re is a beautifully
furnished room--a dressing-table beside the bed--nice curtains drawn all
round it--snow-white sheets, and a pair of very handsome bed-room
candles. The bed-room is brought too prominently forward; and when
Desdemona is discovered asleep, it needs all the magic of Shakspeare's
name, and the reverence that his genius has created and maintains, even
upon the shilling gallery, to prevent the tragic interest from turning
into another channel. The contrast is too great between the truthfulness
of the bed-curtains and easy-chair, and the horrid purpose--which ought
to be idealized, and not realized--for which the Moor enters the room.
It is a frightful, blackfaced murderer--designed in the seventeenth
century, and considered true to nature then, coming into the open
daylight of the nineteenth, casting his Elizabethan energies into forms
repulsive to the sentiments of our VICTORIAN time; and we should also
feel, if the play were presented to us for the first time, that an
Othello created by Shakspeare--if he had been left for these latter
times--would not have murdered his wife with a pillow--if he had
murdered her at all--and would not have brought forward on the stage the
bed-room of a jealous husband, with his wife expecting his approach. The
barrenness of the stage in Shakspeare's time was an advantage in a scene
like this;--when people were told to fancy that old bench was a bed, and
that the close-shaved stripling reclining on it was a woman--the
imagination was set down to a feast of its own: the scanty scenery
became an accessory--not a realization--all that was palpable was the
innocence and sacrifice of the heroine--and the awful and inexpressible
struggles of the man.

Do you see what I mean? Do you agree with me that it was a misfortune to
the British drama that the summit of its glory was reached by Shakspeare
so long ago;--a Shakspeare that knew the whole secrets of the human
heart, as the human heart existed before his time--or at least as it was
supposed in his time to exist;--a Shakspeare who was ignorant of the
Great Rebellion--of the Restoration--of the Revolution--of the glorious
First of June--of the Guillotine--of Napoleon--of Trafalgar--of
Waterloo;--a Shakspeare who had never seen a telegraph--a mail-coach--a
steam-boat--a railway. What sort of a man must this have been, that
still maintains possession of the stage--that keeps (as I maintain) the
British taste in a state of almost med