Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/716

664 For nothing human is ever for a moment above the reach or beyond the scope or beneath the notice of his all but superhuman genius. In this very play he sets before mankind forever not only the perfect models of heroic love and honor, of womanly sweetness and courage, of intelligent activity and joyous energy in evil, but also an unsurpassable type of the tragicomic dullard. Roderigo is not only Iago's but (in Dryden's masterly phrase) "God Almighty's fool." And Shakespeare shows the poor devil no more mercy than Iago or than God. You see at once that he was born to be plundered, cudgelled, and killed—if he tries to play the villain—like a dog. No lighter comic relief than this rather grim and pitiless exhibition of the typic fool could have been acceptable or admissible on the stage of so supreme a tragedy.

Such humorous realism—and it is excellent of its kind—as half relieves and half intensifies the horror of Cinthio's tale may serve as well as any other point of difference to show with what matchless tact of transfiguration by selection and rejection the hand of Shakespeare wrought his will and set his mark on the materials left ready for it by the hand of a lesser genius. The ancient waylays and maims the lieutenant on a dark night as he comes from the house of a harlot "with whom he was wont to solace himself"; and when the news gets abroad next morning, and reaches the ears of Disdemona, "she, who was of a loving nature, and thought not that evil should thence befall her, shewed that she had right great sorrow for such a mishap. Hereof the Moor took the worst opinion that might be, and went to find the ancient, and said to him, 'Thou knowest well that my ass of a wife is, in so great trouble for the lieutenant's mishap that she is like to run mad.' 'And how could you,' said he, 'deem otherwise, seeing that he is her soul?' 'Her soul, eh?' replied the Moor. 'I will pluck—that will I—the soul from her body.

Shakespeare and his one disciple Webster alone could have afforded to leave this masterly bit of dialogue unused or untranslated. For they alone would so have elevated and ennobled the figure of the protagonist as to make it unimaginable that he could have talked in this tone of his wife and her supposed paramour with the living instrument of his revenge. Could he have done so, he might have been capable of playing the part played by the merciless Moor who allows the ancient to thrash her to death with a stocking stuffed with sand. No later master of realistic fiction can presumably have surpassed the simple force of impression and effect conveyed by this direct and unlovely narrative.

And as they debated with each other whether the lady should be done to death by poison or dagger, and resolved not on either the one or the other of these, the ancient said, "A way there is come into my mind whereby you shall satisfy yourself, and there shall be no suspicion of it whatever. And it is this. The house wherein you dwell is very old, and the ceiling of your chamber has many chinks in it. I will that with a stocking full of sand we smite Disdemona so sore that she die thereof, whereby there may seem oh her no sign of blows: when she shall be dead, we will make part of the ceiling fall, and will shatter the lady's head; feigning that a beam as it fell has shattered it and killed her: and in this wise there shall be no one who may conceive any suspicion of you, every man believing that her death has befallen by accident." The cruel counsel pleased, the Moor, and after abiding the time that seemed convenient to him, he being one night with her abed, and having already hidden the ancient in a little chamber that opened into the bedchamber, the ancient, according to the order taken between them, made some manner of noise in the little chamber: and, hearing it, the Moor said, suddenly, to his wife, "Hast thou heard that noise?" "I have heard it," said she. "Get up," subjoined the Moor, "and see what is the matter." Up rose the hapless Disdemona, and, as soon as she came near the little chamber, forth came thereout the ancient, who, being a strong man, and of good muscle, with the stocking which he had ready gave her a cruel blow in the middle of her back, whereby the lady instantly fell, without being able well-nigh to draw breath. But with that little voice that she could get she called on the Moor to help her, and he, risen out of bed, said to her, "Most wicked lady, thou hast the wage of thine unchastity: thus fare those women, who, feigning to love their husbands, set horns on their heads." The wretched lady, hearing this, and feeling herself come to her end, inasmuch as the ancient had given her an-