The beauties of this play impress themselves so strongly upon the attention of the reader, that they can draw no aid from critical illustration. . . The gradual progress which Iago makes in the Moor’s conviction, and the circumstances which he employs to inflame him, are so artfully natural..." |
No reader of this terribly beautiful passage can fail to ask himself why Shakespeare forbore to make use of it. The substituted incident is as much less probable as it is less tragic. . . In the seventh story of the third decade of the Hecatommithi of M. Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, 'nobile Ferrarese,' first published in I565, there is an incident so beautifully imagined and so beautifully related that it seems at first inexplicable how Shakespeare, when engaged in transfiguring this story into the tragedy of Othello, can have struck it out of his version. The loss of the magic handkerchief which seals the doom of the hero and his fellow-victim is far less plausibly and far less beautifully explained by a mere accident, and a most unlikely accident, than by a device which heightens at once the charm of Desdemona and the atrocity of Iago."
- Algernon Swinburne
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