. Hence it is that it is so
respected by women. Nothing was more remarkable at Salvini's admirable
performance of Othello than the acquiescence of all his female auditors
in the fate of Desdemona. They were sorry for the poor girl, to be sure;
but they seemed to think that Desdemonas were made to be the victims of
Othellos, and that a man who could love in that fashion and be jealous
in that style of exalted fury was rather to be pitied and admired when
he smothered a woman on a misunderstanding. She should not have teased
him so to take back Cassio; and what could she have expected when she
was so careless about the handkerchief and told such lies about it! It
is somewhat unpleasant to be smothered, to be sure, but all the same
she ought to be content and happy to be the object of such love and the
occasion of such jealousy. They mourned far more over his fate than over
hers. This representation of manly jealousy, so elemental and simple,
and yet so stupendous, is one of Shakespeare's masterpieces. I mean not
merely in its verbal expression, but in its characteristic conception of
the masculine form of the passion. Compare it with the jealousy of any
of his women--of Adriana, of Julia, of Cleopatra, of Imogen, of
Regan--and see how different it is in kind; I will not say in degree;
for Shakespeare has not exhibited woman as highly deformed by this
passion; that he left for inferior dramatists, with whom it is a
favorite subject.

In two of these tragedies we have Shakespeare's most elaborate and, so
to speak, admirable representations of villany: Edmund in "King Lear"
and Iago in "Othello." These vile creations cannot, however, be justly
regarded as the fruit of a lower view of human nature consequent upon a
longer acquaintance with it. They were merely required by the exigencies
of his plots; and being required, he made them as it was in him to do.
For in nothing is his superiority more greatly manifested than in the
fact that monsters of baseness, or even thoroughly base men, figure so
rarely among his _dramatis personae_. They are common with inferior
dramatists and writers of prose fiction, whose ruder hands need them as
convenient motive powers and as vehicles of the expression of a lower
view of human nature. Not so with him. He has weak and erring men--men
who are misled by their passions, ambition, revenge, selfish lust, or
what not; but Iago, Edmund, and the Duke in "Measure for Measure" are
almost all his cha