I

N 1622 "N. O." printed for Thomas Walkly: "and are to be sold at his Shop, at the Sign of the Eagle and Child, in Brittan's Bursse": the "Tragedy of Othello the Moore of Venice," as it had been "divers times acted at the Globe and at the Black-Friars by his Maiestie's Servants." This is the first "Othello." "To commend it I will not," Walkly says; "for that which is good I hope every man will commend, without entreaty; and I am the bolder because the Author's name is sufficient to vent his work." Then, the year after (1623), came the First Folio; and in 1630 Walkly, who seems to have been in pocket by his earlier venture, published a Second Quarto. It is of no particular

interest or importance: the text, as we have it, being Walkly plus Heminge and Condell, the First Quarto plus the First Folio. The latter version is longer than Walkly's by some hundred and fifty lines; but the Walkly, printed (Mr. Herford conjectures) "from an old copy of the play, as curtailed, and otherwise modified, for performance," is very much richer in "oaths and expletives" than the Heminge and Condell, and is therefore of respectable authority. As the first recorded performance of "Othello" is dated 1604: in the November of which year it was presented before the Court at Whitehall and as the style, as beseems the subject, is "simple, sensuous, and passionate" to the nth degree: a style with memories of "Hamlet," yet with scarce a foretaste of "Macbeth": it is assumed that 1604 was the birth-year of this unrivalled achievement in intimate, or domestic, drama, and that the text, as we have it, is very much the text that left Shakespeare's hand.

II

The material is engagingly old and plain, at the same time that it is unalterably and essentially eternal. As stated by a critic of a day or two ago, a critic, by the way, of the same name as the "Moore's" first printer, it is simply the story of what your Modern Frenchman has elected to denote and to discriminate as un crime passionnel. In Cinthio's "Hecatommithi," where Shakespeare found the raw suggestion of his mighty and magnificent presentation of jealousy: of jealousy, too, in

its operation on a mind which, rich in other sorts of experience, is, sexually speaking, next door to virginal: the passional crime is ever so much more persuasively paragraphed than it is in Mr. Walkley's amiable boutade; for in Cinthio the hero is not Othello (he is not so much, I believe, as named by name) but Iago, his Ensign, "in love with Disdemona." To that fair and innocent creature Cinthio's Antient imparts the purpose of his passion; she understands him not; he instantly conceives her enamoured of the party we know as Michael Cassio. So he goes to work, corrupts the Moor, plots Desdemona's death, and the Lieutenant's; and, in the end, after sand-bagging the object of his passion into the other world in her husband's presence, pulling down the ceiling upon her broken body, and giving out that she has been killed by a fallen beam, turns on the Moor, accuses him of murder, gets him tortured and done to death, and, having thus justified his Renaissance habit, and purged himself of his crime d'amour, goes gallantly to justice on a different count, and accepts the sweet compulsion of the Rope for another crime. It is in this rather blackguard story of a blackguard lecher's disappointment and revenge that our Archimage discovered his "Othello." He astonishes always, when you come to look into his treatment of other men's material. His method is ever royal: he lays hands on what he wants, and the fact that he wants it makes it his, and none else's. I know not that, anywhere in his work, is there discovered so clear a proof of sovranty as here. Othello, Iago, Cassio,

1 This is Cinthio's spelling of the Shakespearean Desdemona.

Emilia, Desdemona - even the Handkerchief- all these figure in the twenty-seventh of the "Hecatommithi." Yet to compare the Novella and the Play is to live in two worlds at once, and, so living, to be utterly and everlastingly cognisant of the inexpressible difference between creation as Cinthio understood and practised it, and creation as it was apprehended and done by William Shakespeare.

III

In Cinthio's anecdote, or compte-rendu, the interest is almost wholly one of incident. The Novelist, or Reporter, is primarily concerned with—not character, nor action in its effect on character, but — action for its own sake, action as material for narrative. His Moor, his Lieutenant, his Desdemona, are counters all: such character-interest as he discovers is contained in his Antient ; and he even is no more personal than any trim, literal incarnation of the clear-eyed, clean-minded, self-seeking, ruthless, self-sufficing scoundrelism of Cesare Borgia would be. Cinthio's Antient is wholly lacking in those touches of doubt, those instants of inquiry, those hints and flashes of internal conflict, those glimpes of desperate debate between Mind and Appetite, between Brain and Temperament, which lend so potent and so variable a magic to the portraiture of that strange, brilliant, evil-speaking, evil-thinking, evil-doing" demi-devil": that parcel-tamed, over-civilised man-eating tiger, which we know as Iago. He is Cinthio's hero; but in Cinthio his psychology