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A. C. Bradley - Shakespearean Tragedy

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5

Iago stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the
greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone to his making,
and because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts
concerning evil which seem to have impressed Shakespeare most. The first
of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom
fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism
becomes possible to them, and with it those hard vices--such as
ingratitude and cruelty--which to Shakespeare were far the worst. The
second is that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself
easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect. In the latter
respect Iago is nearly or quite the equal of Richard, in egoism he is
the superior, and his inferiority in passion and massive force only
makes him more repulsive. How is it then that we can bear to contemplate
him; nay, that, if we really imagine him, we feel admiration and some
kind of sympathy? Henry the Fifth tells us:

There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out;

but here, it may be said, we are shown a thing absolutely evil,
and--what is more dreadful still--this absolute evil is united with
supreme intellectual power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why
do we not accuse its author either of untruth or of a desperate
pessimism?

To these questions it might at once be replied: Iago does not stand
alone; he is a factor in a whole; and we perceive him there and not in
isolation, acted upon as well as acting, destroyed as well as
destroying.[117] But, although this is true and important, I pass it by
and, continuing to regard him by himself, I would make three remarks in
answer to the questions.

In the first place, Iago is not merely negative or evil--far from it.
Those very forces that moved him and made his fate--sense of power,
delight in performing a difficult and dangerous action, delight in the
exercise of artistic skill--are not at all evil things. We sympathise
with one or other of them almost every day of our lives. And,
accordingly, though in Iago they are combined with something detestable
and so contribute to evil, our perception of them is accompanied with
sympathy. In the same way, Iago's insight, dexterity, quickness,
address, and the like, are in themselves admirable things; the perfect
man would possess them. And certainly he would possess also Iago's
courage and self-control, and, like Iago, would stand above the impulses
of mere feeling, lord of his inner world. All this goes to evil ends in
Iago, but in itself it has a great worth; and, although in reading, of
course, we do not sift it out and regard it separately, it inevitably
affects us and mingles admiration with our hatred or horror.

All this, however, might apparently co-exist with absolute egoism and
total want of humanity. But, in the second place, it is not true that in
Iago this egoism and this want are absolute, and that in this sense he
is a thing of mere evil. They are frightful, but if they were absolute
Iago would be a monster, not a man. The fact is, he _tries_ to make them
absolute and cannot succeed; and the traces of conscience, shame and
humanity, though faint, are discernible. If his egoism were absolute he
would be perfectly indifferent to the opinion of others; and he clearly
is not so. His very irritation at goodness, again, is a sign that his
faith in his creed is not entirely firm; and it is not entirely firm
because he himself has a perception, however dim, of the goodness of
goodness. What is the meaning of the last reason he gives himself for
killing Cassio:

He hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly?

Does he mean that he is ugly to others? Then he is not an absolute
egoist. Does he mean that he is ugly to himself? Then he makes an open
confession of moral sense. And, once more, if he really possessed no
moral sense, we should never have heard those soliloquies which so
clearly betray his uneasiness and his unconscious desire to persuade
himself that he has some excuse for the villainy he contemplates. These
seem to be indubitable proofs that, against his will, Iago is a little
better than his creed, and has failed to withdraw himself wholly from
the human atmosphere about him. And to these proofs I would add, though
with less confidence, two others. Iago's momentary doubt towards the end
whether Roderigo and Cassio must be killed has always surprised me. As a
mere matter of calculation it is perfectly obvious that they must; and I
believe his hesitation is not merely intellectual, it is another symptom
of the obscure working of conscience or humanity. Lastly, is it not
significant that, when once his plot has begun to develop, Iago never
seeks the presence of Desdemona; that he seems to leave her as quickly
as he can (III. iv. 138); and that, when he is fetched by
Emilia to see her in her distress (IV. ii. 110 ff.), we fail to
catch in his words any sign of the pleasure he shows in Othello's
misery, and seem rather to perceive a certain discomfort, and, if one
dare say it, a faint touch of shame or remorse? This interpretation of
the passage, I admit, is not inevitable, but to my mind (quite apart
from any theorising about Iago) it seems the natural one.[118] And if it
is right, Iago's discomfort is easily understood; for Desdemona is the
one person concerned against whom it is impossible for him even to
imagine a ground of resentment, and so an excuse for cruelty.[119]

There remains, thirdly, the idea that Iago is a man of supreme
intellect who is at the same time supremely wicked. That he is supremely
wicked nobody will doubt; and I have claimed for him nothing that will
interfere with his right to that title. But to say that his intellectual
power is supreme is to make a great mistake. Within certain limits he
has indeed extraordinary penetration, quickness, inventiveness,
adaptiveness; but the limits are defined with the hardest of lines, and
they are narrow limits. It would scarcely be unjust to call him simply
astonishingly clever, or simply a consummate master of intrigue. But
compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of
supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how small and negative
Iago's mind is, incapable of Napoleon's military achievements, and much
more incapable of his political constructions. Or, to keep within the
Shakespearean world, compare him with Hamlet, and you perceive how
miserably close is his intellectual horizon; that such a thing as a
thought beyond the reaches of his soul has never come near him; that he
is prosaic through and through, deaf and blind to all but a tiny
fragment of the meaning of things. Is it not quite absurd, then, to call
him a man of supreme intellect?

And observe, lastly, that his failure in perception is closely connected
with his badness. He was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the
power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not
understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him.
Iago never meant his plot to be so dangerous to himself. He knew that
jealousy is painful, but the jealousy of a love like Othello's he could
not imagine, and he found himself involved in murders which were no part
of his original design. That difficulty he surmounted, and his changed
plot still seemed to prosper. Roderigo and Cassio and Desdemona once
dead, all will be well. Nay, when he fails to kill Cassio, all may still
be well. He will avow that he told Othello of the adultery, and persist
that he told the truth, and Cassio will deny it in vain. And then, in a
moment, his plot is shattered by a blow from a quarter where he never
dreamt of danger. He knows his wife, he thinks. She is not
over-scrupulous, she will do anything to please him, and she has learnt
obedience. But one thing in her he does not know--that she _loves_ her
mistress and would face a hundred deaths sooner than see her fair fame
darkened. There is genuine astonishment in his outburst 'What! Are you
mad?' as it dawns upon him that she means to speak the truth about the
handkerchief. But he might well have applied to himself the words she
flings at Othello,

O gull! O dolt!
As ignorant as dirt!

The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the
marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity.

To the thinking mind the divorce of unusual intellect from goodness is a
thing to startle; and Shakespeare clearly felt it so. The combination of
unusual intellect with extreme evil is more than startling, it is
frightful. It is rare, but it exists; and Shakespeare represented it in
Iago. But the alliance of evil like Iago's with _supreme_ intellect is
an impossible fiction; and Shakespeare's fictions were truth.


6

The characters of Cassio and Emilia hardly require analysis, and I will
touch on them only from a single point of view. In their combination of
excellences and defects they are good examples of that truth to nature
which in dramatic art is the one unfailing source of moral instruction.

Cassio is a handsome, light-hearted, good-natured young fellow, who
takes life gaily, and is evidently very attractive and popular. Othello,
who calls him by his Christian name, is fond of him; Desdemona likes him
much; Emilia at once interests herself on his behalf. He has warm
generous feelings, an enthusiastic admiration for the General, and a
chivalrous adoration for his peerless wife. But he is too easy-going. He
finds it hard to say No; and accordingly, although he is aware that he
has a very weak head, and that the occasion is one on which he is bound
to run no risk, he gets drunk--not disgustingly so, but ludicrously
so.[120] And, besides, he amuses himself without any scruple by
frequenting the company of a woman of more than doubtful reputation, who
has fallen in love with his good looks. Moralising critics point out
that he pays for the first offence by losing his post, and for the
second by nearly losing his life. They are quite entitled to do so,
though the careful reader will not forget Iago's part in these
transactions. But they ought also to point out that Cassio's looseness
does not in the least disturb our confidence in him in his relations
with Desdemona and Othello. He is loose, and we are sorry for it; but we
never doubt that there was 'a daily beauty in his life,' or that his
rapturous admiration of Desdemona was as wholly beautiful a thing as it
appears, or that Othello was perfectly safe when in his courtship he
employed Cassio to 'go between' Desdemona and himself. It is fortunately
a fact in human nature that these aspects of Cassio's character are
quite compatible. Shakespeare simply sets it down; and it is just
because he is truthful in these smaller things that in greater things we
trust him absolutely never to pervert the truth for the sake of some
doctrine or purpose of his own.

There is something very lovable about Cassio, with his fresh eager
feelings; his distress at his disgrace and still more at having lost
Othello's trust; his hero-worship; and at the end his sorrow and pity,
which are at first too acute for words. He is carried in, wounded, on a
chair. He looks at Othello and cannot speak. His first words come later
when, to Lodovico's question, 'Did you and he consent in Cassio's
death?' Othello answers 'Ay.' Then he falters out, 'Dear General, I
never gave you cause.' One is sure he had never used that adjective
before. The love in it makes it beautiful, but there is something else
in it, unknown to Cassio, which goes to one's heart. It tells us that
his hero is no longer unapproachably above him.

Few of Shakespeare's minor characters are more distinct than Emilia, and
towards few do our feelings change so much within the course of a play.
Till close to the end she frequently sets one's teeth on edge; and at
the end one is ready to worship her. She nowhere shows any sign of
having a bad heart; but she is common, sometimes vulgar, in minor
matters far from scrupulous, blunt in perception and feeling, and quite
destitute of imagination. She let Iago take the handkerchief though she
knew how much its loss would distress Desdemona; and she said nothing
about it though she saw that Othello was jealous. We rightly resent her
unkindness in permitting the theft, but--it is an important point--we
are apt to misconstrue her subsequent silence, because we know that
Othello's jealousy was intimately connected with the loss of the
handkerchief. Emilia, however, certainly failed to perceive this; for
otherwise, when Othello's anger showed itself violently and she was
really distressed for her mistress, she could not have failed to think
of the handkerchief, and would, I believe, undoubtedly have told the
truth about it. But, in fact, she never thought of it, although she
guessed that Othello was being deceived by some scoundrel. Even after
Desdemona's death, nay, even when she knew that Iago had brought it
about, she still did not remember the handkerchief; and when Othello at
last mentions, as a proof of his wife's guilt, that he had seen the
handkerchief in Cassio's hand, the truth falls on Emilia like a
thunder-bolt. 'O God!' she bursts out, 'O heavenly God!'[121] Her
stupidity in this matter is gross, but it is stupidity and nothing
worse.

But along with it goes a certain coarseness of nature. The contrast
between Emilia and Desdemona in their conversation about the infidelity
of wives (IV. iii.) is too famous to need a word,--unless it be a word
of warning against critics who take her light talk too seriously. But
the contrast in the preceding scene is hardly less remarkable. Othello,
affecting to treat Emilia as the keeper of a brothel, sends her away,
bidding her shut the door behind her; and then he proceeds to torture
himself as well as Desdemona by accusations of adultery. But, as a
critic has pointed out, Emilia listens at the door, for we find, as soon
as Othello is gone and Iago has been summoned, that she knows what
Othello has said to Desdemona. And what could better illustrate those
defects of hers which make one wince, than her repeating again and again
in Desdemona's presence the word Desdemona could not repeat; than her
talking before Desdemona of Iago's suspicions regarding Othello and
herself; than her speaking to Desdemona of husbands who strike their
wives; than the expression of her honest indignation in the words,

Has she forsook so many noble matches,
Her father and her country and her friends,
To be called whore?

If one were capable of laughing or even of smiling when this point in
the play is reached, the difference between Desdemona's anguish at the
loss of Othello's love, and Emilia's recollection of the noble matches
she might have secured, would be irresistibly ludicrous.

And yet how all this, and all her defects, vanish into nothingness when
we see her face to face with that which she can understand and feel!
From the moment of her appearance after the murder to the moment of her
death she is transfigured; and yet she remains perfectly true to
herself, and we would not have her one atom less herself. She is the
only person who utters for us the violent common emotions which we feel,
together with those more tragic emotions which she does not comprehend.
She has done this once already, to our great comfort. When she suggests
that some villain has poisoned Othello's mind, and Iago answers,

Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible;

and Desdemona answers,

If any such there be, Heaven pardon him;

Emilia's retort,

A halter pardon him, and Hell gnaw his bones,

says what we long to say, and helps us. And who has not felt in the last
scene how her glorious carelessness of her own life, and her outbursts
against Othello--even that most characteristic one,

She was too fond of her most filthy bargain--

lift the overwhelming weight of calamity that oppresses us, and bring us
an extraordinary lightening of the heart? Terror and pity are here too
much to bear; we long to be allowed to feel also indignation, if not
rage; and Emilia lets us feel them and gives them words. She brings us
too the relief of joy and admiration,--a joy that is not lessened by her
death. Why should she live? If she lived for ever she never could soar a
higher pitch, and nothing in her life became her like the losing
it.[122]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 107: It has been held, for example, that Othello treated Iago
abominably in preferring Cassio to him; that he _did_ seduce Emilia;
that he and Desdemona were too familiar before marriage; and that in any
case his fate was a moral judgment on his sins, and Iago a righteous, if
sharp, instrument of Providence.]

[Footnote 108: See III. iii. 201, V. i. 89 f. The statements are his
own, but he has no particular reason for lying. One reason of his
disgust at Cassio's appointment was that Cassio was a Florentine (I. i.
20). When Cassio says (III. i. 42) 'I never knew a Florentine more kind
and honest,' of course he means, not that Iago is a Florentine, but that
he could not be kinder and honester if he were one.]

[Footnote 109: I am here merely recording a general impression. There is
no specific evidence, unless we take Cassio's language in his drink (II.
ii. 105 f.) to imply that Iago was not a 'man of quality' like himself.
I do not know if it has been observed that Iago uses more nautical
phrases and metaphors than is at all usual with Shakespeare's
characters. This might naturally be explained by his roving military
life, but it is curious that almost all the examples occur in the
earlier scenes (see _e.g._ I. i. 30, 153, 157; I. ii. 17, 50; I. iii.
343; II. iii. 65), so that the use of these phrases and metaphors may
not be characteristic of Iago but symptomatic of a particular state of
Shakespeare's mind.]

[Footnote 110: See further Note P.]

[Footnote 111: But it by no means follows that we are to believe his
statement that there was a report abroad about an intrigue between his
wife and Othello (I. iii. 393), or his statement (which may be divined
from IV. ii. 145) that someone had spoken to him on the subject.]

[Footnote 112: See, for instance, Aaron in _Titus Andronicus_, II. iii.;
Richard in _3 Henry VI._, III. ii. and V. vi., and in _Richard III._, I.
i. (twice), I. ii.; Edmund in _King Lear_, I. ii. (twice), III. iii. and
v., V. i.]

[Footnote 113: See, further, Note Q.]

[Footnote 114: On the meaning which this phrase had for its author,
Coleridge, see note on p. 228.][Transcriber's note: Reference is to
Footnote 115.]

[Footnote 115: Coleridge's view is not materially different, though less
complete. When he speaks of 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless
malignity,' he does not mean by the last two words that 'disinterested
love of evil' or 'love of evil for evil's sake' of which I spoke just
now, and which other critics attribute to Iago. He means really that
Iago's malignity does not spring from the causes to which Iago himself
refers it, nor from any 'motive' in the sense of an idea present to
consciousness. But unfortunately his phrase suggests the theory which
has been criticised above. On the question whether there is such a thing
as this supposed pure malignity, the reader may refer to a discussion
between Professor Bain and F.H. Bradley in _Mind_, vol. viii.]

[Footnote 116: _I.e._ terrifying.]

[Footnote 117: Cf. note at end of lecture.][Transcriber's note: Refers
to Footnote 122.]

[Footnote 118: It was suggested to me by a Glasgow student.]

[Footnote 119: A curious proof of Iago's inability to hold by his creed
that absolute egoism is the only proper attitude, and that loyalty and
affection are mere stupidity or want of spirit, may be found in his one
moment of real passion, where he rushes at Emilia with the cry,
'Villainous whore!' (V. ii. 229). There is more than fury in his cry,
there is indignation. She has been false to him, she has betrayed him.
Well, but why should she not, if his creed is true? And what a
melancholy exhibition of human inconsistency it is that he should use as
terms of reproach words which, according to him, should be quite
neutral, if not complimentary!]

[Footnote 120: Cassio's invective against drink may be compared with
Hamlet's expressions of disgust at his uncle's drunkenness. Possibly the
subject may for some reason have been prominent in Shakespeare's mind
about this time.]

[Footnote 121: So the Quarto, and certainly rightly, though modern
editors reprint the feeble alteration of the Folio, due to fear of the
Censor, 'O heaven! O heavenly Powers!']

[Footnote 122: The feelings evoked by Emilia are one of the causes which
mitigate the excess of tragic pain at the conclusion. Others are the
downfall of Iago, and the fact, already alluded to, that both Desdemona
and Othello show themselves at their noblest just before death.]




LECTURE VII

KING LEAR


_King Lear_ has again and again been described as Shakespeare's greatest
work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully
his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas
except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him
best would pronounce for keeping _King Lear_.

Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four. The
'general reader' reads it less often than the others, and, though he
acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain
distaste. It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the
least successful there. And when we look back on its history we find a
curious fact. Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate
altered _King Lear_ for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting
Edgar in the place of the King of France as Cordelia's lover. From that
time Shakespeare's tragedy in its original form was never seen on the
stage for a century and a half. Betterton acted Tate's version; Garrick
acted it and Dr. Johnson approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In
1823 Kean, 'stimulated by Hazlitt's remonstrances and Charles Lamb's
essays,' restored the original tragic ending. At last, in 1838, Macready
returned to Shakespeare's text throughout.

What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts? Are the lovers of
Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and
play-goer, were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong? I
venture to doubt it. When I read _King Lear_ two impressions are left on
my mind, which seem to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. _King
Lear_ seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me
_not_ his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two
rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama,
it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly
inferior as a whole to _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and _Macbeth_. When I am
feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation
of Shakespeare's power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama,
but am grouping it in my mind with works like the _Prometheus Vinctus_
and the _Divine Comedy_, and even with the greatest symphonies of
Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.

This two-fold character of the play is to some extent illustrated by the
affinities and the probable chronological position of _King Lear_. It is
allied with two tragedies, _Othello_ and _Timon of Athens_; and these
two tragedies are utterly unlike.[123] _Othello_ was probably composed
about 1604, and _King Lear_ about 1605; and though there is a somewhat
marked change in style and versification, there are obvious resemblances
between the two. The most important have been touched on already: these
are the most painful and the most pathetic of the four tragedies, those
in which evil appears in its coldest and most inhuman forms, and those
which exclude the supernatural from the action. But there is also in
_King Lear_ a good deal which sounds like an echo of _Othello_,--a fact
which should not surprise us, since there are other instances where the
matter of a play seems to go on working in Shakespeare's mind and
re-appears, generally in a weaker form, in his next play. So, in _King
Lear_, the conception of Edmund is not so fresh as that of Goneril.
Goneril has no predecessor; but Edmund, though of course essentially
distinguished from Iago, often reminds us of him, and the soliloquy,
'This is the excellent foppery of the world,' is in the very tone of
Iago's discourse on the sovereignty of the will. The gulling of Gloster,
again, recalls the gulling of Othello. Even Edmund's idea (not carried
out) of making his father witness, without over-hearing, his
conversation with Edgar, reproduces the idea of the passage where
Othello watches Iago and Cassio talking about Bianca; and the conclusion
of the temptation, where Gloster says to Edmund:

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