Lord thy God is a jealous God"; which
saying, indeed, is a consequence of the anthropomorphic conception of
the Deity, notwithstanding the exclusion from it of the idea of sex. But
it is impossible to conceive of such a feeling as feminine jealousy
being referred to in the passage in the second commandment. The
"jealousy" of Othello and Leontes, and of Claudio, will be found on
examination to be at bottom the same. In Claudio it is correct,
gentlemanly, princely, and somewhat weak; in Leontes it is morbid,
unreasonable, hard, and cruel; in Othello it is perfectly pure in its
quality, and has in it quite as much of tenderness and grief as of wrath
and indignation; and it rages with all the fierceness of his half-savage
nature. The passion in him becomes heroic, colossal; but it is perfect
in its nature and in its proportions, and from the point to which he has
been brought by Iago, perfectly justifiable