Duff had shown himself, from the commencement of his reign, very anxious to protect the people against malefactors, and "idle persons who sought to live only upon other men's goods." He put several to death, and compelled others to withdraw to Ireland, or else to learn "some manual occupation wherewith to get their living." Although, as it would appear, these fellows were connected only in a very remote degree with the high nobility of Scotland, the nobles, says the chronicle, "were much offended with this extreme rigor, accounting it a great dishonor for such as were descended of noble parentage to be constrained to get their living with the labor of their hands, which only appertained to plowmen, and such others of the base degree as were born to travail for the maintenance of the nobility, and to serve at their commandment." The king was consequently regarded by them as an enemy of the nobles, and unworthy to govern them, as he was, they said, devoted solely to the interests of the people and clergy, who at that time made common cause against the oppression of the great lords. The discontent increased daily, and several rebellions arose, in one of which some young gentlemen engaged, who were relatives of Donwald, the king's lieutenant of the castle of Forres. These young men were taken prisoners, and Donwald, who until then had faithfully and usefully served the king, hoped to obtain their pardon; but not succeeding in his attempt, he was filled with resentment. His wife, who was irritated against the king from a similar cause, spared no efforts to increase his anger, and reminded him how easy it would be to take his revenge when Duff came, as frequently happened, to reside at Forres without any other guard than the garrison of the castle, which was entirely devoted to them; and "she showed him the means whereby he might soonest accomplish it."
Duff came to Forres a short time afterward, and, on the evening before his departure, when he had gone to bed after spending a longer time than usual at prayers in his oratory, Donwald and his wife sat down to table with the two chamberlains, whose "reare-supper or collation" they had carefully prepared, and feasted them so well that they fell into a lethargic sleep. Then Donwald, "though he abhorred the act greatly in heart," at the instigation of his wife, summoned four of his servants who were aware of his plot, and whom he had gained over by presents. These entered the king's chamber, killed him, carried his body out of the castle by a postern-gate, and, placing it on a horse which they had provided for the purpose, conveyed it to a place about two miles distant from the castle. Having got some laborers to help them to turn the course of a little river that ran through the fields, they dug a deep hole in the channel and buried the body in it, "ramming it up with stones and gravel so closely, that, setting the water in the right course again, no man could perceive that any thing had been newly digged there. This they did by order of Donwald, that the body should not be found, and by bleeding, when Donwald was present, declare him to be guilty of the murder." Donwald, in the mean while, was careful to be one of those who kept guard, and did not leave his post during the whole night. The subsequent circumstances relative to the murder of the two chamberlains are exactly as Shakspeare has represented them in "Macbeth;" and the same may be said of the prodigies which he relates, and which took place at the death of Duff. The sun did not appear for six months, until at last, the murderers having been discovered and executed, it shone forth again upon the earth, and the fields became covered with flowers, "clean contrary to the time and season of the year."
To return to Macbeth. The first ten years of his reign were marked by a wise, equitable, and vigorous government. Several of his laws have been preserved, of which the following are specimens:
"He that attendeth any man to the church, market, or to any other public assembly, as a retainer, shall suffer death, except he have living at his hands, on whom he so attendeth." The punishment of death was also decreed against all who became sworn retainers of any other person than the king.
"All manner of lords and great barons shall not contract matrimony with other, under pain of death, specially if their lands and rooms be near together."
"All armor and weapon borne to other effect than in defense of the king and realm in time of wars, shall be confiscated to the king's use, with all other movable goods of the party that herein offendeth." It was also enacted that "a horse kept by any of the commons or husbandmen to any other use than for tillage and laboring of the earth shall be forfeited to the king by escheat."
"Such as be appointed governors or (as I may call them) captains, that buy within those limits where their charges lie any lands or possessions, shall lose both lands and possessions, and the money which they have paid fur the same. And if any of the said captains or governors marry their sons or daughters unto any manner of person that dwelleth within the bounds of their rooms, they shall lose their office; neither shall it be lawful for any of their sons or copartners to occupy the same office."
"No man shall sit as judge in any temporal court without the king's commission authorizing him thereto. All conventions, offices, and acts of justice shall pass in the king's name."
Other laws are intended to assure the immunity of the clergy and the authority of the censures of the Church, to regulate the duties of knighthood, the succession of property, and so forth. Several of these laws, some of which are rather singular for the time, were passed from motives of order and regularity; others were destined to maintain civil independence against the oppressive power of the officers of the crown; but most of them are evidently intended to diminish the power of the nobles, and to concentrate all authority in the hands of the king. All are mentioned by the historians of the period as wise and beneficent laws; and if Macbeth had obtained the throne by legitimate means, and had continued in the ways of justice as he began, he might, says Holinshed, "have been numbered among the most noble princes that any where had reigned."
"But this," continues our chronicle, "was but a counterfeit zeal of equity showed by him against his natural inclination." Macbeth appeared at length in his true colors, and the same feeling of his position which had led him to seek public favor by justice changed justice into cruelty; "for the prick of conscience caused him ever to fear lest he should be served of the same cup as he had ministered to his predecessor." Now begins the Macbeth of the tragedy. The murder of Banquo, executed in the same manner and for the same reasons as those which Shakspeare ascribes to him, was followed by a great number of other crimes, so that "at length he found such sweetness by putting his nobles thus to death, that his earnest thirst after blood in this behalf might in no wise be satisfied." Certain wizards, in whom he placed great trust, had warned him to beware of Macduff, whose power, moreover, gave him great umbrage, and he only sought a pretext for giving vent to his hatred of him. Macduff, informed of his danger, passed over into England to invite Malcolm, who had taken refuge in that country, to return to claim his rights. Macbeth became acquainted with this plot, "for kings," says the chronicle, "have sharp sight like unto lynx, and long ears like unto Midas;" and Macbeth maintained spies in the houses of all the nobles of his realm. The flight of Macduff, the massacre of all his family, and his conversation with Malcolm, are all facts taken from the chronicle. Malcolm at first met Macduff's entreaties with objections based upon his own incontinence, and Macduff replied as in Shakspeare, with this addition only, "Make thyself king, and I shall convey the matter so wisely that thou shalt be so satisfied at thy pleasure in such secret wise that no man shall be aware thereof." The remainder of the scene is faithfully imitated by the poet; and all that concerns the death of Macbeth, the predictions that had been made to him, and the manner in which they were at once eluded and accomplished, is taken almost word for word from the chronicle, in which we see at last how, "by illusion of the devil, he defamed, with most terrible cruelty, his reign, which in the beginning was very profitable to the commonwealth." Macbeth had assassinated Duncan in the year 1040, and he was himself killed in 1057, after a reign of seventeen years. [Footnote 26]
[Footnote 26: Holinshed's Chronicle, "History of Scotland," vol. i., p. 168-176. The story of the murder of King Duff is contained in p. 150, 151. It was probably of the facts furnished by Hector Boëtius to this chronicle that Buchanan, when relating in a much more summary manner the history of Macbeth, said, "Multa hic fabulose quidam nostrorum affingunt; sed quia theatris aut Milesiis fabulis sunt aptiora quam historiæ, ea omitto."—Rerum. Scot. Hist., lib. vii.]
Such is a general view of the facts to which Shakspeare undertook to impart a soul and life. He places himself simply in the midst of the events and personages, and, setting all these inanimate things in motion with a breath, he enables us to witness the spectacle of their existence. Far from adding any thing to the incidents furnished him by the narrative from which he has borrowed his subject, he omits many things; he is especially careful to lop off every thing that might injure the simplicity of his progress, and embarrass the action of his personages; and he suppresses every thing that might prevent him from fathoming them with a single glance, and portraying them with a few bold touches. Macbeth, with all the crimes and great qualities ascribed to him by his history, would be too complicated a being; it would be necessary for him to possess at once too much ambition and too much virtue for one of his dispositions to maintain itself for any time in presence of the other, and too cumbrous machinery would be required to make the balance finally incline to one or the other side. Shakspeare's Macbeth is brilliant only by his warlike virtues, and especially by his personal bravery; he has only the qualities and the defects of a barbarian; brave, but not a stranger to the fear of peril when he believes in its proximity; cruel and sensitive by fits and starts; perfidious through his inconstancy; always ready to yield to any temptation that presents itself, whether it lead to crime or to virtue—he displays, in his ambition as well as in his criminality, that character of thoughtlessness and mobility which belongs to an almost savage state of civilization. His passions are imperious, but no series of reasonings and projects determines and governs them; they form a lofty tree, but one devoid of roots, which the least breeze may shake, and the fall of which is a disaster. Hence arises his tragic grandeur; it resides in his destiny more than in his character. Macbeth, if placed at a greater distance from the expectation of succession to the throne, would have remained virtuous; but his virtue, would have been restless, for it would have been merely the fruit of circumstance. His crime becomes a punishment to him, because it is circumstance which has forced him to commit it; this crime did not proceed from the depths of Macbeth's nature, and yet it clings to him, envelops him, enchains him, racks him in every part, and thus creates for him a troubled and irremissible destiny, in which the unhappy victim vainly writhes, doing nothing that does not plunge him still deeper, and with increasing despair, into the career which is henceforward prescribed to him by his implacable persecutor. Macbeth is one of those characters marked out in all superstitions to become the prey and instrument of the perverse spirit who takes pleasure in destroying them, because they have received some spark of the divine nature, and who, at the same time, meets with but few difficulties in his task, for the heavenly light darts but a few fleeting rays into their souls, which are obscured by storms at every instant.
Lady Macbeth is just exactly the wife of such a man, the product of the same state of civilization, and of the same habit of passions. She adds to this, moreover, the fact that she is a woman without prudence, without generality in her views, perceiving at once only a single part of a single idea, and giving herself up to it entirely, without ever admitting any thing that might distract or disturb her attention from it. The feelings which belong to her sex are not unknown to her; she loves her husband, knows the pleasures of a mother, and could not kill Duncan herself, because he resembled "her father as he slept;" but she aspires to be queen, and for this cause Duncan must die; she sees nothing in the death of Duncan but the pleasure of being queen; her courage is easy, for she does not perceive any thing to make her recoil from the deed. When her passion is satisfied and the action committed, then only will the other consequences be revealed to her as a novelty of which she previously had not the slightest anticipation. Those fears, and that necessity for new crimes, which her husband had foreseen at the outset, she has never thought of. She was quite willing to throw the crime upon the two chamberlains, but it was not her idea to kill them; she did not arrange the murder of Banquo, or the massacre of Macduff's family; she did not see so far forward; she had not even divined the effect which would be produced upon her by such a sight, when she entered the room in which Duncan lay dead. She leaves it in agitation, no longer contemning the terrors of her husband, but merely urging him not to dwell too much upon images, by which we see that she is beginning to feel herself besieged. The blow is struck, and will reveal itself in the admirable and terrible scene of her somnambulism: there we shall learn what becomes of a character apparently so immovable, when it is no longer sustained by the blind fury of passion. Macbeth has become hardened in crime, after having hesitated to commit it, because he knew its character; but we shall see his wife, succumbing beneath the knowledge which she has acquired too late, substitute one fixed idea for another, die to deliver herself from its influence, and punish, by the madness of despair, the crime which she was led to commit by the madness of ambition.
The other personages, introduced merely to fill up this great picture of the progress and destiny of crime, have no other color than that of the position given them by history. The Witches are, indeed, what they should be, and I do not know why it is the custom to exclaim with disgust against this portion of the representation of "Macbeth." When we see these vile creatures the arbiters of life and death, of all the chances and all the interests of humanity, disposing of them in accordance with the most contemptible caprices of their odious nature, to the terror which their power inspires is added the dread occasioned by their unreason, and the very absurdity of such a spectacle only augments its effect.
The style of "Macbeth" is remarkable, in its wild energy, for a refinement which we may indeed blame, but which it would be wrong to consider as contrary to truth as it is to naturalness. Refinement of language is not incompatible with rudeness of manners and ideas; it seems even to be rather common in times and positions in which general ideas are wanting. The mind, which can not remain idle, then attaches itself to the slightest verbal connections, takes delight in them, and makes a habit of them, which we meet with in all analogous positions. Nothing can be more far-fetched than the spirit of the literature of the Middle Ages; and what we know of the speech of savages contains many choice ideas. Refinement is the characteristic of the wits of the lower classes; and even the insults of the common people are sometimes composed with a quite singular fastidiousness, as if, at those times when anger excites their faculties, their mind seized with greater facility and abundance upon relations of this kind, the only ones which it was capable of attaining.
It is believed that "Macbeth" was performed in 1606. The idea of writing a tragedy upon this subject, which would necessarily be pleasing to King James, who had just ascended the throne of England, was probably suggested to Shakspeare by a short poetical dialogue, which the students of Oxford, in 1605, recited in Latin before the king, and in English before the queen, who had accompanied him to that city. The students were three in number, and probably spoke in turn. Their speech turned upon the prediction uttered to Banquo; and, in allusion to the triple salutation which Macbeth had received, they hailed James King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. They also hailed him King of France, which destroyed, somewhat gratuitously, the virtue of the number three.
Among those tragedies of Shakspeare to which public opinion has assigned a first rank, "Julius Cæsar" is the one of which the commentators have spoken most coldly. Johnson, the coldest of them all, contents himself with saying: "Of this tragedy, many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally celebrated; but I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, compared with some other of Shakspeare's plays."
It is to adopt an entirely false principle of criticism to judge Shakspeare by himself, and to compare the impressions which he has succeeded in producing, in a given style and subject, with those which he calls forth in another style and subject; as if he possessed only a special and singular merit, which he was bound to display on every occasion, and which constituted his sole title to glory. His vast and true genius must be measured on a larger scale; we must compare Shakspeare with nature, with the world; and in every particular case, the comparison must be made between that portion of the world and of nature which it was his intention to represent, and the picture which he has drawn of it. Do not expect from the painter of Brutus the same impressions and the same effects as from the delineator of King Lear, or of Romeo and Juliet. Shakspeare penetrates to the inmost recesses of all subjects, and can derive from each the impressions which naturally flow from it, and the distinct and original effects which it ought to produce.
That, after this, the spectacle of the soul of Brutus should he, to Johnson, less touching and dramatic than the display of any particular passion, or of any particular position in life, is a result of the personal inclinations of the critic, and of the turn taken by his ideas and feelings. We can not find in it a general rule upon which we may found a comparison between works of an absolutely different kind. There are minds so constituted that Corneille will fill them with more emotions than Voltaire, and a mother will feel her nature more agitated and disturbed by Mérope than by Zaire. The mind of Johnson, more strong and upright than it was elevated, could understand tolerably well the interests and passions which agitate the middle region of life, but he never could attain to those lofty eminences in which a truly stoical soul can exist without effort or distraction. The age in which Johnson lived, moreover, was not an age of great devotements; and although, even at that epoch, the political climate of England preserved its literature in some degree from that effeminate influence which had enervated our own, it could not entirely escape from that general disposition of the national mind, that sort of moral materialism, which, granting, as it were, to the soul no other life but that which it derives from the contact of external objects, did not suppose it possible for it to be supplied with other sources of interest than the pathetic, properly so called—the individual sorrows of life, the anguish of the heart, and the storms of the passions. This disposition of the eighteenth century was so powerful, that, when introducing the death of Cæsar upon our stage, Voltaire, who justly boasted that he had made a tragedy succeed without the aid of love, nevertheless did not think that such a spectacle could dispense with the pathetic interest which results from the painful conflict of duty and affection. In this great struggle of the last efforts of dying liberty against budding despotism, he sought out, and gave the first place to, an obscure and doubtful fact, but one which was adapted to furnish him with the kind of emotions of which he stood in need; and from the position, real or fictitious, of Brutus placed between his father and his country, Voltaire has constructed the basis and lifespring of his tragedy.
Shakspeare's drama rests entirely upon the character of Brutus; and he has even been blamed for not having entitled his work "Marcus Brutus" instead of "Julius Cæsar." But if Brutus is the hero of the play, the power and death of Cæsar form its subject. Cæsar alone occupies the foreground; the horror felt for his power, and the necessity of deliverance from it, fill the whole of the first part of the drama; the other half is consecrated to the recollection and consequences of his death. It is, as Antony says,
"Cæsar's spirit ranging for revenge;"
and, that his sway may not be lost sight of, it is still his spirit which, on the plains of Sardis and of Philippi, appears to Brutus as his evil genius.
The picture of this great catastrophe, however, finishes with the death of Brutus. Shakspeare desired to interest us in the event of his drama only as it related to Brutus, just as he has presented Brutus to us only in relation to the event. The fact which furnishes the subject of the tragedy, and the character which accomplishes it, the death of Cæsar and the character of Brutus—this is the union which constitutes Shakspeare's dramatic work, just as the union of soul and body constitutes life, both elements being equally necessary to the existence of the individual. Before the death of Cæsar was planned, the play does not begin; after the death of Brutus, it ends.
It is, then, upon the character of Brutus, the soul of his drama, that Shakspeare has stamped the impress of his genius; and it is all the more admirable in this picture, because, while remaining faithful to history, he has made it also a work of creation, and has presented Plutarch's Brutus to us as truthfully and completely in the scenes which the poet has imagined, as in those which the historian had supplied. That dreamy spirit ever busied in self-examination, that disturbance of a stern conscience at the first indications of a duty that is still doubtful, that calm and resolute firmness as soon as the duty becomes certain, that profound and almost painful sensibility, ever restrained by the rigor of the most austere principles, that gentleness of soul which never disappears for a single moment amid the most cruel offices of virtue—in fine, the character of Brutus, as its idea is present to us all, proceeds animate and unchanging through the different scenes of life in which we meet it, and in which we can not doubt that it appeared under the very aspect with which the poet has clothed it.
Perhaps this historical fidelity may have occasioned the coldness of Shakspeare's critics regarding the tragedy of "Julius Cæsar." They could not discover in it those features of almost wild originality which strike us in the works which Shakspeare has composed upon modern subjects, foreign to the actual habits of our life, as well as to the classical ideas upon which the habits of our mind nave been formed. The manners of Hotspur are certainly more original to us than those of Brutus, and they are also more original in themselves. The grandeur of the characters of the Middle Ages is strongly impressed with originality; the grandeur of the ancients arises with regularity upon the basis of certain general principles, which leave no other sensible difference between individuals than the difference of elevation to which they attain. This was felt by Shakspeare; he merely thought to enhance Brutus, and not to make him singular. The other personages, being placed in an inferior sphere, resume somewhat of the liberty of their individual character, because they are free from that rule of perfection which duty imposes upon Brutus. The poet also seems to play around them with less respect, and to allow himself to ingraft upon them several forms which belong to himself rather than to them. Cassius, disdainfully comparing the bodily strength of Cæsar to his own, and running through the streets of Rome by night in the midst of the storm, to assuage the fever of dangers which devours him, bears much greater resemblance to a comrade of Canute or of Harold than to a Roman of the time of Cæsar; but this barbarian tint throws over the irregularities of Cassius an interest which would not, perhaps, arise with such liveliness from the historical resemblance. M. Schlegel, whose opinions upon Shakspeare always deserve great consideration, seems to me, however, to fall into a slight error when he remarks that "the poet has pointed out with great nicety the superiority of Cassius over Brutus in independent volition and discernment in judging of human affairs." I think, on the contrary, that Shakspeare's admirable art consists, in this piece, in preserving to the principal personage an entire superiority, even when he is mistaken, and in making this evident by the very fact that he falls into error, and yet is deferred to, and that the reason of the others yields with confidence to the mistake of Brutus. Brutus goes so far as to do himself a wrong; in his quarrel with Cassius, overcome for a moment by terrible and secret grief, he forgets the moderation which becomes him; in fine, Brutus is wrong once, and yet Cassius humbles himself, for Brutus has in fact continued greater than he.
Cæsar's character may perhaps appear to us rather too much disfigured by that boastfulness which is common to all barbarous times in which individual force, incessantly called upon to engage in the most terrible struggles, can sustain itself only by a lofty consciousness of its own power, and even has need to be supported by the idea which others entertain of it. It was necessary to display in Cæsar the force which had subjugated the Romans, and the pride which crushed them; Shakspeare had only one position in which he could manifest this state of the soul of his hero; and he, consequently, laid the color on too thickly. Nevertheless, his Cæsar, I confess, does not appear to me more false than our own. Shakspeare even seems to me to have better preserved, in the midst of his rhodomontades, those forms of equality which the despot of a republic ever maintains toward those whom he oppresses.
The tone of "Julius Cæsar" is more generally sustained than that of most of the other tragedies of Shakspeare. Scarcely, throughout the whole of the part of Brutus, do we meet with a single vulgar image; and the only one at all open to the charge of vulgarity occurs when he gives way to anger. The visible care which the poet has taken to imitate the laconic language which history attributes to his hero has very rarely led him into affectation, unless perhaps in the speech of Brutus to the people, which is a model of the scholastic eloquence of the age in which the author lived. The language of Cassius, more figurative because it is more passionate, and distinguished by a less simple loftiness than that of Brutus, is nevertheless equally exempt from triviality. Antony's harangue is a model of adroitness, and of the feigned simplicity of a skillful tactician who is desirous to gain the minds of a coarse and changeful multitude. Voltaire blames Shakspeare, at least with severity, for having presented under a comic form the scene at the feast of Lupercal, the substance of which, he says, "is so noble and interesting." Voltaire sees here nothing but a crown demanded of a free people who refuse it; but Cæsar making himself, in presence of the people, the actor of a farce prepared for his own aggrandizement, and in despair at the applause bestowed on the manner in which he acts his part, was in truth, to the wits of Rome, something extremely comic, which could not be presented to them under any other form.
The action of the piece comprises the period from the triumph of Cæsar, after the victory gained over young Pompey, until the death of Brutus, which gives it a duration of nearly three years and a half.
There is in English another tragedy on "Julius Cæsar," composed by Lord Sterline, and known to the public, as it would appear, several years before Shakspeare composed his drama, so that he may have borrowed some ideas from it. This tragedy ends with the death of Cæsar, which the author has thrown into the narrative form. A Doctor Richard Eedes, celebrated in his time as a tragic poet, had also written a Latin play on the same subject, which was printed, it is said, in 1582, but which has been lost, as well as an English play entitled "The History of Cæsar and Pompey," which was written before the year 1579. In 1607, a play was printed in London under the title of "The Tragedie of Cæsar and Pompey, or Cæsar's Revenge." This drama, which extends from the battle of Pharsalia to that of Philippi, was performed at a private theatre by some students of Oxford, and it is supposed that it was printed in consequence of the successful performance of Shakspeare's tragedy, which Malone's chronology refers to the same year, 1607.
"Julius Cæsar" was performed, as corrected by Dryden and Davenant, under the title of "Julius Cæsar, with the Death of Brutus," and was printed in London in 1719.
The Duke of Buckingham also remodeled this same tragedy, dividing it into two parts; the first under the title of "Julius Cæsar," with many alterations, a prologue, and a chorus; and the second under the title of "Marcus Brutus," with a prologue and two choruses. Both were printed in 1722.
"There was once in Venice a Moor of great merit, who, for his personal courage, and the proofs he had given of his conduct, as well as his vigorous genius in the affairs of war, was held in great esteem by the lords of the republic. It happened that a virtuous woman, of great beauty, called Desdemona, not drawn by female appetite, but by the virtue of the Moor, fell in love with him; and he, subdued by the charms and noble sentiments of the lady, became equally enamored of her. Their passion was so successful that they were married, although her relations did all in their power to make her take another husband. They lived together in such peace and concord while they were at Venice, that there never passed between them either word or action that was not expressive of affection. The Venetians, resolving to change the garrison which they maintain in Cyprus, selected the Moor to the command of the troops which they destined for that island. Although he was extremely pleased with the honor proposed to him, yet was his joy diminished when he reflected on the length and inconvenience of the voyage. His wife was very much vexed at seeing the Moor disturbed; and, not knowing the reason, said to him one day at dinner, 'How can you be so melancholy, after having received from the Senate so high and so honorable a distinction?' 'My love for you, Desdemona,' replied the Moor, 'disturbs my enjoyment of the rank conferred upon me, since I am now exposed to this alternative—I must either endanger your life by sea, or leave you at Venice. The first will be terrible, as I shall suffer extremely from every fatigue you undergo, from every danger that threatens you; the second would render me insupportable to myself, as parting from you would be parting from my life.' 'Ah! husband,' returned Desdemona, 'why do you perplex yourself with such idle imaginations? I will follow you wherever you go, though it were necessary to pass through fire instead of only going by water in a safe and well-equipped vessel.' The Moor then tenderly embraced his wife, saying, 'May Heaven long preserve us in this degree of reciprocal affection!' Soon afterward, he went on board the galley with his wife, and sailed for Cyprus with a favorable wind.
"He had in his company an ensign of a very amiable outward appearance, but whose character was extremely treacherous and base. This rascal had also conducted his wife with him to Cyprus, who was a handsome and discreet woman; and, being an Italian, Desdemona was so fond of her that they passed the greatest part of their time together. In the same company was also a lieutenant, to whom the Moor was much attached. The lieutenant went often to the Moor's house, and dined frequently with him and his wife. Desdemona, seeing that the Moor was so fond of him, showed him every mark of attention and civility, with which the Moor was much pleased. The detestable ensign, forgetting his duty to his own wife, and violating all the laws of friendship, honor, and gratitude with which he was bound to the Moor, fell passionately in love with Desdemona, and sought by all the private means in his power to make her conscious of his love. But she was so entirely taken up with the Moor that she thought neither of him nor of any one else; and all that he did to engage her affections produced not the least effect. He then took it into his head that this neglect arose from her being pre-engaged in favor of the lieutenant; and not only determined to get rid of him, but changed his affection for her into the most bitter hatred. He studied, besides, how he might prevent in future the Moor from living happily with Desdemona, should his passion not be gratified. Revolving in his mind a variety of methods, all impious and abominable, he at last determined to accuse her to the Moor of adultery with the lieutenant. But knowing the Moor's great affection for Desdemona, and his friendship for the lieutenant, he determined to wait till time and place afforded him a fit opportunity for entering on his wicked design; and it was not long before the Moor degraded the lieutenant for having drawn his sword and wounded a soldier upon guard. This accident was so painful to Desdemona that she often tried to obtain for him her husband's pardon. In the mean time, the Moor had observed to the ensign that his wife teased him so much in favor of the lieutenant that he feared he should be obliged at last to restore to him his commission. 'Perhaps,' said the villain, 'Desdemona is fond of his company.' 'And why?' said the Moor. 'Nay,' replied he, 'I do not choose to meddle between man and wife; but if you watch her properly, you will understand me.' Nor would he, to the earnest entreaties of the Moor, afford any further explanation." [Footnote 27]
[Footnote 27: See Giraldi Cinthio's "Hecatommithi," printed in Payne Collier's "Shakspeare's Library," vol. ii.]
The novelist then goes on to relate all the practices of the perfidious ensign to convince Othello of Desdemona's infidelity. There is not a single detail in Shakspeare's tragedy which does not occur also in Cinthio's novel. The handkerchief of Desdemona, that precious handkerchief which the Moor had inherited from his mother, and which he had given to his wife during the early days of their love; the manner in which the ensign obtains possession of it, and leads to its discovery in the chamber of the lieutenant, whom he is desirous to ruin; the Moor's insistence upon having this handkerchief produced, and the trouble into which Desdemona is thrown by its loss; the artful conversation of the ensign with the lieutenant, to which the Moor listens at a distance, and fancies he hears all that he dreads; the plot of the duped Moor and the wretch who is deceiving him, to assassinate the lieutenant; the blow which the ensign strikes him from behind, and which cuts off his leg; in a word, all the facts, whether important or not, upon which the various scenes of the play successively rest, have been supplied to the poet by the novelist, who had doubtless added a great number of embellishments to the historical tradition which he had discovered. The dénouement alone is different; in the novel, the Moor and the ensign together murder Desdemona during the night, pull down the ceiling on the bed in which she slept, and say she has been crushed by this accident. The true cause of her death long remains unknown. Ere long the Moor conceives a dislike to the ensign, and dismisses him from his army. Another adventure leads the ensign, on his return to Venice, to accuse the Moor of the murder of his wife. The Moor is recalled to Venice and put to the torture, but he denies the charge; he is banished, and the relatives of Desdemona have him assassinated in his exile. A new crime leads to the arrest of the ensign, and he dies racked with tortures. "The ensign's wife, who had been informed of the whole affair," says Giraldi Cinthio, "after his death, thus circumstantially related this story."
It is clear that this dénouement could nob be brought on the stage; and Shakspeare changed it because it was absolutely necessary to do so. In other respects, he has retained and reproduced every incident; and not only has he omitted nothing, but he has added nothing. He seems to have attached almost no importance to the facts themselves; he took them as he found them, without giving himself the trouble to invent the slightest addition, or to alter the slightest incident.
He has, however, created the whole; for, into the facts which he has thus exactly borrowed from another, he has infused a vitality which they did not inherently possess. The narrative of Giraldi Cinthio is complete; it is deficient in nothing that seems essential to the interest of a recital; situations, incidents, progressive development of the principal event, external and material construction, so to speak, of a pathetic and singular adventure—all these things are contained in it, ready for use; and some of the conversations even are not wanting in a natural and touching simplicity. But the genius which supplies the actors to such a scene, which creates individuals, imparts to each his peculiar figure and character, and enables us to witness their actions, to hear their words, to anticipate their thoughts, and to enter into their feelings; that vivifying power which commands facts to rise, to go onward, to display themselves and to effect their accomplishment; that creative breath, which, diffusing itself over the past, resuscitates it, and fills it in some sort with a present and imperishable vitality; this is what Shakspeare alone possessed; and by means of this, from a forgotten novel, he made "Othello."
All subsists, in fact, and yet all is changed. We no longer hear of a Moor, a lieutenant, an ensign, and a woman, the victim of jealousy and treason. We behold Othello, Cassio, Iago, and Desdemona real and living beings, who resemble no other, who present themselves in flesh and bone before the spectator—all entwined by the bonds of a common position, all carried away by the same event, yet each having his own personal nature and distinct physiognomy, and each co-operating to produce the general effect by ideas, feelings, passions, and acts which are peculiar to him, and result from his individuality. It was not the fact, it was not the position which struck the poet, and from which he sought to obtain all his means of a wakening interest and emotion. The position appeared to him to possess the conditions of a great dramatic scene; the fact struck him as a suitable frame-work into which life might be appropriately introduced. Suddenly he gave birth to beings complete in themselves, animated and tragic, independently of every particular position and every determinate fact; he brought them forth capable of feeling, and of displaying beneath our eyes all that the special event in which they were about to take part could make human nature experience and produce; and he launched them forth into this event, feeling very sure that, whatever circumstances might be furnished him by the narrative, he would find in them, as he had made them, a fruitful source of pathetic effects and of truth.
Thus the poet creates, and such is poetical genius. Events, and even positions, are not what he deems most important, or what he takes delight in inventing; his power aims at exercising itself otherwise than in searching after incidents of a more or less singular character, and adventures of a more or less touching nature; it manifests itself by the creation of man himself; and when it creates man, it creates him complete, armed at all points as he should be, to suffice for all the vicissitudes of life, and to present the aspect of reality in every sense of the word. Othello is something far more than a blind and jealous husband, urged to commit murder by his jealousy; this is only his position during the play, and his character goes far beyond his position. The sun-burned Moor, with ardent blood, and a keen and brutal imagination, credulous by the violence of his temperament as well as by the excess of his passion; the successful soldier, proud of his fortune and his glory, respectful and submissive to the power from which he holds his rank, never forgetting the duties of war in the blandishments of love, and bitterly regretting the joys of war when he loses all the happiness of love; the man whose life has been harsh and agitated, for whom gentle and tender pleasures are something novel which astonishes while it delights him, and which does not inspire him with a feeling of security, although his character is full of generosity and confidence; Othello, in a word, delineated, not only in those portions of himself which have a present and direct connection with the accidental position in which he is placed, but in the whole extent of his nature, and as he has been made by the entire course of his destiny; this is what Shakspeare enables us to see. In the same manner, Iago is not merely an irritated enemy desirous of revenge, or an ordinary rascal anxious to destroy a happiness which he can not contemplate with satisfaction; he is a cynical and reasoning wretch, who has made for himself a philosophy of egotism and a science of crime; who looks upon men merely as instruments or obstacles to his personal interests; who despises virtue as an absurdity, and yet hates it as an injury; who preserves entire independence of thought, while engaged in the most servile conduct; and who, at the very moment when his crimes are about to cost him his life, still enjoys, with ferocious pride, the evil which he has done, as if it were a proof of his superiority.
Pass in review all the personages of the tragedy, from its heroes down to the least important characters—Desdemona, Cassio, Emilia, Bianca; we behold them appearing, not under vague aspects, and with those features only which correspond to their dramatic position, but with precise and complete forms, and all the elements which constitute personality. Cassio is not introduced merely to become the object of Othello's jealousy, and as a necessity of the drama; he has his own character, inclinations, qualities, and defects; and from what he is naturally flows the influence which he exercises upon what occurs to him. Emilia is not merely an attendant employed by the poet as an instrument either of the entanglement or of the discovery of the perfidies which lead to the catastrophe; she is the wife of Iago, whom she does not love, and whom she obeys because she fears him; but although she distrusts him, she has actually contracted, in the society of that man, somewhat of the immorality of his mind; nothing is pure either in her thoughts or in her words; and yet she is kind-hearted and attached to her mistress, and detests evil and deeds of darkness. Bianca herself has her own physiognomy, entirely independent of the little part which she plays in the action. Forget the events, set aside the drama, and all these personages will continue real, animated, and distinct; they possess inherent vitality, and their existence will not disappear with their position. In them is displayed the creative power of the poet, and the facts, to him, are only the stage upon which he bids his characters appear.