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CORNELL 
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 LIBRARY-. 
 
 FROM THE INCOME 
 
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 MADE BY 
 
 BENNO LOEWY 
 1854-1919 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 2829.C91 
 
 An allegory of Othello. 
 
 3 1924 013 141 613 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 3j 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013141613 
 
AN ALLEGORY OF 
 OTHELLO 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES CREIGHTON, M.D. 
 
 LONDON 
 ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS 
 187 PICCADILLY 
 1912 
 
13-^ ^'4 
 
 " Many may imagine that I am here entering upon a work 
 of fancy^ or amusement, and design to use a poetical liberty, 
 in explaining poetical fables. It is true, fables in general are 
 composed of ductile matter, that may be drawn into great 
 variety by a witty talent or an inventive genius, and be 
 delivered of plausible meanings which they never contained. 
 . And certainly it were very injudicious to suffer the 
 fondness and licentiousness of a few to detract from the 
 honour of allegory and parable in general." — BaCON, Preface 
 to T/ie Wisdom of tlie Ancienis. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 1. INTRODUCTION 
 
 2. FIRST ACT AS PROLOGUE : BRABANTIO 
 
 3. OTHELLO . 
 
 4. DESDEMONA 
 
 5. lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 
 
 6. lAGO AT WORK 
 
 7. /EMILIA 
 
 8. RODERIGO . 
 
 9. CASSIO 
 
 10. BIANCA .... 
 
 11. GRATIANO AND LODOVICO . 
 
 12. MONTANO 
 
 INDEX OF LINES EXPLAINED 
 INDEX OF NAMES . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 13 
 28 
 
 37 
 44 
 
 73 
 112 
 117 
 122 
 124 
 127 
 128 
 
 13s 
 138 
 
SHAKESPEAREAN ALLEGORIES 
 
 PART L— OTHELLO 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION 
 
 If there be allegories in any of Shakespeare's plays, they have been 
 
 constructed on a plan peculiar to himself, and with a degree of 
 
 perfection not less unique. In allegories known to be such there are 
 
 four things so commonly found that they may be said to be the 
 
 conditions and drawbacks of the double sense. Those are tediousness, 
 
 want of a uniform and consistent design, a story newly made to suit 
 
 the previously chosen moral, and the double meaning either declared 
 
 or easily discoverable. There is, in Macaulay's opinion, only one brilliant 
 
 exception to the rule of tediousness — The Pilgrim's Progress. To the 
 
 rule of rambling design, or looseness of structure, there are naturally 
 
 exceptions among the old allegories of the stage. There is probably 
 
 no professed allegory in which the poet or novelist did not invent a 
 
 narrative or plot to fit his preconceived moral at every step. Lastly, 
 
 the symbolism underlying the tale, if it had not been announced in 
 
 the title or preface, can always be discovered to be present before we 
 
 have read many pages, although students and critics may be not 
 
 always able to agree as to what that symbolism is. The plays 
 
 of Shakespeare conform to none of those conditions of double 
 
 intention. Taking the four in an inverse order, the poet nowhere 
 
 declares or reveals an allegory. He is remarkable among all modern 
 
 dramatists of the first rank for an addiction to old plots, to which 
 
 he seems to adhere with needless closeness. He is distinguished 
 
 above all dramatists for his eagle flight, " bold and forth on," for his 
 
 design seen from afar and fulfilled in an undeviating course. And, 
 
 lastly, he is never tedious. Of his adherence to an old plot, one of 
 
 the best instances is 'The Winter's Tale,' in which some sixty or 
 
 more correspondences with Greene's Pandosto, great and small, can be 
 
 traced; another instance is his retention in 'Othello' of all the salient 
 
 incidents in Cinthio's tale of the Moor of Venice ; a third striking 
 
 I 
 
2 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 instance is his faithful adherence to the almost childish motives and 
 caprices in the legend of King Lear and his three daughters. There is 
 no better instance in all poetry of a great design firml>' g'||'P^^^"J 
 naturally unfolded in the order of the scenes than ' Othello. _ bucn 
 being his distinction from all allegorists, with the partial exception ot 
 Bunyan, it may seem as absurd to look for deliberate double purpose 
 'in his poetry as in the poetry of Homer, ^et it is in some of those 
 peculiarities and distinctions of Shakespeare as a playwright that the 
 hypothesis of allegory in certain plays finds its firmest ground. The 
 most significant of them is the adoption of an old plot or familiar 
 history, and the almost ostentatious adherence to it. The only 
 allegorist who has done that in a certain sense is Bunyan, and he is 
 the only one of them who has succeeded in giving human interest to 
 his symbolic story. As the coincidence is singular, I may be per- 
 mitted to digress for a moment to the case of Bunyan. 
 
 He has told us, in the verses prefixed as an Apology for his Book, 
 how he came to be an allegorist. He was engaged on a religious 
 work of the kind usual " in this our gospel-day." Suddenly he fell 
 into an allegory about the way to glory, in more than twenty things. 
 These he set down, and soon found twenty more, " and they again 
 began to multiply like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly." Nay, 
 then, thought he, if you do breed so fast, I'll put you by yourselves. 
 He only thought to make he knew not what, nor did he think to 
 instruct and edify mankind. " No, not I ; I did it my own self to 
 gratify." Having now his method by the end, "still as I pulled, it 
 came" ; and so he wrote Tlie Pilgrim's Progress. Some of his friends 
 advised him to print it ; others said. No, taking various objections. 
 To these he set himself to reply, and in doing so discovered that he 
 had not merely pleased himself by the exercise of his invention, but 
 had fulfilled a moral purpose perhaps better than if he had written 
 the book he intended at first. He succeeded in reaching the affections 
 and filling the imagination with moving images because he took the 
 reader everywhere into his confidence, using for his scenes the familiar 
 metaphors of Scripture, calling his characters by expressive names 
 (which he might have borrowed from Ben Jonson's comedies), and 
 clinching every lesson of the allegory at every step of the journey by 
 a text cited with chapter and verse from holy writ. 
 
 In the assumed parallel of Shakespeare, there is at least one 
 thing the same, and that an essential — the constant stimulus to the 
 imagination in finding similitudes or analogies between two unlike 
 things, of which one was in a manner fixed by convention for 
 the other to conform to by the poet's ingenuity. The journey of 
 Bunyan's pilgrim, and all that befel him by the way, was devised for 
 the occasion ; while the spiritual side of the allegory was all familiar 
 matter, not only the doctrines, but also the imagery : the valley of 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 the shadow of death was known to everyone in the Psalms, the 
 strait and narrow way was in the Gospels, the contests were in the 
 Epistles, even the more delectable things were in the Song of 
 Solomon, and the heavenly joys at the end of the journey were in the 
 Apocalypse. The conventional or fixed points for Shakespeare were 
 the converse, namely, some old plot or story ; yet the stimulus to the 
 imagination in making an inward and spiritual meaning conform to 
 a pre-established action was the same as in the invention of a natural 
 journey to suit something already settled and familiar in the things 
 of the spirit. And as Bunyan began that delightful exercise of the 
 mind to please himself, so we may suppose that Shakespeare did, 
 but keeping to himself the secret of his inspiration. In respect of 
 moral purpose, of course the parallel fails ; for the dramatist could 
 hardly be said to inculcate a moral if he declined to tell what 
 the moral was. What he has succeeded in, like Bunyan, is to be 
 intensely interesting ; and he has done even better for his own fame, 
 by exciting a curiosity as to his meaning, which a never-ceasing 
 criticism and commentary in all the languages of the world has only 
 in part gratified. 
 
 Whether the attempt to prove him an allegorist, and to discover 
 his allegories, will help to gratify that natural curiosity any more 
 than the criticisms a la mode, remains to be seen. Isaac D'Israeli 
 called the interpretation of even a confessed allegory '' usually the 
 forlorn hope of literature." But in the instance of Rabelais' allegory 
 of the ecclesiastical state of Europe in his own time, it appears that 
 students are now on the whole agreed as to the originals of sixty or 
 more symbols. In Spenser's case the attempt is hopeless, for the 
 reason that he had no intellectual grasp of his whole theme, but 
 only a sense of the beauties of its several episodes. In the case of 
 Shakespeare, if the attempt should fail, that will not be from any 
 want of completeness and consistency in the poet's thought, but only 
 because there is no double sense uniformly present in the plays in 
 question. If he has indeed allegorised, he has succeeded so perfectly 
 in suiting his open to his latent meaning that the real presence of 
 the latter is seldom suspected, and may easily be denied. 
 
 Yet there are plays of Shakespeare in which he invites us by an 
 occasional hint to look for something below the surface. ' Hamlet ' 
 is of course the clearest case, When Hamlet says, " You would pluck 
 out the heart of my mystery," he uses a stronger phrase than he 
 needed for his immediate answer to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 
 who had been sent for from the university of Wittenberg to find out 
 whether he was mad or only shamming. But even without the hint 
 of "my mystery," a play which turns upon feigned madness is 
 necessarily an irony or dissimulation of the poet as well as of his 
 hero, who is indeed himself. It is needless to labour the point, 
 
4 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 because all the world admits that ' Hamlet' is a riddle. On different 
 grounds, "all critics of name" would admit 'Othello' into the same 
 class. One of these, in the Edinburgh Review (July 1840), who 
 calls 'Hamlet' "a riddle of the Sphinx," goes on to call 'Othello' 
 " a moral enigma." Professor Bradley, the most unlikely of critics to 
 find a mare's-nest, has been arrested by something latent in the brief 
 parting words between Othello and lago : 
 
 0th. Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil 
 Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body ? 
 
 lago. Demand me nothing ; what you know, you know. 
 From this time forth I never will speak word. 
 
 0th. Well, thou dost best. 
 
 This, says the Professor, " is the question ; lago refused to answer 
 it — he could not have answered it. But Shakespeare knew the 
 answer." It is more than a truism to say that the poet knew the 
 answer; it means that he knew it, and, knowing also our curiosity 
 about it, left us to find it out if we can. In my view of lago, he could 
 have answered it if the author had let him ; there is meaning in his 
 words, " What you know, you know," and no less in Othello's assent, 
 " Well, thou dost best." 
 
 In 'King Lear' there is no such plain hint as in 'Hamlet 'and 
 'Othello' of something undeclared. If there be allegory in it, as 
 Bradley half suspects from the inhuman characters of Goneril and 
 Regan, it is so guarded by a charmed circle of illusion that one can 
 hardly penetrate to it. Yet there will ever be a haunting suspicion 
 of something behind, because the legendary action is as trivial as a 
 nursery tale, and the terrific explosions of Lear unaccountable in any 
 theory of him as a literal ancient Briton, mad or sane. I carried 
 about in my pocket for many months a copy of ' King Lear,' feeling 
 sure that there was an allegory there if only 1 could find a beginning 
 to it. I did at length find a clue in something said by Lear's Fool that 
 brought to mind the poet John Skelton of Henry VIII.'s time; and 
 from that I went on until I had disentangled, and proved from double 
 meanings in the text, a complete allegory of the Reformation in 
 England, with mainly abstractions personified in the greater parts, 
 and in the minor parts such real persons as Wolsey, Skelton, Erasmus! 
 More, Surrey, Norfolk, Cromwell, and Somerset. That exposition of 
 •King Lear' I hope to submit to the reader's judgment as Part II. 
 Meanwhile I proceed with the allegory of ' Othello,' which is also in 
 the sphere of English ecclesiastical history, but of a later date than 
 the Reformation, and to be taken first because it was earlier in the 
 poet's thought. Those are the two tragedies in which Shakespeare 
 has allegorised the affairs of the churches, and made his contribution 
 to the religious problem. It is a subject on which he is supposed to 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 have kept a judicious silence. But it is one on which he may well 
 have had a mind and a will to deliver it, if only to please himself, or 
 to poke fun at King James and the bishops ; and he could not have 
 done so under any other form. 
 
 But those are not his only allegories. He used symbolism in his 
 later plays to a far greater extent than has ever been suspected. In 
 a former book (1904) I showed how 'The Tempest' could be read as 
 an allegory of the poet's own literary life. The comedy had been 
 expounded before by M. Emile Montegut {Rev. des Deux Mondes, 
 1st August i86s),,in a paper entitled " Une Hypoth^se sur la Tempete 
 de Shakespeare," as an allegorical history of his life — cette histoire 
 allegorique de sa vie ; but so generally, or if at all particularly, yet so 
 capriciously, that not a single character save Prospero himself was 
 identified correctly by means of the marks which the text affords. 
 The chief revelation of the play is, that Antonio, " most wicked sir," 
 who was Prospero's arch-enemy, corresponds with Lord Southampton. 
 ' The Tempest ' is obviously " the story of my life " only in outline, 
 or one retrospective view of the whole. Although I guessed from 
 that outline that the poet had collaborated with his patron in certain 
 plays, and that an inveterate quarrel had ensued, I found Prospero's 
 wrongs in general, and some of his specific charges, very difficult to 
 understand, but did not suppose that any details would ever be forth- 
 coming from the same kind of symbolism in other plays. As I 
 continued my reading, several things began to come to light (first in 
 ' Twelfth Night '), which seemed to fill in parts of the outline of ' The 
 Tempest'; and as 1 proceeded very tentatively with one unlikely 
 play after another, I found to my great surprise that the whole 
 particulars of a literary partnership with Southampton, and of the 
 grounds of the quarrel and the issues of it, were given from various 
 points of view, according to the opportunities of the plot, under the 
 several disguises of ' The Winter's Tale,' ' Macbeth,' ' Cymbeline,' 
 and, most comprehensively of all, under ' Anthony and Cleopatra.' 
 These discoveries from the text, after some practice in reading 
 hieroglyphics, helped by collateral evidence from outside, are all 
 written out and ready for publication ; but whether they shall ever see 
 the light depends on the reception that may await the two religious 
 allegories as an academical " program " or experiment. 
 
 It is now certain that ' Othello ' was played on the king's private 
 stage at Whitehall on the feast of All Saints, ist November 1604. 
 At one time there was a suspicion that Peter Cunningham had 
 composed out of his imagination the whole leaf of the Revels Accounts 
 in which that entry of Mr ' Shaxberd's ' play occurs ; but it was known 
 from Malone's papers in the Bodleian Library that he must have 
 seen some such entry long before Cunningham came on the scene, 
 and it has now been proved that there never was any forgery in the 
 
6 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 matter. That performance at All Saints may not have been the 
 first ; yet it is probable that the play was then new, and that the 
 poet had been commissioned to write a play for the king's stage at 
 the particular festival. In any case, 'Othello' was probably written 
 in 1604. It followed ' Measure for Measure,' the plot of both being 
 taken from the same collection of Italian tales by Giraldi Cinthio. 
 Whetstone had used Cinthio for the plot of Promos and Cassandra 
 in 1579, and Shakespeare had based on Whetstone in his 'Measure 
 for Measure.' But he would naturally have wished to see the original 
 of the story which Whetstone had dramatised ; he might easily have 
 got it read to him from the Italian by someone, say John Florio, or 
 he may have known enough of the language, helped by his knowledge 
 of Latin, to have skimmed it for himself In the same collection he 
 would have found " II Moro di Venezia," while, for his greater ease, he 
 could have got it translated on a few folios, as it is of no great length. 
 No one had dramatised the tragedy of the black and white marriage 
 in any language, so far as is known ; nor is it at first sight a promising 
 subject for the stage. But Shakespeare must have seen something 
 in it that he fancied. What it was that he saw in the gross and crude 
 materials remains to be brought out in detail in the sequel ; but here 
 it may be hazarded that his choice of the theme for his All Saints 
 play at Court was determined by the discovery of its allegorical 
 possibilities. Allegorical plays at Court, especially at religious 
 festivals, had been common since the reign of Henry VII., and in 
 Elizabeth's time there had been at least two allegories of marriage 
 between such qualities as wit and wisdom, or wit and science. A 
 marriage between black and white was something hitherto unattempted 
 in that line. It was bound to end in tragedy, whatever symbolism 
 might be given respectively to the white lady of Venice and to the 
 valiant Moor. To see in them the symbolism which Shakespeare 
 extracted from them implies more than the sudden flash of recogni- 
 tion which Goethe assumed for the inception of ' Hamlet.' Besides 
 an "unexpected impression," there must have been ideas collecting 
 for a long time which would fall into their places in some architectural 
 design. Trains of thought are formed from reflection on passing 
 events or current reading, which combine to some dramatic unity, 
 like a chemical solution depositing crystals under some influence.' 
 We may safely assume that the crystallising influence came from 
 some topic of the year 1604. It happens that we get a clue to what 
 that was from the matter of the first act, which is from some other 
 source than the Italian story. There is first a curiously particular 
 account of an alarm at Venice on account of a Turkish attemot 
 Cyprus ; the duke and council are in midnight session, there are 
 various rumours of the strength of the Turkish fleet, and there is a 
 question whether they did not intend to attack Rhodes before Cyprus 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 The reasons for looking beneath the surface of this animated affair 
 are two : first, that nothing of the kind occurs in Cinthio, who makes 
 the Moor's appointment to Cyprus a simple matter of routine on 
 changing the command there in rotation ; and, secondly, that 
 Shakespeare's new matter is speciously like real Venetian history, 
 but is altered to suit some purpose of his own. The Turks attacked 
 Cyprus only once, in 1571, and then captured it. They could have 
 had no designs on Rhodes on the same occasion, for Rhodes had 
 been their own since 1522. In the play, the Turkish fleet, variously 
 estimated at 107, 140, or 200 galleys, is wrecked in a storm, and the 
 war is over. The alarm, the urgency for Othello's services, and the 
 storm are all used with consummate skill to give animation to the 
 first act and the opening scene of the second. But nothing turns 
 on the Turkish attempt for the real action of the tragedy ; the 
 prominence given to it, and the minute particulars of it, are inexplicable 
 except as an amusing parable. 
 
 The Turks in the first act are the Nonconforming clergy in the 
 reign of Elizabeth. The nickname had sprung from a saying of 
 the Calvinist Cartwright, that they ought rather to conform to the 
 usages of the Turks than to the rites of Rome. Hooker had rubbed 
 in the name of Turks for the Nonconformists at the end of his fourth 
 book, in an eloquent passage where he further illustrates their hatred 
 of everything savouring of even the name of Rome, by the example of 
 the ancient Romans banishing even the name of Tarquin from their 
 city, happening upon the same story from Livy which Shakespeare 
 had told in the same year, 1594, in the Argument of his ' Lucrece.' 
 The Duke in midnight council over the Turkish preparations is King 
 James at the Hampton Court Conference in January 1604, where "the 
 Turks" were again in evidence in the gowns of Turkey merchants, 
 which the four Oxford and Cambridge delegates of Nonconformity 
 wore instead of the academical robes " sorting to their degrees." The 
 discrepant estimates of the Turkish fleet are the uncertain number of 
 signatures of the clergy to the so-called Millenary Petition which gave 
 occasion to the Conference — variously estimated at 700, 800, or 1000. 
 Most amusing of all, Brabantio, the father of Desdemona, who does 
 not appear at all in Cinthio's story, is Archbishop Whitgift. The 
 feint on Rhodes is an abortive attack on doctrines — roads or well- 
 trodden highways of thought. Cyprus is cyprus-stuff or " cypres," 
 a black crepe, soft and fine like lawn, which symbolises rites and 
 ceremonies. 
 
 The after fleet with which the main Turkish fleet " injointed " 
 somewhere in the vicinity of Rhodes, numbering some thirty sail, 
 as near as the sailor could guess, were the nine ultra-Calvinist 
 Lambeth Articles, which got Whitgift into trouble with Elizabeth, and 
 were actually demanded at the Conference to be added to the Thirty- 
 
8 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 nine Articles. Some proof of all this from the text of the play remains 
 for the next section. Here it must suffice to assume that we are 
 introduced to the ecclesiastical situation in England at the accession 
 of James. We carry the religious symbolism with us to Cyprus, 
 where it is brought out with great beauty in the speeches of Cassio 
 on Desdemona while they were awaiting her and in welcoming her, 
 and in her reunion with Othello after his stormy voyage. I am 
 incurring some risk of prejudice by giving here a bare outline of what 
 is entirely novel and not easy to prove ; but it seems necessary that 
 I should put the reader in possession of the heads of the allegory 
 before entering on the details. The " Turks " at the Hampton Court 
 Conference, having served their purpose in the first act, especially the 
 purpose of bringing in Brabantio, are dismissed from the action, and 
 the way left clear for the domestic scenes in Cyprus. In the religious 
 allegory these were really imagined from certain events of a few years 
 earlier date than the Conference of 1604. The antecedent events 
 were the publication of Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1594- 
 97, and a remarkable anonymous attack upon Hooker in 1599, called 
 A Christian Letter, etc. This attack was secret, without even the 
 printer's name ; it was masterly, and it was effective, Hooker himself 
 having written below the colophon of his copy of the pamphlet (now 
 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford) : " You have given me as many 
 stabs as my body could receive at your hands, although in effect — I 
 praise God for it — -none of them deadly" ; but he died about a year 
 after, and it was currently rumoured that the criticism had killed him. 
 Of that mysterious affair, now known only to students of Keble's 
 edition of Hooker, and practically disregarded since Keble's time, I 
 shall prove three things : first, that the secret pamphleteer who 
 exposed the illogical or vague nature of the first Anglican via media 
 was Francis Bacon ; secondly, that the method and some of the 
 particular points, and even the identical figures of speech, of the 
 unknown critic of Hooker are used in parable to inspire lago's 
 subversion of Othello's belief in his wife ; and, thirdly, that lago's 
 grievances are exactly Bacon's, in his lack of promotion in the law, 
 and lago's principles of conduct those of Bacon's essays. Each of 
 these three proofs I shall give independently of the other two, so that 
 the evidence for lago as Bacon will be seen to be concurrent from 
 three several sides. It is this discovery that explains the mystery of 
 lago's apparent want of motive, and gives the key to his powerful 
 intellect, his reputation for honesty, and his denial that his conduct 
 was villainous, although it might seem so. But the object of lago's 
 subversion in the play is not Hooker. The author of the Ecclesiastical 
 Polity is indeed a character in the drama, but a subordinate one. It 
 can be shown with little difficulty that he is Montano, the ordinary 
 Governor of Cyprus, whom Othello replaced temporarily— an invention 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 of Shakespeare's with certain things said of him from some source 
 outside the action, which are very plainly taken from the life and 
 character of Hooker (Section XII.). There was more than one reason 
 why this famous contemporary of Shakespeare and Bacon should not 
 have been made the protagonist in the tragedy, although his own 
 end was commonly believed to have been tragic at some enemy's 
 hands. The noble Moor had to be a valiant soldier, a man of action 
 rather than a meek thinker and recluse, and, above all, he had to be 
 black. Blackness in the religious symbolism of the time was heresy, 
 as in "the Morisco dance of heretics." Now, although Hooker had 
 been accused of heresy by his anonymous enemy, he was a heretic in 
 his own despite, he had little sympathy with the brave spirits of the 
 Reformation, and he wrote on his copy of the pamphlet which had 
 challenged his Protestantism the words taken from St Augustine, 
 which Keble has adopted for the motto of Hooker's whole works : 
 " But an heretic, by the help of Almighty God, I will never be." 
 
 The heretical type which combined both the valour and the 
 blackness of Othello, and recalled his descent from men of royal 
 siege, was the Lollard — a distinctive product of English soil which 
 once, in the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II., found favour with 
 princes and nobles as well as with Piers the ploughman, and spread 
 its influence as far as Bohemia. We shall find that the Moor's story 
 of the dangers he had passed, of capture by the insolent foe and 
 being sold to slavery, of his redemption thence, and portance in his 
 travail, and of all his pilgrimage, the story which excited the pity and 
 won the love of Desdemona, which moved the Duke to say, " I think 
 this tale would win my daughter too " — we shall find from one or two 
 slight things in it that this was the story of the English Reformation 
 from the time of Wicklif, " from my boyish days even to the moment 
 when he [Brabantio] bade me tell it." This Lollard spirit was also 
 Othello's " unhoused free condition " — the very connotation of the 
 name " Lollard " — -which he would not have put into circumscrip- 
 tion and confine for the sea's worth but that he loved the gentle 
 Desdemona. 
 
 But at this point we are thrown back upon the literalism of the 
 Moor of Venice. He was a pagan before his marriage, if not 
 expressly so called by Cinthio, yet clearly so assumed by Shakespeare. 
 His paganism is brought to our notice by Brabantio, and his baptism 
 by lago, who must have known it when Brabantio was unaware of it. 
 He had been received into the Church as a necessary preliminary to 
 his marriage with a lady of Venice. Thus he is a neophyte, and the 
 condition of his marriage with Desdemona, or the religion into which 
 he was baptized, is opportunely his acceptance of the recent teaching 
 of Hooker. In the end, as we shall see, he reverts to the same type 
 of fighting Lollard who had won Desdemona's heart by the story of 
 
10 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 the dangers he had passed. But in order to blend all the elements of 
 the tragedy, his blackness as a heretic has to be interchangeable with 
 his blackness as a pagan, or the literal situation of a Moor about to 
 be married to a Christian has to be taken in the religious symbolism 
 which pertains to it naturally. He is thus enabled to feel all the ardour 
 and joy of a neophyte. Also his " unbookish jealousjFiP^tnore easily 
 wrought upon by lago, for he is supposed to be in the position of one 
 of those catechumens of the early Church from whom the mystery of 
 the Sacraments was withheld as matter of intellectual apprehension. 
 
 Desdemona is the traditional Sacrament of the Altar in England, 
 descended from medieval times, something undefinable, which excelled 
 the quirks of blazoning pens, and in the essential vesture of creation did 
 tire the ingener. She was a maiden never bold, of spirit so still and 
 quiet that her motion blushed at herself, so opposite to marriage that 
 she had forsook many noble matches, many proposed matches of her 
 own clime, complexion, and degree — alliances proposed with Augsburg 
 or with Geneva, as well as with Rome, but all alike declined. 
 
 Here we return to the ground of Hooker's treatise and to the fore- 
 bodings of Brabantio, who is the Calvinist archbishop, and to the 
 practices of lago. The most notable thing in the Ecclesiastical Polity 
 was the doctrine, or rather no doctrine, of the Sacraments. It was 
 this that King James specially singled out : " I have received more 
 satisfaction in reading a leaf, or paragraph, in Mr Hooker, though 
 it were but about the fashion of churches, or church music, or the like, 
 but especially of the Sacraments, than I have had in reading particular 
 large treatises," etc. It was this form of High Church in Hooker 
 which Charles I. commended to his sons, and it was the study of the 
 same that converted one of them, James II., to the Mass. Shake- 
 speare may or may not have looked so far into the seeds of time ; but 
 he makes Othello discover, under the tuition of lago, that he had 
 inadvertently married the Mass. The fanaticism of the Lollard 
 breaks out when the truth comes home to him, for he recalls that the 
 Mass had become a thing of sale. 
 
 Was this fair paper, this most goodly book. 
 
 Made to write " whore " upon ? What committed ! 
 
 Committed ! — O thou public commoner! 
 
 I should make very forges of my cheeks, 
 
 That would to cinders burn up modesty, 
 
 Did I but speak thy deeds. — What committed ! 
 
 Heaven stops the nose at it and the moon winks ; 
 
 The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets. 
 
 Is hushed within the hollow mine of earth, 
 
 And will not hear it. — What committed! — 
 
 Impudent strumpet ! 
 
 Des. By heaven, you do me wrong. 
 
 0th. Are not you a strumpet ? 
 
 Des. No, as I am a Christian. 
 
INTRODUCTION ii 
 
 The allegory of ' Othello ' is indeed the tragedy of the Sacrament. 
 It was not the first time that the saving victim had been brought 
 upon the stage. There was an old mystery-play, called " The Play of 
 the Blessed Sacrament/' of which a copy is preserved in the library 
 of Trinity College, Dublin. Collier has given some account of it in 
 his chapter on the " History of the English Stage to the Time of 
 Shakespeare.' The host is brought into the action as a miraculous 
 cake, which yields blood when stabbed, and turns red the water of 
 the cauldron in which it is boiled, and when thrown into an oven 
 bursts asunder and gives out the figure of the Saviour, who rises from 
 the fumes and speaks to the sacrilegious company of Jews, like the 
 " artificial sprites" rising and speaking from the cauldron in 'Macbeth.' 
 The date of this quaint play is supposed to be the reign of Henry VI. 
 or Edward IV. It happens that the same Dublin library contains 
 Hooker's MS. draft of a reply to his anonymous critic, of which 
 several folios are devoted to the Sacraments. " In a word," he says, 
 " Sacraments Bxe God's secrets, discovered to none but His own people," 
 and in support of that " large " meaning he cites TertuUian and St 
 Augustine, the former actually speaking of the sacrainentum, or 
 secret, of " an allegory," and of sacramenta contained in allegorical 
 " figures " such as that of Hagar and Mount Sinai, which St Paul 
 borrowed from Philo. From this generic usage. Hooker passes to 
 Sacraments as visible signs or tokens of invisible grace. One need 
 not assume that Shakespeare had seen either the MS. play of the 
 Blessed Sacrament, or Hooker's reply to his critic, both of which 
 afterwards found their way to Trinity College, Dublin, or that he 
 otherwise knew Tertullian's large mean'mg of sacramentum, although 
 I can show, and have elsewhere given the proof, that he knew of the 
 allegorisings of Philo. But we can as little set bounds to his dis- 
 cursive reading and thinking as to the flights of his imagination ; nor 
 can we ignore the dependence of the latter on the former. To 
 allegorise the Sacrament was to turn the name to its original use. To 
 bring the allegory upon the stage without its real presence being 
 discovered was to do in a poetical way what had been done before 
 in a gross way. At all events, the play of the divine Desdemona is 
 the play of the Blessed Sacrament in certain circumstances of time 
 and place. 
 
 In no other play except 'King Lear' does Shakespeare's imagina- 
 tion move so familiarly among the symbols of things spiritual, 
 borne onwards with an unfaltering pen to the final " Soft you ! a word 
 or two before you go. " The sincerity and natural pathos which the 
 poet has somehow imparted to his work had not their origin in the 
 gross anomaly of a white woman married to a negro — a conceivable 
 matter of interest and speculation to a colonial drin king-saloon — 
 but in the universal antinomy of superstition and truth, and the need 
 
12 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 that most everyone has of some fiction of the one to cover some 
 nakedness of the other. 
 
 The discovery of symbolism in this great tragedy is not, of course, 
 necessary to its effect upon our minds. But I believe that the 
 allegory will be found to explain a good many difficulties of the text, 
 of the characterisation, and of the action, which are felt most by 
 students, and are confessed in the variorum notes ; also that it will 
 bring out new beauties and much latent wit (which I do not profess 
 to exhaust) ; and, above all, that it will enable us to understand how 
 the playwright could carry through so monstrous an action with so 
 profound conviction to so imposing a catastrophe. The grasp, the 
 harmony, the sequence of thought, the consistent moral, are amazing 
 if we look below the surface or read between the lines. But if we 
 look only at the ostensible meaning, there is not even so much 
 probability and ethical consistency as in Cinthio's chronicle of small 
 beer. This was the criticism of Rymer (1693), and of Mrs Lennox 
 (1753)) and of Tolstoy in our own day, and it is not easy to answer if 
 their matter-of-fact point of view be granted. Macaulay pronounced 
 Rymer (the editor of the Fcederd) to be " the worst critic that ever 
 lived," and ' Othello,' which was the chief object of his animadversions, 
 to be " perhaps the greatest work in the world." But he did not deign 
 to answer the objections of Rymer, whose literalism he shared to the 
 full; nor will any literalist ever be able to explain why 'Othello' is 
 " perhaps the greatest work in the world," how much soever he may 
 feel its power. 
 
II. THE FIRST ACT AS PROLOGUE : BRABANTIO 
 
 In Cinthio's story the father of Desdemona does not appear ; we are 
 merely told that " her relations did all they could to make her take 
 another husband." The pair lived happily in wedlock at Venice for 
 some months, until the Moor was appointed to the command of the 
 troops ordered to Cyprus to relieve the old garrison. He hesitated 
 to take his wife with him on account of the voyage, but she elected to 
 go with him. The Moor here makes a speech of half a page in the 
 Italian original, and Desdemona answers at equal length. This is the 
 only place in the whole of Shakespeare's first act where he has taken 
 even a formal hint from Cinthio, and of course the substance of the 
 speeches is altogether different. 
 
 The Lieutenant, the Ensign, and the Ensign's wife, who are not 
 otherwise named by Cinthio, are first mentioned as making the voyage 
 with the Commandant and his wife in the same galley. There is 
 not a word of any grievance felt by the Ensign because he had been 
 refused the Lieutenant's place, nor has he any enmity to the Moor on 
 that or any other ground. The whole party are carried to Cyprus by 
 a favourable wind, and become settled there in perfect amity for a 
 time. The Lieutenant is a favourite of the Moor, and is often invited 
 to his house, where Desdemona is hospitable to him merely for her 
 husband's sake. Meanwhile the Ensign conceives an unlawful passion 
 for Desdemona, of which she is wholly unaware. Because he is thus 
 ignored by the lady, the Ensign (who has been characterised very 
 plainly as a man of good presence, but superficial and plausible and 
 at heart a coward and a sneak) changes from love to hatred, and 
 resolves to accomplish her ruin. His plan is the same as lago's, 
 namely, to accuse her to her husband of being too familiar with the 
 Lieutenant. But it is solely against Desdemona, not at all against 
 the Moor, that his emnity is directed. There is no Roderigo in the 
 case. (Shakespeare's other new parts are Montano the ordinary 
 governor of Cyprus, Brabantio the father of Desdemona, his brother 
 Gratiano, his kinsman Lodovico, and the Duke of Venice.) 
 
 This is, of course, a very different beginning from Shakespeare's. 
 The curtain rises on lago conversing with his friend Roderigo, who 
 takes it much unkindly that lago should have been pocketing his 
 
 13 
 
14 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 money for helping his suit to Desdemona, knowing all the time of 
 her love for the Moor, which had resulted that night in their elope- 
 ment and marriage. lago pacifies him, unfolds his own grievance 
 and his hearted hatred of Othello, and shows that they ought to be 
 conjunctive in their revenge. They go together to arouse Brabantio, 
 lago on the way declaring that his policy is to iniflict on Othello as 
 many pin-pricks as he can, to plague him with flies, and " though that 
 his joy be joy " to throw such chances of vexation on it that it may 
 lose some colour. 
 
 Arrived under the magnifico's windows, he begins shouting indecent 
 gibes about the issue of the cross breeding. Brabantio hears the 
 shouting and comes out, but gathers no distinct meaning from the 
 jargon, until Roderigo, whom he knows, explains to him simply and 
 seriously that his daughter has eloped. lago makes off in the dark, 
 and Roderigo attends the Senator to the Council, which is in midnight 
 session. The occasion of the Duke being in council at that hour is 
 the tidings of a Turkish expedition against the Venetian possessions 
 in the Levant. Here the playwright has taken a few hints from 
 Knolles's History of the Turks, 1C03 ; but he has used them for some 
 purpose of his own and in complete disregard of historical fact. 
 The Turks attacked Cyprus for the first time in 1570-71, and 
 captured it from the Venetians. Rhodes had been theirs since 1522. 
 The Turkish war on Cyprus, as related by Knolles, presents many 
 motives, incidents, and results which a dramatist might have turned 
 to account ; but Shakespeare has deviated from them, except in the 
 single matter of the junction of two fleets near Rhodes, and invented 
 new particulars, not because he could make them more picturesque 
 than the real would have been, but because he wanted something else 
 for his allegory. The first novelty is, that various rumours are flying 
 about as to the strength of the Turkish fleet. Some letters say they 
 have 107 galleys, others say 140, others 200; all agree that they are 
 bearing up for Cyprus. But now arrives a sailor to say that "the 
 Turkish preparations " are making for Rhodes ; so he was bid to 
 report by Signior Angelo. This is thought to be probably a feint, 
 first, because of the importance of Cyprus to the Turk, and, secondly, 
 because it lacked " the abilities that Rhodes is dressed in." 
 
 Senator. We must not think the Turk is so unskilful. 
 To leave that latest which concerns him first. 
 Neglecting an attempt of ease and gain, 
 To wake and wage a danger profitless. 
 
 And so it proved; the Ottomites, steering with due course towards 
 the isle of Rhodes, had there injointed them with an after fleet of 
 some thirty sail, and now they do re-stem their backward course, 
 bearing with frank appearance their purposes toward Cyprus. The 
 Duke then inquires after a person with a remarkable name : 
 
THE FIRST ACT AS PROLOGUE : BRABANTIO 
 
 15 
 
 Marcus Luccicos, is he not in town ? 
 1 Sen. He's now in Florence. 
 Buke. Write from us to him ; post-post-haste despatch. 
 
 But we hear no more of Marcus Luccicos, nor of Signior Angelo. 
 I suppose this is omitted in playing; but why was it ever put in ? 
 
 Brabantio enters hurriedly to the council in session. On his way 
 to seek for his daughter he had met an officer of the Senate, who 
 said to him : 
 
 The duke's in council, and your noble self, 
 I am sure, is sent for. 
 
 Brab. How ! the duke in council ! 
 
 Soon after he entered the council chamber, the Duke observed 
 him, and greeted him politely : 
 
 Duke. I did not see you; welcome, gentle signior; 
 We lack'd your counsel and your help to-night. 
 
 Brab. So did I yours. Good your grace, pardon me; 
 Neither my place, nor aught I heard of business 
 Hath rais'd me from my bed : nor doth the general care 
 Take any hold of me; for my particular grief 
 Is of so flood-gate and o'erbearmg nature, 
 That it engluts and swallows other sorrows, 
 And it is still itself 
 
 This is, of course, a perfectly natural speech for Brabantio to make 
 
 with the flight of his daughter in his mind. But it is remarkable 
 
 that the magnifico should not have been summoned to the council, 
 
 and still more so that he should disclaim all interest in public business : 
 
 " Neither my place nor aught I heard of business hath raised me 
 
 from my bed, nor doth the general care take any hold on me." 
 
 Brabantio's confession is so naive for a magnifico of Venice, that we 
 
 are led to think what it means. It can hardly mean that he was 
 
 so old a senator as to have ceased to attend to public business, for 
 
 he refers to " my place " as if he had active duties of his own, and 
 
 again we learn that " the magnifico is much beloved, and hath a voice 
 
 potential and double as the Duke's." His is a power in the state, 
 
 and yet "the general care" does not take any hold of him. It looks 
 
 as if Brabantio might be some high ecclesiastic, vicar apostolic in the 
 
 Venetian state ; and if we read again all that gives individuality to 
 
 his part, we shall find that he is a most felicitous and amusing portrait 
 
 of Archbishop Whitgift. That prelate never allowed the general care 
 
 to take any hold of him, but confined himself so strictly to his 
 
 " particular grief," that it became his v^ell-known distinction. Fuller 
 
 says that he would come to the council chamber every morning, 
 
 but if he found that there was no church business, he had a formula 
 
 ready, " Then, my lords, here is no need of me," and went back to 
 
 Lambeth. This is Brabantio's " neither my place nor aught I heard 
 
 of business." 
 
i6 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 The phrase which Fuller has preserved was perfectly characteristic 
 of Whitgift. He was so capable a man of business that he was in 
 request for many other duties besides his ecclesiastical. As Master 
 of Trinity he managed the whole business of the university. When 
 he went thence to be Bishop of Worcester, he was loaded with the 
 civil duties of vice-president of the Council of the Marches of Wales, 
 and with the appointment of the justices for Worcestershire and 
 Warwickshire. When he was Archbishop, the Queen pressed him 
 in 1587 to accept the vacant office of Lord Chancellor. ''But he, 
 excusing himself in many respects, that he was grown into years, 
 and had the burthen of all ecclesiastical businesses laid on his back 
 (which was as much as one man could well undergo, considering 
 the troubles with so many sectaries that were sprung up), desired to 
 be spared." 
 
 Brabantio describes his "particular grief" in words which need 
 not have been so out of the way if there were nothing more under 
 them than his anxiety to recover his daughter. His grief " is of so 
 flood-gate and o'erbearing nature, that it engluts and swallows other 
 sorrows, and it is still itself" 
 
 Duke. Why, what's the matter? 
 
 Brab. My daughter ! O, my daughter ! 
 
 Flood-gate and overbearing grief is ingenious. Assuming that 
 Brabantio wept, it means that his grief was so overpowering as to 
 sweep past the flood-gates of his eyelids. Yet it was the " nature" of 
 his grief to be flood-gate and overbearing, which is a happy description 
 of Whitgift's ecclesiastical policy. He was the flood-gate to the strong 
 current of Nonconformity, and he was so overbearing in his methods 
 of repression that he was called the Pope of Lambeth. Harington, 
 in his amusing sketches of past church dignitaries, written for Prince 
 Henry, says of Whitgift : " He was a great stay in Court and Council 
 to all oppressions of the Church, though the current was sometimes so 
 violent as one man's force could not stop!' Brabantio's " particular 
 grief" betrays the ecclesiastical occasion as much as "flood-gate" and 
 " overbearing." The Nonconformist Millenary clergy, in their petition 
 to King James, spoke of their " particular griefs," which is used by the 
 poet in counterpart for the particular grief of Whitgift as responsible 
 for unity and conformity in the Church. His particular grief " engluts 
 and swallows other sorrows, and it is still itself" The good old man's 
 sole thought for the Church was at no time revealed so plainly as in 
 his own mortal hour; for all the town knew that Whitgift's last 
 articulate words, murmured to King James at his bedside, were Pro 
 ecclesia Dei, pro ecclesia Dei. 
 
 The name Brabantio borne by a magnifico of Venice, though 
 striking, is not improbable, for there was a free intercourse between 
 
THE FIRST ACT AS PROLOGUE: BRABANTIO 17 
 
 Brabant and Italy ; thus the anatomist Vesalius, who gave lustre to 
 the school of Padua and the State of Venice, was a native of Brabant, 
 and so also was the illustrator of his great work, the artist Calcar, 
 afterwards settled at Naples. But Brabantio is otherwise a happy 
 choice for Archbishop Whitgift. His father was a merchant and 
 shipowner of Great Grimsby, trading chiefly in wool to Antwerp, or he 
 was a Brabant merchant. Perhaps a better reason for the name was 
 Whitgift's physique. In those days, Dutchmen, high Germans, 
 Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, were assigned certain fixed types of 
 physique : e.g., " like the icicles on a Dutchman's beard," " swag- 
 bellied Hollander," "the yellow lachimo, slight thing of Italy," etc. 
 The Archbishop was certainly a person of distinctive build and 
 complexion, not the pure Dutch build perhaps, but yet somewhat 
 foreign-looking. His almoner Paul's description of him, in his " Life," 
 suggests a Brabantine habit of body even more than his painted 
 portrait does, for example, the portrait in Pembroke College, 
 Cambridge: "He was of a middle stature, of a grave countenance 
 and brown complexion, black hair and eyes ; he wore his beard neither 
 long nor thick. For his small timber he was of good, quick strength, 
 straight and well-shaped in all his limbs to the habit of his body, 
 which somewhat began to burnish towards his latter years." The 
 Queen used to call him " my black husband." " Magnifico " was a not 
 unusual style for a senator of Venice, but it had a special fitness for 
 Whitgift, who kept a large retinue and entertained splendidly. The 
 Duke's greeting, " We did not see you, gentle signior," is equally 
 suitable to the Archbishop, whose manners were as gentle and modest 
 as his personal tastes were simple. 
 
 As Whitgift's name was often punned upon, it would not be 
 surprising, if he be Brabantio, to find Shakespeare exercising himself 
 in so congenial a pastime. The Queen had called him " my white 
 gift " the first time she heard him preach ; and Sir John Harington 
 has preserved an epitaph for his bust, which he says was written in 
 his presence by a young scholar of Oxford, but more probably by 
 
 himself: 
 
 Candida dona tibi, Whytgifte, sunt nomen et omen ; 
 
 Candidiora tuis munera nemo didit. 
 Nomen habes nivei inscriptum nunc ergo lapilla, 
 Et stola pro merids redditur alba tuis. 
 
 There is no such manifest pun on "white gift "in Brabantio's part, 
 but there is an implied one. After the Moor and Desdemona have 
 been heard by the Council in defence of their runaway marriage, her 
 father becomes magnanimous perforce : 
 Brab. Come hither. Moor : 
 I here do give thee that with all my heart, 
 Which, but thou hast already, with all my heart 
 I would keep from thee. 
 
i8 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 He is nothing if not candid, and it is a white gift that he makes to the 
 black Othello. 
 
 From thinking of the " Candida dona" of Harington's epigram 
 on Whitgift, Shakespeare passes to a pun of his own on the name of 
 Whitgift's friend Jewel. Turning from the Moor to his daughter, 
 
 Brabantio says : 
 
 For your sake, jewels 
 I am glad at soul I have no other child ; 
 For thy escape would teach me tyranny, 
 To hang clogs on them. 
 
 Candid readers will confess this a strange remark, even if it 
 could be given a natural meaning ; but that is so difficult that one 
 editor has changed it to " for my own sake." It is natural enough 
 to call Desdemona a jewel ; but why does he change from ''your sake" 
 to " thy escape " ? and why does he think of restraining her supposed 
 sisters by clogs ? For Desdemona's sake he was glad that she had 
 no sisters to be clogged on account of her bad example of wilfulness 
 — glad for her sake, perhaps, because she would have reproached 
 herself with bringing tyranny upon them. For a parent's thought 
 and a sister's compunction it may pass, however unexpected in the 
 scene. But it would hardly have occurred to the dramatist had he 
 not been in the mood of ecclesiastical history. He calls her a jewel 
 for the sake of the pun on the bishop of that name who is brought 
 to mind at once by the reference to clogs. Clogs are the peculiar 
 distinction of the Anglican Articles of Religion, the restraints which 
 the Reformers put upon the old rites and doctrines by the constant 
 appeal to Scripture. The most famous instance was the 20th Article, 
 on the Church's power to decree rites and ceremonies and on her 
 authority in controversies of faith, " and yet it is not lawful for the 
 Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God's written word," 
 etc. Bishop Jewel having been appointed by Convocation in 1571 
 to prepare the copy of the Articles of 1 563 to be submitted to the 
 Parliament of that year for ratification, he omitted the positive clause, 
 " The Church hath power," etc., and left only the clog, so that the 
 Article read as it did originally in 1552: "It is not lawful for the 
 Church to ordain anything that is contrary," etc. Thus ratified by 
 Parliament, it was supposed that the Church's power had escaped 
 from the Article, leaving only the clog. Long after, in 1637, Laud 
 was indeed charged by the Puritans with having "forged" the 
 Church's power in that Article. He had no difficulty in proving that 
 the positive clause which had been inserted in 1563, although omitted 
 in 1571, had reappeared in editions of 1593, 1605, and 1612. More- 
 over, the power "to ordain, change, or abolish ceremonies and rites" 
 was reserved in the positive form, by the last clause of Article 34, " Of 
 the traditions of the Church," which positive clause was also an 
 
THE FIRST ACT AS PROLOGUE : BRABANTIO 19 
 
 Elizabethan addition to the original Edward VI. Article of 1552. 
 The escape of 1571, therefore, was only of "authority in controversies 
 of faith." But that also was implicitly contained in the clog of 
 Article 34 : " So, besides holy writ, the Church ought not to enforce 
 anything to be believed for necessity of salvation." That the poet 
 did not choose the word "clogs" at random will appear from his 
 repetition of it in Cassio's description of Desdemona (see Section IV.). 
 No happier phrase could be found for the motive or purpose of the 
 Reformation Articles. But the clog of Article 20 not only restrained 
 the Church's power ; it restrained also Jewel's " escape." And that 
 was doubtless the reason why Whitgift was glad at soul " for your 
 sake, Jewel " ; for Jewel's escape was a coup manque which did him no 
 credit.^ This does not exhaust Brabantio's meaning as to having 
 '' no other child," but it is impossible to carry it further until we 
 know who or what his only child was, and what her escape was. 
 
 Without attempting here the symbolism of Desdemona's escape 
 from the house of her father, it may be said negatively that it did not 
 mean dissent in the Church getting out of hand. In strict history that 
 was Whitgift's " particular grief," and the sole cause of his disquietude, 
 so far as appears in his biography. The poet had to conform to that 
 in appearance, and he has done so very ingeniously by making 
 Brabantio turn from his private grief to join in the debate upon the 
 Turks. His private grief has also a symbolism, which Shakespeare 
 somehow knew to be real among the Archbishop's anxieties. But 
 for the present we are concerned with the Turks, who are the Non- 
 conformists in the matter of rites and ceremonies. So far from 
 Desdemona being identified with them, her husband, whose public 
 duties she shared, was the strong defence of the State against the Turks. 
 
 The Nonconformists were then known as the Turks. The name 
 arose from an often-cited saying of Cartwright, that they ought rather 
 to conform to the fashion of the Turks in rites and ceremonies than 
 to those of Rome. Strange to say, their scholarly representatives 
 from Oxford and Cambridge at the Hampton Court Conference gave 
 some countenance to the nickname ; for Bancroft, Bishop of London, 
 charged them to their faces with appearing " before His Majesty in 
 Turkey gowns, not in their scholastical habits sorting to their 
 degrees." Here, then, was an ecclesiastical parable of the Turks which 
 Shakespeare had no need to invent, any further than to bring a Turkish 
 war into his play. 
 
 It happened that Hooker had quoted Cartwright's saying about 
 the Turks in a context which Shakespeare could hardly miss, namely, 
 the very point of the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome with 
 1 In his last public appearance, about a week before his death, Jewel preached at Paul's 
 Cross " on the ceremonies and state of the Church." Th>s sermon los him h.s old favour 
 with the party of Cartwright, who assailed his memory, so that Whitgift came to the defence 
 of Jewel against what he calls their "railing, depraving, and backbiting. 
 
20 
 
 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 which he ends his own Argument to ' Lucrece,' published in 
 the same year as Hooker's book, 1594- Hooker writes, Hk. 
 IV. xiv. 6: 
 
 " The Romans having banished Tarquinius the Proud, and taken a solemn 
 oath that they never would permit any man more to reign could not herewitn 
 content themselves, or think that tyranny was thoroughly extinguished tiii 
 they had driven one of their consuls to depart the city, against whom they 
 found not in this world what to object, saving only that his name was iarqmn, 
 and that the commonwealth could not seem to have recovered perfect treedom 
 as long as a man of so dangerous a name was left remaining. For the Church 
 of England to have done the like in casting out of papal tyranny and supersti- 
 tion ; to have showed greater willingness of accepting the very ceremonies ot 
 the Turk [Cartwright cited], Christ's professed enemy, than of the most 
 indifferent things which the Church of Rome approveth ; to have left not so 
 much as the names which the Church of Rome doth give unto thmgs 
 innocent," etc. 
 
 The Millenary Petition to King James represented " the Turkish 
 preparations." Some said they had 107 galleys, others said 140, others 
 200 ; these are the discrepant accounts of the number of ministers, 
 in twenty-five counties, who had signed the petition — 700 and odd, 
 or 800, or a round thousand— hence the name Millenary. Having 
 found in Knolles's History of the Turks an unimportant particular, 
 that two Turkish fleets had made Rhodes their rendezvous before 
 their combined attack on Cyprus, the playwright adapted Rhodes to 
 a witty use in the ecclesiastical war, notwithstanding the fact that the 
 real Turks could have had no thought of attacking Rhodes, which had 
 been in their possession for half a century. The symbolic Rhodes is 
 roads, the beaten tracks of religious thought, or doctrines as contrasted 
 with rites and ceremonies, which are Cyprus. It happened that 
 Cyprus had given its name to a textile product of the island, a soft, 
 black crepe called " cypres," and commonly confused with cypress, 
 perhaps because of its sombre colour and resemblance to foliage. 
 Those two islands of the Levant, both lying conveniently near to the 
 Holy Land, thus symbolised the two great divisions of ecclesiastical 
 controversy, rites and ceremonies and doctrines — the one by its 
 distinctive textile fabric, the other by a pun upon its name. 
 
 A messenger arrives from one Signior Angelo (whom we do not 
 otherwise hear of) to inform the Senate that the Turks were going to 
 attack Rhodes. A senator thinks this news unlikely to be true, 
 because the Turks would not wake and wage a danger profitless — 
 because the Nonconformists had then no occasion to attack doctrines ; 
 and because of the greater importancy of Cyprus to them and the 
 weaker defences of that island. Another messenger brings the 
 authentic news. The Turkish fleet, sailing towards Rhodes, had there 
 injointed them with an after fleet of some thirty galleys, roughly 
 estimated, and thereupon had changed their course for Cyprus. This 
 
THE FIRST ACT AS PROLOGUE: BRABANTIO 
 
 21 
 
 reinforcement of the Turks, which diverted them from the attack on 
 Rhodes, was the celebrated Lambeth Articles, which had been drawn 
 up at a conference summoned under Whitgift's presidency to satisfy 
 the Cambridge divinity professors by removing all doubts as to the 
 Calvinism of the Thirty-nine Articles. There were only nine of them, 
 but we are given to understand that the number of galleys in the 
 after fleet was only approximate. The supplementary Articles had 
 no binding force ; but they committed the Archbishop to the most 
 rigorous views of predestination and election, final perseverance, 
 fixed number of the elect, eternal damnation of non-elect. At the 
 Hampton Court Conference, Dr Reynolds proposed that they should 
 be added to the Thirty-nine Articles, but King James and Bancroft 
 took upon themselves to answer, and spared Whitgift's blushes. 
 
 The most amusing reminiscence of the Conference is the ex- 
 change of speeches, in rhymed couplets, between the Duke and 
 Brabantio, i.e. King James and the Archbishop. When James came 
 to Whitehall there was great fear that he would bring his Presby- 
 terianism with him. It turned out, however, that he was only too 
 glad to get away from it. On the first day of the Conference he 
 had been very gracious to the Puritan divines, and had embraced 
 Dr Reynolds, the estimable President of Corpus Christi College, 
 Oxford. On the second day he snubbed them, so that the Bishop of 
 London fell on his knees declaring that his soul was filled with joy. 
 The upshot of the whole was, that two or three slight alterations were 
 made in the liturgy and rubrics ; but Whitgift's fears were not allayed, 
 and it was currently said that his death, two or three weeks after, 
 was " for grief" The Duke's speech is ostensibly " a grise or step to 
 help these lovers into your favour " ; but it will be seen that both he 
 and Brabantio drift away from the affair of the marriage. The style 
 of the Duke's speech, as well as the peculiar rhythm, is modelled on 
 one of Harington's clever epigrams on a certain simoniacal bishop, 
 none other than the father of John Fletcher the dramatist. The 
 similarity of the manner to Shakespeare's opening will appear from 
 Harington's couplet : 
 
 Alas, a fault confessed were half amended ; 
 But sin is doubled that is thus defended. 
 
 This was the hint for the form, but the substance of the Duke's 
 speech is an amusing exercise on Whitgift's well-known motto on 
 his impresse : Vincit qui patitur—He conquers who endures. That 
 excellent maxim is offered by the Duke to Brabantio, but Whitgift 
 finds King James's wisdom to be cold comfort. 
 
 Duke. When remedies are past, the griefs are ended 
 By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended. 
 To mourn a mischief that is past and gone, 
 Is the next way to draw more mischief on. 
 
22 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 What cannot be preserv'd when fortune takes, 
 Patience her injury a mockery makes. [ Vmcit qui patitur. \ 
 
 The robb'd, that smiles, steals something from the thief: 
 He robs himself, that spends a bootless grief. 
 
 It will be observed that Brabantio's reply begins on the Turks 
 and Cyprus, ostensibly as an illustration, but really because the 
 ecclesiastical Turks are the subject of both speeches : 
 
 Brab. So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile ; 
 We lose it not, so long as we can smile ! [ Vincit qui patitur.] 
 He bears the sentence well, that nothing bears 
 But the free comfort which from thence he hears ; 
 But he bears both the sentence and the sorrow, 
 That, to pay grief, must of poor patience borrow. 
 These sentences, to sugar, or to gall. 
 Being strong on both sides, are equivocal : 
 But words are words ; I never yet did hear 
 That the bruis'd heart was pierced through the ear. 
 
 Will it be believed that there are editors at the present day who 
 think this venue of wit unworthy of the poet, and mark it as a 
 spurious addition by an inferior hand ? Substitute King James for the 
 Duke, and the Archbishop for Brabantio, and the speeches become real 
 wit. The " sentences, to sugar, or to gall " are the King's extremes of 
 cordiality and rebuke to the Puritans, and vice versa to the bishops 
 on successive days of the Hampton Court Conference. The changes 
 rung on Vincit qui paiitur should rank Shakespeare among the best 
 of epigrammatists. Brabantio's last couplet should recommend the 
 poet to the eternal gratitude of High Churchmen — words are words ; 
 the bruised heart not pierced through the ear. The case for rites 
 and ceremonies as against the preaching of the word we never yet 
 did hear more neatly put. Hooker, defending religious symbols, 
 had supplied the poet with the idiom : " That which we drink in at 
 our ears doth not so piercingly enter as that which the mind doth 
 conceive by sight." 
 
 Having discovered the Duke and Council in midnight session on 
 the Turks to be the Hampton Court Conference, we may now -return 
 to the mysterious affair of Marcus Luccicos. This name looks like 
 Italian with a wrong termination, which one pundit would correct 
 by reading Lucchese. Taken phonetically, however, it is merely 
 " Lucky coz." The name was sometimes given to the Cecils in that 
 age; thus Bacon always thought of Sir Robert as his lucky coz. 
 " Marcus Luccicos," cried the Duke, " is not he in town ? " No, he 
 was in Florence. Then send for him post-post-haste. Sir Robert 
 Cecil came to the Conference on the second day, and answered a 
 question about the non-suppression of Popish books. It would appear 
 that he was not present on the opening day, being absent at Florence 
 doubtless on a visit to Signior Machiavelli. 
 
THE FIRST ACT AS PROLOGUE: BRABANTIO 23 
 
 While Brabantio is undoubtedly the Archbishop, the Duke in 
 Council King James at the Hampton Court Conference, and the 
 subject of the whole tragedy, therefore, brought within an ecclesiastical 
 purview, the disobedient Desdemona is a conception of the allegorist 
 less easy to seize. She deceived her father, who warned Othello that 
 she might deceive him. Brabantio did not live to see the result : 
 " The match was mortal to him, and pure grief shore his old thread in 
 twain." The last clause is singularly near what was said of Whitgift's 
 death. Camden, in his Annals of James /., re-echoed the common 
 talk : " Whilst the King began to find fault with some things used 
 in the Liturgy, and thought it convenient that they should be altered, 
 John Whitgift, the Archbishop, died for grief" The old prelate was 
 subject to jaundice, which was aggravated by a chill caught in his 
 barge on a cold February day, and he died of a paralytic stroke 
 which came on at the Court after a long conversation on a Sunday 
 forenoon with King James and the Bishop of London. His fears 
 that the King was going to yield to Puritan pressure in Parliament, 
 and his wish not to live to see it, are recorded by Dr Barlow, his 
 chaplain, in his account of the Conference ; so that his death was 
 popularly put down to grief, adapted by the dramatist to the " pure 
 grief" of which Brabantio died. But nothing in the allegorical sequel 
 of the tragedy suits that cause of Whitgift's grief Desdemona 
 deceived him past thought, but her deceit and disobedience were in 
 an altogether different matter from Nonconformity. Her husband 
 was designated by public opinion, " sovereign mistress of effects " for 
 the defence of Cyprus against the Turks, and she was eager to 
 accompany him. The Turks, having served a purpose in the first 
 act, are dropped thereafter; their fleet was destroyed in a storm, and 
 the war ended before it was well begun, so that the stage is left clear 
 for the tragedy of the disobedient marriage. It was that which broke 
 Brabantio's heart. In what allegorical sense Brabantio's daughter 
 deceived him in marrying the Moor is a question reserved for the 
 end of Section IV. 
 
 The first act strikes no tragic note anywhere, not even in the 
 policy of lago so far as therein avouched, which was only that of pin- 
 pricking. Dr Johnson has remarked that ' Othello ' would have been 
 a " regular " tragedy if the scene had opened with the arrival of 
 Othello at Cyprus. His criticism has been expanded by Snider 
 (Boston, 1887), who says of the first act, that "it almost constitutes a 
 drama by itself, with its collisions and happy termination. Were 
 Othello a Venetian, it would be difficult to tell why the play should 
 not end here." The shadow of disaster hanging over the newly 
 wedded pair is so faint that Brabantio, the affectionate, anxious, 
 almost heart-broken father, is just a little comical. In Shakespeare's 
 mind, this effect of " comedy," as Snider sees it, is due in part to 
 
24 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 something else than appears above the surface of the play. He knew 
 Whitgift before he ruled at Lambeth : he knew him as his own 
 bishop in his youth in Warwickshire ; and such is his skill in double 
 and treble meanings, that he has made the Othello marriage not only 
 to conceal a profound allegory of the Sacrament, but also to recall the 
 circumstances of his own marriage with Anne Hathaway, in which 
 Bishop Whitgift played a not unimportant part. 
 
 Dr Whitgift had been a familiar figure in Warwickshire as Bishop 
 of Worcester from 1577 to 1583, busy in all diocesan duties, preach- 
 ing incessantly in the parish churches, and taking a minute care of 
 the whole spiritualities. 
 
 Among the details of his diocesan work at Worcester there was 
 none more likely to stick in his memory than the quandary he and 
 his officers had been placed in by Shakespeare's own matrimonial 
 affairs. On 27th November 1582, the right reverend Father in God, 
 John, Bishop of Worcester, had issued his licence to William Shaxper 
 to marry Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton ; and next day had again 
 licensed William Shagspere to marry Anne Hathwey of Stratford, so 
 that the favoured youth was in the unique position of being licensed 
 by his Bishop to commit bigamy. But the Bishop and his officers 
 were equal to the occasion. They drew a bond as a condition of the 
 second or Hathaway licence, by which the licencee was strictly tied up, 
 in two sureties of forty pounds, to do two things, one negatively 
 expressed, the other positively. 
 
 The terms of the bond and licence are accessible to all, so that I 
 need give only a summary. There are four conditions on which the 
 money would not be forfeited by the two sureties, being also the four 
 conditions on which the second licence was granted to marry Anne 
 Hathaway with once asking of the banns. The two first may have 
 been conditions proper to all licences : (a) that there shall not appear 
 any lawful let or impediment by reason of any pre-contract, consan- 
 guinity, affinity, etc. ; (d) if there be not at this present time any 
 action, suit, quarrel, or demand moved or depending before any judge, 
 ecclesiastical or temporal, for and concerning any such lawful let or 
 impediment. Then come the two conditions personal to the case. 
 The first is if the said Willm. Shagspere do not proceed to solemni- 
 sation of marriage with the said Anne Hathwey without the consent of 
 hir frindes, i.e., he do not proceed without having got her friends' 
 consent not to proceed. The negative form is used obviously because 
 the consent of her friends not to proceed with her marriage was 
 known beforehand to be withheld, inasmuch as it was Anne Hathaway's 
 friends who had moved the whole matter in the Ecclesiastical Court 
 of Worcester. The condition really means, that the said William 
 Shakespeare do proceed to the marriage because her friends demanded 
 it. But the last condition is the one that clears up the whole mystery : 
 
THE FIRST ACT AS PROLOGUE: BRABANTIO 25 
 
 " And also if the said William do upon his own proper costs and 
 expenses defend and save harmless the right reverend Father in God, 
 Lord John, Bishop of Worcester, and his officers for licensing them" 
 etc. But why should it be necessary for the said William to defend 
 and save harmless the Bishop and his officers for issuing a marriage 
 licence? The answer is, that they had issued a prior licence to him, 
 the day before, to marry a different woman, namely, Anne Whateley, 
 of Temple Grafton. He was bound in two sureties to marry Anne 
 Hathaway at the instance of her friends, and to cancel or not to use 
 his licence to marry Anne Whateley. The peculiar negative form of 
 the condition, that he was not to proceed without the consent of her 
 friends, means that the ecclesiastical lawyers admitted the friends' 
 consent to be relevant, both positively for the marriage with Anne 
 Hathaway, and negatively as against the marriage with Anne 
 Whateley ; and the reason why the friends had locus standi to bar the 
 execution of the prior licence was, that the second Anne was with 
 child to the said William at the time it was taken out. 
 
 I pointed out for the first time that meaning of the famous 
 marriage bond in a note at p. 303 of my former book. Much has 
 been written on the bond ; great pains have been taken to show that 
 it implies nothing extraordinary in the circumstances of the marriage, 
 and that there are other instances of a marriage licence being con- 
 joined with a surety bond. It may be so; but one may doubt if Dr 
 Whitgift, with all his experience of ecclesiastical law, knew of another 
 such case, or had ever such another occasion to bind the licencee to 
 save him, the Bishop, and his officers harmless for issuing the licence. 
 When I gave my reading of the bond seven years ago, I had not the 
 remotest notion that Dr Whitgift was Brabantio. But now I find a 
 full and indeed literal corroboration of the theory in what lago said 
 to Othello about his marriage and Brabantio's power to undo it : 
 
 lago. But, I pray, sir. 
 
 Are you fast married ? for, be assur'd of this. 
 That the magnifico is much beloved ; 
 And hath, in his effect, a voice potential 
 And double as the duke's ; he will divorce you ; 
 Or put upon you what restraint or grievance 
 The law (with all his might to enforce it on) 
 Will give him cable. 
 
 Brabantio did indeed try something of the kind, by charging Othello 
 with using witchcraft, demanding that it should be disputed on, with 
 the ulterior object, doubtless, of bringing him into the Ecclesiastical 
 Court for nullification of his daughter's marriage. Also, when he met 
 Othello in the street, he threatened him with prison : 
 
 Brab. I therefore apprehend and do attach thee 
 For an abuser of the world, a practiser 
 Of arts inhibited and out of warrant. 
 
26 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Lay hold upon him ! if he do resist, 
 Suddue him at his peril. 
 
 Oth. Hold your hands ! 
 
 Both you of my inclining and the rest : 
 Were it my cue to fight I should have known it 
 Without a prompter. Where will you that I go 
 To answer this your charge ? 
 
 Brab. To prison ; till fit time 
 
 Of law, and course of direct session 
 Call thee to answer. 
 
 Whatever actually happened at Worcester or Stratford between the 
 Hathaway and Shakespeare factions on 27th to 28th November 1582, 
 the events must have been of an exciting nature. I should guess that 
 the youthful William was threatened with the pains of the Ecclesiastical 
 Court if he did not give up the woman of his choice, and undertake to 
 marry the woman whom he had compromised. He surrendered at 
 discretion — "Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it." He 
 gave a bond, in two sureties for a heavy sum, that he would not use his 
 first licence, but marry Anne Hathaway under a second. Recurring to 
 the matter long after, he makes lago analyse, with his usual lucidity, 
 the circumstances of that restraining instrument. Before the youth 
 had time to h&fast married, the Bishop stretched his authority as far 
 as the law will give him cable, to divorce the potential marriage (or to 
 get it declared null in the Ecclesiastical Court), or, short of that, to put 
 restraint upon it by a bond ox grievance of two sureties in forty pounds. 
 The double voice of the magnifico may mean half a dozen things ; and 
 it happens that it suits Whitgift in another curious respect, which 
 helps the proof that he is Brabantio. About the year 1598 the 
 Archbishop took vigorous measures to stop irregular marriages among 
 the great. Several statesmen or courtiers were proceeded against, 
 among others Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General. Coke 
 married for his second wife a rich young widow, the Lady Hatton, to 
 whose hand his rival. Bacon, had also aspired. The marriage was in 
 a private house, without banns or licence. " Coke, with his habitual 
 pride, imagined that the rank of the parties concerned would have 
 set him above such restrictions" (Isaac D'Israeli), which may be 
 implied in " My services which I have done the seignory shall out- 
 tongue his complaints." Whitgift, who was no respecter of persons, 
 took the great lawyer and his haughty wife into the Ecclesiastical 
 Court, but let them off without penalties on Coke pleading his 
 ignorance of the law.'- 
 
 This, however, is merely a subordinate illustration of Brabantio's 
 peculiar powers in the Venetian State. Such phrases as " potential " 
 and ■' put upon you what restraint or grievance the law (with all his 
 might to enforce it on) will give him cable'; are more suited to the 
 
 1 See the account of the affair by Isaac D'Israeli in his Curiosities of Literature. 
 
THE FIRST ACT AS PROLOGUE : BRABANTIO 27 
 
 circumstances of Shakespeare's own marriage. Othello's command 
 to his followers, " Keep up your bright swords, or the dew will rust 
 them," is the peremptory order of the poetical lover to those of his 
 inclining, sympathetic Stratford friends of his youth who had rallied 
 round him. 
 
 One other thing said of the wooing recalls a Warwickshire cottage 
 rather than a great house in Venice : 
 
 But still the house affairs would draw her thence, 
 Which ever as she could with haste despatch 
 She'd come again, and with a greedy ear 
 Devour up my discourse. 
 
 This is the picture of courting in a country kitchen. The amorous 
 youth has dropped in of an evening and has made himself comfortable 
 on the settle. He improves the time with tales of his own doings, 
 from which the daughter of the house is sometimes called away, but 
 soon comes back to listen with eagerness to his stories of moving 
 accidents by flood and field, hairbreadth scapes, and the insolent foe 
 — on shiny nights, in the season of the year. The " rough quarries " 
 are most curiously reminiscent of the vicinity of Temple Grafton. 
 With those personal adventures would be mixed tales of the marvel- 
 lous from Mandeville, about the Anthropophagi and men whose 
 heads do grow beneath their shoulders — which things to hear would 
 Desdemona seriously incline. 
 
 Shakespeare's conduct in the affair of his marriage probably made 
 no bad impression on the Bishop. He himself recalls it, in the 11 6th 
 Sonnet, with an air of making a virtue of necessity, or of treating his 
 second thoughts, and eventual action, as if they had been his constant 
 purpose. In the same subtle allusion, he seems to acknowledge that 
 he did the right thing by the advice of his father. Public opinion 
 would have excused him if he had not come to the rescue of a woman 
 much older than himself, who is suspected by De Quincey to have 
 inveigled him. One reason for saying that Dr Whitgift did not think 
 bkdly of his conduct then, is that he did Shakespeare a service ten 
 years after, when he was Archbishop, by giving his personal licence— 
 a rare thing in the Stationers' Register— to the publication of ' Venus 
 and Adonis.' The primate's imprimatur stood the poet in good stead 
 in the year 1599, when Whitgift and Bancroft together issued an 
 order for the burning of various erotic and satyric poems, including the 
 future Bishop Hall's and the future Rev. John Marston's. ' Venus and 
 Adonis,' though the most erotic of them all, escaped the fire ; for the 
 Archbishop could not with a good face order that to be burned 
 which he had himself licensed. Dr Whitgift had rather the best of it 
 in the matter of the marriage licence. On the other hand, the poet 
 undoubtedly scored off him in the licence to ' Venus and Adonis.' 
 The honours may be said to have been even, and the respect mutual. 
 
III. OTHELLO 
 
 Although this section is headed with the name of the hero of the 
 play, and the next with the name of the heroine, it is not with 
 the intention of bringing together all that should be said of them 
 from the particular symbolic point of view. Until lago is introduced, 
 it is impossible to proceed far with any of the characters except 
 Brabantio. But it seems necessary, before coming to the master- 
 spirit of the tragedy, to seek at least the definition of the Moor and 
 his wife in the allegory; and even to do that, one will have to 
 anticipate much of the proof Whereas the poet saw his design as a 
 consistent whole from some inside point of view, and wrote his dialogue 
 from the first line to the last with a certain symbolic meaning clearly 
 worked out in his thought, in all its bearings, the critic who thinks he 
 has found out that design (after many tentative efforts) can only 
 develop his proof in fragments from point to point. If there were to 
 be no evidence of a latent symbolism, involving innumerable details 
 deduced from the study of lines and phrases, it would be right to 
 attempt the chief characters in their entirety, according to the usual im- 
 pressionist method. It is not my wish to quarrel with such estimates; 
 yet one may venture to say that the critic who is afraid to become 
 frankly subjective, or to adopt a complete theory of the problem in 
 question, can only grope around the outside of it ; he can never hope 
 to seize the poet's central thought. Studied from the surface inwards, 
 Othello and Desdemona and lago have revealed to critics much in 
 their natures that must be accepted as true to the poet's intention : 
 for example, Bradley's view of lago as not by nature malignant, with 
 good-nature, real but superficial, and depending more on a good 
 digestion than a good heart, uncomfortable in his hypocrisy, and 
 finding relief from his discomfort in caustic speech, taking no pleasure 
 in the distress of Desdemona, believed in by his wife, a clever or able 
 man, but not remarkably profound ; or Schlegel's happy metaphor for 
 Desdemona — " a sacrifice without blemish " ; or the universal opinion 
 of Othello as a noble and magnaminous soul, devoted to truth and 
 honour. The present attempt to bring out an all-pervading symbolism 
 will almost necessarily debar me from appreciations, because I must 
 ever be proving that the symbolism is there. It is, of course an 
 
 28 
 
OTHELLO 29 
 
 ungracious task to have to prove anything from great verse ; and 
 perhaps the wisest course for anyone who thinks he has made the 
 discovery would be to enjoy it privately, as I have been doing for 
 years, because trouble begins as soon as one seeks to retrace the 
 steps of a growing conviction, with data enough for others to adopt 
 the same or reject it — hie labor, hoe opus est. Not the least of the 
 difficulty is that the proofs can only be offered piecemeal, as, for 
 example, in what follows about Othello. 
 
 In the original novel, says Schlegel, the Moor was " unquestionably 
 meant to be a baptised Saracen of the northern coast of Africa," that 
 is to say, a Berber Arab, bronzed by the sun, with the nobler type of 
 Semitic features. But Shakespeare, he admits, had made him " in 
 every respect a negro," and he thinks he had done so by " a fortunate 
 mistake." Certainly the " mistake" is very persistent. " What a full 
 fortune does the thick lips owe 1 " says Roderigo. " The sooty bosom of 
 such a thing as thou — what she feared to look upon," says Brabantio. 
 " Haply, for I am black . . . begrimed and black as mine own face 
 . . . declined into the vale of years," says Othello. " A black ram — 
 the devil will make a grandsire of you," says lago to Brabantio. 
 Further, the sign hanging over the door of the house where Othello 
 had lodged her was the Sagittary, a " dreadful " thing (as in ' Troilus 
 and Cressida'), half man, half horse, with coarse black skin and eyes 
 like burning coals : this was what Desdemona would have seen as she 
 crossed the threshold, and it was meant to remind her of the man she 
 had eloped with. On the stage it has been hardly practicable to 
 combine the negro's coarse lineaments with his black colour, nor has 
 he usually been declined into the vale of years. Salvini was a hand- 
 some man, whom blacking could not make at all repulsive. The only 
 Othello I have seen without some personal attractiveness was old 
 Dessoir at the Berlin Schauspielhaus, slow and thick of speech, with 
 the weight of years in his gait and gestures, making with Desdemona 
 the perfect picture of Beauty and the Beast. In Shakespeare's day 
 Burbage won his greatest fame in the part of Othello (so the eulogy 
 after his death implies), and doubtless the poet had his friend in view 
 when he wrote the part. It is a part well suited to the English 
 Roscius gravis et doctus, grave and studied in his attitudes, gestures, 
 and declamation, which would have lost none of their effect by the 
 blackening of his skin. This was the old tradition of acting, some- 
 times called " stagey," which descended through Betterton, Garrick, 
 Edmund Kean, and many more. Correctness of costume and 
 naturalism of gesture and speech were superseded by a certain artifici- 
 ality, which created an illusion more impressive than reality. The 
 manner was suited to the matter, and that, as I maintain, took its 
 character from symbolism. It made the acting of Othello's part 
 different in kind from the acting of Cassio's or even lago's. Any 
 
30 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 attempt to make the Moor less black or more personally attractive 
 than the text prescribes could only have the effect that was produced 
 upon the Morisco slave in ^Esop's fable, whose health v^^as merely 
 ruined by the drugs given him to whiten his face. Yet such attempts 
 have been made by critics as well as actors. Coleridge tried hard to 
 show that the text did not mean Othello to be "a veritable negro." 
 Besides, " if we could in good earnest believe Shakespeare ignorant of 
 the distinction [between a Berber Arab and a negro], still, why should 
 we adopt one disagreeable possibility instead of a ten times greater 
 and more pleasing probability?" Lamb confesses that he would 
 rather read the play than see it, because then he could think of the 
 hero as a white man. When critics of their calibre wish him white, 
 it is clear that there must be some incongruity between his exterior 
 and his nature — "the very noblest man," says Swinburne, "whom 
 even omnipotence or Shakespeare could ever call to life." 
 
 The incongruity vanishes on the discovery of his symbolism, and 
 the symbolism is betrayed by Desdemona's speech : 
 
 Desd. I saw Othello's visage in his mind, 
 And to his honours and his valiant parts 
 Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate. 
 
 The rule is, as in Cicero, Imago antini vultus est — the face is the 
 image of the mind. She saw Othello's mind black as his face, and 
 for that reason did consecrate her soul and fortunes to him for the 
 sake of his honours and his valiant parts — external things admirable 
 in themselves, and somehow conjoined with blackness of the mind. 
 If the poet had meant no more than to improve upon the literal 
 story in Cinthio, he would have been merely helped in his idealising 
 by retaining the Saracen features and the degree of bronzing which he 
 found in the original. But he has made him black and unlovely to 
 match the blackness which Desdemona was to see in his mind. That 
 could be none other than the symbolic blackness of heresy, which is 
 of course quite compatible with honours and valiant parts. On the 
 old mystery stage, heretics were represented by men with blackened 
 faces. Rabelais mentions somewhere " a Morisco dance of heretics." 
 In the Fh'st Part ofjeronimo, a play written for Henslowe's theatre 
 in 1 592 as a forepiece to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and bearing many 
 marks of mock-tragic wit like the young Shakespeare's own, there is 
 a couplet which contains very nearly the spiritual contrast' between 
 Othello and Desdemona when she said, " I saw Othello's visage in 
 his mind," etc. It is spoken by a hired assassin, Lazarotto, to assure 
 his employer that he would not flinch : 
 
 I have no hope of everlasting height : 
 
 My soul's a Moor, you know— Salvation's white. 
 
 Desdemona is salvation in a certain definition of it, as we shall 
 
OTHELLO 31 
 
 see ; but in her " downright violence and storm of fortunes," and in 
 consecrating her soul and fortunes to Othello's honours and his 
 valiant parts, she has the enthusiasm of salvation for the black soul. 
 
 The definition of his blackness as heresy is not reached all at 
 once. In the natural meaning of the marriage, he was merely outside 
 the Church as a pagan. Brabantio knew all his story, including his 
 having been sold to slavery ; and from him we hear of paganism as 
 well as slavery : 
 
 For if such actions may have passage free. 
 Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be. 
 
 At that stage Brabantio did not know that the marriage had been 
 carried through with a formality that the Duke and senators would 
 find sufficient. The condition of its legality was, that the pagan should 
 be received into the Church, and we learn, very obliquely, no doubt, 
 that he had been baptised, although Brabantio was unaware of the 
 fact. lago was the first to discover it by his question, " But, I pray 
 you, sir, are you fast married ? " Othello gave a discursive answer, 
 but came to the point in the end : 
 
 My parts, my title, and my perfect soul 
 Shall manifest me rightly. 
 
 His perfect soul was not, of course, priggish self-esteem, but the 
 grace conferred by baptism, and constituting his "title." lago 
 understood it so, as appears from his conversation with Roderigo 
 immediately after, and from his allusion in the next act to the Moor's 
 " baptism, all seals and symbols of redeemed sin." There was no 
 reason why the Moor should not have been " the baptised Saracen '' 
 which Schlegel takes him to have been in Cinthio's story ; but as he 
 is made a veritable negro, so he is made unbaptised at the time when 
 Brabantio knew him as his frequent guest The baptism would not 
 have been deferred had not the poet wanted it as part of his allegory 
 of the marriage. It had to be recent, for a reason; but we shall find 
 that the conversion which is assumed from paganism in one place is 
 exchanged to be as from heresy in another, the blackness of the skin 
 symbolising both. It was possible, no doubt, to have made a good 
 dramatic situation out of the contact of Christian with pagan, and 
 the conversion of the pagan, as Voltaire (according to Schlegel's 
 summary) had done in his Alzire, the scene being Peru. But, as in 
 every other instance in which Voltaire seems to have touched the 
 same themes as Shakespeare, the Englishman had been the more 
 subtle and the more profound. Othello is English of the time, and 
 the blackness of his mind, as Desdemona saw it, is really the heresy 
 of a Lollard, or an English Protestant of the militant type. The 
 reason for saying so is the double meaning of the story of his 
 adventurous life. 
 
32 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 The story of dangers and hardships which won Desdemona's 
 heart, which had been told to her father in the first instance, which 
 so affected the Duke when he heard it, that he declared, " I think 
 this tale would win my daughter too" — this moving tale has a plain 
 sense for young and old without going below the surface. But 
 captious critics, such as Rymer and Shaftesbury, have thought some 
 parts of it a strange way to a lady's heart, and it is clear that 
 Brabantio had never dreamt of love and marriage following it. lago 
 said he had won her heart by " bragging and telling her fantastical 
 lies." Let us examine closely this fantastical or romantic narrative 
 of travel and adventure, of dangers and wonders, and we shall find 
 in every phrase, nothing omitted or evaded, an ingenious allegory 
 of the ecclesiastical history of England from the time of the Lollards 
 to the moment of speaking. 
 
 0th. I ran it through, even from my boyish days, 
 To the very moment that he bade me tell it : 
 Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances. 
 Of moving accidents by flood and field : 
 Of hairbreadth scapes i' th' imminent deadly breach : 
 Of being taken by the insolent foe. 
 And sold to slavery ; of my redemption thence, 
 And portance in my travellour's history ; 
 Wherein of antres vast, and deserts idle, 
 Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, 
 It was my hint to speak, — such was the process ; 
 And of the Cannibals that each other eat, 
 The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads 
 Do grow beneath their shoulders. 
 
 The sober document for all this is Foxe's Acts and Monuments, 
 surely a more enthralling narrative of moving accidents, hairbreadth 
 scapes, the insolent foe, slavery, redemption thence and portance in 
 travail, pilgrimage and distressful strokes, than Mandeville ever 
 feigned in his imagination. "Many fights, many frights, many 
 flights," as Harington said with a touch of sarcasm — the lives of 
 Wicklif, Thorpe, Oldcastle, little Bilney, Tyndale, of Latimer, Ridley 
 and Rowland Taylor, of Jewel and Sandys, even of Parker and 
 Whitgift in their college days. The strange word "portance" is 
 coined for the occasion from a religious source, the old name of 
 the breviary, or manual of devotion, being fortasse, portuas, or the 
 like, ixomportir, to carry in the pocket. The antres vast and' deserts 
 idle are the vast caverns and barren fields of schoolmen's divinity; 
 the rough quarries are the sources of authority in the Fathers • the 
 rocks are "the rock of Holy Scripture"; the insolent foe are the 
 prolocutors of Holy Church who met the steadfast erudition of the 
 Reformers with arrogance or sophistry ; the hills whose heads touch 
 heaven are theologies lost in the clouds. Such was the process But 
 
OTHELLO 33 
 
 if that should seem too general for an ecclesiastical meaning, the 
 strange addition of the Anthropophagi, which somewhat mars the 
 eloquence, at the same time betrays the allegorical intention : " And 
 of the Cannibals that each other eat, the Anthropophagi, and men 
 whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.'' All the annotators 
 refer here to the travels of Mandeville, but they all fail to perceive 
 that Sir John had been an allegorist before Shakespeare. In the 
 company of his "man-eaters" he mentions certain drinkers of blood, 
 " the whiche thei clepen Dieu " — meaning, of course, the wine of the 
 Sacrament. This figurative blood-drinking and cannibalism appear 
 to have been of ancient date ; for Jewel says that the foes of Christ's 
 cross "among our forefathers made the people believe that Christians 
 were wicked persons who 'sacrificed men's flesh and drunk men's 
 blood.'" The very word Anthropophagi was used in scorn of the 
 believers in transubstantiation by Ridley, in his answers to the 
 Oxford Commission of 1554: "This carnal presence confirmeth also 
 and maintaineth that beastly kind of cruelty of the Anthropophagi : 
 that is, the devourers of men's flesh ; for it is a more cruel thing to 
 devour a quick man than to slay him." The men whose heads do 
 grow beneath their shoulders are not so easy, but it is probable that 
 they mean the friars, with their cowls thrown back and used as 
 wallets for food. 
 
 Desdemona loved him for the dangers he had passed, and he did 
 love her that she did pity them. The dangers are the patient, 
 tentative struggles of the English Reformation from the time of 
 Wicklif; and Othello is an old campaigner who had seen two 
 centuries of such fighting and suffering. Desdemona is the symbol 
 of something also English, which, pitying the dangers and feeling 
 them to be passing strange and wondrous pitiful, saw the heroes of 
 them to be men black in their minds, or heretics. 
 
 She wished she had not heard it ; yet she wished 
 
 That Heaven had made her such a man : she thanked me ; 
 
 And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, 
 
 I should but teach him how . tell my story. 
 
 And that would woo her. . fpon this hint I spake. 
 
 The purposed wooing by a orney is meant to attract our atten- 
 tion, although Othello takes it merely as a feminine hint to press his 
 suit forthwith. It is a hint in the symbolism also, which cannot 
 be taken advantage of until we have found out what Desdemona 
 herself stands for. 
 
 Next, as to Othello's honours and his valiant parts. Whence 
 comes his individuality as a man of noble nature, magnanimous and 
 generous? I shall show at once, by five things in the text, that 
 Shakespeare was thinking of Lord Essex, and later I shall show the 
 fitness of posing such a character as the foil of lago. But at the 
 
 3 
 
34 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 outset it must be premised that Essex is drawn upon merely for 
 Othello's moral and intellectual qualities, so as to give individuality 
 and consistency to them. Nothing in Essex's real life corresponded 
 with the marriage to Desdemona, whether in a natural sense or in 
 the allegory of it which I am to bring out. Reasons enough can be 
 given why the poet should have thought of him for the character of 
 his hero, and proofs enough can be given that he did so think of him ; 
 but the circumstances of the Moor are those of Essex only in a 
 secondary aspect of the allegory, and not in its primary religious 
 aspect. The following proofs should suffice, I think, to make the 
 portraiture from Essex probable, irrespective of any theory of alle- 
 gorical design. 
 
 (i) The most curious of the five is a reminiscence by lago: 
 
 I have seen the cannoD; 
 When it hath blown his ranks into the air, 
 And, like the devil, from his very arm 
 Puffed his own brother ; — and can he be angry ? 
 
 This was what actually happened to Essex's only brother before 
 his eyes at the siege of Rouen in 1591. 
 
 (2) " I fetch my life and being from men of royal siege." When 
 shiploads of negro slaves from the West Coast of Africa were first 
 imported into the West Indies, about 1650, some of the slaves, says 
 the Jesuit Father, Dutertre, " were of high degree : there was one 
 negress, in particular, whom all the rest looked up to as a princess." 
 Applied to Othello, the literalism of Dahomey or Ashantee is 
 ludicrous. The men of royal siege in Othello's ancestry were the 
 Plantagenets, Essex being descended in the female line, through the 
 Staffords, from Thomas of Woodstock, son of Edward I IL, so that 
 he was counted in the succession to the Crown in the book by 
 "Dolman," 1594. 
 
 (3) " Since these arms of mine had seven years' pith, till now some 
 nine moons wasted, they have used their dearest action in the tented 
 field." This really means since the age of seventeen, for the reason 
 that the long bones do not begin to have pith or marrow in them 
 until about the age of ten. To have said " seventeen " at once would 
 perhaps have been too plain a hint, for it was at that age that Essex 
 began to bear arms, and with so confident a bearing that he was 
 known as "the boy soldier." At twenty he was made Master of the 
 Horse, and from that time until " these nine moons wasted," he was 
 never long without active service— in the expeditions of 1589, 1591, 
 1596, 1597, and 1599. 
 
 " Rude am I in my speech, and little blessed with the soft phrase 
 of peace," is a happy description of Essex. His speech was brusque, 
 and sometimes rude, even to the Queen ; he was " little blessed " with 
 the soft phrase of peace, because he was so much occupied in broil 
 
OTHELLO 35 
 
 and battle, although he could write like a scholar, and sometimes 
 breathed the wish for a contemplative life. 
 
 (4) " Another of his fathom they have none to lead their business." 
 " I have done the State some service, and they know it — no more of 
 that." The first was exactly true of Essex in the Irish campaign of 
 1 599) which he undertook, well knowing the risks, because no other 
 commander could be found. The second was the signal service 
 which Essex did the State at the moment of a second attempt by 
 Spain, in his brilliant capture of Cadiz, 1596 ; while " no more of that " 
 was his well-known impatience to hear his services spoken of 
 
 (5) " As truly as to Heaven I do confess the vices of my blood." 
 How little conventional those words could be may be realised by 
 anyone who will read Essex's confession before he was executed 
 on Ash Wednesday, 24th February 1601 ; it was literally a con- 
 fession to Heaven of the vices of his blood, and only one of many 
 moments of penitence ; for he had, as Horace Walpole says, always 
 " a solemn tincture of religion." 
 
 These five specific things are introduced from some source outside 
 the story, for, of course, there is no hint of any of them in Cinthio. 
 They are effective as picturesque touches, and might have been 
 imagined to that end ; but, taken as a group, they point plainly enough 
 to Essex. 
 
 11^-. The Moor was meant to be a man of action, of war and affairs, a 
 hardy campaigner such as Essex. There is another significant clue 
 to the dramatist's thought in a famous passage of the play, which 
 recalls, not Essex directly, but the commanders in the first expedition 
 he took part in, the year after the Spanish Armada, namely, Norris 
 and Drake. The poet George Peele wrote a farewell to those heroes 
 as they sailed from the Thames, in which he has a catalogue of the 
 emblems of war nearly the same as, but less euphonious than, those 
 in Othello's farewell— the spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, 
 the royal banner, etc. The resemblance is so close that one may 
 safely say Shakespeare knew Peek's verses and the sentiment of them. 
 The expedition was for plunder and glory ; but Peele puts a religious 
 face on it— "to propagate religious piety," and to subdue the Don 
 " under the Cross of Christ and England's queen." A reflective person 
 would have asked then, as every reader of Westward Ho ! asks now, 
 "What did the religion of those Protestant sea-dogs amount to?" 
 Othello was meant to be' such another as Norris and Drake, or as 
 Essex— a hardy campaigner, whose profession of arms required him 
 to be, above all things, truthful, sensitive to honour, and brave, not 
 wanting in tenderness, nor indifferent to the spiritual needs of his 
 nature. He represents the most characteristic English qualities of 
 the time. When Shakespeare wanted to draw a magnanimous and 
 generous man, not without the faults of his nature, he posed Essex as 
 
36 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 his model, in a great variety of circumstances — as Theseus, Hector, 
 Timon in his prosperity, Coriolanus, Brutus, Henry V. in the field ; 
 in every one of these parts I could show from specific things in the 
 text that Essex inspired them. The inspiration for Othello's noble 
 qualities, and in a small degree for his jealousy, is from the same 
 source; but in this instance there is no such correspondence in 
 situation or circumstances as in the instances of Timon (first part), 
 Coriolanus, and Brutus. The rest of the acts and character ot 
 Othello must be reserved until lago comes into collision with him. 
 
IV. DESDEMONA 
 
 Desdemoma's part depends so much on others that she hardly 
 requires a separate section ; even in the moving scenes immediately 
 before her death, it is under the head of Emilia that the analysis 
 falls most naturally both for that lady and her mistress. All of her 
 that need be taken here is her definition. As we are in a world of 
 religious allegory, the question is, Who or what is symbolised by 
 Desdemona? This is the greatest difficulty of the whole, because 
 she is perhaps the only character in the play for whom no original, 
 or part-original, can be found, so that we are without the help of 
 personality in realising what the poet meant by her. For all her 
 human qualities, she is drawn from no real woman, being in the same 
 class of imaginary creations as Cordelia, Hermione, Perdita, Imogen, 
 and Miranda. But she is far more elusive as a poetic symbol than 
 any of these; and it is clear from Cassio's words about her to the 
 Cypriotes that she was not easy to describe, or to estimate, or 
 
 to define : 
 
 Cassio. He hath achieved a maid 
 
 That paragons description and wild fame ; 
 One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens, 
 And fn the essential vesture of creation 
 Does tire the ingener. 
 
 This bears well enough the meaning that one is disposed to put 
 upon it at the first glance, namely, that Cassio in an excess of admira- 
 tion and gallantry has given way to hyperbole. But when she landed 
 in Cyprus soon after, Cassio hailed her in language which is no excess 
 of compliment, but breathes religious symbolism in every line. And 
 so does this, if we scan it closely. The essential vesture in which she 
 was created in herself, in which also the poet created her image, may 
 tire our ingenuity to discover, as it may have tired the artist or 
 "ingener" to frame; but it is there for us to attempt, and we are 
 invited to do our best. The reader may call what follows the quirks 
 of a blazoning pen, yet the answer to the riddle would be found to be 
 something very simple if we could hear it pronounced by Shakespeare's 
 own lips and tongue and teeth. 
 
 The name of Disddmona is found in the original Italian story, 
 
 37 
 
38 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 she being the only one of all the characters who bears a proper name 
 (the rest are "the Moor," "the Lieutenant," " the Ensign," etc.). It 
 does not appear where Cinthio found this name, or why he gave it to 
 the Venetian lady married to the Moor. As he spells it with an i, 
 probably he derived it from SugSal/uLoov, meaning one born to ill fortune, 
 unhappy ; and as in his story she does nothing to bring her fate upon 
 her, she suited that derivation perfectly. But Shakespeare changed 
 the spelling to Desdemona, with an e ; and if we may suppose that 
 he was not unfamiliar with the Greek Testament, it is easy to find a 
 meaning for her to suit that spelling. It is the meaning that Shaftes- 
 bury (1710) somehow lighted upon for her, perhaps because it served 
 his purpose of ridiculing her and the whole play, namely, the Lady 
 Superstitious (Adv. to an Author, cited by Watkiss Lloyd). The Greek 
 word is §€L(TiSaliJ.<iovi fearing the gods, pious, religious, or superstitious. 
 It is the master- word in a very fam.ous passage of the Acts : 
 
 "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are somewhat super- 
 stitious ; for as I passed by and beheld your objects of worship, I found an 
 altar with this inscribed on it : To an unknown god. Whom therefore ye 
 ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you." 
 
 Many things in the play, above all the innumerable subtle meanings 
 in the fourth and fifth acts, serve to define what Desdemona was in 
 the sense of this Greek word meaning religious or superstitious. 
 
 Thus, her father described her to the Council : 
 
 Bral?. A maiden never bold, 
 
 Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion 
 Blushed at herself. 
 
 The poetic symbol that suits her best in every part of the alleo-ory 
 is the Sacrament as it descended from medieval times, something 
 traditional, undefined to the people, objective, not apprehended by 
 the reason, venerated as a mystic customary rite. And just as Cassio 
 said she excelled the quirks of blazoning pens, so the same admirer 
 of Desdemona, in his next speech, wittily expressed the superiority of 
 the Sacrament to definition by the Articles and rubrics and homilies 
 of the Reformers : 
 
 Cas. Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds, 
 The gutter' d rocks, and congregated sands, — 
 Traitors ensteep'd to dog the guiltless keel,— 
 As having sense of beauty, do omit 
 Their mortal natures, letting go safely by 
 The divine Desdemona. 
 
 The " gutter'd rocks " are a mixed metaphor of the rock of Holy 
 Scripture sounded in the throat of the preacher. The " congregated 
 sands " are the congregation of his hearers as the sands of the sea in 
 number. " Clog the guiltless keel " is the same word that Brabantio 
 
DESDEMONA 39 
 
 (Whitgift) used of Jewel's escape in the matter of the Article on the 
 Church's power (see p. 18). The definition of the Sacrament in the 
 Articles was clogged by the Black Rubric, and both Article and 
 clog were neutralised by what was said in the Catechism and by 
 some things in the Book of Homilies. This latitude of definition is the 
 meaning of " do omit their mortal natures and let go safely by the 
 divine Desdemona " — they suffer themselves to be taken in a non- 
 natural sense, just as Newman did take them in Tract XC. The 
 quarto reads "omit their common natures," which almost suggests 
 the non-natural operation of theologians, but it was thought better to 
 change it to " mortal," which is at the same time more poetical. This 
 elasticity of definition in the Anglican Sacrament is a fact, and has 
 often been the envy and admiration of neighbouring lands. 
 
 In the earlier scenes one would hardly discover Desdemona to be 
 that symbol, unless on going back to them from the end. Something 
 in religious allegory she seems to be, but so generic at first that she 
 might be St Paul's agape — beareth all things, believeth all things, 
 hopeth all things, sustaineth all things, suffers long and is kind, never 
 fails. Or, again, her whiteness, in contrast with the blackness of 
 Othello, is salvation. But neither "the greatest of these" nor the 
 enthusiasm of it, is the one specific symbol that fits the double 
 meaning of the text at every point. It is only the Sacrament that 
 does so ; and inasmuch as that may be held to comprehend all the 
 rest, it becomes the talisman to open the secret of the allegory. This 
 will appear in the sequel in a score of ways. As soon as the 
 hypothesis is entertained, phrase after phrase, incident after incident, 
 acquire a consistent sense under it, until the symbol seems to shine 
 out as the master-jewel of the design. But that feeling of certitude does 
 not depend on any exactness in the thought of her. Cassio's words to 
 the Cypriotes, "excels the quirks of blazoning pens," have not two 
 meanings, but three. It is not merely that she is the Sacrament, and 
 that the doctrine of that is among the arcana or mysteries, but also 
 that the traditional religion of England knew not the doctrine of it, and 
 cared not to know. Desdemona deceived her father, and he warned 
 Othello that she might deceive him. She herself asked, " Alas ! 
 what ignorant sin have I committed?" The elusiveness of the 
 symbol is something to be felt in Shakespeare's text, howsoever he 
 conveyed it thither, analysis being powerless to reach it. He does 
 not mean a culpable benighted superstition, but something as 
 innocent and simple as Desdemona herself, something that she is, not 
 anything that she thinks about, or can be expected to answer for. 
 But Desdemona is that thing in homely circumstances of time and 
 place. She is Brabantio's daughter, something at Lambeth, some- 
 thing Anglican. King James, while he was still at Holyrood, once 
 said that the Sacrament of his Episcopalian neighbours was the Mass 
 
40 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 " without the liftings." In the play we are come to that point of time 
 when James had arrived at Whitehall. But more particularly we are 
 come to the hour of Hooker's great book, to a conception of the 
 Sacrament which was neither of Rome, nor of Augsburg, nor of 
 Geneva, nor of Zurich, — something according to the law of nature 
 and the law of faith, sympathetic with tradition and congenial to 
 superstition, as if it had been the old altar to an unknown god, and a 
 new St Paul had said to the pious English, " Whom therefore ye 
 ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you." 
 
 This will be the most convenient place to introduce Desdemona's 
 disobedience to her father, and the general question of the relations 
 between them. Brabantio disappears from the action early, much to 
 one's regret, for Shakespeare has seldom drawn a part with more 
 insight, or more of the sympathy which gives insight, or more of the 
 humour which comes of affection. Brabantio is the only character of 
 the first rank who does not come into contact consciously with lago. 
 He quits the scene early, with a warning to Othello : 
 
 Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see : 
 She has deceived her father, and may thee. 
 
 We hear of him next, near the end, from Gratiano, his brother : 
 
 Grat. Poor Desdemona 1 I'm glad thy father's dead. 
 The match was mortal to him, and pure grief 
 Shore his old thread in twain ; did he Uve now, 
 This sight would make him do a desperate turn, 
 Yea, curse his better angel from his side. 
 And fall to reprobation. 
 
 "John Whitgift died of grief," as Camden records; but that was 
 because he thought James was going to give way to the Parliament 
 and the Nonconformists. This historical grief of the Archbishop has 
 been transferred by the poet to an altogether different cause in 
 the Brabantio of the play. Shakespeare seems to have known that 
 the Archbishop had other reasons to be disquieted besides the eiTorts 
 of " the Turks." Although Dr Whitgift kept a very firm hand on 
 those who dissented from the ritual of the Common Prayer, yet he 
 was at one with them in points of doctrine. This is expressed with 
 so much sincerity in his controversy with Cartwright thirty years 
 before the scene opens, that we may take it to have been the mature 
 belief of his whole life. So little was he then of Hooker's way of 
 thinking, that he rebukes Cartwright himself for drawing an argument 
 from Aristotle : 
 
 " How contrary is our communion to the Mass ! Is this divinity ? fsome- 
 thing that Cartwright had said about the Aristotelian mean between extremesl 
 Indeed such divmity it is that Aristotle, a profane philosopher, doth teach 
 m his Ethics, but not that Christ and His Apostles do teach in the Gospel 
 
DESDEMONA 41 
 
 . . . These words that you use, ' like their God of the altar,' be slanderous 
 and false. We are as far from thinking the bread to be our God as you, and 
 teach as sound doctrine touching this Sacrament ; and therefore you show of 
 what spirit you be. . . . And you should have learned that the whole action 
 of this Supper is a thanksgiving, and therefore it is called Eucharistia. . 
 And I would to God this vain curiosity had only occupied the schoolmen, 
 and contained itself within the Popish Church. I would to God it had not 
 invaded this Church also. Nay, I would to God it did not much more 
 trouble the Church of Christ now than it did at that time [of Chrysostom]." 
 
 The last quotation is from a sermon before the Queen at Green- 
 w^ich in 1574. In due time Hooker came on the scene, and was 
 befriended by Whitgift in his controversy with Travers at the Temple 
 Church. The Ecclesiastical Polity followed, of which the Fifth Book, 
 in 1597, was dedicated (it would seem after some hitch or delay) to 
 Whitgift. It was full of the schoolmen and of Aristotle — neither of 
 whom would seem from the above quotations to have been favourites 
 with Whitgift. It was more poetical than logical, and was everywhere 
 lacking in those clear-cut, succinct propositions which were Whitgift's 
 distinction in his controversial days. What he thought of it is no- 
 where expressed. When King James was on his way to assume the 
 English Crown, the Archbishop went out to Theobalds to meet him, 
 and one of the first questions the King put to him was about "Mr 
 Hooker that writ the Books of Church Polity," to which the answer 
 was, says Izaak Walton, "that he died a year [three years] before 
 Queen Elizabeth, who received the sad news of his death with very 
 much sorrow." "And I receive it with no less," said James. So 
 doubtless did the Archbishop himself in a personal respect, but hardly 
 in the same sense as Elizabeth, or with that sense of loss to the 
 Church which her chaplain Andrewes expressed in an extant letter 
 written "from the Court" five days after Hookers death. "Had 
 Elizabeth a conscience against the Mass?" asks Newman on good 
 grounds. " I claimed," he says again, " in behalf of who would be in 
 the Anglican Church, the right of holding ... the Mass in all but 
 Transubstantiation with Andrewes, with Hooker that Transubstantia- 
 tion itself is not a point for churches to part communion upon. . . . 
 I doubt whether Hooker could have preached effectively against 
 Transubstantiation better than I, though neither he nor I held that 
 doctrine." Whitgift must have seen the gist of Hooker's via media 
 as clearly as Bancroft, or Andrewes, or all High Churchmen since 
 then ; but he was a sincere Calvinist, if not an ultra-Calvinist, in all 
 but the Discipline, and at the same time he guarded the Common 
 Prayer as if it had been the Ark of the Covenant. 
 
 We may now return to Brabantio's relations with his daughter. 
 He said that she was herself " opposite to marriage," which is more 
 than we know otherwise. For his own part, he discouraged the suit 
 of Roderigo, telling him not to haunt about his doors ; although, after 
 
42 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Desdemona's escape, he said to Roderigo, " O, would you had had 
 her!" From his question, " How got she out?" it maybe inferred 
 that she was kept in somewhat strict seclusion. Looking back at her 
 disobedience, he said, in a moment of chagrin, " I had rather to adopt 
 a child than get it," meaning that he would then have had one to his 
 mind ; in which case we may be sure that he would have gone to 
 Geneva for it. The escape from Lambeth Palace beyond Brabantio's 
 control was really at the call of Hooker's new evangel. It was her 
 "downright violence and storm of fortunes." Desdemona herself 
 justified it before the Duke and senators in a speech which her father 
 could not answer : 
 
 Brab. Come hither, gentle mistress : 
 Do you perceive in all this noble company 
 Where most you owe obedience ? 
 
 Desd. My noble father, 
 
 I do perceive here a divided duty : 
 To you I am bound for life and education ; 
 My life and education both do learn me 
 How to respect you ; you're the lord of duty, — 
 I'm hitherto your daughter : but here's my husband ; 
 And so much duty as my inother showed 
 To you, preferring you before her father, 
 So much I challenge that I may profess 
 Due to the Moor my lord. 
 
 Brab. God be wi' you ! I have done. 
 
 It is an unanswerable argument, or it would have been answered. 
 But observe how necessary to it is the existence of Desdemona's 
 mother. This is the first time that we hear of the signora, and if it 
 had been the only time, her symbolic meaning would have been less 
 clear. But once again she is mentioned : " My mother had a maid 
 called Barbaric." It will be shown, under the part of .Emilia, that the 
 Barbara who sang the song boding of death was St Barbara, one of 
 the most familiar pre- Reformation saints in the popular excerpts 
 from the Sarum missal. Therefore Desdemona's mother was Mother 
 Church in England ; and there can be no doubt of the occasion when 
 that lady preferred " Brabantio " to her father. Her father was the 
 Pope, and the occasion was the Act of Convocation, April 1534, by 
 which the English Church threw off the papal supremacy. Desde- 
 mona adroitly reminds Brabantio of that act of disobedience (without 
 calling it so) by way of justifying her own. As Rome had been dis- 
 obeyed, so would Lambeth be in turn. The fathers have eaten sour 
 grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. But the new occasion 
 in the ecclesiastical history of England was not comparable with the 
 great event of Henry VIII.'s reign. It was a clandestine marriage 
 and elopement, which came before the Duke and Council (throwing 
 the business of the Turks into the background), and was pronounced 
 
DESDEMONA 43 
 
 valid by those high authorities, although the old magnifico bade his 
 daughter goodbye and died of grief. 
 
 Desdemona's knowledge of the family history was minute enough 
 to remind her father that there had been disobedience in his own 
 marriage; for, if there had been none, her precedent would not have 
 been let pass. The air of generality in her argument almost implies 
 that disobedience in the daughter was the rule ; and certainly Shake- 
 speare has many cases of it in his plays. Each generation must 
 please itself; or there is a secular progression, which in the language 
 of biology is heredity modified by adaptation. There is also a church 
 doctrine of development of which Desdemona can have had no 
 technical knowledge, but only an intuition. In his Development of 
 Christian Doctrine (p. 363), Newman writes : " Not in one principle or 
 doctrine only, but in its whole system, Montanism is a remarkable 
 anticipation or presage of developments which soon began to show 
 themselves in the Church, though they were not perfected for 
 centuries after." Montanus was a Phrygian of the third century, and 
 in the fierce controversies of the time he was pronounced a heretic, 
 although he seems to have been merely premature and too ardent. 
 His teaching was the law of nature applied to things the most 
 artificial of any. It was always in operation, whether the Church 
 were conscious of it or not. The law of it was rediscovered in 
 England by Hooker, who is the English Montanus, as Shakespeare 
 clearly saw from the sympathetic way in which Montanus is treated 
 in the Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker is made the Montano of ' Othello,' 
 as I shall prove easily in the end. It was he whom Desdemona 
 meant, at the conclusion of Othello's story, when she " bade me, if I 
 had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my 
 story, and that would woo her." It was also the English Montanus 
 who inspired Desdemona's speech on a divided duty, preferring her 
 husband to her father, " with the same authority from whence all 
 other ordinances came, both being the laws of God Himself, without 
 any other distinction or difference saving only, that he which before 
 had declared his will by Paul and Peter, did now farther reveal the 
 same by Montanus also." 
 
V. lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, HIS GRIEVANCES, 
 AND HIS MOTIVES 
 
 Iago was well known in Venice, for when Lodovico and Gratiano 
 arrived in Cyprus towards the end of the play, they both knew him 
 of old, the former calling him " a very valiant fellow." The one was 
 kinsman to Brabantio, the other his brother ; whence it follows that 
 Iago was a known man in Brabantio's circle. Yet when he came 
 shouting at midnight under the magnifico's windows, he was received 
 with "What profane wretch art thou?" and "Thou art a villain." 
 He did not remain to be recognised when Brabantio came down, 
 giving the reason to Roderigo : 
 
 It seems not meet, nor wholesome to my place. 
 To be produced — as, if I stay, I shall — 
 Against the Moor. 
 
 As usual, he gives Roderigo the wrong reason, or only a part of 
 the reason. He made off because it would not do to be recognised 
 by Brabantio after the language he had used to him in the dark. 
 This is the only time he pours out a torrent of coarse speech ; in his 
 talks with Roderigo on the same matters he is analytical and almost 
 pedantic; once afterwards with Othello he uses blunt phrises, but 
 with evident reluctance. Comparing his incognito with his public 
 manner, we are given to understand that he leads a double life, which 
 impression his oath "By Janus" emphasises. He takes Roderigo 
 so far into his confidence as to explain that, when his outward action 
 demonstrates the native act and figure of his heart, "'tis not long after 
 but I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at. I am 
 not what I am." So far as the play goes, he never did wear his 
 heart upon his sleeve. He was reputed honest Iago by everyone 
 almost to the end ; and, when the sudden revulsion of feeling arose 
 against him in the last scene, he kept a grim silence : 
 
 Iago. Demand me nothing : what you know, you know. 
 From this time forth I never will speak word. 
 0th. Well, thou dost best. 
 
 Owing to the dramatic uses made of him, lago's character is 
 placed in an unfavourable light to the audience. His masterly power 
 of analysis and his terseness of expression are utilised by the dramatist 
 
 44 
 
lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 45 
 
 in the way of chorus, not indeed inconsistently with his character, 
 yet so as to create the illusion that he is a conscious villain, or a 
 devil by nature. But if his monologues be construed strictly, it will 
 be found that he is never conscious of villainy. He is called 
 '■ lago, a villaine," in the list of dramatic persons on the fly-leaf at 
 the end of the quarto of 1622, in which list Roderigo is called "a 
 gulled gentleman." " Thou art a villain," said also Brabantio, not 
 knowing who he was, but judging him by his language. More 
 generally, he himself was aware that his conduct might come to 
 bear that construction ; but he challenged the conclusion : " What is 
 he, then, that says I am a villain?" " How, then, am I a villain?" 
 He had principles well thought out, deliberately adopted, consistently 
 acted upon. Indeed, no one else in the play could have given so 
 good an account of him or herself, unless it were his wife, .Emilia. 
 Bradley remarks that he is not a Machiavellian in the popular sense 
 of the term, and that there is nothing to show he did not profess the 
 received religion. When we come to pick out his more sententious 
 sayings about himself and put them together as a coherent rule of 
 life, it is surprising to find how closely they agree with the counsels, 
 civil and moral, of Francis Bacon. Not only so, but it is startling 
 to find several of Bacon's very phrases put into his mouth. Thus, 
 " I am not what I am " (a peculiar idiom which Maginn thought might 
 be the negative of the Divine Name, " I am that I am ") is found in 
 the third person in the essay "Of Simulation and Dissimulation," 
 in the section where Bacon lays down "the best composition and 
 temperature " — " When a man lets fall signs and arguments that he 
 is not that he is." In the same essay, a man is warranted to feign 
 " if there be no remedy," which is lago's reason for following Othello — 
 " But there's no remedy : 'tis the curse of service," When Roderigo 
 remonstrated at his question, " Whether I am in any just term affin'd 
 to love the Moor," with " I would not follow him, then," he replied, 
 " Oh sir ! content you ; I follow him but to serve my turn upon him" 
 using a not unusual phrase, but one which is found in the same 
 context of a suit in the essay "Of Suitors." His advice to Othello, 
 "Wear your eye thus," showing him how, is filled in as to the 
 particular 'haviour of the visage in the essay " Of Cunning." Another 
 lago phrase, " Yet I for mere suspicion in that kind will do as if for 
 surety," is taken almost verbatim from the essay "Of Suspicion," 
 being the same prudential maxim that Bacon had illustrated in one 
 of his earliest writings. The definition of love : " 'Tis a lust of the 
 blood and a permission of the will," is a neat epitome of the essay 
 " Of Love." Allowing for the necessary paraphrases of a dramatic 
 dialogue one might complete the list of lago's principles and artifices 
 by an ironical use of two or three other essays: "Of Seeming Wise," 
 " Of Friendship," " Of Unity in Religion," and of the fragment on 
 
46 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 " The Colours of Good and Evil " appended to the first collection of 
 essays published in 1597. 
 
 For a succinct account of the principles of honest lago, nothing 
 could be better than this from Bacon's essay "Of Simulation and 
 Dissimulation": 
 
 " The best composition and temperature is to have openness in fame and 
 opinion [t.e. a reputation for openness]; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in 
 seasonable use ; and a power to feign [t.e. to lie] if there be no remedy." 
 
 lago had so great a reputation for openness that he is called 
 " honest lago" with the iteration of a Homeric epithet. His habitual 
 secrecy is revealed to the audience from the first. We see him also 
 dissembling when the occasion called for it. And at the last, when 
 there was no remedy, he lies outright. 
 
 That essay ("Of Simulation," etc.) was not printed until 1625; but there 
 is no reason to assume that it was written late in his life ; at all events his 
 extant counsels to Lord Essex, thirty years before, expound the uses of 
 dissimulation in the same terms. Again, the counsel how to act upon a 
 suspicion, if published late in the essay, is illustrated in his " Letter of Advice 
 to Queen Elizabeth," 1584, by the negative example of a son of Alexander 
 the Great and a treacherous servant. The question of the dates of the several 
 essays is still an open one. In the dedication to Anthony Bacon of the first 
 ten in 1597, he says there is as much vanity in keeping back as in publishing 
 his essays, "unless they be of some nature " — a significant reservation. Of the 
 twenty which had never been published until 1625, about one-half may be said 
 to be "of some nature, "and these are distinguished also by the same terseness 
 and proportion which mark his earliest essays — for example, the model essay 
 "Of Studies," the first in the collection often in 1597. Those ten were sent 
 to the press, "as they passed /ong ago from my pen, to prevent stealing." A 
 much larger number were printed in 1612, which may have been written also 
 " long ago," for the dedication explains: "Looking amongst my papers this 
 vacation, I found others of the same nature," as those published in 1597. 
 The final collection of 1625 contains some of more diffuse style, which are 
 quite obviously the work of his later years, some others that are earlier essays 
 rewritten or added to, but almost certainly some belonging to his first essay- 
 writing period, which he had not thought fit before, on account of their 
 subjects, to wear upon his sleeve for daws to peck at. That his unpublished 
 writings were multiplied in copies is clear from his own reason for publishing 
 in 1597, "to prevent stealing," as well as from the many copies in MS. that 
 Spedding found of his church tract of 1592, and from the fact that his letters 
 to Essex are to be found copied into commonplace books of the time of 
 James I., such as the Sloane MS. No. 1775. In the preface to Nash's 
 Terrors of the Night, 1594, he explains, just as Bacon did, that he had been 
 obliged to print his work because MS. copies were sold without his leave. 
 He had given his manuscript to a friend to read, and somehow copies of it 
 had multiplied. Scriveners hung them out at their shop doors "like a pair 
 of indentures." Thus long after the invention of printing the same kind of 
 piracy went on as in ancient Rome. 
 
 The essay " Of Cunning," which is rich in parallels for the artifices of lago 
 as well as for Edmund in ' King Lear,' had a curious history. In the edition 
 of 1625, it is four times as long as in that of 1612, but the opening paragraph 
 of fifteen lines is exactly the same in both, and the closing paragraph is also 
 
lAGO: HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 47 
 
 the same, except that the last three Hnes of 161 2 are transferred in 1625 ; the 
 whole difference is that an intermediate section of some ninety lines is omitted 
 from the first printing, or interpolated in the second. This is the section 
 which contains the artifices of lago and Edmund. It consists of eighteen 
 specific points, which are introduced as " the small wares of cunning.'' Those 
 are the illustrations of the general principles, so that the essay in its originally 
 printed form (1612) was, in a sense, complete without them. Probably the 
 illustrations, being so many as they are, were collected from time to time, and 
 not .completed until long after the general principles, two of them being 
 instances from the reign of " the late Queen Elizabeth." Among the Harleian 
 MSS. there is a scrivener's copy of thirty-four essays, the title-page of which 
 describes the author as Solicitor-General, so that it was compiled after 1607. 
 It differs from the printed edition of 16 12 only in the order, and in 
 omitting the essay " Of Cunning," as well as those " Of Love " and " Of 
 Religion." The essay on Love underwent no changes; that on Religion was 
 much enlarged in 1625 to " Unity in Religion " ; and that on Cunning had the 
 extensive middle section of examples interpolated. Whatever was the history 
 of the last in manuscript, there are the following similarities between the small 
 wares of cunning and the artifices of lago and Edmund : — 
 
 Essay " Or Cunning." 
 It is a point of cunning to wait upon 
 him with whom you speak with your 
 eye, as the Jesuits give it in precept ; 
 for there be many wise men that have 
 secret hearts and transparent counten- 
 ances : yet this would be done with a 
 demure abasing of your eyes some- 
 times, as the Jesuits also do use. 
 
 The breaking off in the midst of 
 that one was about to say, as if he 
 took himself up, breeds a greater 
 appetite in him with whom you con- 
 fer, to know more. 
 
 I knew another, that when he came 
 to have speech, he would pass over 
 that that he intended most ; and go 
 forth and come back again, and speak 
 of it as a thing that he had almost 
 forgot. 
 
 It is a way that some men have, 
 to glance and dart at others by justi- 
 fying themselves by negatives, as to 
 say, " This I do not." 
 
 ' Othello.' 
 lago. Wear your eye 
 jealous, nor severe. 
 
 {Showing him how.) 
 
 thus, not 
 
 0th. And, for I know thou art full 
 
 of love and honesty. 
 And weigh'st thy words before thou 
 
 giv'st them breath, 
 Therefore, these stops of thine fright 
 
 me the more : 
 For such things in a false disloyal 
 
 knave 
 Are tricks of custom. 
 
 0th. Leave me, lago. 
 lago. My lord, I take my leave. 
 lago {returning). My lord, I would 
 I might entreat your honour 
 To scan this thing no further . . . 
 Note if your lady strain his [Cassio's] 
 
 entertainment 
 With any strong or vehement im- 
 portunity ; 
 Much will be seen in that. 
 
 lago. It were not for your quiet 
 nor your good. 
 Nor for my manhood, honesty or 
 
 wisdom. 
 To let you know my thoughts. 
 (And many other speeches.) 
 
48 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 A sudden, bold, and unexpected lago. Did Michael Cassio, when 
 
 question doth many times surprise a you woo'd my lady, 
 
 man, and lay him open. Know of your love ? 
 
 0th. He did, from first to last ; 
 why dost thou ask ? 
 
 Some persons procure themselves This is literally and exactly the 
 
 to be surprised at such times as it is artifice of Edmund in ' King Lear,' 
 like the party they work upon will from which source Bacon may, of 
 suddenly come upon them, and to be course, have taken it. 
 found with a letter in their hand, or 
 doing somewhat which they are not 
 accustomed, to the end that they may 
 be opposed of \i.e. questioned upon] 
 those things which of themselves they 
 are desirous to utter. 
 
 2. His Grievances. — Not less surprising is it to find that logo's 
 service grievance, which is put into the forefi-ont of the play, becomes 
 exactly Bacon's on changing the military profession into the legal. 
 The Ensign in Cinthio's story had no such motive for hating his 
 General, nor did he hate him at all, but only his wife for ignoring his 
 lustful passion. The grievance of unrewarded merit was not peculiar 
 to Bacon in that age, for he himself has generalised it thus : " In the 
 time of the Cecils, the father and the son, able men were by design 
 and of purpose suppressed." But he was himself his best instance : he 
 aspired to the Attorneyship in 1593, when he was thirty-three, and he 
 got nothing until the Solicitorship in 1607. Not only is the grievance 
 imagined for lago of that generic kind, but the very full particulars 
 which he gives of his unsuccessful suit are those of Bacon's case, 
 skilfully disguised. His suit was, of course, to the Queen, lago's to 
 the General : 
 
 lago. Three great ones of the city. 
 
 In personal suit to make me his lieutenant, 
 
 Off-capp'd to him ; and by the faith of man, 
 
 I know my price ; I am worth no less a place : 
 
 But he, as loving his own pride and purposes. 
 
 Evades them, with a bombast circumstance, 
 
 Horribly stuff d with epithets of war : 
 
 And in conclusion 
 
 Non-suits my mediators : for " Cartes," says he, 
 
 " I have already chose my officer." 
 
 And what was he ? 
 
 Forsooth, a great arithmetician, 
 
 One Michael Cassio, a Florentine, 
 
 A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife ; 
 
 That never set a squadron in the field, 
 
 Nor the division of a battle knows 
 
 More than a spinster : unless the bookish theoric, 
 
 Wherein the toga'd consuls can propose 
 
 As masterly as he : mere prattle without practice 
 
 Is all his soldiership. But he, sir, had the election : 
 
 And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof 
 
lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 49 
 
 At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds. 
 
 Christian and heathen, must be belee'd and caltn'd 
 
 By debtor and creditor : this counter-caster. 
 
 He, in good time, must his lieutenant be, 
 
 And I — God bless the mark ! — his Moorship's ancient, 
 
 the last phrase having been originally " his worship's ancient." 
 
 The speech is characteristic and human for lago, because it is 
 carefully constructed from the real case of Bacon, The occasion was 
 his suit for the Attorneyship in 1593; by the faith of man he knew 
 his price, he was worth no worse a place. It was decided to give it to 
 Sir Edward Coke, afterwards the famous Lord Chief-Justice ; the 
 decision was taken a whole year before Coke's patent was made out, 
 hence the fitness of " I have already chose mine officer." Bacon's 
 mediators were non-suited or evaded with a bombast circumstance 
 horribly stuffed with epithets of law : the Queen said, " Bacon hath a 
 great wit and much learning, but in law showeth to the utmost of his 
 knowledge, which is not deep." He then tried for the Solicitorship 
 vacated by Coke's promotion, which he ought to have had if he were 
 exactly lago becoming " his worship's " ancient. In both candidatures 
 " three great ones of the city " off-capped to the Queen for him — Lord 
 Essex with so much persistence (hence, perhaps, the other reading, 
 •'oft capped ") that Bacon thought afterwards he had injured his suit, 
 and, with less zeal, his uncle. Lord Burghley, and his cousin. Sir 
 Robert Cecil. The Solicitorship was kept vacant a year and a half, 
 Bacon's suit going on incessantly, and was at length given to 
 Sergeant Fleming ("he in good time must his lieutenant be"), whose 
 surname accounts for the " great arithmetician," and the " counter- 
 caster," the Flemings being keen traders and adepts in reckoning or 
 casting accounts. These epithets are really outside the play, as we 
 can hardly suppose that the jovial Cassio, who spent his evenings 
 with Bianca and got drunk, was really addicted to the bookish 
 theoric of his profession. The other fling, " a fellow almost damned 
 in a fair wife," has a witty meaning for the original of Cassio, which is 
 explained below. 
 
 The general reason for putting these gibes and sneers at his rival 
 into the mouth of lago is, that Bacon practised disparagement of a 
 rival " as a fine art." Most persons find it a mistaken policy in a suit, 
 but Bacon was not of that opinion. The point is enlarged upon by 
 Abbott {Bacon and Essex, p. 64, 1877), and is sufficiently proved by a 
 single phrase from one of his letters to Essex when the suit for the 
 Attorneyship was going on : he urges his lordship not only to press 
 his own positive merits, but also to "drive in the nail for the 
 Huddler," meaning Sir Edward Coke— the huddler for Coke warrant- 
 ing Shakespeare's counter-caster for lago's successful competitor in 
 military service. 
 
50 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Still more distinctive of Bacon is lago's " belee'd and calm'd by 
 debtor and creditor." This is taken to mean no more than a reitera- 
 tion of the gibe at Cassio as a counter-caster and a great arithmetician ; 
 but it is even less appropriate to Cassio than these, and must have a 
 meaning for lago's own circumstances, or rather for the circumstances 
 of lago's original. Supposing there were any point in placing the 
 Ancient in financial straits, he would not have been relieved by 
 getting the pay of the higher office. But the lack of promotion made 
 a real difference to Bacon's financial position. So long as he had 
 some chance of the Attorneyship ( 1593-94), and later of the Solicitor- 
 ship (1594-96), his creditors forebore to press him ; but when he lost 
 the second office they closed in upon him. His troubles with his 
 creditors are a large part of his biography about the year 1597. One 
 moneylender had him arrested in the street and thrown into a 
 spunging house, where he was of course " belee'd " if not " calm'd." 
 The calming may have been by Essex's generous gift of the land at 
 Twickenham, which Bacon afterwards sold for ^1800. 
 
 3. His Motives. — lago's service grievance was no sufficient motive 
 for " I hate the Moor," although Maginn has rightly pointed out that 
 it has often been a motive for dislike of commanders and even for 
 revenge. Moreover, it is not used as a motive against Othello in 
 what follows, but only as against his favoured rival Cassio, " to plume 
 up my will in double knavery." His hatred of the Moor had some- 
 how begun long before the expedition to Cyprus was heard of. In 
 the opening scene he said to Roderigo : " I have told thee often, and 
 I re-tell thee again and again, I hate the Moor; my cause is hearted." 
 Nothing so recent as the appointments to Othello's staff can explain 
 that hatred. It is a constitutional antipathy, rooted or "hearted" in 
 some opposition of qualities or temperament. It is like the antipathy 
 of Kent to Oswald in ' King Lear ' : "No contraries hold more 
 antipathy than I and such a knave. . . . His countenance likes me 
 not." lago's announcement is as abrupt as Kent's, and in both cases 
 the meaning of it must be found by discovering the originals of the 
 respective parties. 
 
 The easiest way with the puzzle of lago's motives is to deny that 
 he had any. He was simply an automaton, wound up by the devil, 
 which made believe that it had motives, and that these were no worse 
 than other people's. He was a being next to devil, and only not 
 quite devil because he shrank from the fiendish image of himself 
 The inventor of this plausible nonsense was Coleridge. lago's 
 soliloquy at the end of the first act was " the motive-hunting of a 
 motiveless malignity — how awful it is ! " The motiveless malignity 
 hunting for motives has " caught on," as a fine-sounding paradox is 
 always safe to do. Coleridge was a philosopher in slippers, too easily 
 pleased with his inspired verbalisms to test the reality of them by facts. 
 
lAGO: HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 51 
 
 If he had read the soliloquy carefulh', and compared it with another in 
 the second act, he would have found in both a very ordinary motive 
 announced, and mused forth only to lago himself, so that it was not 
 meant to deceive anyone. It is stated the second time with added 
 emphasis, and with an earnestness unusual with him, as the signal for 
 beginning operations against the Moor. It was the common rumour, 
 and his own suspicion, that Othello was carrying on an intrigue with 
 his wife ^^imilia, " the thought whereof doth like a poisonous mineral 
 gnaw my inwards ; and nothing can or shall content my soul till 
 I am even'd with him, wife for wife." Could anything be more 
 explicit, more serious, more resolute? 
 
 The critics have decided almost unanimously to treat the cuckold 
 motive as negligible, because lago took no steps to verify the rumour, 
 never recurred to it, nor re-asserted the truth of it when ^Emilia 
 denied it, and told him that " some such squire had turned his wit the 
 seamy side without.'' One critic. Snider, accepts it as a genuine 
 motive, but only on the condition that the suspicion was well 
 grounded, or that Othello was in fact guilty with ^Emilia, which is 
 too absurd to be granted. The motive in lago's mind is not negligible, 
 although it has a forced or artificial appearance. I shall cite the 
 exact terms of it in both speeches, as there are subtleties in them. 
 But meanwhile we have to ask. What is the meaning of bringing 
 forward such a motive at all, when it is dropped almost as soon as 
 stated? It cannot have been inadvertence, for Emilia recurs to it 
 near the end. The explanation is the same as for lago's constitu- 
 tional antipathy to the Moor, which was his grand motive. It 
 pertains to the real man for whom lago stood ; it is real for the 
 allegory behind the Cyprus tragedy ; but as it fitted awkwardly to 
 the Cinthio story, it was not made operative in the details of the plot. 
 Had it not been necessary for the symbolism, it would not have been 
 advanced at all. The original of lago appears to be Bacon in his 
 principles and in his grievance of non-promotion ; he suits Bacon also 
 in his constitutional antipathy to something represented by Othello, 
 and in the particular motive of having been supplanted in his bed by 
 the same something. The constitutional antipathy and the cuckold's 
 revenge are involved the one in the other; the thing that Bacon had 
 a whole-hearted hatred of was also the thing that ousted him, the 
 thought whereof gnawed his inwards like a poisonous mineral. To 
 find this thing, Othello being the poetic symbol of it, is not at first 
 sight easy in Bacon's life. He was not a man of personal hatreds : on 
 the contrary, there is much reason to believe that he had a strong 
 tincture of good nature, although he seems to have been accused of 
 arrogance in his youth. In the signal instance of Essex, it is im- 
 possible to believe that Bacon ever hated him, however meanly he 
 may have behaved to him. No one ever hated Essex, such was the 
 
52 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 fascination of his nature. Bacon was at one time drawn to him as the 
 hope of the State, and threw him over so as not to be involved in his 
 impending ruin. In his profession of the law there was certainly no 
 love lost between him and Sir Edward Coke; but that is a mere 
 bagatelle, and quite beside the point. It is not in politics, nor in the 
 law, that we have to look for Bacon's strong constitutional aversions 
 and singular dislikes, spites, and revenges, but in philosophy, in 
 religion, and in ecclesiastical polity ; and in that sphere his mortal 
 antipathies are so far from being to his discredit, that more than half 
 the world at the present day will applaud them. His hatred of 
 Aristotle and the Schoolmen is perhaps the most fundamental thing, 
 colouring his antipathies in religion and ecclesiastical polity indirectly; 
 but it is only the latter that I am immediately concerned with for the 
 antipathies of lago. 
 
 Bacon's earliest ambition was to compose the ecclesiastical 
 differences of the nation, and to settle the polity of the Church on a 
 statesman-like basis. When he was only three-and-twenty, he wrote 
 on that subject his "Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth," 1584. 
 He returned to it in 1589, the year of Bancroft's famous High Church 
 Sermon at Paul's Cross, with an " Advertisement concerning Church 
 Controversies " ; again in 1 592 with his " Answer to a [Papist] Libel " ; 
 and once more, after an interval of eleven years, he sought the ear 
 of King James before he had been well seated on the throne, with 
 his State paper on " The Better Pacification and Edification of the 
 Church of England," which the King used as a kind of brief for his 
 management of the Hampton Court Conference in the January 
 following. These four pamphlets do not bulk largely amongst his 
 writings, and have been printed by Spedding in his Biography, not 
 among his Works. Yet the fact that he essayed the same task so 
 often, that it was his first love, and that he had the field as a layman 
 all to himself, makes Bacon peculiarly the ecclesiastical politician of 
 the end of Elizabeth's reign. It appears that, in 1590, he was em- 
 ployed by Walsingham and the Archbishop to draw up a declaration 
 and defence of the Queen's procedure with heretics and Catholics in 
 answer to an inquiry from France, and that Whitgift revised the draft 
 of his old Cambridge pupil (Spedding). 
 
 It was in those years that Richard Hooker, the famous author of 
 The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, came into note. He was eight 
 years older than Bacon, and had been brought up to London in 1585, 
 from a poor living in Bucks, to be Master of the Temple, over the 
 head of the reader, Travers, a minister ordained by the presbytery 
 of Antwerp, who was afterwards the first provost of Trinity College, 
 Dublin. Hooker's sermons on Sunday mornings, and Travers's 
 Puritan polemics in the afternoon, were matters of keen interest to 
 the lawyers. It was said that half the congregation took notes, 
 
lAGO: HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 53 
 
 including such eminent benchers as Sir Edward Coke and Sir James 
 Altham. It is known that Bacon was one of Travers's hearers. In 
 his morning discourses Hooker began to develop those profound 
 principles which he afterwards threw into a system in his great 
 book. To give him leisure and quiet for the systematic treatise he 
 was at work upon, Whitgift presented him in 1591 to a living near 
 Salisbury, from whence the Queen, at the instance of the Archbishop, 
 preferred him, in 1595, to the good living of Bishopsbourne, three 
 miles from Canterbury. On 9th March 1 593 were copyrighted the first 
 four books of his Ecclesiastical Polity, the publication being delayed 
 until 1594: the iifth book, on the Sacraments, longer than the other 
 four, was published in 1597, with a dedication to Whitgift. The re- 
 maining three books were posthumous, doubtfully authentic in parts, 
 and not all published until 1662. His five books were made the subject 
 of a powerful and merciless anonymous attack two years after their 
 completion, in a pamphlet of forty-seven pages issued in 1599, without 
 even a printer's name on it. Hooker himself wrote on the fly-leaf of 
 his copy that it had inflicted " as many stabs as my body could 
 receive at your hands," and compared himself to Julius Caesar 
 assassinated by Cassius and Brutus. Dr Covel, who delivered the 
 official answer to the attack in 1603, gave currency to the saying, 
 which he himself mildly denied, that "the wound to that reverend 
 and learned man was not the least cause to procure his death." He 
 died of consumption on 2nd November 1600, brought on by a chill 
 caught in a journey by water from London to Gravesend on his way 
 home to Bishopsbourne. I shall adduce reasons for believing that 
 the anonymous pamphleteer was Bacon, and that Bacon in that 
 capacity is I ago. 
 
 Hooker called his work a polity, and his introduction, addressed 
 to the Nonconformists, is eminently practical. But his grand object 
 was to discover the laws of ecclesiastical polity. His first book is 
 an exposition of the reign of law throughout the universe, in things 
 spiritual as well as material. It was read to the reigning Pope, 
 Clement VIII., by Dr Stapleton in a Latin paraphrase; at the con- 
 clusion of which the Pope spake to this purpose : " There is no learning 
 that this man hath not searched into ; nothing too hard for his under- 
 standing : this man indeed deserves the name of an author ; his books 
 will get reverence by age, for there are in them such seeds of eternity, 
 that, if the rest be like this, they shall last till the last fire shall 
 consume all learning." 
 
 His practical object for peace in the Church was, by exhibiting the 
 law of nature in the things of the spirit, including all rites and 
 ceremonies, to procure common obedience thereto on the ground of 
 its reasonableness, fairness, and truth. "It is not agreed upon by 
 one or two, or few, but by all, which we may not so understand, as 
 
54 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 if every particular man in the whole world did know and confess 
 whatsoever the Law of Reason doth contain ; but this law is such that, 
 being proposed, no man can reject it as unreasonable and unjust." 
 He discovered reason and common sense in Scripture, in the writings 
 of the Fathers, and in the decisions of councils. He based constantly 
 on Aristotle and his schoolmen interpreters, and even on the Greek 
 poets, citing, for example, "that which one in Sophocles observeth 
 concerning a branch of this law : ' It is no child of to-day's or 
 yesterday's birth, but hath been, no man knoweth how long 
 sithence,' " giving two lines from the Greek of the Antigone in a 
 note. (The more famous passage on " unwritten laws " in a chorus 
 of the (Edipus Tyranniis he does not cite, but the substance of it is 
 re-echoed more than once in his own eloquent prose.) 
 
 Upon such materials, which his erudition and his large library 
 supplied in abundance. Hooker used a method which may be called 
 scientific for its time and a style which has the quality of poetry. 
 
 All this was Bacon's pet aversion. He denied the reign of 
 natural law in the things of the spirit as vehemently as he asserted 
 it in the material universe. The laws of religion were for him a code, 
 written by the finger of God in Scripture, which he took in the lump 
 as the Testimony, or Book of the Law, an all-sufficient code, deposited 
 in the Ark, of which the Church had merely the custody and liberty 
 to interpret — in the sense of Calvin. He hated Aristotle and " the 
 rubbish and pother of the Schoolmen," scoffed at the question-begging 
 logic and figments of patristic writings, and held the authority of the 
 Church to be a degenerate tradition perverting the plain meaning of 
 scriptural texts. In his tract of 1589, by which time Hooker's 
 sermons were making a stir, he was pleased to say : " The blessed 
 procedure of the Apostles and Fathers of the primitive Church was, 
 not to enter into assertions and positions, but to deliver counsels and 
 advices," which procedure he, Bacon, sought " to revive," as the right 
 way to settle the ecclesiastical polity of the nation. As a sample of 
 his " counsels and advices," he proposed to keep a check on Popish 
 recusants by ordering that no one, great or small, be enrolled in the 
 musters, or be suffered to keep so much as an halberd in his house, 
 unless he come to communion "orderly and duly." His erudition 
 was, of course, much more restricted than Hooker's in the particular 
 sphere ; so that one part of the antipathy between the two aspirants 
 in ecclesiastical polity was in scope and method. Bacon's attempts 
 to settle the polity of the Church by counsels and advices fell fiat. 
 How entirely they were disregarded one may read in Spedding's 
 Life, i. 39, where it is pointed out that he was thwarted by the rise 
 of High Church principles, "which ended in the overthrow of the 
 monarchy itself for a time, and in making the existence of a national 
 English Church, in any true sense of the word national, an impossi- 
 
lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 55 
 
 bility to this day." While Bacon's biographer thus clearly recognises 
 his ambition to settle the affairs of the Church, and his want of 
 success, he never mentions the Ecclesiastical Polity of Hooker, but 
 refers the whole High Church reaction to the appointment of 
 Whitgift to the primacy in 1583. But that prelate was really at one 
 with Bacon in all matters of Calvinist doctrine, while both alike 
 rejected the Calvinist discipline as impracticable in England. The 
 Queen's selection of Whitgift for the primacy may have been as 
 decisive of the course of events as Spedding maintains ; but it was 
 the later developments, under Bancroft as a man of affairs, and 
 under Hooker as a thinker, that made Bacon's church polity fall 
 fiat. Bancroft's sermon on " trying the spirits,'' preached at Paul's 
 Cross 9th February 1589, on the eve of the meeting of Parliament, 
 and his tract of 1593 on "Dangerous Positions," were the first High 
 Church charter. Hooker quoted Bancroft's sermon in his preface of 
 1594, and endorsed the principle of it ; while his anonymous enemy, 
 the author of the Christian Letter, bracketed the Ecclesiastical Polity 
 with the " Dangerous Positions" and with another tract in Latin, also 
 supposed Bancroft's, of the same sacerdotal tendency, and issued from 
 the same press. 
 
 When Bacon sent to the press ten of his essays in 1597, he 
 included in the slim volume (Spedding thinks with no other object 
 than to make it less slim) a series of twelve Sacred Meditations, in 
 Latin, which he himself translated into English two years after. The 
 first half of the series are properly called sacred meditations, and are 
 indeed so unctuous that one wonders how they could ever have 
 issued from such a menage as Bacon kept at that time in Gray's Inn. 
 (See his mother's lachrymose letter to Anthony.) But the last half 
 dozen are neither meditations nor sacred, but trenchant attacks on 
 patristic and scholastic writings, on visionaries and enthusiasts of the 
 past, under the respective headings of Hypocrites, Impostors, Three 
 Kinds of Imposture, Heresies, Atheists (including those who did not 
 take the Calvinist view of Predestination), and the Supremacy of 
 Scripture, which is the Testimony, or Book of the Law, preserved in 
 the Ark. Hooker, of course, is not mentioned— Bacon seldom refers 
 to any contemporary by name, nor was it then usual ; but it is hardly 
 doubtful that the author of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and all 
 his crew of authorities, Aristotelian, patristic, and scholastic, were 
 among the impostors. 
 
 Shortly after, in 1599, there appeared the anonymous attack on 
 Hooker, called " A Christian Letter of certaine English Protestants, 
 unfained favourers of the present state of Religion, authorised and 
 professed in England: unto that Reverend and learned man, Mr 
 R. Hoo, requiring resolution in certain matters of doctrine (which 
 seeme to overthrow the foundation of Christian Religion and of the 
 
56 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Church among us), expreslie contained in his five books of 
 Ecclesiastical Policie,'' 1599, pp. 49— no author's, publisher's, or 
 printer's name. Hooker's copy of this tract, annotated on the fly- 
 leaves and margins by himself, is in the library of Corpus Christi 
 College, Oxford. Keble was the first to use these valuable marginalia 
 of Hooker. He has transcribed the whole of them into various places 
 of his edition of his works, giving also a lithograph of the hand- 
 writing in three specimens, and selecting the most solemn of the 
 notes, a sentence adapted from St Augustine, to be the motto on 
 the title-pages of his edition in three volumes. Thus the Christian 
 Letter and Hooker's reply to it has gained a very wide publicity 
 in modern times. ^ 
 
 I begin with Hooker's notes on his enemy, from which it was 
 clear to Keble "that he knew or strongly suspected who the writer 
 of the pamphlet was." The tract bore on its title-page that it was 
 the work of " certaine English Protestants, unfained favourers of the 
 present state of Religion, authorised and professed in England," i.e. 
 of the Prayer-book and of the Articles. Hooker sets aside the plural 
 authorship, and speaks of one man as if he knew him, or knew more 
 of him than the tract itself revealed. As to the alleged collaboration, 
 he says in a legal figure : " But the best is, they are not many that 
 sate on the bench from which this sentence proceeded. It is your owne. 
 As for them against whom you give it, I think they take you for 
 no competent^'z^;^." The most striking proof of personal knowledge 
 is, that he credits his enemy with gifts of oratory (not of the pulpit), 
 as well as of style : 
 
 " I doubt not but if you once attain to understand the rudiments of 
 Christian religion, which with good helps may be done in reasonable time, 
 those other gifts of speech and writing, wherewith it hath pleased God to 
 indue you in very good handsome measure, may do good for the edifying 
 of poor country people, in case you apply your talent that way, and leave 
 the controversies of religion to other men that have bestowed their time 
 on them." 
 
 Hooker recognises his power, and was probably more in awe of 
 him than Keble will admit. The nervous manner of many of the 
 notes suggests the kind of impression on him that Hanbury thinks 
 the tract ought to have made: "No ordinary production for vigour 
 of style and the insight it gives into the latent principles. . . . The 
 
 1 The first notice of the Christian Letter in modern times, perhaps the first since 1603, 
 was by C. Wordsworth in a note to Walton's Life of Hooker, in his Eccles. Biog., iv. p. 269, 
 181 8. It was probably one of the many rare tracts that Wordsworth found in the Lambeth 
 Library. Attracted by the extracts from it there given, Benjamin Hanbury, Hooker's 
 Nonconformist editor, 1830, reprinted the whole pamphlet, in sections scattered throughout 
 his two first volumes. He reprinted also Dr Covel's reply to it, 1603, and claimed the 
 reprints of both as a distinguishing feature of his edition of the Ecclesiastical Polity. 
 Although the Christian Letter in Keble's edition is as prominent in the notes as T. C or 
 Cartwright, and although Keble's volumes are in constant use (edited by Church and' Paget) 
 by candidates for orders, yet it does not appear to have been the subject of any research 
 since Keble's in 1836. 
 
lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 57 
 
 great Hooker is encountered by talents which he dared not to dis- 
 regard, and which must have awed and unnerved him for the 
 remainder of his undertaking." (He does not seem to have known of 
 the annotated copy.) Yet Hooker repeatedly speaks of his enemy 
 as a mere tyro in divinity; and although he does not call him a 
 layman, it is impossible to understand in any other sense his profound 
 scorn of his opponent's theological ignorance, combined with the 
 admission of his "gifts of speech and writing in very good handsome 
 measure." With the notes before him, Keble guessed that the enemy 
 might be some " person before versed in the Puritan controversy, 
 and now desirous, under cover of anxiety for evangelical doctrine, to 
 insinuate the principles of the Genevan discipline in all their disturbing 
 force." But the tract has not one word to say for presbytery, nor 
 does Hooker accuse the author of playing false to his very explicit 
 title-page in that respect. The note on which Keble seems to have 
 relied for his guess of a Disciplinarian "veteran" is this: "Have you 
 been tampering so long with Pastors, Doctors, Elders, Deacons, that 
 the first principles of your religion are now to learn ? " the occasion of 
 the note being that the Christian Letter had denied that Hope and 
 Charity were included in justification by Faith. It is not easy to 
 understand how Keble should ever have thought of a veteran 
 Puritan controversialist, unless that he were puzzled what to think ; 
 for one of Hooker's gibes is, " Read some good Catechism, and take 
 the help of divines allowed by authority." If he knew his man, as 
 Keble says it is clear that he did, he would not have said that even 
 in anger, had his critic been a Puritan divine. The most unhappy 
 guess, unsupported by a single argument, is that of C. Wordsworth 
 {Christ. Inst., i. 90, 1837), that the formidable unknown was Dr 
 Andrew Willet, the author of the standard folio. Synopsis Papismi, 
 3rd ed., 1600, dedicated to Whitgift. Willet was a dungeon of 
 controversial erudition ; he delighted in the scholastic "positions," for 
 and against, which the tract condemns, and he congratulated 
 Whitgift on the security of the Church under his firm rule; whereas 
 the anonymous author begins, in deep-mouthed tones of warning, that 
 the security was false, and the house of God on fire. 
 
 Dr Covel, who answered it after four years, treated the authorship 
 as a mystery which he had no wish to search into, but he called the 
 tract " an uncivil ironie," and quoted St James : " If any man among 
 you seem to be religious and bridle not his tongue, that man's religion 
 is vain." Neither did Hooker himself believe in his enemy's sincerity, 
 nor take him seriously except in the sense that he could stab, sting, 
 vex, and annoy : 
 
 "Forget not here to use that of Solomon, Prov. xxvi. 18 : As a madman 
 who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death, so is the man that deceiveth his 
 neighbour, and saith, Am not 1 in sport 1 " 
 
58 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 How malicious the criticism is may be shown by the example of 
 the cardinal doctrine of the Trinity. Bacon, in a curious fragment 
 called " Christian Paradoxes," which Spedding has reproduced, says : 
 " He believes three to be one, and one to be three ; a father not to be 
 elder than his so?i ; a son to be equal with his father." This, it will be 
 remembered, was the great controversy which convulsed the Church 
 in the fourth century. Hooker, in his section on the Nicene and 
 Athanasian Creeds, has written effusively on the " blasphemy where- 
 with Arius had dishonoured his co-eternally begotten Son," "the 
 venomous infection of heresy," the " pestilence" of demi-Arians, etc. 
 But in expounding the idea of Sonship, he had said : " Seeing there- 
 fore the Father alone is originally that Deity which Christ originally 
 is not." Whereupon his enemy asked him, '' How differ from the 
 heresy of Arius, who saith, 'There was when he was not,' who yet 
 granted that he was before all creatures?" Hooker, however, had 
 safeguarded himself by the doctrine of " eternal generation," following 
 Hilary and Augustine : " Ubi auctor sternus est, ibi et nativitatis 
 a^ternitas est," " generatio prsestat Filio sine initio." Such scholastic 
 subtleties were not approved by Bacon. He escapes from them by a 
 string of cynical " paradoxes," while the anonymous critic of Hooker's 
 orthodoxy, with equally Baconian bluffness, proves the co-eternity of 
 the Son by a text from the Proverbs of Solomon. 
 
 But to let the reader judge for himself of the general unscrupulous- 
 ness towards Hooker, as well as of the enormous rhetorical power, I 
 shall give the peroration of the Christian Letter in full : — 
 
 " In the book of that most learned and Reverend Father, Dr Whitgift, we 
 find the question judicially set down ; his answer to the matter in question 
 sensible ; his reasons either from Holy Scripture, from Fathers, or new 
 writers, without all circumferences and crooked windings, directly applied ; 
 so as such poor men as we be may bear away what he saith, and what he 
 intendeth ; but in your writing we are mightily encumbered ; we walk in a 
 labyrinth, and are suddenly overwhelmed as in the deep sea : sometime it 
 seemeth to us that we see great flourishing of warlike and gUttering weapons, 
 and to hear the loud outcries and noise of them which pursue their enemies 
 in battle, thundering, gunshot, tossing of spears, and rattling of harness ; yet 
 cannot we perfectly perceive anything almost rightly to touch the adversary 
 pretended, but rather (as in our demands before we verily think doth mani- 
 festly appear) most heavy strokes, poisoned pellets, and dangerous pushes of 
 the pikes against the Jerusalem of God, the Holy Christian Church of 
 England, whom you would seem to defend. We desire you, therefore, with 
 all instancy, that you would not deny us three things : First, to show unto us 
 what arguments you have alleged, which are material and of weight, which are 
 not to be found in the ' Aunswere ' of that Reverend Father \i.e. Whitgift] 
 unto Master Cartwright ; and herein plainly to declare which be your 
 arguments or direct answers, which are neither fine and close ironies or 
 blustering bitter scoffs, begging of the question, or peremptory affirmations ; 
 and how we may know what is the state of the question, and when you are in 
 or out, and what you hold in your conscience to be the truth in God's sight ; 
 
lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 59 
 
 how great and large your Five Books would be if you had used reasonable, 
 intelligible, and logical arguments only, as other writers and disputers do ; and 
 had left out all needless witty glosses and rhetorical shadows, in preambles, 
 discourses, digressions, amphfications ; and had kept yourself out of the 
 common jail of sophistical clenches and impertinent outleaps; and had 
 followed St Peter's prescript in a most reverend and direct apology and defense 
 proceeding from 'a good conscience' (i Pet. iii. 15, 16). Secondly, that if 
 you set forth your other Books which are promised, you would be more plain 
 and sensible ; and follow the usual language and style of other learned men 
 and English writers ; leaving out unnecessary long discourses and common- 
 places, set out your reasons in plain terms and words of sincerity, without 
 those huge embossments or stuffed bombasting, that poor plain men which 
 cannot skill of such hidden mysteries may perceive and learn something by 
 your great travails. Thirdly, that you would be careful not to corrupt the 
 Enghsh Creed and pure doctrine (whereunto you have subscribed) either by 
 philosophy or vain deceit of schoolmen's new-born divinity, or by any other 
 beggarly rudiments of this world ; nor set these Churches by the ears with 
 these closely carried and dainty insinuations ; and that through desire of vain- 
 glory, you provoke not your brethren, and help the common and sworn 
 enemy which fighteth against God, against Christ's Church, against our 
 peaceable country, and against our religious, godly, and Christian Princess. 
 And especially that you beware in the cause of Supremacy to give your lawful 
 Sovereign her right and full due, and not so to make the Church of Rome of 
 the family of Christ Jesus that you hft up the son of pride, the blasphemous 
 tyrant the Pope, into that high chair of pestilence to be Christ's vicar upon 
 earth, and ministerial head of His universal Church. For as there is one 
 that saith, the Church of Rome is Mater nostra, 'our mother,' so if you should 
 go but one step further, we know not what injury may be done to her 
 Majesty's rightful imperial crown and dignity. And, lasdy, that you remember 
 Him which is high and excellent, the King of all glory and Lord of all power; 
 that you please not man to displease God ; and, seeking yourself, you forsake 
 not your own mercy. You know that it is written, " Only by pride doth man 
 make contention ; but with the well-advised is wisdom ' (Prov. xiii. 10); and 
 ' When pride cometh, then shame cometh ; but with the lowly is wisdom ' 
 (ibid. xi. 2) ; you know also who hath said, ' Vengeance is mine,' etc. (Deut. 
 xxxii. 35); and again, 'Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no 
 harm' (Psalm cv. 15) ; and again, ' The Lord knoweth the way of the righteous ; 
 and the way of the wicked shall perish ' {ibid. i. 6). Now in all these things, 
 good Maister Hoo, though we thus write, we do not take upon us to censure 
 your Books; neither rashly to judge of you for them ; but because we be all 
 children born in this Church, and every child loving his mother is jealous 
 over that which seemeth disgraceful to his mother, and all Christians are 
 exhorted to ' contend earnestly for the Faith which was once given to the 
 Saints ' (Jude, ver. 3), and he that toucheth our faith touches the apple of our 
 eye ; we could not but utter our inward grief, and yet in as charitable manner 
 as the cause in hand would suffer. . . ." 
 
 There is half a page more in the same vein of loving expostulation, 
 and the work ends with the announcement that the author would 
 remember good Maister Hoo in his prayers— a well-known amenity 
 of the odium theologicum. To this " charitable " profession Hooker 
 replied : " As if Cassius and Brutus having slain Csesar, they should 
 have solemnly protested to his friends that they meant him nothing 
 but goodwill and friendship." The exordium, which Keble gives 
 
6o ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 nearly in full (pp. x, xi) is in the same deep-mouthed tones of the 
 Spartan hound. Aut Franciscus aut diabolus ! Excepting at the 
 beginning and the end, where it is powerful and flowing, the style is 
 remarkable for masterly coolness, brevity, and point. That part of 
 the attack, some four-fifths of it, is concerned with a detailed examina- 
 tion of Hooker's liberties taken with some twenty of the Articles, and 
 with other of his heresies. Here the critic is urbane and ingenuously 
 anxious for information and reassurance, like a skilful cross-examiner. 
 Many scripture texts are cited, in the verbal manner of " proofs." 
 Few of the ancient writers appealed to by Hooker are used, and of 
 the moderns most frequently Jewel and Fulke. In the more rhetorical 
 opening and close, the scripture texts are those that Bacon is fond of 
 using, such as " philosophy and vain deceit." The most curious text 
 cited is found in the opening passage : " Spend his sharp arrows and 
 coals of juniper." Bacon does not appear to have used this in any of 
 his essays or other minor writings ; but the next verse but one to it, 
 in Psalm cxx., is the most favourite of all Bacon's texts, Multum incola, 
 " My soul hath long dwelt," which is found at least four times in the 
 essays, letters, etc. There is one curious metaphor which might be 
 a clue: "The hollow and glittering thread of your own witty con- 
 jectures " ; and another which no one could have invented but a 
 lawyer and an enemy of the Schoolmen : " And had kept yourself 
 out of the common jail of sophistical elenches and impertinent 
 outleaps " — outleaps being an old law term for escapes and evasions 
 from prison. 
 
 It is difficult to convey to others the impression of Baconian 
 authorship that haunts one through all the forty-seven pages ; but I 
 accept the usual conditions of proof in such a matter, and table the 
 following parallel passages for the judgment of the reader who will 
 be so good as to compare them. Those on the left hand are taken 
 from Bacon's Meditationes Sacrce, 1597 and 1599, from three of his 
 church tracts, 1584, 1589, and 1592, and from the first book (in English) 
 of his Advancement of Learning, supposed by Spedding to have been 
 written in 1603. Those on the right hand are from the anonymous 
 Christian Letter of 1599. If the correspondences in thought and 
 phrase are not more numerous than I have found, it should be 
 remembered that an author who so carefully concealed his identity as 
 to suppress even the name of his printer was not likely, except by 
 inadvertence, to use turns of expression, figures of speech, or special 
 points of argument which he had used elsewhere under his name. 
 But it is noteworthy, and Spedding has noted it, that Bacon for some 
 reason omitted the Meditationes Sacrce from every collection of his 
 writings, and it is still more significant that the sentences in the first 
 book of XhQ Advancement of Learning (in English) which are so like 
 those used a few years before in the Christian Letter, e.g. on Luther 
 
lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 6i 
 
 and the Schoolmen, were omitted, along with a few others, from the 
 first edition in Latin, 1606. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Suffering Him to foreknow some 
 things, as an unconcerned looker-on, 
 which he does not predestine and 
 ordain : a notion not unlike the fig- 
 ment which Epicurus introduced into 
 the philosophy of Democritus to get 
 rid oifate and make room for fortune, 
 — namely, the sidelong movement of 
 the Atom — "quod Epicurus introduxit 
 in Democritismum, ut fatum toUeret 
 et fortunce locum daret, declinationem 
 videlicet atomi." — " Medit. Sacrse." 
 
 Extreme detestation of some former 
 heresies had led to others. Thus 
 the heresy of Arrius arose from 
 detestation of that of Gentilian, whose 
 doctrine of the co-equal divinity of 
 our Saviour approximated to more 
 gods than one. — " Controv. in the 
 Ch.," 1589. 
 
 Contrary it is with hypocrites and 
 impostors ; for they in the Church 
 and towards the people set themselves 
 on fire and are carried as it were out 
 of themselves, and becoming as men 
 inspired, they set heaven and earth 
 together — " veluti sacris furoribus aflflati 
 omnia miscent." — " Medit. Sacrse." 
 
 The permission of the exercise of 
 more religions than one is a danger- 
 ous indulgence and toleration. — 
 "Obs. on a Libel," 1592. 
 
 The Church never wanteth a kind 
 of persons which love the salutation 
 of Rabbi. . . . These men are the 
 true successors of Diotrephes, the 
 lover of pre-eminence. — " Controv. 
 intheCh.," 1589. 
 
 There are three kinds of speech, 
 and, as it were, styles of imposture. 
 The first kind is of those who, as 
 soon as they get any subject matter, 
 
 "Christian Letter." 
 
 After quoting Art. XVII., "Pre- 
 destination and Election " : But you, 
 Maister Hoo, seem to us to affirm con- 
 trary. ... Is it not more than vari- 
 ableness and shadow of turning to 
 incline one way, and upon occasion to 
 decree another ? Do not these words 
 of yours give some place unto chance 
 and fortune'^ 
 
 Whether such words [on the Son- 
 ship of Christ] weaken not the co- 
 eternity of the Son in the opinion of 
 the simple, or at least make the Son 
 inferior to the Father in respect of the 
 Godhead ; or else teach the ignorant 
 there be many gods. 
 
 And we could not tell how zeal, 
 love, or glory might carry a man of 
 such towardly and excellent gifts in 
 the first showing of himself to the 
 world. Or else do you mean to bring 
 in a confusion of all things, to reconcile 
 heaven and earth, and to make all 
 things equal ? 
 
 Will you bring us to Atheism or to 
 Popery ? or to prepare a plot for an 
 interim, that our streets may run with 
 blood, when all Religions shall be 
 tolerated, and one shall beard and 
 provoke another ? 
 
 We must think that Maister Hoo 
 is very arrogant and presumptuous to 
 make himself the only Rabbi. . . . 
 Whether your meaning be, to show 
 yourself some rare Demosthenes or 
 extraordinary Rabbi, or some great 
 Pythagoras, that enjoin your scholars 
 or your adversaries to five years' 
 silence before they can be perfect in 
 your meaning, or able to reply? 
 
 Have we not cause to fear that the 
 witty Schoolmen have seduced you, 
 and by their conceited distinctions 
 made you forget, etc, ? 
 
62 
 
 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 straightway make an art of it, fit it 
 with technical terms, reduce all into 
 distinctions, thence educe positions 
 and assertions and frame oppositions. 
 Hence the rubbish and pother of the 
 Schoolmen. 
 
 The Second kind is of those who, 
 through vanity of wit, as a kind of 
 holy poets, imagine and invent all 
 variety of [stories and] examples, for 
 the training and moulding of men's 
 minds : whence the lives of the 
 Fathers, and innumerable figments 
 of the ancient heretics. 
 
 The Third kind is of those who fill 
 everything with mysteries and high- 
 sounding phrases, allegories, and allu- 
 sions : which mystic and Gnostic style 
 of discourse a great number of heretics 
 have adopted. 
 
 Of these kinds, the First catches 
 and entangles man's sense and under- 
 standing, the Second allures, the Third 
 astonishes. All seduce it. — " Medit. 
 Sacrse." 
 
 The Schoolmen's wits being shut 
 up in the cells of a few authors 
 (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator), as 
 their persons were shut up in the 
 cells of monasteries and colleges. — 
 "Advancement of Learning," Bk. i., 
 1603. 
 
 And the Catholic Fathers were com- 
 pelled to follow them with all subtilty 
 of decisions and determinations, to 
 exclude them from their evasions and 
 to take them in their labyrinths. — 
 " Advt. concerning Church Controv.," 
 '589- 
 
 Martin Luther, conducted, no doubt, 
 by an higher Providence, but in dis- 
 course of r&z.%on finding what a pro- 
 vince he had undertaken against the 
 Bishop of Rome and the degenerate 
 traditions of the Church, a!Wi/_;?;2ifz«^/^u 
 ownsolitude, being noways aided by the 
 opinions of his own time, was enforced 
 to awake all antiquity ... so that 
 ancient authors, both in divinity and 
 in humanity, began generally to be read 
 and revolved; . . . much furthered 
 and precipitated by the enmity and 
 opposition that the propoujiders of these 
 
 And that you would have men 
 better seen in philosophy and School- 
 men's divinity, and, namely, in Aris- 
 totle? 
 
 Or that you would bear down the 
 cause with swelling words of vanity 
 and cunningly framed sentences, to 
 blind and entangle the simple ? 
 
 So there is a cunning framed 
 method, by excellencie of words and 
 enticing speeches of men's wisdom, 
 to beguile and bewitch the very Church 
 of God. . . . Or that you should show 
 yourself another Aristotle by a certain 
 metaphysical and cryptical method, 
 to bring men into a maze, that they 
 should rather wonder sA your learning 
 than be able to understand what you 
 teach in your writing ? . . . 
 
 . . . That poor plain man, which 
 cannot skill of such hidden mysteries, 
 may perceive and learn something by 
 your great travail. 
 
 And had kept yourself out of the 
 common jail of sophistical clenches 
 and impertinent outleaps. 
 
 But in your writing we walk in a 
 labyrinth. 
 
 That worthy man, Martin Luther, 
 through God's goodness to his Church, 
 finding by great experience i7i himself 
 andothers, is bold to say, "That school 
 divinity hath banished from us the 
 true and sincere divinity " ; and again, 
 " All Aristotle unto divinity is dark- 
 ness unto light." Now, in all your 
 Books, although we find many good 
 things, many truths, and fine points 
 bravely handled, yet in all your Dis- 
 course, for the most part, Aristode, 
 the patriarch of Philosophers (with 
 divers other human writers), and the 
 
lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 63 
 
 primitive {but seeming new) opinions 
 had against the Schoolmen. ... So 
 that these four causes concurring — the 
 admiration of ancient authors, the 
 hate of the Schoolmen, the exact study 
 of languages, and the efficacy of 
 preaching,— did bring in an affec- 
 tionate study of eloquence and copie 
 of speech, which then began to flourish. 
 This grew speedily to an excess ; for 
 men began to hunt more after words 
 than matter, etc. — "Adv. of Learn- 
 ing," Bk. i., 1603. 
 
 It is an intelligence between incen- 
 diaries and robbers, the one to fire 
 the house, the other to rifle it. — 
 "Controv. in the Ch.," 1589. 
 
 ingenious Schoolmen, almost in all 
 points have some finger. Reason is 
 highly set up against Holy Scripture, 
 etc. 
 
 I will with the same sincerity 
 display my humble conceits where- 
 with my life shall be am^ng the fore- 
 most to defend the blessing which God 
 in you hath bestowed upon us. — 
 "Letter of Advice to Q. Eliz.," 1584. 
 
 To bring heedless men into the 
 pleasant dream of well-weening, while 
 they closely set on fire the house 
 of God. (Hooker's paraphrase of 
 this : " I might be taken indeed for 
 an incendiary, one to set to fire the 
 house of God for other men's better 
 opportunity to rifle it" — as if he had 
 been quoting the sentence by Bacon 
 in the column opposite.) 
 
 Being ready every hour to give up 
 our lives for God's glory and the 
 honour of our Queen. (Hooker's 
 note : " Who driveth you to this 
 profession ? ") 
 
 The authorship of an anonymous work can never be proved in 
 the strict sense, and may be disputed on by the dilettanti to the end 
 of time. But the degree of probability may rise so high as to be 
 sufficient for assent, and so, I think, it does here. Considering the 
 secrecy of the attack on Hooker, it is surprising that the evidence 
 for anyone's hand should be so strong as it is. It would not have 
 been so strong, had not Hooker's notes for a reply been preserved, 
 which are highly personal, and show that he knew who his adversary 
 was. Even without his pointed allusion to the judicial bench, and 
 to the unknown's distinguished powers of speech as well as of writing, 
 the whole style of the pamphlet should suggest a man of great forensic 
 ability, not a polemical divine. 
 
 The attack on Hooker is what might have been expected from 
 Bacon ; first, in his scope and aims as an ecclesiastical politician ; 
 secondly, as a Calvinist in doctrine, though not in discipline ; and, 
 thirdly, as the inveterate enemy of " Hooker's master, Aristotle" (the 
 phrase is Warburton's). It is the scorn for Aristotle and the School- 
 men, in combination with the other two things, that makes the 
 onslaught so peculiarly Baconian. In the parallel passages cited 
 about Luther and the Schoolmen, the earlier of the two, from the 
 
64 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Christian Letter, is meant to bring out the weakness of Hooker's 
 Protestantism by comparison; the latter, 1603, to bring out the fact 
 that Luther's anti-scholastic services were counteracted by a certain 
 inexactness and rhetorical excess in his followers. Scholastic learning 
 and Aristotelian authority are assumed to be still vigorous, notwith- 
 standing Luther. The effective adversary was Bacon himself — so he 
 wishes us always to believe, and so we are always taught in history. 
 Such being the great ambition of his life, it is not to be supposed 
 that he saw with indifference Hooker's new appeal to Aristotle and 
 the Schoolmen. 
 
 While the adversary's 20th section, " Schoolmen, Philosophy, 
 and Popery," is thoroughly Baconian, the 21st, on "The Stile and 
 Manner of Writing," is not less so. Few men would have had 
 the courage to attack Hooker's style, for it is his passport to fame 
 more than his thought, and is a landmark in the progress of the 
 language. Yet the style is objected to in many places, and indicted 
 in a special section. It is admitted to be melodious, brave, and the 
 like, but is blamed for confusion, circumlocution, and tediousness. 
 Such criticism comes with peculiar propriety from Bacon, whose 
 style is also one of the distinctions of English prose for qualities as 
 nearly as possible the opposite of Hooker's. It is distinguished by 
 terseness, point, incisiveness, clearness, and coherency ; it avoids 
 exuberance and eloquent flourishes, and is seldom diverted from 
 the matter in hand by the copiousness of his illustrations. If the 
 criticism on Hooker's style be viewed apart from all other considera- 
 tions touching the authorship, we shall have to admit that no one 
 who was not himself a master of a different style could have made it, 
 such is its shrewdness and assurance. 
 
 On the second point, of Bacon's Calvinism, it is not necessary to 
 enlarge. The supremacy of Scripture is taught by him uniformly, 
 and its " plain meaning " is for him the exposition of Calvin's Institutes. 
 On the question of discipline. Bacon stood for Episcopacy on the 
 ground of monarchical expediency: "The parity and equality of 
 ministers is a thing of wonderful great confusion" (1589). He 
 adopted King James's maxim, " No bishop, no king." But in his 
 brief for the King at the Hampton Court Conference he proposed 
 that the diocesan power of the bishop should be limited by associating 
 with him, as assessors, certain of the dignitaries of the chapter. The 
 charge against Hooker in the Christian Letter of blowing up the 
 coals of enmity to foreign churches is in keeping with Bacon's rebuke, 
 probably meant for Bancroft, in his paper on church controversies in 
 1589: "Yea, and some indiscreet persons have been bold in open 
 preaching to use dishonouring and derogatory speech and censure of 
 the churches abroad." The Letter contains a warm defence of 
 Calvin against Hooker's alleged attack on him ; but the warmth of it 
 
lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 65 
 
 is rather in a spirit of personal fairness to the proceedings of the 
 Church of Geneva, than from sympathy with its principles of 
 discipline. 
 
 Thirdly, as to the practical way of settling the differences within 
 the Church, the Letter is distinctively Baconian. Hooker, in one of 
 his marginal notes, thus sums up the indictment : " That it was not 
 my purpose, though it were my profession, to write for men's informa- 
 tion concerning the state of the Church of England." Instead of 
 that proximate object, he had laid down a basis of agreement in 
 an enormous range of principles, with endless digressions into 
 '' philosophy and vain deceit." Ten years before, Bacon had sought 
 " to revive the blessed procedure of the Apostles and Fathers of the 
 primitive Church, which was, not to enter into assertions and 
 positions, but to deliver counsels and advice" — a limited view, indeed, 
 of their procedure, but one that Bacon consistently adhered to by 
 citing the Pastoral Epistles and ignoring the argumentative. The 
 four church tracts under his name are all practical in that sense. 
 The Christian Letter is not positive in the same way, because its 
 main object is to convict Hooker of heresy by following him into his 
 " positions " ; but its whole spirit is one of impatience with his philoso- 
 phising discursiveness. 
 
 The antagonist positions of these two great men are worth study 
 apart from the authorship of the Christian Letter. How little 
 Hooker and Bacon have been seen as opposites in the most engrossing 
 dispute of their age will appear from Landor's imaginary conversation, 
 which brings Hooker back from the grave to console Bacon in his 
 fall. The conversation ought to have been on The Laws of Ecclesi- 
 astical Polity, with Shakespeare of the company to supply the wit. 
 
 But I must return to lago, to find in many subtleties of his part the 
 convincing evidence of two things involved the one in the other: that 
 he was Bacon as the antagonist of Hooker, and that his means of 
 unsettling the mind of the Moor are, in the symbolism, the same as 
 the criticisms of the Christian Letter. At the outset it may be 
 repeated that Hooker himself is not the Moor ; he is indeed Montano, 
 the permanent Governor of Cyprus, as I can show without difficulty. 
 The Parson of Bishopsbourne was no heroic figure for the stage: 
 " An obscure, harmless man ; a man in poor clothes, his loins usually 
 girt in a coarse gown or canonical coat ; of a mean stature, and 
 stooping, and yet more lowly in the thoughts of his soul ; his body 
 worn out, not with age, but study and holy mortifications ; his face 
 full of heat pimples begot by his inactivity and sedentary life." So 
 much Izaak Vl^alton was told, as well as that he had weak sight ; " nor 
 did he ever willingly look any man in the face ; and was of so mild 
 and humble a nature that his poor parish clerk and he did never talk 
 but with both their hats on, or both off, at the same time." The 
 
66 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 noble Moor has merely embraced his teaching with the joy of a 
 convert. It is on the disciple, not on the apostle, that lago 
 practises. 
 
 lago's practices come into the next section, as the main theme 
 of the exposition. But there are a few points in the earlier scenes 
 which fall to be taken here retrospectively, as showing how Shakespeare 
 from the outset of his allegory saw lago as the author of the anonymous 
 attack on Hooker. The scene opens with lago and Roderigo at 
 midnight shouting under Brabantio's windows — Bacon incognito and 
 his friend Davies raising a midnight alarm under the windows of 
 Lambeth Palace. As lago and Roderigo approach the house of 
 the magnifico, the former delivers three lines, which are sometimes 
 omitted in playing, because they seem superfluous, although it is said 
 that the American actor, Booth, made a great point of them : 
 
 Rod. Here is her father's house ; I'll call aloud. 
 
 lago. Do ; with like timorous accent and dire yell. 
 As when by night and negligence the fire 
 Is spied in populous cities. 
 
 Rod. What, ho ! Brabantio ! etc. 
 
 lago thinks of a fire-alarm, which should somehow combine 
 " timorous accent " and " dire yell " in one voice. The opening of the 
 Christian Letter is a fire-alarm : " When men dream they are asleep, 
 and while men sleep the enemy soweth tares. . . . To bring heedless 
 men into the pleasant dream of well-meaning, while they closely set on 
 fire the house of God!' This gives night, negligence, and the fire 
 spied in populous cities. Brabantio is Whitgift, to whom the tract 
 appeals twice in the passage cited, the allusions to him gaining all 
 their significance from the fact that he was the patron of the book 
 attacked. The first words of the attack, "When men dream they 
 are asleep," are based on Hooker's opening sentence about " permitting 
 things to pass away as in a dream," but are turned as a warning to 
 those who were not awake to the purport or tendency of his book. 
 Brabantio was asleep when the fire-alarm was raised, and it appears 
 that he had been dreaming : 
 
 Brab. This accident is not unlike my dream : 
 Belief of it oppresses me already. 
 Light, I say, light ! 
 
 lago (to Roderigo). Farewell ; for I must leave you. 
 
 This dream of Brabantio's is a mystery of the text, and so is the 
 "timorous accent and dire yell" which lago wanted combined in 
 the fire-alarm. The latter, like the former, is explained in the 
 hypothesis of lago as the author of the alarm against Hooker. The 
 close of it, as the reader may verify, contains both the dire yell and 
 the timorous accent. It is dire in its relentless accumulation of 
 
lAGO: HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 67 
 
 charges, and it rises by the gradations of a practised orator to a kind 
 of yell at the close of the indictment. But it ends in subdued tones, 
 as when a preacher, after his final burst of eloquence, turns to the 
 east, and says in another voice, " And now, etc." This bated breath 
 and whispering humbleness is the timorous accent: "Now, in all 
 these things, good Maister Hoo, though we thus write . . . yet in 
 as charitable a manner as the cause in hand would suffer." But the 
 timorous accent is also heard throughout the body of the tract in 
 contrast with the deep vociferation of the exordium and the peroration. 
 Reading it continuously through, one seems to enter, after the ex- 
 ordium, upon a long expanse of forensic calm in the well-feigned 
 dubieties and polite requests to be reassured which mark the cross- 
 examination of Hooker on a score of heresies. Supposing that 
 Roderigo might somehow convey to his voice a "timorous accent" 
 along with a " dire yell," and so produce a note of alarm, there was 
 no need to be thus particular with Signor Brabantio. Knocking on 
 his door would have roused him well enough, and the news of his 
 daughter's flight would have been told him quietly, as it is indeed 
 so told him in the event. The alarm of fire is only figurative, and 
 the source of the figure is the exordium of the Christian Letter. 
 
 lago's enigmatic speech just before the fire-alarm can also be 
 explained by the thought of the attack on Hooker latent in the 
 playwright's mind. The speech conveys exactly the mischievous 
 spirit of that attack, which Hooker did not miss when he made a note 
 to quote from the Proverbs the verses about the madman casting 
 firebrands, arrows, and death, and saying, " Am not I in sport ? " 
 
 lago. Make after him, poison his delight, 
 Proclaim him in the streets ; incense her kinsmen ; 
 And thoicgh he in a fertile climate dwell, 
 Plague him with flies ; though that his joy be joy. 
 Yet throw such chances of vexation on't 
 As it may lose some colour. 
 
 This is a policy of pin-pricks, which is not incorrect for the surface 
 meaning that lago intended no more at the outset. The same 
 limitation is found in his soliloquy on Roderigo ; he would not spend 
 his time on such a snipe " but for my sport and profit:' His profit did 
 not necessarily involve the ruin either of Roderigo or the Moor, and 
 it was combined with his sport in both. Yet the particular petty 
 vexations on Othello are nowhere carried out in the action, nor 
 attempted. The elopement would have come to light in any case, 
 and any vexations that the Moor had to endure as the result of it 
 were also inevitable, and none of lago's doing. The proposed vexations 
 are correct in the abstract for his sportive malice ; and, in the particulars, 
 they are an adumbration of his practice upon Othello when it became 
 revenge. These particulars are introduced at this stage, just as in a 
 
68 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 symphony a single phrase in the introduction will give a hint of a 
 theme to be fully developed. 
 
 The two arresting phrases are, " Though that he in a fertile climate 
 dwell, plague him with flies," and " Though that his joy be joy, yet 
 throw such chances of vexation on't." The first recalls the plagues of 
 Egypt, the particular plague of flies being appropriate to the stinging 
 and irritating intention of lago. But the moral of that plague, as 
 of them all, was the humiliation of Pharaoh, whose pride is implied 
 in dwelling in a " fertile climate." Yet pride was not a vice of Othello, 
 nor does lago ever charge him with it. Turn, then, to the Christian 
 Letter, and we shall find pride charged upon Hooker with an emphasis 
 that is merely comical or malicious for a man of his known unworldli- 
 ness and meekness of habit : " We must think that Maister Hoo is very 
 arrogant and presumptuous to make himself the only Rabbi." "You 
 know that it is written, Only by pride doth man make contention ; but 
 with the well-advised is wisdom ; and, When pride cometh, then 
 shame cometh ; but with the lowly is wisdom." Hooker's enemy, 
 identify him as one may, was a man of ability, who knew what he 
 meant, and weighed his words. It happened that one of Hooker's 
 most famous sermons at the Temple Church was on " The Nature of 
 Pride," supposed to have been preached in 1586, in the same series 
 with those which Travers challenged in his Supplication to the Privy 
 Council, as it is like them on a text of Habakkuk (" His mind 
 swelleth and is not right in him, but the just by his faith shall live"). 
 This sermon, as Keble was the first to show, contains the germs of 
 Hooker's treatise. The third sentence opens the whole theme of the 
 future book : " A law simply commanding or forbidding is but dead 
 in comparison of that which expresseth the reason wherefore it doth 
 the one or the other." It is a question not only of what God doth 
 speak, but why. Although the title of the sermon be Pride, that is 
 only the negative part of it; its chief and substantive theme is Law, to 
 which the preacher passes with the second clause of his text: "The 
 just by his faith shall live." Laws of man's making are contrasted 
 with the unwritten laws of nature, with abstract justice, and with the 
 justice of God. It is pointed out that " the laws which God Himself 
 hath given " are sometimes " abrogated and disannulled by human 
 authority." The preacher shows a considerable command of juridical 
 phraseology. He appears to be usurping the province of his legal 
 auditory in the Temple Church, but in a spirit of opposition to "all 
 that Bacon taught of the human code or the divine. "There is a 
 cunning," says Bacon, " which we in England call the turning of the 
 cat in the pan." 
 
 Accordingly, in the first book of the Advancement of Learnin<r he 
 preaches m effect a sermon on Pride, as if he were using the same 
 text of Habakkuk, " His mind swelleth and is not right in him " 
 
lAGO : HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 69 
 
 " Not the pure knowledge of nature and universality, ... but the 
 proud knowledge of good and evil, with an intent in man to give law 
 unto himself, and to depend no more upon God's commandments, 
 which was the form of the temptation. Neither is it any quantity of 
 knowledge how great soever that can make the mind of man swell. 
 . . . No, but it is merely the quality of knowledge which, be it in 
 quantity more or less, if it be taken without the true corrective thereof, 
 hath in it some nature of venom or malignity, and some effects of 
 that venom, which is ventosity or swelling^ This is an obvious use 
 of Hooker's text from Habakkuk, with an application in an exactly 
 contrary sense — Habakkuk capable de tout. The Babylonian swelled 
 head of pride, which is the negative half of Hooker's sermon, becomes 
 in Bacon's exposition a vice of its positive half, namely, to search out 
 the principles of divine justice in nature and unwritten law. Thus 
 the cat is turned in the pan. Hooker is, of course, unnamed ; but he is 
 just the man among Bacon's contemporaries to be understood wherever 
 he writes of the Schoolmen ; for example, in one of his earlier tracts : 
 " For the inquiry of divine truth, \h€\x pride inclined to leave the oracles 
 of God's word, and to vanish in the mixture of their own invention." 
 
 " Though that his joy be joy " arrests the attention as much as the 
 fertile climate plagued with flies. It is not mere emphasis, but an 
 epigram. It may have a certain fitness for Othello and Desdemona, 
 his soul's joy being an objective joy, or herself joy. But just as pride 
 is not brought out in Othello, neither is joy the note of Desdemona. 
 It is, however, the note of Hooker's teaching on the Sacrament, as we 
 shall see. Also, in the same sermon on Pride, by Hooker, there is an 
 excuse made for pride, if it means taking joy or delight in a thing : 
 " Though in speech we do intimate a kind of vanity to be in them of 
 whom we say, ' They are wise men and they know it,' yet this doth 
 not prove that every wise man is proud which doth not think himself 
 to be blockish. What we may have, and know that we have it without 
 offence, do we then make offensive when we take joy and delight in 
 having it ? '' lago would have answered, " No, certainly not — yet 
 throw such chances of vexation on't as it may lose some colour." 
 The painfully anxious Hooker lays himself open to the bluff Bacon 
 by the confession that his joy may be a form of pride— the last thing 
 that one would think of in Hooker, had not his own hyper-sensitiveness 
 suggested it. 
 
 After lago had declared his intention of sport and profit out of 
 Roderigo, he passed in his soliloquy abruptly to hatred of the Moor : 
 
 I hate the Moor: 
 And it is thought abroad that Hwixt my sheets 
 He has done my office : I know not if't be true ; 
 Yet I, for mere suspicion in that kind, 
 Will do as if for surety. 
 
70 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Doing as if for surety on mere suspicion happens to be very nearly 
 the words of Bacon in his essay Of Suspicion : " For so far a man 
 ought to make use of suspicions as to provide, as if that should be 
 true that he suspects, yet it may do him no hurt." His meaning is 
 not quite clear (it is brought out by his negative example of a son of 
 Alexander, in his letter to the Queen, 1584), but neither is lago's. 
 " Twixt my sheets has done my office " is varied in the next soliloquy 
 to " leapt into my seat." Both are correct for himself as the supposed 
 supplanted husband of ^Emilia ; but " 'twixt my sheets " — the sheets of 
 his wife's bed — is a clever ambiguity, not unknown in the music halls, 
 for written sheets of paper. It was 'twixt Bacon's written sheets on 
 church polity that Hooker had interposed, and done his office for 
 him in a province which he had marked for his own. " I know not 
 ift be true," — he was not sure at first what effect the systematic 
 scholarly method would produce. But he knew before long, by the 
 influence it had on Elizabeth, on James at Holyrood, on Clement VHI. 
 at Rome, and, above all, in emboldening the pretensions of High 
 Church among the clergy. Hooker had been preaching nearly four 
 years at the Temple before Bancroft's famous sermon at Paul's Cross, 
 in February 1589. In 1586 he had been arraigned of Romish 
 doctrine by Travers in a Supplication to the Privy Council ; he made 
 his answer to the Archbishop, and Whitgift had annotated it with 
 some disapproval. The no-popery public feeling was not lessened by 
 the Armada, although the danger was escaped. Bancroft chose the 
 moment as opportune to preach the divine right of bishops, and to 
 flout the Nonconformists at all points. Bacon's tract " Concerning 
 Church Controversies " followed Bancroft's sermon, and may have 
 been evoked by it. His next church paper was in 1592. Hooker's 
 first four books were submitted to Lord Burghley for approval in 
 March 1593, and published in 1594; so that "'twixt my sheets has 
 done my office " is about right for Hooker and Bacon. 
 
 In his next soliloquy I ago goes further than " I know not 
 ift be true." 
 
 But partly led to diet my revenge, 
 
 For I do suspect the lusty Moor 
 
 Hath leapt into my seat ; the thought whereof 
 
 Doth Hke a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards ; 
 
 And nothing can or shall content my soul, 
 
 Till I am evened with him, wife for wife ; 
 
 Or, failing so, yet that I put the Moor 
 
 At least into a jealousy so strong 
 
 That judgment cannot cure. 
 
 " Evened with him, wife for wife" means that lago was to seduce 
 Desdemona, as he believed Othello had seduced Emilia. He pre- 
 faces the speech with " Now I do love her too, not out of absolute 
 lust— though peradventure I stand accountant for as great a sin— 
 
lAGO: HIS PRINCIPLES, GRIEVANCES, MOTIVES 71 
 
 but partly led to diet my revenge ; for that I do suspect," etc. lago 
 makes no such attempt on Desdemona, as everyone knows. He does 
 not " fail " in that kind of revenge, for he never tries it. He does 
 indeed " put the Moor into a jealousy so strong that judgment cannot 
 cure." But it is a strangely abstract kind of jealousy — a jealousy in 
 which Cassio is the co-respondent merely for form's sake. lago's own 
 cuckold motive disappears from the action, and Cassio becomes in 
 the end little more than a lay figure in it. It is given to Emilia to 
 expound the nature of this peculiar jealousy : 
 
 They are not jealous for the cause, 
 
 But jealous for they are jealous : 'tis a monster 
 
 Begot upon itself, born of itself. 
 
 Here, as always, the poet takes care to keep within the limits of 
 human nature ; but the point in making "jealousy" thus abstract is 
 found only in the allegory of it which I shall come to in the course of 
 the next section. 
 
 Besides the evidence that lago is Bacon in his principles, his 
 grievances, and his motives, including among the last a certain part 
 of the contents of the Christian Letter, I shall take here two some- 
 what pointed hits at Bacon as a poet. The first is the song which 
 lago " learned in England " : 
 
 And let me the canakin clink, clink ; 
 And let me the canakin clink ! 
 
 A soldier's a man ; 
 
 Oh, man's life's but a span ; 
 Why, then, let a soldier drink ! 
 
 This is modelled, partly in the rhythm and wholly in the sentiment, 
 upon Bacon's paraphrase of a Greek epigram, which is his only extant 
 verse besides the Psalms. It begins with a stanza not found in the 
 Greek original : 
 
 The world's a bubble and the life of man 
 
 Less than a span. 
 In his conception wretched, from the womb 
 
 So to the tomb. 
 Curst from the cradle and brought up to years 
 
 With cares and fears, etc. 
 
 lago's muse is also put to labour in a series of epigrams com- 
 posed to pass the time while they were waiting for Othello to come 
 ashore. The best of them, "She that was ever fair and never 
 proud," may be guessed to be one of Shakespeare's own tributes 
 to Elizabeth, for the subject of it is some particular lady of posi- 
 tion, probably in a court. After a really fine characterisation, it ends 
 strangely : 
 
72 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 She was a wight, if ever such wight were — 
 Des. To do what ? 
 lago. To suckle fools and chronicle small beer. 
 
 O most impotent and lame conclusion! said Desdemona. But it 
 is to Bacon's original that her criticism properly applies : 
 
 Courts are but only superficial schools 
 To dandle fools. 
 
 For why should anyone be dandled either in a court or a school 
 unless lame or impotent? 
 
VI. lAGO AT WORK 
 
 Everyone sees that lago is the central figure ; some have even held 
 that the play ought to have borne his name. It should follow that 
 the character of the Ancient had been equally central in the author's 
 design. Having realised him as a unity of disposition, principles, 
 motives, and aims, he shaped the parts of Othello and Desdemona to 
 suit, or, in other words, he drew lago from real life, but the noble 
 Moor and his gentle wife he imagined. The so-called villain of the 
 piece required a certain situation to be found for him in which he 
 could act to advantage. That was the anomalous marriage of a black 
 man with a white woman, the several anomalies contained in it being 
 the adversary's opportunities. It will be found that lago sets to 
 work systematically, and that the text of his part from scene to scene 
 reveals a complete plan of campaign. That plan, as I maintain, 
 coincided with a certain covert attack, which I ascribe to Bacon, upon 
 the exposition of Anglican Church polity put forward two years 
 before by Hooker. Here are great names brought together, the three 
 names which Hallam takes in a group as the most illustrious of their 
 age. And what more natural than that the poet of the trio should 
 use his genius upon the antagonist principles of the other two ? 
 
 The onslaught on Hooker was dramatic enough, whoever the 
 cloaked figure was who delivered the blows. But if Shakespeare knew 
 him to be Bacon — and a man of his penetration was likely enough to 
 have pierced through the disguise — then he had before him a theme 
 which fulfilled. Aristotle's condition, that it should be worthy of a 
 dramatic action. A play by Shakespeare, with the contending forces 
 in it those respectively of Hooker and Bacon, may be said to belong 
 to the fitness of things. 
 
 It happened that the Italian story of the Moor of Venice, remote 
 as it looks from ecclesiastical affairs, could be adapted with little 
 seeming change' to that covert use, inasmuch as the marriage of a 
 pagan Moor to a lady of Venice involved literally the two Sacraments 
 which Protestantism had retained as such. Moreover, the marriage 
 between black and white could be turned to an allegorical use, as the 
 idea of marriage often was in those days. The allegories of marriage 
 were many. Only the year before the Thistle was married to the 
 
 73 
 
74 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Rose. There was an old play, full of lively dialogue, on the Marriage 
 of Wit, the son of Dame Nature, with Science, the daughter of 
 Reason and Experience ; another on the Marriage of Wit and 
 Wisdom. Venice, the scene of Othello's marriage, had an annual 
 ceremony of the marriage of the city with the Adriatic by throwing 
 a ring into the sea. It was easy to extend the same idea to such 
 couples as reason and faith, Reformation doctrine and traditional usage, 
 truth and superstition. There is possible in the background some 
 such symbolism for the gentle lady married to the Moor ; while on 
 the surface there was the actual religious symbolism of the marriage 
 rite, if the poet chose to use it, as well as the two literal Sacraments 
 — baptism for the pagan bridegroom as a preliminary, and the 
 communion office for the wedded pair as a sequel. Without im- 
 porting anything fanciful or far-fetched into the customary rites of 
 Christendom, all the ideas that the poet needed for the spiritual 
 meaning of his tragedy were latent in Cinthio's crude story. They 
 were indeed no more than latent in it, and it would have been 
 contrary to all usage on the stage to drag them to light ; but there 
 was no reason why they should not be allegorised, if the playwright 
 had the genius to do it. 
 
 It is a question whether Shakespeare had begun with exactly 
 the same symbolic design that he eventually carried out. That his 
 purpose was always symbolic upon Cinthio's materials is hardly 
 doubtful. No playwright before him is known to have attempted 
 them ; nor could anything short of Shakespeare's unique mastery 
 over double meanings have enabled him to carry through, in the 
 vein of high tragedy, an action so repulsive in its crude shape and 
 so improbable even when idealised. Cinthio's Moor had risen to a 
 military command in the Venetian State, like the Luria of Browning's 
 play in the republic of Florence. But he is not drawn as a heroic 
 figure ; he shows no magnanimity or distinctive quality of any kind : 
 he is a somewhat humdrum person leading an ordinary life, who is 
 led to suspect the fidelity of his wife ; and although there is some- 
 thing pathetic in his remorse, the melodrama is of the homeliest 
 fashion, more quaint than tragic. Nor is the villain of the story a 
 man of brains and courage, but a plausible, spurious Hector, at heart 
 a coward and sneak. It mattered little for the event whether the 
 husband had been white or black, and in fact he was probably a 
 Saracen Arab. There was a certain disparity of race and tempera- 
 ment, but not enough to repel, or to prevent the married life from 
 proceeding smoothly for several months in Venice and for some time 
 longer in Cyprus. The story had so little of moral at all that a 
 poet's imagination might give to it what turn he pleased, while 
 seeming to retain the main outlines of it and actually keeping many 
 small details. It is not easy to guess what were the possibilities 
 
lAGO AT WORK 75 
 
 that Shakespeare saw in it at the first glance. Cinthio himself had 
 given a hint near the beginning that the lady's family had done all 
 they could to make her marry elsewhere, and that the marriage might 
 turn out ill owing to the jealous temperament of "these Moors." 
 
 Next, it would appear from Shakespeare's wholly new matter in 
 the first act that Cyprus, the scene of the tragedy, had given him 
 many ideas. In realising Cyprus as the dependency of Venice, he 
 had been met at once by the designs of the Turks upon it. These 
 were not in Cinthio's story at all ; but in any work which treated of 
 the affairs of Cyprus, such as the newly published History of the 
 Turks by an Oxford scholar, Knolles, the Turkish attack of 1571 
 filled a large space. Allegory being his purpose, this historical design 
 of the Turks on Cyprus (their only attempt, as it was at once success- 
 ful) had an obvious use for him. The English Nonconformists of 
 his time were "the Turks." The nickname was current in the gossip 
 of the day about the Hampton Court Conference, January 1604, 
 which was a topic of much deeper interest in London then than a 
 corresponding event would be now. The Turks in that ecclesiastical 
 sense happened to have been named by Hooker in a passage of his 
 book which Shakespeare could hardly have missed, as it brought in 
 his own story of the Tarquins driven from Rome 
 
 English ecclesiastical affairs being thus brought to his mind in 
 the context of the Turks and Cyprus, a beginning was made in 
 religious symbolism for the Moor's tragedy in Cyprus; and it may 
 be inferred, from the curiously invented minute details of the first 
 act, that he proceeded at once to follow up the allegory on those 
 lines. The symbolism might have been developed, and pursued to 
 the end, on the lines of Nonconformity in the Church as the Turkish 
 attack upon Cyprus; nor would that have been unworthy of a 
 complete dramatic action in the light of what followed in the next 
 reign. There is little in the first act that v/ould not have suited such 
 a turn of affairs in Cyprus. There is also a curious indication that 
 the dramatist had originally some such purpose, in the name which 
 he invented for his hero. Othello is a kind of diminutive or familiar 
 form of Otho— the Otho of our days. The great Otho of history was 
 not the short-lived Roman Emperor who came between Vespasian 
 and Nero, but the Otho of the Germanic Empire, Otho the Great, 
 whose distinction was that he drove back the Turks by a decisive 
 victory on the Bavarian plains. Othello was appointed to the 
 command in Cyprus that he might repel the Turkish attack on it. 
 But, for all the ado about the Turks, and the urgent need of Othello's 
 services in the first act, that thread of the action is abruptly broken ; 
 the war came to nothing ; the Turks are used, to adopt the language 
 of the Duke at the Council, but " as a grise, or step, may help these 
 lovers into your favour." 
 
76 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Another way to develop an allegory out of Cinthio, which seemed 
 to me at one time the likely one, was to imagine the ruin of the Moor 
 by his officer as the collision between two principles of conduct, or 
 types of mind, a magnanimous statesman and a Machiavellian. There 
 are obvious traits of Essex under the black skin of Othello, and 
 equally obvious traits of Bacon in the grievances and maxims of 
 lago. Essex and Bacon came into fatal collision at length, after a 
 friendship of ten years or more. Their attraction to each other when 
 both were young, although it was sincere, was probably the attraction 
 of opposites. Bacon's apologists will hardly deny that his mind was 
 of the Machiavellian type, as that is now scientifically appreciated. 
 At the State trial he was not only Essex's opposite in disposition, but 
 his opponent forensically, as Cicero had been of Roman publicists. 
 The result was, that all the world believed he had behaved badly 
 to his quondam friend and confidant, especially in his published 
 " Declaration of the Treasons," a State paper drawn up after the 
 Earl's execution. Even if he did not press the case unfairly at the 
 State trial, which is Spedding's ccntention, he certainly did so in his 
 subsequent writing, which gives so black a colour to the motives of 
 Essex that Clarendon calls it '' a pestilent libel." Supposing that 
 Shakespeare merely shared the popular sentiment against Bacon in 
 the Essex affair, his sense of poetic justice would not have been 
 offended by exhibiting him in the guise of lago. 
 
 At the same time, it was clear that the story of the Moor of 
 Venice had not been turned to poh^ica/ symhoMsm, and was probably 
 unsuited to any such allegory. The symbolism is found to be 
 consistently in the sphere of religion. But Bacon never came into 
 collision with Essex in that matter, except in an aside at the State 
 trial, in which, according to Camden and one of the Lambeth MSS., 
 he accused Essex of having worn the mask of piety to conceal his 
 political designs — an irrelevancy, as Spedding admits, as well as an 
 untruth. They were both Calvinists, and Essex was never more 
 sincere in his creed than in the last days of his life. It being thus 
 impossible that the real Essex could have been posed in the 
 religious symbolism of Othello's marriage, or that the real Bacon 
 could ever have practised upon him in that matter, I tried for a 
 time (as I remember) the hypothesis that the poet might have 
 imagined them pitted against each other in the Church, as they had 
 been actually in the State. Apart from the objection that he had 
 no right to imagine what was so contrary to fact, this theory gave no 
 clue to the very specific form in which the religious collision had been 
 conceived. Somehow the doctrine of the Sacraments was involved. 
 It arose naturally enough out of the rites implied in the story— the 
 Moor's marriage and preceding baptism. But these might easily have 
 been ignored, as they would certainly have been by an ordinary 
 
lAGO AT WORK 77 
 
 playwright; and why should they have been conceived as they were? 
 I can clearly recall that I was somehow led to think of the dis- 
 tinctive teaching of Hooker, which was the newest thought in England 
 on those matters ; then came the investigation of the attack on 
 Hooker in the Christian Letter, which I have related in the last 
 section. Even if the authorship of it were an insoluble mystery, as 
 little known to contemporaries as to us, the method and spirit of its 
 dealings with Hooker corresponded with lago's practices on the mind 
 of Othello, and might have been conveniently used to inspire them. 
 The evidence, however, points to Bacon himself as the author, and 
 has its own interest for his life and for Hooker's, if it has nothing to 
 do with the allegory of ' Othello.' It has been drawn out in the last 
 section in such a form that it may be judged in its purely historical 
 interest and apart from its context. In the symbolism of the play, it 
 was clear that Hooker in his proper person could not possibly be the 
 Moor. Further study showed that he was indeed Montano, the 
 permanent Governor of Cyprus, whom Othello replaced for a brief 
 space. The baptism of the Moor, which lago brings to our notice, 
 pointed to his having been a pagan until the eve of his marriage ; he 
 was necessarily a catechumen, and the religion into which he was 
 baptised was opportunely Hooker's new revelation. The magna- 
 nimity of the Venetian soldier and man of affairs, which seemed to be 
 drawn from Essex in things secular, was just the quality needed in a 
 convert to the Christian religion as it is set forth in the Ecclesiastical 
 Polity; for it has been said by a competent judge that " Hooker ought 
 rather to be valued for the magnanimity and richness of his thoughts 
 than blamed for their occasional vagueness " (Fitzjames Stephen, 
 Horce SabbaticcB). 
 
 Bacon, if he were the author of the attack upon Hooker, could 
 thus be brought into a collision with magnanimity not unlike that 
 which all the world knew to have occurred between him and Essex ; 
 it was a real collision in matters religious, not an imagined ; and 
 the poetic justice of posing Bacon as lago in a matter known to few 
 was just the same as in the political matter known to all. 
 
 That Shakespeare had any personal animosity to Bacon is not to 
 be assumed. Without a fair appreciation of his principles, and a certain 
 sympathy with his logic, the character of lago could never have been 
 drawn. It is probable that he held the balance more fairly in his 
 private mind than appears on the surface of lago's character, which 
 is by various artifices made to appear that of the conventional stage 
 villain, but is seen by many critics, as well as by studious actors, to 
 be a much more intricate affair. Certainly Shakespeare meant the 
 character of lago to be odious ; and it is altogether probable from the 
 spirit of his plays that such a mind as Bacon's was antipathetic to 
 him, as well as his character despicable to him for the inconsistency 
 
78 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 between his unctuous use of Scripture and his ill repute in at least 
 one vice of the time. No one can read Bacon's essays and other 
 minor works without wondering why he should have so needlessly 
 laid himself open to the charge of hypocrisy by citing so many 
 Biblical maxims which he did not practise ; for example, from the 
 Epistle of James. He cites St James often, and once about the man 
 beholding his face in a glass and straightway forgetting what manner 
 of man he was, with so pointed an allusion to his own counsels to 
 Essex, — as if Bacon had shown to Essex his face in a glass and 
 Essex had forgotten — that the hypocrisy is apparent to anyone 
 aware of the real facts as Dr Abbott has set them forth. 
 
 This is the meaning of the name lago, the Spanish James. The 
 Spaniards, says Bacon, " seem wiser than they are," which is exactly 
 Bradley's well-judged estimate of lago in the play. The Spanish 
 St James, St lago of Compostella, was a re-incarnation of the James 
 of the Epistle, a ninth-century St James, whom Gibbon appears to 
 have taken for a somewhat theatrical saint. lago of the play was 
 still another avatar. And as in the transmigration of souls there are 
 strange vicissitudes, so the third St James emerged almost the 
 opposite of the first. Bacon quotes the Apostle often, as if his epistle 
 had a fascination for him ; thus twice or thrice he quotes or para- 
 phrases " Pure religion and undefiled " ; but, to give the devil his 
 due, he always breaks off before "keep himself unspotted from, 
 the world." 
 
 I come now to the proof that the criticisms of the Christian Letter, 
 that is to say, Bacon's criticisms of Hooker's system, are used to 
 inspire lago's plan of campaign. Some things from that pamphlet, 
 relating to lago's motives and to the alarming of Brabantio, who is 
 Hooker's patron Whitgift, have been taken before. Those to be 
 brought out now are the detailed attack on Hooker's teaching, which 
 occupies four-fifths of the pamphlet. It will be found that Shakespeare 
 has selected such of the points as suited Othello and Desdemona in 
 the natural circumstances of the plot. lago begins operations by 
 blandly asking: "But I pray you, sir, are you fast married?" The 
 reason of his asking is, that the magnifico, who has " a voice potential 
 and double as the Duke's," would stretch his authority to the utmost 
 to divorce him or put restraint and grievance upon him. Othello 
 answers at large, and ends with a summary of the strength of his 
 case: "My parts, my title, and my perfect soul, shall manifest me 
 rightly." His " perfect soul " was, of course, no sanctimonious boast : 
 if proof of that be needed, it is found in his words to the Senate : " As 
 truly as to heaven I do confess the vices of my blood." He meant 
 a ritual perfection, which was his " title " or part of it ; and that can 
 have been none other than the effect of the baptism which he, a 
 pagan, had submitted to before being joined in marriage to a Christian 
 
lAGO AT WORK 79 
 
 woman. It was not necessary to have called his soul " perfect " after 
 that rite ; for baptism, the most catholic of all rites, would have 
 been his passport to Christian marriage whether he believed or not 
 that it conferred election and regenerative grace there and then. But 
 that is the doctrine implied in " my perfect soul," and it is the first 
 of many hints embedded in the text that Othello exemplifies a 
 certain view of the Sacraments which is Hooker's. lago heard his 
 words and said nothing ; but, talking to Roderigo soon after, he said : 
 " If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a 
 supersubtle Venetian be not too hard for my wits and all the tribe 
 of hell, thou shalt enjoy her." 
 
 His ascription of sanctimony to Othello is unexpected ; it arises 
 from nothing in the Moor's character and conduct, for lago knew his 
 " free and open nature " ; nor is it intelligible as a sneer invented for 
 Roderigo's benefit. It is lago's real estimate of the words " my 
 perfect soul " : — as he himself did not hold baptismal regeneration, he 
 called it sanctimony in Othello to profess that belief This is one 
 of the points in the attack on Hooker, p. 36 : " What warrant have 
 you of present grace in the verie worke wrought of baptism ? " The 
 point came up again at the Hampton Court Conference, King James 
 pronouncing decidedly for the High Church doctrine. 
 
 So far, the word " baptism " had not been spoken in the dialogue ; 
 but it needs only a moment's reflection to find it implied, both in the 
 phrases quoted and in the practical result of Brabantio's appeal to 
 the Duke and Senate, which was to dismiss his charge of " practices 
 inhibited and out of warrant," and to find the marriage regular and 
 formally complete. The Moor's baptism is alluded to only once, and 
 not until the second act, lago being the speaker ; and then it is 
 recalled not with reference to the grace conferred, but to the vow 
 taken. It occurs immediately after Cassio's degradation, when 
 Desdemona was interceding for him : 
 
 lago. And then for her 
 
 To win the Moor, — were't to renounce his baptism, 
 All seals and symbols of redeemed sin — 
 His soul is so enfettered to her love 
 That she may make, unmake, do what she list, 
 Even as her appetite shall play the gad 
 With his weak function. 
 
 (Be it noted that lago takes baptism at its Calvinist value.) 
 
 It is an odious duty to have to extricate lago's meaning. Desde- 
 mona's appetite would play the gad with the defunct and satisfied 
 appetite of Othello, and thereby unmake his baptismal vow, one part of 
 which was to renounce the carnal desires of the flesh. Not often 
 does the vow of baptism or its repetition at confirmation come into 
 close juxtaposition with the vow of marriage ; but it did so for once 
 
8o ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 in the peculiar circumstances of the case. It appears that Othello in 
 his matter-of-fact way had accepted the obligation to renounce the 
 carnal desires of the flesh. He makes a needless digression on it in 
 his speech to the Council before embarking, where he is backing up 
 Desdemona's request to be allowed to go with him : 
 
 0th. Vouch with me, Heaven, I therefore beg it not 
 To please the palate of my appetite : 
 Nor to comply with heat, the young affects 
 In me defunct, and proper satisfaction ; 
 But to be free and bounteous to her mind. 
 
 The sentence is hopelessly ungrammatical, and was intended to be 
 so. Taken along with his other admission that he was declined into 
 the vale of years, and with much else that will have to be brought 
 forward in the sequel, his stammering words mean that there was to 
 be no carnal union but only a spiritual, candour requiring him to add 
 that he did not make a virtue of his renunciation. When lago 
 recurred to the point, he brought the baptismal vow into the context 
 quite plainly, with the reminder that Desdemona had an appetite. 
 
 As lago conveys part of his meaning by alleging " sanctimony" 
 in Othello, so he conveys another part of it by equally subtle remarks 
 on Desdemona. Cassio, he says, "hath all those requisites in him 
 that folly and green minds look after; a pestilent complete knave: 
 and the woman hath found him already." 
 
 Rod. I cannot believe that of her : she is full of most blessed condition, 
 lago. Blessed fig's end ! the wine she drinks is made of grapes : if she had 
 been blessed, she would never have loved the Moor : blessed pudding ! 
 
 If he had not hit upon the particular truism of wine being made 
 of grapes, his detraction of Desdemona would be thought part of his 
 malignity. His words mean strictly that she might have been full 
 of most blessed condition if the wine she drank had been made of 
 something else than grapes. There is only one such wine, the conse- 
 crated wine of the chalice, in the high Romish theory of it. lago 
 means to deny that the theory is applicable to Desdemona's wine, 
 which leads him to deny that she was full of most blessed condition. 
 This corresponds with the challenge to Hooker in the Christian 
 Letter: " Instruct us upon what ground of Scripture it may be proved 
 that the co-operation of his omnipotent power doeth make it his bodie 
 and blood to us, and in what sense." The anonymous writer often 
 quotes Jewel's Apologie, which had been written in Latin, and 
 Englished by Bacon's mother. One of the quaintest things in it is 
 the same truism as lago's, " the wine she drinks is made of grapes." 
 "/^ is well known that the fruit of the vine is wine, and not blood." 
 lago's, "blessed pudding ! " is Lady Ann's, "it is well known." 
 
 Following the order of allusions in the text to sacramental and 
 
lAGO AT WORK 8i 
 
 other rites, and to positions heretical from lago's point of view, I 
 ought to take first certain references to the Communion, or to the 
 communion of saints, to the heresy of works of supererogation, and 
 to the other two renunciations in the baptismal vow (the vain pomp 
 and glory of the world, and the devil and all his works). But I will 
 preface all that curious matter with the handkerchief, which, although 
 mentioned later, was really earlier in respect that it was Othello's 
 wedding present to his wife, and is the one thing in the play which 
 confesses a symbolic intention, the author having made no secret of his 
 meaning therein, but given a very broad hint, which I believe he wished 
 us to take. The symbolism of the handkerchief is so clear that it would 
 certainly have been discovered before by some critic if he had been 
 on the outlook for symbolism. Although there is not a hint of it in 
 any of the annotations, it needs only to be pointed out to be assented 
 to. In the Italian story the handkerchief has no symbol and no 
 history ; it is merely worked in a " very subtle " arabesque pattern, 
 distinctive enough to be recognised by the Moor when he saw it at a 
 window in the hands of his lieutenant's housekeeper ; it has neither 
 strawberries nor mulberries (mori), although some have assumed it 
 must have had the latter as the emblem of II Moro. 
 
 Othello's handkerchief was of a " very subtle " pattern in another 
 way. It had a remarkable history. It was an heirloom, given him 
 by his mother at her death, to give to his wife if ever he had a mind 
 to wive. lago knew about -that handkerchief before anyone else, as 
 he knew about the baptism. He had entreated his wife " a hundred 
 times " to steal it, which Emilia thought " a wayward wish," wonder- 
 ing what he wanted it for that he should be " so earnest " to get it, 
 and recalling later the " solemn earnestness '' with which he had " so 
 often " woo'd her to steal it. As it happened, Emilia had no occasion 
 to steal it, for Othello threw it on the floor as too little to bind his 
 sore head when his wife offered it with that charitable intent, 
 forbidding her to take it up when she stooped to do so, at once 
 marching her off the stage, and leaving it a prize to ^Emilia, who was 
 present. 
 
 Shortly after, the Moor took occasion to ask for the identical 
 handkerchief, whereupon Desdemona, instead of turning upon her 
 husband, as a less generous soul would have done, to remind him that 
 he had himself thrown it away and had forbidden her to recover it, she 
 prevaricated and brought suspicion on herself. 
 
 Although Othello had been told just before that lago had seen 
 Cassio wipe his beard with it, he did not breathe his suspicion to her, 
 but gave her a solemn history- of the precious piece of cambric. 
 Hitherto he had merely " conjured her she should ever keep it," and 
 she had " reserved it evermore about her to kiss and talk to." Now 
 she is to hear its antecedents and its origin : 
 
82 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 0th. That handkerchief 
 
 Did an Egyptian to my mother give ; 
 She was a charmer, and could almost read 
 The thoughts of people : she told her, while she kept it, 
 'Twould make her amiable and subdue my father 
 Entirely to her love ; but if she lost it 
 Or made a gift of it, my father's eye 
 Should hold her loathed, and his spirits should hunt 
 After new fancies : she, dying, gave it me ; 
 And bid me when my fate should have me wive 
 To give it her. I did so : and take heed on't : 
 Make it a darling like your precious eye ; 
 To lose't or give't away were such perdition 
 As nothing else could match. 
 
 Des. Is't possible ? 
 
 Oih. 'Tis true : there's magic in the web of it : 
 A sibyl, that had numbered in the world 
 The sun to course two hundred compasses. 
 In her prophetic fury sew'd the work ; 
 The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk ; 
 And it was dyed in mummy which the skilful 
 Conserved of maidens' hearts. 
 
 Des. Indeed ! is't true ? 
 
 Desdemona receives this august recital with unconscious hunnour. 
 When told that the loss of the handkerchief would be such perdition 
 as nothing else could match, she exclaims, "Is't possible?" and at 
 the story of the two-hundred-years-old Sibyl sewing the work in her 
 prophetic fury, she betrays ingenuous alarm, "Indeed! is't true?" 
 Othello's profound seriousness over the piece of embroidered cambric 
 is effective in its plain sense to bring out Desdemona's charming 
 simpleness. Whether or not she ever saw through the mystery of the 
 antique token, it is clear that she did not understand why Othello 
 attached so much importance to it. But if we could have questioned 
 the Egyptian charmer who could "almost" read the thoughts of 
 people, we should have heard from her that the Sibyl who had 
 existed in the world two hundred years before her prophetic fury 
 inspired her to sew the work was the Church at the Council of 
 Nicasa ; that the strawberries on it were " almost " — strawberry leaves 
 altogether — the emblem of the Trinity, the hallowed worms — " almost " 
 again — the Incorruptible Body, the conserve of maidens' hearts the 
 hidden mystery of the Virgin Birth. Othello's marriage present to 
 his wife was the Nicene Creed, the Creed in the Communion. If 
 there be any doubt of the symbolic meaning of the tragedy elsewhere, 
 there can be none here ; for the prophetic fury of the Sibyl who had 
 numbered two hundred courses of the sun can be none other than the 
 furor propheticus of the Nicene Council — the very phrase which Gibbon 
 would have applauded.^ 
 
 1 "And in a furie seems to prophetize " is found in Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas 
 " The Schisme," where it is used of the prophets of Baal in contrast with the calm Elijah. 
 
lAGO AT WORK 83 
 
 The symbolism of the handkerchief also explains why Desdeniona 
 is made to say : " I had rather have lost my purse full of cruzadoes." 
 These were Portuguese gold coins with the cross on one face. Douce 
 figures two varieties, one of which has under the cross three points, 
 probably standing for the Trinity. 
 
 The wedding present having been a symbol of the Creed in the 
 Communion, there is nothing forced in bringing into the context the 
 religious meaning of the marriage rite itself, which is indeed insepar- 
 able from any marriage by a priest. The time and place of the 
 ceremony are passed over in the play without the smallest hint. 
 It was secret ; but, unlike the private marriages which Whitgift had 
 to bring into the Ecclesiastical Court (see Isaac Disraeli's note, supra, 
 p. 26), it was regular, or it would not have satisfied the Duke and 
 Council. It was Othello's " title," armed with which he came boldly 
 to the Council — " my parts, my title, and my perfect soul shall 
 manifest me rightly.'' It was therefore a marriage with the rites of 
 the Church, and in every such marriage there is symbolism so profound 
 and insistent as almost to jar with the gaiety of the more sedate, or 
 with the boisterous humour and practical jokes of a marriage company 
 in the olden time. The sacramental idea, as well as the implied 
 baptism of the pagan bridegroom, were in the story in any case. The 
 symbols were there; the playwright not only did not invent them, 
 but he ought not to ignore them. What he omitted, very properly 
 and of necessity, was the marriage on the stage ; but the fact of it, 
 and the whole of its ritual, are latent : " So excellent a mystery 
 (sacramentum) that by it is signified and represented the spiritual 
 marriage and unity betwixt Christ and His Church." Then, quoting 
 St Paul, " This is a great mystery {sacramentum), but I speak con- 
 cerning Christ and the Church." It happens that the language is 
 almost identical with the opening sentence of the Collect for All 
 Saints Day. The tragedy was performed on the King's private stage 
 at Whitehall on the festival of All Saints, 1604, and may have been 
 commissioned for that occasion. On the surface it does not seem to 
 be appropriate to the occasion ; yet when the real action begins 
 with the second act, we are introduced at once to the religious 
 symbolism of the festival for which the play appears to have been 
 
 Joseph Hunter says "prophetic fury" is used " many times" by Sylvester ; but in Grosart's 
 glossary to his works, the above is the only phrase which comes near Shakespeare s. 
 Brandes says that " Profetico furore" occurs in the original Orlando Funoso but not m 
 Harington's English. It matters nothing that Ariosto used the phrase, for Shakespeare had 
 direct access to the source, the sixth book of the ^neid, where the two notions of _ tury 
 and " prophetic" occur in association with the Cumaean Sibyl. Shakespeare s ongmality 
 was in thinking of the Sibyl ; her prophetic fury followed as a matter of course. 
 
 This meaning of the handkerchief may seem to imply that Othello s parents were 
 Christians. Even if it were so, it does not imply that they were Christians at the time of his 
 birth ; and we know that he was thrown on the world at an early age But the author, who 
 wanted the handkerchief only for an ulterior purpose, is not careful about its anteceden s in 
 the family. In one place Othello says an Egyptian gave it to his mother ; in another place, 
 " it was an antique token my father gave my mother." 
 
84 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 written. In the hurry of the moment at Venice, owing to pressure 
 of matters of State and the displeasure of Brabantio, nothing but the 
 fact of the marriage, and of its regularity, is brought forward ; but 
 the religious associations of the wedlock are only postponed until a 
 convenient point in the action, which is the reunion of Othello and 
 Desdemona after the voyage. They embarked in different ships ; 
 Othello, being a week in advance, encountered a storm ; Desdemona 
 sailed over summer seas and came in before her husband. We come 
 then to Cyprus, where the wedded bliss is to begin. Desdemona's 
 galley coming in before Othello's, Cassio, already there, is enabled to 
 receive her by herself. He greets her almost in the words of the 
 Salutation or " Hail Mary " : 
 
 O behold ! 
 
 The riches of the ship is come on shore. 
 
 Ye men of Cyprus, let her have your knees, — 
 
 Hail to thee, lady ! and the grace of heaven. 
 
 Before, behind thee, and on every hand 
 
 Enwheel thee round. 
 
 There is some anxiety for the General's safety. Cassio had lost 
 him on a dangerous sea ; the roughness of the storm is well impressed 
 upon us. At length Othello's galley is descried in the offing, and, 
 after an interval filled by lago's talk with Desdemona, the Moor 
 comes ashore. His first words are ingeniously adapted to the 
 " unspeakable joys " of the saints after the storms of life : 
 
 Oh, my soul's joy. 
 If after every tempest come such calms, 
 May the winds blow //// they have waken' d death ; 
 And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas, 
 Olympus-high, and duck again as low 
 As hell's from heaven ! If 'twere now to die, 
 'Twere now to be most happy ; for, I fear. 
 My soul hath her content so absolute 
 That not another comfort like to this 
 Succeeds in unknown fate. 
 
 Desdemona's reply is still in the language of religious ceremony, 
 recalling the husband's promise in the marriage rite : 
 
 Desd. The heavens forbid 
 
 But that our loves and comforts should increase 
 Even as our days do grow. 
 
 0th. Amen to that, sweet powers ; 
 
 I cannot speak enough of this content ; 
 It stops me here; it is too much of joy : 
 And this, and this, the greatest discords be 
 That e'er our hearts shall make. 
 
 On the stage this richly coloured scene is apt to lose the tincture 
 of religion which the poet's words give it. It has little need of the 
 arts of the scene-painter and the costumier, Cassio's salutation is 
 
lAGO AT WORK 85 
 
 literally an Ave, gratid plena, Domitms tecum. Othello was certainly 
 thinking of the Collect for All Saints in his " wakened death," and " if 
 it were now to die," and his labouring bark tossed from hell to heaven. 
 Cyprus, the Isle of Venus, is become the Isle of Saints, the scene of 
 their wedded bliss ; and that, too, in strict conformity with the words 
 of the ritual. The reunion of the wedded pair after the voyage in 
 separate ships is the first opportunity of adverting in no oblique way 
 to the rites and ceremonies that had preceded. In the natural 
 sequence, the Communion office itself should have followed. It 
 was contended by the Puritans that the Sacrament should not be 
 administered to the wedded pair " unless there be a general receiving." 
 Hooker, however, defended the plighting of their troth to each other 
 and to Christ by the same act, as " a custom so religious and so holy " 
 that it should not only be tolerated but made general. To avoid the 
 profanation of things sacred, and perhaps for another reason as well, 
 Shakespeare has substituted the ideas of the communion and fellow- 
 ship of the saints on earth. The dramatist may well have been 
 thinking of the eloquent words of Dean Barlow, in his Defence of the 
 Articles, 1601 : — 
 
 " We believe and confess that among the saints on earth, though distant 
 in place, or different in condition, or alien by nation, there is an unity in 
 religion, an unanimity in affection, a sympathy in affliction, a mutual charity, 
 a relief each of other, either comforting the mind if vexed, or supplying the 
 wants if distressed, or supporting the weakness if unsettled, or reforming the 
 ignorance if blinded, or praying for deliverance if oppressed. This is our 
 faith, without breach whereof we , deny Seven Sacraments to be Christ's 
 ordinance." 
 
 Not only was this quasi-sacrament specially suited to the two who 
 were " alien by nation," and to the necessary absence of formal ritual 
 from the action, but we shall find that it had a greater allegorical 
 fitness for Othello's platonic relations with his wife. The wedded 
 bliss in Cyprus begins with a scene which is unmistakably religious, 
 but with a conscious limitation of the rite (" I cannot speak enough 
 of this content: it stops me here"). This limitation, which was fore- 
 shadowed in Othello's last speech to the Venetian Senate, and again 
 hinted at by lago in the context of the Moor's baptism, will be 
 noticed more fully on a later page: I return now to lago. 
 
 There is hardly another sentence in the play more significant of 
 the author's intention in the part of lago than his aside at the end of 
 Othello's rhapsody on his soul's joy. He is called honest lago many 
 times by others, but here he calls himself honest, and he means it : 
 
 lago. O, you are well tuned now ; 
 
 But I'll set down the pegs that make this music 
 As honest as I am. 
 
 It may seem a strange moment for him to assert his honesty. Yet 
 
86 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 he was not sardonically mocking at the credit which he enjoyed for 
 honesty ; the words were said to himself, and were meant in their 
 plain sense. But they are not intelligible, nor is the whole play 
 anything but an enigma of incredible blundering on the one side and 
 incredible malignity on the other, unless we keep the religious allegory 
 steadily in view. lago, as honest as he was, purposing to set down 
 the pegs that made the music, is exactly Hooker's anonymous critic 
 reducing to logical terms " the sweet sound of your melodious style." 
 Othello's rhapsody on his " soul's joy " is pitched in the very key of 
 Hooker, and conveys his very note. It would be out of place to 
 enter at large into his view of the Sacrament, but I may be permitted, 
 as the matter was really one of Shakespeare's day, and is of great 
 historical importance, to summarise it briefly. He applied to the Sacra- 
 ment, as spoken prophetically and non-figuratively, the two Johannine 
 sentences which Jewel had refused to accept in that sense : " Except 
 ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no 
 life in you," and " He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood 
 hath life everlasting." Neither of these sentences, said Jewel, 
 " pertains directly to the Sacrament." While Hooker deduced from 
 these words both the necessity and primary importance of the 
 Sacrament as a means of grace, and the doctrine of the Real Presence, 
 and while he assumed a continual miracle therein wrought by 
 Omnipotent Power, he refused to follow the Papists and the Lutherans 
 into their respective intellectual positions of transubstantiation and 
 consubstantiation ; indeed, he poured ridicule upon them. But he 
 did not deny the continual miracle; he merely declined their meta- 
 physics of it, as well as all questions of when, where, and by what 
 human instrument. Perfect joy casteth out thought — it would seem 
 even from the mind of the theologian : " Whether with change or 
 without alteration of the element, such as they imagine, we need not 
 greatly to care nor inquire!' Why, then, asked the Christian Letter, did 
 so many bishops and other confessors throw away their lives ? To 
 show that joy was (as Wordsworth afterwards said) " its own security," 
 Hooker went back to the unquestioning mood of the disciples on the 
 shore of the lake in the twentieth of John, contrasting it with that of 
 the Capernaites in the sixth of John, who asked as to the miraculous 
 crossing, " Rabbi, when camest thou hither? " 
 
 " How Cometh it to pass that so few words of high mystery being uttered, 
 they receive with gladness the gift of Christ, and make no show of doubt or 
 scruple ? The reason hereof is not dark to them which have anything at all 
 observed how the powers of the mind are wont to stir when that which we 
 infinitely long for presenteth itself above and besides expectadon. Curious 
 and intricate speculations do hinder, they abate, they quench such inflamed 
 motions of delight and joy as divine graces use to raise when extraordinarily 
 they are present. The mind therefore feeling present joy is always marvellous 
 unwilling to admit any other cogitation, and in that case casteth off those 
 
lAGO AT WORK 87 
 
 disputes whereunto the intellectual part at other times easily draweth. In 
 this where they all [Rome, Luther, Sacramentarians] speak but one thing, 
 their discourses are heavenly, their words sweet as the honeycomb, their 
 tongues melodiously tuned instruments, their sentences mere consolation and 
 joy; are we not hereby almost with voice from heaven admonished which 
 we may safliest cling unto ? " 
 
 Such a passage as this is the best explanation of Othello's " O 
 my soul's joy " ; of lago's resolve, as honest as he was, to unstring 
 Hooker's " melodiously tuned instrument," and of his keynote in the 
 opening scene, " Though that his joy be joy, yet," etc. 
 
 It is shortly after this that lago informs the audience of his plan 
 of operation, in the famous soliloquy at the end of the second act : 
 
 Cassio. Good night, honest lago. \_Exit. 
 
 lago. And what's he then that says I play the villain? etc. 
 
 He begins with an apostrophe to " Divinity of hell ! " which seems 
 to range him with the devils. This is indeed the loais classicus to 
 prove his hellish malignity of purpose, the only others which can be 
 cited for his consciousness of " motiveless malignity " being two 
 confessions of knavery and two of hell — " my wits and all the tribe 
 of hell," and "hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the 
 world's light." But knavery did not mean anything worse than 
 sportive malice or a practical joke,^ while hell and night are the same 
 as in the principal speech which I am to take at once. What may 
 seem on the surface a confession of diabolical purpose is never any- 
 thing but his cleverness in dissembling his meaning. The monologue 
 on the divinity of hell is artfully constructed as a sop to the audience, 
 who cannot understand him at all, unless he be the complete stage 
 villain. The " divinity " or theology of hell which he apostrophised 
 is nothing worse than heresy, described by the Fathers as the business 
 of the devil, negotiuiii diaboli, because the devil can cite Scripture. 
 His other appeal to hell, " Not too hard for my wits and all the tribe 
 of hell," is also in the context of heresy, as it follows direct from 
 Othello's " sanctimony," which was his view of the election and present 
 grace conferred by his baptism. Not only is lago's hellish mind 
 everywhere reducible to a mere negotium diaboli, or heresy as the 
 orthodox saw it, but we are now to see that he resorts to this ironical 
 "devil's business" for the sufficient reason that others in the play 
 are heretics from his point of view. 
 
 lago. How am I, then, a villain, 
 
 To counsel Cassio to this parallel course. 
 Directly to his good ? Divinity of hell ! 
 When devils will the blackest sins put on, 
 They do suggest {i.e. tempt] at first with heavenly shows. 
 
 1 "You hoped for some merriment, some toys, some scurrility, or, to speak plain 
 English, some knavery. "—Harington, Metamorphosis of Ajax, 1596. 
 
88 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 As I do now : for whiles this honest fool 
 
 Plies Desdemonato repair his fortunes, 
 
 And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor, 
 
 I'll pour this pestilence into his ear, 
 
 That she repeals [i.e. recalls] him for her body's lust : 
 
 And by how much she strives to do him good, 
 
 She shall undo her credit with the Moor ; 
 
 So will I turn her virtue into pitch, 
 
 And out of her own goodness make the net 
 
 That shall enmesh them all. 
 
 Heresy being the divinity of hell as the orthodox saw it, we shall 
 find that lago was sound on a certain Article wherein Desdemona, 
 of all persons in the world, was a heretic. The instance chosen by 
 him was a representative one, nor could a better instance have been 
 found to bring out the essential difference between medievalism 
 (which was bred in Desdemona's bones) and Calvinism. It is the 
 heresy underlying Desdemona's pleadings for Cassio, works of super- 
 erogation, the subject of the 14th Article : " For by them men do 
 declare that they do not only render unto God as much as they are 
 bound to do, but that they do more for His sake than of bounden 
 duty is required." lago had before said of Desdemona, and said as 
 handsomely as truly: "She is so free, so kind, so apt, so blessed a 
 disposition, that she holds it a vice of her goodness ttot to do more 
 than she is requested" — using almost the formula for the forbidden 
 thing of the Article, which, therefore, she contravened. Moreover, 
 " she holds it a vice not to," fixes on her the heresy in its completest 
 form, as an opinion which she maintained after the error thereof had 
 been pointed out. It is clear that he is still thinking of what he had 
 before said as to a vice of her goodness not to do more, for he now 
 says he will turn her virtue into pitch — a word which had then the 
 special meaning of an overplus beyond bare duty. Doing more than 
 she was requested, although the literal language of the Article, was 
 not really what it meant by works of supererogation ; there was no 
 "arrogancy or impiety" unless the overplus were pleaded in satis- 
 faction of someone's sins. But in its arid and abstract form, the 
 Article seems not only to condemn the satisfactory and meritorious 
 works of Papists, but to repress all generous enthusiasm whatsoever. 
 
 The Calvinist position was merely that we are unprofitable servants, 
 do v^hat we may ; or that our good deeds have no merit in the sight 
 of God. It happened that Hooker, in a section of his work to which 
 Keble gives the running head of Counsels of Perfection, had ap- 
 proximated to the Papist view of good deeds (familiar to many in 
 our day by the part of that name in the revived allegorical play 
 Everyman) by claiming that they were approved of Heaven and 
 would make for the "accessory augmentation of our bliss," although 
 he denied, of course, that they could be in any degree satisfactory of 
 
lAGO AT WORK 89 
 
 sins. I shall quote the passage, and the Christian Letter's criticism 
 on it : 
 
 " Finally, some things, although not so required of necessity that to leave 
 theni undone excludeth from salvation, are notwithstanding of so great 
 dignity and acceptation with God, that most ample reward in heaven is laid up 
 for them. Hereby we have no command in Nature or Scripture which doth 
 exact them at our hands ; yet those motives there are in both which draw 
 most effectually our minds unto them. In this kind there is not the least 
 action but it doth somewhat make to the accessory augmentation of our bliss. 
 For which cause our Saviour doth plainly witness, that there shall not be as 
 much as a cup of cold water bestowed for His sake without reward." 
 
 Whereupon his adversary asked him, " Whether we may not justly 
 judge, that in thus speaking you sow the seed of that doctrine which 
 leadeth to those arrogant works of supererogation." It was the same 
 care for correct doctrine that led lago to canvass Desdemona's 
 conduct in the affair of Cassio's reinstatement. He had before 
 praised, or seemed to praise, her excess of generosity, but now he sees 
 the heretical side of it, and will " turn her virtue into pitch, and out of 
 her own goodness make the net that shall enmesh them all." Had 
 Desdemona been no more than technically or pedantically a heretic, 
 he could not have expected to succeed. But he knew, as indeed he 
 knew " all qualities with a learned spirit of human dealings," — a 
 perfect description of Bacon — that nothing is so likely in the ordinary 
 way of the world to get us into trouble as doing more than of bounden 
 duty is required. 
 
 Works of supererogation are selected from among Hooker's 
 many alleged contraventions of the Articles, because doing more 
 than she was in duty bound was what actually brought Desdemona to 
 grief, and enmeshed them all. But lago prefaced it in his monologue, 
 where it is latent, with the general case of heretics, the devils who 
 tempt with heavenly shows when they will put on, or instigate to, the 
 blackest sins, "as I do now." As this is lago's cleverest ruse to 
 blacken his own character to the audience, I may be permitted to 
 digress a little in order to explain it. I would premise that the 
 Bible was very well known to everyone in that age, perhaps better 
 known than now, for all the multiplication of copies ; that the folios of 
 the Fathers did not then repose unopened on the lower shelves of 
 libraries, and that church history and theology were favourite subjects 
 with many. 
 
 The idea of the devil tempting under a fair or angelic form had 
 become familiar in the medieval legends of the saints : for example, 
 several of St Anthony's well-known temptations were presented under 
 a fair disguise. But in the Bible there is only one instance of Satan 
 transformed into an angel of light. It is St Paul's famous instance 
 in the Church of Corinth ; and in that case there is no doubt at all 
 that the devil was a certain heretic, perhaps the most hated heretic of the 
 
90 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 whole Apostolic age. Although he is not so pointedly referred to in 
 the Epistle to the Galatians, there is little doubt that it was the same 
 plausible false apostle who was inquired after in the question, " Who 
 hath bewitched you ? " At Corinth he was a degree more obnoxious 
 to Paul than the eloquent ApoUos, with his Alexandrian doctrine of 
 " the wisdom of the cosmos," and two degrees more obnoxious to him 
 than Cephas. 
 
 All three rivals of Paul in that infant Church had a following. It 
 is probable that he had actually written the name, or rather the 
 nickname, of the arch-heretic, along with his own and the other two, 
 in the sentence : " Everyone of you saith, I am of Paul, and I of 
 
 Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of . Is Christ divided ? " 
 
 But the copyists of the letter had stumbled at the fourth name (here 
 left blank), or had been shocked by it ; so that the name which begins 
 the next sentence, having some letters in common with it, has got 
 attracted into its place, making a confusion of thought upon which 
 whole treatises have been expended in vain. This was the false 
 apostle who professed to have the gift of visions, and prided himself 
 so much thereon that he drew Paul into glorying also, and into 
 relating his own rapture into the third heaven. He is the subject of 
 the anathema at the end, where his pretensions to be a seer are 
 deducible from the letters of his real name, if the Hebrew word 
 " Maranatha" be transliterated from the Greek, and the vowel points 
 inserted in either of two ways to make a paronomasia. Had not this 
 " false apostle " been a man of persuasive powers, and the most 
 formidable of adversaries, he would not have been compared with 
 Satan transformed into an angel of light. His identity is not clearly 
 revealed, and for the mere illustration of heresy as the business of the 
 devil, it is not essential to know it. But, for a reason, I shall pursue 
 the matter a step further. Epiphanius, Against Heresies, gives the 
 name of this earliest troubler of the Church in more than one part of 
 his work. He identifies him under his name with the great adversary 
 of St Paul at Corinth, by applying St Paul's term " false apostle" to 
 him, and by citing the text 2 Cor. xi. This father, a fourth-century 
 bishop in Cyprus, who compiled his history of eighty or more heresies 
 in great part from an earlier work, makes no doubt that the sectary 
 of whom he treats in his eighth paragraph was the disturbing force on 
 three occasions in Scripture, where we should not suspect his existence 
 at all. He was the unnamed person in the Acts who troubled the 
 Church of Judaea by insisting that the Jewish law held good ; it was 
 he who caused Paul all the controversy about the circumcision in 
 Galatia; and, thirdly, he was the identical heretic whose negative 
 teaching on the resurrection of the body called forth the eloquent 
 fifteenth chapter of i Cor. This was the Satan transformed into 
 an angel of light of whom lago was thinking when he said, "As I do 
 
lAGO AT WORK 91 
 
 now." Strong support for his argument, " How am I then a villain? " 
 he might have gathered from Epiphanius in another place, as well as 
 from Eusebius. It appears that the same heretic was widely reputed 
 in the second and third centuries to have written one of the books of 
 Scripture which was long kept out of the Canon for its heretical 
 associations, but was at length found to have too many of the 
 intrinsic qualities of the angel of light not to be admitted side by 
 side with St Paul himself. Of course, another theory of authorship 
 was made for it, and is still taught with various qualifications; but no 
 less an authority than Harnack has given his adhesion to a theory of 
 it which should bring the authorship nearly back to where the old 
 tradition left it. 
 
 If I should seem to be going outside the limits of the poet's probable 
 reading and thinking, I may mention that much of the above is lound in 
 substance in a very readable English book published by Shakespeare's friend 
 Richard Field, the first printer and publisher of ' Venus and Adonis.' It is 
 Meredith Hanmer's translation of Eusebius, Socrates, and other church 
 historians. Hanmer was domestic chaplain to the Earl of Lincoln, and 
 having read Eusebius in Greek with the Countess, he published his book 
 doubtless for the laity as well as the learned. At p. 137 is given an important 
 extract from Dionysius, head of the catechetical school of Alexandria and 
 the successor therein of Origen. It is perhaps the earliest instance of 
 scientific biblical criticism. He shows conclusively that the Apocalypse is 
 quite unlike the other Johannine writings in feeling, idiom, and style. He 
 repeats the tradition that it was the work of Cerinthus, and although he does 
 not formally adhere to it, yet he assigns the authorship to some vague and 
 unknown "John" who might just as well be the person named. He objects 
 to the book chiefly for its barbarisms of manner, but does not think that it 
 should be shut out from the class of inspired writings. 
 
 lago's identical figure of devils tempting with heavenly shows had 
 been applied to Hooker by the Christian Letter : 
 
 " By excellency of words and enticing speeches of men's wisdom, to beguile 
 and bewitch the very Church of God. And such as are used for this purpose 
 come in sheep's clothing. For he translateth himself into an angel of light, 
 who blindeth all men with utter darkness.— 2 Cor. xi. 14, 15." 
 
 Tempt with heavenly shows, " as I do now," said lago. He also 
 would play the heretic, and " pour this pestilence into his ear, that 
 she repeals him [Cassio] for her body's lust." The pestilence was a 
 pestilent heresy, not a pestilent lie ; for lago believed honestly that 
 all love was of that nature, and all benevolence a form of self-interest ; 
 and such being his rule for all mankind, he measured Desdemona by 
 it, as honest as he was. 
 
 This view of love he had before expounded to Roderigo: "'Tis 
 but a lust of the blood and a permission of the will." Also, he had 
 said of himself and Desdemona: "Now, I do love her too; not out 
 of absolute lust— though peradventure I stand accountant for as great 
 a sin." The parenthesis is obscure, but it probably betrays a con- 
 
92 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 sciousness of some heresy, perhaps the homosexual. lago's definition 
 of love is near enough to Bacon's in his essay " Of Love," but in his 
 state paper on the Church, written for the use of King James in 1603, 
 he recognised the Christian variety also : " The Scripture has always 
 agape and never eros ; and we do ever translate ' charity ' and never 
 ' love,' because of the indifferency and equivocation of that word with 
 impure love." Certainly Bacon had no sense of humour, or he would 
 have said nothing about indifferency and equivocation in writing of 
 eros to King James.^ 
 
 The apostrophe to the theology or divinity of hell is lago's 
 reasoned justification for the course he was about to follow. He knew 
 that Desdemona had no lustful motive ; to allege that to Othello was 
 heresy, and a pestilent one ; yet it was merely a heresy, or a colour 
 given to Desdemona's motive, according to lago's honestly held 
 theory of love. Moreover, she herself was defined for him as a heretic 
 on good works, according to the Anglican Article, so that he was but 
 meeting one heresy with another. Thus he had example for turning 
 her "virtue" into pitch, and out of her own goodness making the net 
 that should enmesh them all. It sounds diabolical, and it is announced 
 by an apostrophe to the " Divinity of hell," which sounds alarming ; 
 but he denied that he was a villain, and we must agree with him, 
 unless all heresy be villainous. 
 
 Having thus illustrated his general position by a particular 
 example, he begins his operations against Othello in the next act, 
 and these, we shall find, are all conceived in the same spirit. But, 
 first, to make clear the almost inviting opportunity that lago had for 
 his practices, let us take up the deferred question of Othello's platonic 
 relations with his wife. 
 
 In Cinthio's original it is implied that the Moor's married life for 
 several months in Venice, and for some time after their arrival in 
 Cyprus, was happy in the ordinary way. In the play the marriage 
 is secret and hurried ; the bridegroom sails for Cyprus the same night 
 that Desdemona had been missed from her home, leaving her to 
 follow a week later. They both reach Cyprus on the same day, 
 Othello's ship having been delayed by a storm ; and the first night 
 on the island, Saturday night, should have been the nuptial night. 
 Cassio's drunken brawl at midnight brings both husband and wife 
 upon the scene, one following the other at an interval, with a good 
 deal of dialogue and incident, which the ingenuity of critics may turn 
 in various ways, the general impression being a confused one. But 
 next day, Sunday, Desdemona herself is permitted to make the matter 
 quite clear. Dinner-time has come ; Othello has invited certain of 
 
 1 He is not even right in saying " we do ever translate charity." In Wicklif's translation 
 of St Paul's chapter the word is " charite." But in the Bishop's Bible, and in the popularly 
 used Genevan, it is "love," and was not restored to " charitv" until the authorised version 
 ofi6ii. 
 
lAGO AT WORK 93 
 
 the Cypriotes, but he is late, and Desdemona goes to seek him. He 
 speaks in a faint voice, and complains of a pain in his forehead. 
 " Faith, that's with watching," said his wife. With an air of convic- 
 tion, she divines the cause of the headache, and, passing at once from 
 the cause to the cure, she produces her handkerchief to bind hard 
 about his temples, promising him relief in an hour. " Watching " 
 means sitting up all night, having been used primarily of the religious 
 vigil of the " watcher " in a convent chapel, or of one watching his 
 armour all night on his knees before receiving his knighthood. But 
 it came to have a more general meaning, as when Lady Macbeth, on 
 the night of Duncan's murder, bids her husband get into his nightgown, 
 " lest occasion call us, and show us to be watchers " ; and, as Othello 
 came on the scene in the morning with dispatches in his hand for the 
 Senate, we may assume that he had spent part of the night or early 
 morning in writing them.^ 
 
 But in either sense Desdemona's " Faith, that's with watching " 
 meant that he had been keeping vigil for one night. Next night she 
 had the bridal sheets laid on her bed, with the remark, " All's one. 
 Good faith, how foolish are our minds ! " and again, " If I should die 
 before, shroud me in one of those sheets." On one pretext or another 
 the Moor had kept from bedding with his wife. She alludes darkly to 
 some such " fearful " question between them : 
 
 Des. Nay, when I have a suit 
 
 Wherein I mean to touch your love indeed, 
 It shall be full of poise and difficult weight, 
 And fearful to be granted. 
 
 0th. I will deny thee nothing. 
 
 Whereon, I do beseech thee, grant me this. 
 To leave me but a little to myself. 
 
 And immediately lago begins operations with his question, "Did 
 Michael Cassio, when you woo'd my lady, know of your love .? " from 
 which point to the murder of Desdemona the whole action is crowded 
 into the remaining hours of the Sunday. The Moor's vigil and 
 abstinence are practically negligible in the crowd of events, except as 
 symbolic of the nature of his religious belief As lago said in true 
 Baconian style, Othello was occupied with " the contemplation, mark, 
 and denotement of her parts and graces." It is a passive attitude, 
 which corresponds in the symbolism with the communicant's frame of 
 mind in many of the Reformed Churches. None of Bacon's writings 
 on Church affairs, nor his Confession of Faith, shows what doctrine of 
 the Sacrament he held. In consistency with the other articles of his 
 
 t See Welcker Given, A Further Study of the Othello. Have we mimnderstood Shake- 
 siear^s Moorl New York, 1899, PP- 337- The author's object is to show that the marriage 
 «fas Platonic, and was meant to be, in order that the natural repulsiveness of n might be 
 taken away He has examined the text closely in support of his thesis, but finds no double 
 meanings, and has no suspicion of allegory, although he has a chapter on the symbolism of 
 black faces in the mystery plays. 
 
94 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 declared creed, it ought to have been the Calvinist. In the essay 
 " Of Truth " there is a remarkable passage, in the section on " theo- 
 logical and philosophical truth," which expresses the act of belief — 
 such an act as partaking the Communion — in a startling metaphor. 
 He is comparing truth with love, each having three phases : 
 
 "The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the 
 knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it ; and the belief of truth, 
 which is the enjoying of it." 
 
 Now, in Othellos case, two of these phases are brought out with 
 strong emphasis and great beauty, while the absence of the third is 
 indicated in half a dozen subtle ways. " The wooing of it " is written 
 in the poetry of the first act. ' The presence of it " is Othello's " soul's 
 joy " on landing in Cyprus after the perils of the sea : " I cannot speak 
 enough of this content ; it stops me here " — a plain hint of limitation, 
 made plainer by Desdemona's reply, as well as by lago's gibe about 
 the contemplation, mark, and denotement of her parts and graces, as 
 if she were a picture, or a statue. Clearly, in Bacon's allegory of 
 belief, Othello did not attain to " the enjoying of it." 
 
 Bacon wastes no words over his bold metaphor of the belief of 
 truth. Compared with other figures of speech for the act of belief, 
 such as Jacobi's salto mortale, or a leap upon the serried points of 
 spears, it has the sole disadvantage of being sexual. In one other 
 place Bacon speaks of " ties of relationship, which are the sacraments 
 of nature," so that the bond in question would be " the sacrament of 
 love." That Shakespeare knew the love-analogy in the essay " Of 
 Truth " (not published until long after) is made probable by the 
 strange remark given to Othello, where he replies, without seeming 
 passion or fanaticism, to Gratiano's words on what Brabantio would 
 have done had he lived to hear of his daughter's murder : " 'Tis pitiful. 
 But yet lago knows that she with Cassio hath the act of shame a 
 thousand times committed." This is meant of course to be a construc- 
 tion from something that lago knew, and as a construction it springs 
 most intelligibly from something that Bacon knew or had said in a 
 manner peculiar to himself 
 
 Othello's contemplative love goes the length of kisses, if we may 
 take his ambiguous words literally : 
 
 And this, and this, the greatest discords be 
 That e'er our hearts shall make ! 
 
 It was in that posture of affairs that lago began operations. 
 Knowing all the circumstances of the marriage, including the Moor's 
 baptism as a necessary preliminary, and the gift of the handkerchief 
 with the symbols of the Creed on it, and his probable platonic 
 relations with his wife (implied by his gibe on the midnight brawl "in 
 
lAGO AT WORK 95 
 
 terms like bride and groom divesting them for bed "), he begins at 
 once to " put the Moor into a jealousy so strong that judgment cannot 
 cure." The Moor had embraced the rites of his new religion with the 
 non-intellectual joy of a neophyte, or of the primitive disciple of 
 Hooker's melodious pages. lago's task is merely to set him thinking, 
 and to give a colour to his thoughts in the manner of Bacon's doctrine 
 of colours. In what immediately follows, it will help the sense to 
 understand Desdemona, not in the full meaning of her Greek name, 
 Religion or Superstition, but as specially that part of it which is 
 contained in the traditional Sacrament. Strange as it may appear, 
 Desdemona was a woman with a past, which Reformation had not 
 effaced. 
 
 lago. Did Michael Cassio, when you woo'd my lady. 
 Know of your love ? 
 
 0th. He did, from first to last : why dost thou ask ? 
 
 lago. But for a satisfaction of my thought : 
 No further harm. 
 
 0th. Why of thy thought, lago ? 
 
 lago. I did not think he had been acquainted with her. 
 
 0th. O yes ; and went between us very oft. 
 
 lago. Indeed ! 
 
 0th. Indeed ! ay, indeed : discern'st thou aught in that ? 
 Is he not honest? 
 
 lago. Honest, my lord ! 
 
 0th. Honest ! ay, honest. 
 
 Jago. My lord, for aught I know. 
 
 0th. What dost thou think ? 
 
 lago. Think, my lord ! 
 
 Oth. Think, my lord ! By heaven he echoes me, 
 As if there were some monster in his thought 
 Too hideous to be shown. 
 
 And before the vague probabilities of that time in Venice had 
 begun to seethe in his mind, Desdemona herself had innocently 
 laid the fuel for the fire in pleading for the restoration of Cassio to 
 
 his office : 
 
 What ! Michael Cassio 
 
 That came a-wooing with you, and so many a time 
 
 When I have spoke of you dispraisingly, 
 
 Hath ta'en your part : 
 
 The suddenness of the Moor's suspicion creates the illusion that 
 the falsity which he suspected was itself recent or subsequent to their 
 arrival in Cyprus. But if we scan his words closely, we shall find, to 
 our surprise and disgust, that he was thinking of her falsity in the 
 past. lago began about Cassio "when you woo'd my lady"; and 
 his hint was quite plain where he mentioned later the points that 
 he would make Cassio confess over again so that Othello concealed 
 might hear them ; 
 
96 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 lago. For I will make him tell the tale anew, 
 Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when 
 He hath, and is again to cope your wife. 
 
 To Desdemona also the husband's brutal sarcasm is of her past 
 life in Venice : 
 
 0th. I cry you mercy, then, 
 
 I took you for that cunning whore of Venice 
 That married with Othello, 
 
 meaning one who deserved " that name " by her antecedents. 
 
 But the most conclusive proof that the fixed point of Othello's 
 suspicion of falsity must have been in the past, is that there is neither 
 time nor opportunity in Cyprus. The eighteenth-century commentators 
 (Steevens, Henley, and others, as well as Rymer before them) saw 
 quite clearly that the whole action in Cyprus passes in two days ; 
 and although Halpin and John Wilson afterwards pointed out (1849) 
 that means are used to create the illusion of " long time " and " short 
 time " the one within the other (shown in Cowden Clarke's Shakespeare 
 Key to be a common Shakespearian artifice), yet no one has been 
 able to find any real delay in the action, at such a point, for example, 
 as just before the arrival of Lodovico from Venice with Othello's 
 letter of recall. We are enabled even to tell the two days of the 
 week in which the whole tragedy passes — Saturday and Sunday. 
 Desdemona, in pleading for Cassio, names a succession of days on 
 which Othello might give her a hearing, from which it appears that 
 the time of her speaking is Sunday, the forenoon of the day on which 
 she is murdered, and that the first night in Cyprus, the nuptial night, 
 was Saturday night. On the Saturday night Cassio got drunk ; on 
 the Sunday night Desdemona was stifled, and all the hours of day- 
 light are so filled that they have no opportunity of secret meetings. 
 Othello indeed questions Emilia as to Cassio with his wife in the 
 island ; but that is when he is seeking for corroboration ; and Emilia 
 denies the fact so stoutly that he exclaims, " That's strange." So 
 remote is the probability that Desdemona's suspected falsity had 
 occurred in Venice before her marriage, that only one of the old 
 annotators, Steevens, has thought of it, and he has been afraid to 
 press the point. Yet any honest construing of the two passages last 
 cited can give no other meaning, let the professors pooh-pooh it as 
 they please ; and that meaning we are shut up to by the poet's care 
 in the time-scheme to give Cassio no opportunity in Cyprus. 
 
 If the poet had intended to give to the surface view of Othello's 
 suspicions a real verisimilitude, he would have followed Cinthio in 
 making them spring up with due opportunity after the marriage, as 
 he could have done easily enough by a few touches to the time- 
 scheme as it stands, and without altering the action in a single 
 material point (Armitage Brown). What he has actually succeeded 
 
lAGO AT WORK 97 
 
 in doing is to create the illusion of a somewhat lengthened stay in 
 Cyprus and a rapid development of events, so that the spectator does 
 not realise the improbabilities, or rather the impossibilities, of the 
 real time-scheme after the landing. Hardly anyone discovers the 
 illusion until he looks closely into the action, and then we see that 
 Othello, had he paused to think at all, must have known that there 
 was not an hour's opportunity for his wife's suspected liaison with 
 Cassio. The inference of one critic (Archer) from this discovery has 
 been, that the playwright was careless, that " it was merely an over- 
 sight," the "carelessness" with which the play was constructed. 
 But as the discovery could never have been made unless lines and 
 phrases admitted of a most exact construction consistently with each 
 other, the evidence is not of carelessness but of care. The very 
 intention of the touches in the dialogue and the action, from which 
 the want of opportunity in Cyprus is inferred, was to direct attention 
 elsewhere, namely, to Venice before the marriage ; and if we are thus 
 driven to the shocking and incredible thought of Desdemona's 
 practised deceit at the time Othello was wooing her, we are driven a 
 step further — to look for the solution of the riddle in allegory. In 
 symbolism all those suspicions can be given a meaning in the 
 allegorist's mind, in which they would have appeared to him neither 
 iniprobable nor painful ; on the contrary, there are things in the text, 
 such as Othello's " a thousand times committed," which must be 
 slurred over so as not to make them ludicrous. 
 
 The word jealousy, which is a kind of keynote of the tragedy, is 
 thus introduced : 
 
 lago. O ! beware, my lord, of jealousy : 
 It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock 
 The meat it feeds on : that cuckold lives in bliss 
 Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger ; 
 But, O, what damned minutes tells he o'er 
 Who dotes, yet doubts ; suspects, yet strongly loves ! 
 
 0th. O misery. 
 
 lago. Poor and content is rich, and rich enough : 
 But riches fineless is as poor as winter 
 To him that ever fears he shall be poor : 
 Good heaven, the souls of all my tribe defend 
 From jealousy ! 
 
 As lago had just before said, " it is my nature's plague to spy into 
 abuses, and oft my jealousy shapes faults that are not," his tribe was 
 the critical tribe, and his prayer to be saved from jealousy was either 
 ironical or hypocritical. But what lago could safely venture in the way 
 of "jealousy" Othello could not do, because he was not one of the 
 critical tribe, but " of a constant, loving, noble nature" (lago). Also, 
 when his jealousy was roused, it was " unbookish," or unskilled in the 
 use of scholastic argument. In this first use of "jealousy," it is said 
 
98 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 to mock the meat it feeds on, like a green-eyed monster — a tiger 
 or a cat. The phrase has given endless trouble. Thus Henley 
 (eighteenth century) says that Monck Mason was virtually charging 
 Steevens with maintaining " that it was the property of a jealous 
 husband first to mock his wife, and afterwards to eat her '' — the green- 
 eyed monster playing with its food before eating it. This is, indeed, 
 the grammatical sense; but "his wife" is the Sacrament, and the 
 mocking, or preliminary playing with, is that kind of intellectual 
 apprehension which Hooker so much deprecated — " That knowledge 
 which, curiously sifting what it should adore, and disputing too 
 boldly of that which the wit of man cannot search, chilleth for the 
 most part all warmth of zeal, and bringeth soundness of belief many 
 times into great hazard." lago ironically warned Hooker's disciple 
 against mocking the meat he feeds on, because he knew that, outside 
 the implicit obedience to Rome, it was for him impossible not to do 
 so. He goes on, " Poor and content is rich, and rich enough, but 
 riches fineless is as poor as winter to him that ever fears he shall be 
 poor." There are two possible meanings for " poor and content is 
 rich, and rich enough," although lago may have meant only one. 
 There is the meaning for the Irish or the Sicilian peasant at Mass, 
 who may be assumed poor and content as free from all intellectual 
 apprehension. But it is probable from what precedes that lago's 
 contrast was with his own Calvinist position : " That cuckold lives in 
 bliss, who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger." " Certain of his 
 fate " is a curious reminder of Calvinism. The Genevan doctrine of 
 the Sacrament will not recognise " loves not " as a correct description ; 
 a.nd indeed Knox " utterly condemned the vanity of those that affirm 
 Sacraments to be nothing else but naked and bare signs," repudiating 
 the merely commemorative Abendmahl of the Zwinglian doctrine. 
 But " poor and content " is a not unfair description of the Lord's 
 Table wifhout the Real Presence. " Poor and content" is, of course, 
 a common saying ; but its converse of boundless riches ever fearing 
 that it shall be poor, is not common. It is known as an occasional 
 form of insanity in the well-to-do ; but, apart from that special case, 
 the phrase has no propriety unless in an allegory of religious belief 
 It is exactly Carlyle's saying in Past and Present on the substitutes 
 for medieval belief: " Methodism with its eye for ever turned on its 
 own navel." Othello's reply is so worded as if he took the symbolic 
 meaning, or as if they were both consciously playing with allegory ; 
 but the dramatist's skill in the double use of words is such that it 
 seems quite natural also to a husband of a certain temperament : 
 
 0th. Why, why is this ? 
 
 Think'st thou I'd make a life of jealousy, 
 To follow still the changes of the moon 
 With fresh suspicions ? No : to be once in doubt 
 
lAGO AT WORK 99 
 
 Is once to be resolved. Exchange me for a goat, 
 When I shall turn the business of my soul 
 To such exsufflicate and blown surmises, 
 Matching thy inference. 
 
 It is easy to find symbolism in this, if one is willing to find it. 
 " The business of my soul " may well be religious belief " The 
 changes of the moon " recalls an often-quoted saying of St Hilary on 
 the neologies that followed the definition of the Nicene Creed : 
 '' Every year, nay, every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible 
 mysteries." The annotators have had much trouble with " exsufflicate 
 and blown surmises." Let us try how this of Hooker's, on the per- 
 plexities of transubstantiation and consubstantiation, will suit them : 
 " Perplexities which, albeit with boisterous courage and breath they 
 seem oftentimes to blow away, yet whoso observeth how again they 
 labour and sweat by subtilty of wit to make some show of agreement 
 between their peculiar conceits and the general edicts of nature, 
 must needs perceive they struggle with that which they cannot 
 fully master." 
 
 Oth. No, lago, 
 
 I'll see before I doubt ; when I doubt, prove ; 
 
 And, on the proof, there is no more but this : 
 
 Away at once with love or jealousy. 
 lago. I am glad of it. 
 
 More follows in the same scene, which Othello at .length quits 
 with a headache, to encounter Desdemona. The handkerchief is 
 produced for his head, and thrown aside ; they go out ; .^Emilia and 
 lago succeed them, the handkerchief comes into lago's possession, 
 and Othello re-enters, rapt in thought and muttering, " Ha, ha, false 
 to me ! " 
 
 lago. Look, where he comes ! Not poppy, nor mandragora, 
 Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
 Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
 Which thou ow'dst yesterday. 
 
 The reflection arises out of the loss of the handkerchief, a token 
 which most clearly stands for the Creed. The Moor had given it to 
 his wife's keeping, who had offered it again to soothe his aching head. 
 His words, "Your napkin is too little,"' are a sudden statement of 
 fact, spoken in a moment of impatience, and strangely at variance 
 with his awe-inspiring speech on the napkin in the next scene. " Too 
 little" means, at least, that he could not use the Creed to soothe his 
 aching head. At the same time it was dropped, and Desdemona 
 forbidden to recover it. He is ofif the stage for a few minutes, and 
 returns in deep thought. The only thing that takes place between 
 his exit and re-entrance, and corresponds with the workmg of his 
 mind behind the scenes, is the picking up of the handkerchief by 
 
100 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Emilia and the snatching of it from her by lago. The train of his 
 thoughts is probably given in the aphorism with which he ends : 
 
 What sense had I of her stol'n hours of lust ? 
 I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips. . . 
 He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen, 
 Let him not know't, and he's not robbed at all. 
 
 " Not wanting what is stolen " appears to be unnecessary in addition 
 to " Let him not know't." If he did not want what was stolen, he 
 was not only in blissful ignorance, but in culpable apathy. But the 
 aphorism has a curious fitness to the loss of the handkerchief, which 
 would not have been stolen if he had wanted it. The blissful ignorance 
 in " Let him not know't," translated from the general to the particular, 
 means that Othello's happiness had been destroyed because he had 
 been set thinking. His whole manner in the scene, his talking to 
 himself, his confessed headache, indicate a man suddenly arrested by 
 thought. As in the exactly parallel instance of Leontes in ' Winter's 
 Tale,' the intensity of his thinking makes him elliptical, or the 
 sequence of his ideas difificult to follow. He continues : 
 
 I had been happy, if the general camp, 
 Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body, 
 So I had nothing known. O, now, for ever 
 Farewell the tranquil mind ! farewell content ! 
 Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars 
 That make ambition virtue ! O, farewell ! 
 Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, 
 The spirit-stirring drum and the ear-piercing fife. 
 The royal banner, and all quality, 
 Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war ! 
 And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats 
 The immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit, 
 Farewell ! Othello's occupation's gone ! 
 
 In this speech, what everyone feels is, that its eloquence is spoiled 
 by the two lines on the cannon. Ulrici, quoting it for a purpose, omits 
 them. Why was it necessary after the fine close, " All quality, pride, 
 pomp, and circumstance of glorious war," to begin again with the 
 mortal engines, and end in a kind of bathos? It will be found that 
 the poet's object was to include two of the three renunciations in 
 the baptismal vow: "The vain pomp and glory of the world," which 
 are paraphrased in pride, potnp, and circumstance of glorious war, 
 and "The devil and all his works," which are symbolised by the 
 cannon, the special invention and patent of the devil, as Milton 
 explains at length in Par. Lost, vi. 498-523, and as Shakespeare was 
 careful to imply before when he spoke of cannon "like the devil." 
 The other renunciation in the vow of baptism is the carnal desires 
 of the flesh, which Othello had made up his mind to from the first 
 (see above, p. 80), as it was the most urgent of the three. Now he 
 
lAGO AT WORK loi 
 
 completes the trio of renunciations in the speech of Farewells ; and 
 the question arises, Why at this juncture? 
 
 It will be in recollection that lago had said in Act I.: "These 
 Moors are changeable in their wills ; the food that to him now is as 
 luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida." 
 Francis Douce, the most sensible of antiquaries, has pointed out that 
 this is a variation of the old saying, " to exchange herb John for 
 coloquintida," herb John being St John's wort, the herb with which 
 the Baptist girt his loins on holidays. In place of herb John the 
 dramatist had substituted the Baptist's food of locusts (locust-beans). 
 The association with the Baptist is retained because lago was thinking 
 of the Moor's baptism, and of the vow thereof. He foresaw that all 
 the renunciations of the vow would sooner or later take effect ; and 
 now the hour has come. It cannot be that Othello's occupation was 
 gone because his peace of mind was gone. What many a man does 
 in such a case of domestic upset is to throw himself into his work 
 more than before ; and that is what we should have expected of the 
 Moor, after his speech to the Senate about not letting his marriage 
 interfere with his business : 
 
 Let housewives make a skillet of my helm, 
 And all indign and base adversities 
 Make head against my estimation. 
 
 Although he was not such a sentimentalist as to throw up his com- 
 mission because he suspected the fidelity of his wife, yet he was 
 highly sensitive on any point of honour. He had taken a vow, and 
 it was suddenly brought home to him that he must keep it in its 
 entirety ; he must give up, not only the carnal desires of the flesh, 
 which had been easy to him, as his appetite was defunct and properly, 
 satisfied ; but also the pride and pomp of glorious war (including 
 those special engines of the devil, the cannon), which was not so easy 
 — hence the pathos of his farewells. This moment of realising the 
 literal obligation of his baptismal vow corresponded with the loss of 
 his creed. He has begun to think for himself, and his thinking is 
 fanatical. Given a mind and temperament such as his, fanaticism was 
 the result of such goading as lago used. The effect has been traced 
 by Schlegel (followed by others) to his latent negro savagery ; nor is 
 it improbable that the dramatist may have counted on that explana- 
 tion of the phenomenon. But it is an explanation only on the 
 surface. The fanaticism which the author kept before him in writing 
 the part was in the sphere of religion ; it was what Whitgift called 
 " anabaptism, greatly to be feared in the Church of England." He 
 begins at once with a fanatical supposition of "the general camp, 
 pioneers, and all " ; still, he had been happy so he had nothing known. 
 At the moment of speaking he knew nothing against his wife, not 
 even the flimsy evidence that afterwards convinced him; so that 
 
102 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 " nothing known " must mean, in the hypothetical case so monstrously 
 imagined by him, " if I had not been set thinking." The inability to 
 stand thinking about was the vulnerable side of Hooker's melodious 
 teaching into which the Moor had been baptized : " They [the first 
 disciples] had at that time a sea of comfort and joy to wade in, and 
 we by that which they did are taught that this heavenly food is given 
 for the satisfying of our empty souls, and not for the exercising of 
 our curious and subtile wits." This heavenly food was as luscious 
 as locusts, but lago foresaw that it would become as bitter as colo- 
 quintida the moment Othello began to think, which corresponded with 
 the moment when he lost his creed. The first effect of his thinking 
 was to realise what a net of false profession he was enmeshed in by 
 his baptismal vow if he did not keep it ; therefore, he decided to keep 
 it so far as the sacrifice of his profession would serve that end.^ 
 
 Let us come to the next theme between him and lago, his demand 
 for " ocular proof," which had been foreshadowed in his words "I'll 
 see before I doubt." 
 
 0th. Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore, 
 Be sure of it ; give me the ocular proof. . . . 
 Make me to see't. . ; . 
 I'll have some proof. . . . 
 
 Would I were satisfied ! 
 
 lago. You would be satisfied ? 
 
 0th. Would ! nay, I will. 
 
 lago. And may ; but how ? how satisfied, my lord ? 
 Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on — 
 Behold her tupped ? 
 
 0th. Death and damnation ! O ! 
 
 lago. It were a tedious difficulty. 
 
 lago's coarse language does not seem to suit the symbolism, 
 although it is not far from a certain metaphor of Bacon's. But when 
 he said " It were a tedious difficulty," he was using the very form of 
 words in Lady Ann Bacon's translation of Jewel : "It were over-long 
 and tedious to recount all things " in the argument as to the Real 
 Presence. " Tedious and irksome labour," says Hooker of the proofs 
 of transubstantiation and consubstantiation. This was the answer to 
 Othello's demand for ocular proofs 
 
 1 There is a curious likeness to this situation imagined in St Cyril's first catechetical 
 lecture on Baptism (Church's transl.) : " Perhaps thou comest on another ground. A man 
 may be wishing to pay court to a woman, and on that account come hither. ... I avail 
 myself of this angler's bait, and receive thee as one who has come indeed with an unsound 
 purpose, but art to be saved by a good hope. Thou knewest not perchance whither thou 
 wert commg, nor what net was taking thee. Tliou art within the Church's nets : submit to 
 be taken." 
 
 '- Marston, in his comedy The Malcontent, 1604, has a passage on the same matter of 
 ocular proof, which seems to be a satire on Shakespeare. The Duke suspects his wife and 
 Malevole professes to know that the seducer was one Firenze {Cassio was a Florentine) : 
 
 Malev. I'll prove't. This night you shall take him in your sheets. Wilt serve ? 
 Duke. It will. 
 
 As there are several other parodies of Shakespeare in the same play, this is » probable 
 
lAGO AT WORK 103 
 
 Short of ocular proof, lago can prove much : 
 
 lago. It were a tedious difficulty, I think, 
 To bring them to that prospect ; damn them, then. 
 If ever mortal eyes do see them bolster 
 More than their own. What then ? how then ? 
 ^^'hat shall I say? Where's satisfaction? 
 It is impossible you should see this, 
 Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys. 
 As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross 
 As ignorance made drunk ; but yet I say, 
 If imputation and strong circumstances, 
 Which lead directly to the door of truth. 
 Will give you satisfaction, you might have it. 
 
 He meant to use the handkerchief. Now, that antique token was 
 certainly a religious symbol ; for no one can mistake the allusion to 
 the prophetic fury of the sibyl that had numbered in the world two 
 hundred courses of the sun. Wherever the handkerchief comes in 
 we are not only reminded of symbolism, but we cannot escape from 
 it ; and it is just before lago's use of it as proof that it is described in 
 terms to suit the Nicene Creed. What then ? how then ? what were 
 the "imputation and strong circumstances" in the common Creed of 
 Christendom ? The strong circumstance was the handkerchief in the 
 hands of Bianca. The imputation was probably something construc- 
 tive from the Creed itself lago would show him what leads directly 
 to the door of truth by showing him his handkerchief, or one very like 
 it, in Bianca's hands, without letting him hear all that she said. For 
 his own part, Hooker's critic did not hold " Either the Mass or 
 nothing " ; but that was what lago wanted to reduce Hooker's 
 teaching to in the mind of his disciple. It is to be noted that 
 Othello's language about Desdemona begins now to take a coarse 
 form : "Villain, be sure you prove my love a whore." 
 
 lago then relates how he had heard Cassio talking in his sleep, 
 and how he had seen him wipe his beard with Desdemona's handker- 
 chief Othello jumps to a conclusion and takes a solemn vow in the 
 famous lines " Like to the Pontic Sea." ^ 
 
 I have said that Othello now becomes " fanatical " ; but his 
 fanaticism is thus far merely in his thinking. lago has infected him 
 with his own critical faculty, which the honourable and generous 
 temperament of the Moor carries to the length of what is called a 
 logical conclusion. In his proper business of the operations of war, 
 
 one for ' Othello.' If so, it means two things : that Marston knew the contents of the play 
 before it was produced at Court on 1st November 1604 ( TAe Malcontent having been almost 
 certainly earlier in the same year than November) ; and, secondly, that he either did not 
 know of a symbolic intention, or ignored it so as to make fun of Shakespeare's ocular proof. 
 But in the satire of ' Hamlet ' in Eastward Ho I it is clear that Marston (or Chapman, or 
 Tonson) knew the veiled meaning of Ophelia's mad talk about the owl and the baker's daughter. 
 1 They are an expansion of a device of Sir Philip Sidney's, with the motto Sine refluxu, 
 erroneously given by Camden, among his " Impresses," as of the Caspian Sea, but correctly 
 by Shakespeare as of the Euxine. 
 
104 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Othello would have been as empirical as any, or he would have used 
 his common sense. But he is only a neophyte or a tyro in this 
 new subject-matter, which he reasons upon ardently and vehemently. 
 When he next meets Desdemona, the effect of arousing the critic in 
 him comes out at once. He takes her hand, and remarks, " This 
 hand is moist, my lady." It argues fruitfulness and liberal heart. It 
 " requires a sequester from liberty, fasting and prayer, much castiga- 
 tion, exercise devout : for here's a young and sweating devil here that 
 commonly rebels." He had never thought of her in that light before ; 
 nay, he had said in the scene just preceding: 
 
 'Tis not to make me jealous 
 To say — my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company, 
 Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well ; 
 Where virtue is, these are more virtuous. 
 
 But now he is suddenly reminded of the need of penance. What 
 has been the logical drift of his thoughts, carrying him away from his 
 former common-sense view ? 
 
 In Henry VIII.'s Book of Articles, 1536, the Sacrament of the 
 Altar being still the Mass in the service-books, the Sacrament of 
 Penance was retained along with it, all the rest of the Seven 
 Sacraments, save Baptism, being omitted from the class of sacraments. 
 Penance had three parts — contrition, confession with absolution, and 
 ensuing good works. As Protestantism grew in vigour, penance 
 disappeared as a priestly rite, being left to the consciences of the 
 people, except for some lingering traces of public penance. But 
 in the transition from the organic belief of the Middle Ages to 
 modern empiricism, and in logical minds such as Newman's, the 
 Sacrament of Penance flowed developmentally from post-baptismal 
 sin. Othello had just realised the meaning of his baptismal vow, and 
 now, in the newly awakened exercise of his logical faculty, he goes 
 on to realise the need of penance, which he applies naturally to 
 Desdemona, being reminded of it by her moist hand. If this incident 
 be taken only in its literal sense, it may lead us to very awkward 
 conclusions. It was the Moor's remarks on his wife's hot and 
 sweating palm that turned Heinrich Heine against him. Often a 
 dismal sadness, he says, came over him when he reflected that honest 
 lago may have been not far wrong in his wicked glosses upon 
 Desdemona's feeling for her black husband : " But most unpleasantly 
 of all am I affected by Othello's remarks on his wife's moist hand." 
 This shows how true it is that the play is a " moral enigma " if we 
 take due account of a// things in it in their literal meaning. It may 
 be objected that symbolism does not make the husband's conduct 
 any better, to which the answer is, that at least it makes it intelligible, 
 and explains the kind of deterioration which is overtaking him. 
 
 At the opening of the fourth act a great change takes place in the 
 
lAGO AT WORK 105 
 
 Moor, which has its physical embodiment in an epileptic fit. He 
 enters conversing with lago on a curious point of casuistry, whether 
 kissing in private, or being naked in bed together, necessarily meant 
 harm. lago is at first neither affirmative nor negative, but only 
 interrogative ; Othello says it is " hypocrisy against the devil." The 
 handkerchief is then brought up by lago, and we learn, rather to our 
 surprise after the Moor's recent excitement over it, that he " would 
 most gladly have forgot it." He seems actually to have forgotten 
 what lago had told him of Cassio's talking in his sleep. But this is 
 only a physical dulling of the memory, a reaction of fatigue after the 
 exciting moments of the third act. In that state of his brain, it 
 becomes easy for lago, without committing himself to a single lie, to 
 possess the Moor with evil thoughts. He has only to say " lie," and 
 Othello adds "with her," "on her," or anything else .so far as lago 
 cares. The fagged brain is unequal to consecutive thought ; broken 
 words fall from him, not unmixed with wit, as in " first to be hanged 
 and then to confess," which is perhaps an echo of one of John 
 Haywood's epigrams upon proverbs. He trembles, and feels a shadow 
 coming over him, which is the premonitory aura of epilepsy. But even 
 in that state he is permitted to utter one deep thought, which is the 
 key to the symbolic meaning of the whole seizure : " Nature would 
 not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. 
 It is not words that shake me thus." 
 
 Epilepsy was the morbus sacer of paganism. It reappears in St 
 Mark's gospel as possession by an evil spirit. But I do not suppose 
 that a man of St Mark's depth and subtlety had any more belief 
 in the literalism of demoniac possession than one educated in our 
 own academies would have. In particular, his rich details of the 
 Gadarene, if they are scanned with the closeness which they seem 
 to challenge, have a probable application to a certain teacher of the 
 Alexandrian schools whose relation to the Christology of the new 
 religion is otherwise well known. His habitation among the tombs is 
 the same allegory which Bunyan also drew from the sentence of the 
 Proverbs : " He that wandereth out of the way of understanding 
 shall remain in the congregation of the dead." His use of the 
 unique phrase " the Most High," and his name Legion, together with 
 the whole sequel, point most probably to Phiio. And if that be 
 the nature of St Mark's symbolism (and Bunyan's, with the sub- 
 stitution of blindness for demoniac possession), it was certainly 
 Shakespeare's also in the attack of epilepsy. The difference is, that 
 Othello remains obsessed. To complete the gospel parallel, we should 
 suppose him in the place of the man whose mind was left for a brief 
 space like an empty house, and retenanted by seven other spirits 
 worse than the first. What was fanaticism at the end of the third 
 act becomes obsession in the fourth. 
 
io6 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 The subject-matter of the obsession becomes clear enough in the 
 sequel ; but it is even indicated in the broken words before he falls 
 down in the fit : " Noses, ears, and lips — Is't possible ? — Confess — 
 handkerchief — O devil." The greater part of these disjointed sayings 
 are not in the quarto, from which it may be inferred that they were 
 added at some time after the first text was finished. The additions 
 are curiously like the obsession of Leontes in ' The Winter's Tale,' as 
 Bradley has remarked. The correspondence is indeed far closer than 
 I can bring out without anticipating what I have given under that 
 play ; but I may say here that Leontes uses " intention " in the 
 ecclesiastical sense of the consecration of the element, and that 
 what is for him an analogy in a matter that has nothing to do with 
 religion, is for Othello the substantive thought. We may now return 
 to the fourth act. The idea of demoniac possession is brought out in 
 lago's talk with Cassio ; he will let the lethargy take its quiet course, 
 so that the foaming at the mouth and " savage madness " are only 
 mentioned as symptoms which Othello escapes. When the Moor 
 recovers, he is in a resolute state of mind to murder Desdemona. 
 He strikes her when she appears in the scene, and calls her devil. 
 He is completely obsessed with the thought of her hopeless 
 iniquity, admits no further question, and carries out a fixed resolve 
 uninfluenced by anything said or done. 
 
 His language and his conduct to his wife are now consistently 
 coarser than before, and are unaccountable in any rational suspicion 
 of a mere affair of gallantry between her and Cassio. It is true that 
 the Moor in the Italian story proceeds to the same extremities on the 
 same grounds. But he does not use the same kind of language, nor 
 fall into the same high moral indignation. Not only does the poet 
 not introduce better grounds for the husband's suspicion, but he takes 
 away the plausible grounds that the Italian tale had allowed by the 
 leisurely progress of the supposed intrigue with the lieutenant in 
 Cyprus. The lieutenant is still the only alleged co-respondent, but 
 Desdemona somehow becomes in the Moor's thought a "public 
 commoner." ^Emilia said, " A beggar in his drink could not have 
 laid such terms upon his callat." Why, then, did the poet let him 
 do so? 
 
 It was the language not uncommonly used of the Romish 
 religion, not by fanatics, but by grave divines, who applied the 17th 
 and 1 8th chapters of Revelation to a modern use. It was, above all, 
 the Mass that came into the mind when such languao-e was 
 used : — " Daily in one church commonly ten masses, twenty, 
 thirty, yea, oftentimes more''; "the masses being sold abroad 
 commonly in every corner ; the temples of God become shops to cret 
 money ; . . . nothing more necessary to be bought, nothing more 
 gainful for these men to sell " (Jewel). What the author of the 
 
lAGO AT WORK 107 
 
 Revelation had said of the Jerusalem of his day, and of the apostate 
 Judaism of the Herods, the sixteenth-century Reformers applied to the 
 apostate Christianity of Rome. Religious usage was Shakespeare's 
 warrant for Othello's brutal language to his wife.^ His fanatical 
 obsession is shown most deliberately where he is made to feign his 
 house a brothel and ^Emilia a bawd. He makes a play of the idea, 
 hke a child feigning some simple dramatic action. He retires pro 
 forma with Desdemona and bids Emilia watch at the door to cry hem 
 if anybody comes ; then he comes out, " We have done our course," 
 gives her money, bids her keep their counsel, and tells her that she 
 has the office opposite to St Peter to keep the gate of hell. The one 
 grain of literalness in all this feigning is " the office opposite to St 
 Peter " — the Protestant or anti-Romanist office. 
 
 Othello has recoiled, under the tuition of lago, from the unthinking 
 joys of Hooker's disciple to the fanaticism of an original Lollard, and 
 still further, so that he sees the religion he had married to be in reality 
 the sacramental rites of Rome. The discovery gives him inexpressible 
 anguish. " Had it pleased Heaven to try me with affliction," he would 
 have borne it ; nay, he could have endured to be pointed at by the 
 finger of scorn as a supplanted husband ; but Patience herself must 
 look grim as Hell to be discarded from the place where he had 
 garnered up his heart, or to keep it as a cistern for foul toads to knot 
 and gender in. Not less monstrous, and not less sincere, is his 
 terrible speech to his wife while Emilia was keeping the door of their 
 chamber : 
 
 Des Alas, what ignorant sin have I committed ? 
 
 0th. Was this fair paper, this most goodly book. 
 Made to write " whore " upon ? What committed ! 
 Committed ! — O thou public commoner !' . . . 
 
 Des. By heaven, you do me wrong. 
 
 Oth. Are you not a strumpet ? 
 
 Des. No, as I am a Christian. . . . 
 
 Oth. I cry you mercy, then ; 
 I took you for that cunning whore of Venice 
 That married with Othello. 
 
 That which repels and disgusts some in these speeches is their 
 palpable absurdity; that which fascinates others is their obvious 
 sincerity. But how did the poet combine the two in his own mind, 
 and justify them to his art ? The only possible answer is the double 
 sense of allegory. The Moor sees his wife to be a symbol of the 
 habitual desecration of the Sacrament. 
 
 lago's proof, failing ocular demonstration, was to get Othello to 
 
 1 Harington, who was accused of scurrility in his Ajax pamphlets, retorted: " If I 
 aught know Papist or Protestant, I would cite a principal author on either side, and I would 
 prove tliat either of them hath used more obscene, foul, or scurrilous phrases (not in defence 
 of their matter, but in defacing of their adversaries) in one leaf of their books than 
 in all this." 
 
io8 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 believe things of Desdemona which were really meant by Cassio of 
 Bianca. This character is dealt with in a separate section ; but here 
 it may be assumed that she is the Scarlet Woman. Her name is 
 indeed just the opposite of scarlet, and it appears to have been chosen 
 on the same ironical principle of opposites as lago (St James), 
 Othello (Otho the Less), Roderigo (the new Don Roderick), Cassio 
 {not the lean and wrinkled Cassius), and Michael (who did not 
 defeat Satan, but was defeated by him). lago's chief argument was 
 to let Othello see the handkerchief in Bianca's hands. " By heaven, 
 that should be my handkerchief Was that mine?" The hand- 
 kerchief is the Creed ; and by some enthymeme which it is not easy 
 to put into logical form, Othello concludes that his wife belonged to 
 the same class as Bianca. But be it noted that she retorted upon 
 yEmilia: " I am no strumpet, but of life as honest as you that thus 
 abuse me." 
 
 Othello having lost his handkerchief, thrown up his profession, and 
 murdered his wife, gets out of the mess by suicide. It is a rule with 
 Shakespeare, after the date of Romeo and Juliet,' to let no one take 
 his or her own life who is a Christian. The restraining influence of 
 religion is clearly brought out in the cases of Hamlet and of Imogen 
 (who ought to have been a pagan). Ophelia's death was not found 
 suicidal by the coroner's jury. Cassius, Brutus, Antony and 
 Cleopatra, and Timon are pagans. Goneril belongs ostensibly to a 
 heathen age; but even if she be allegorised to the age of the 
 Reformation, the irony of her death is that she has become a practical 
 infidel. Of Lady Macbeth, 'tis only "thought" she took her life, and, 
 even if she did, she had ceased to be responsible for her actions. 
 Othello is no exception to the Christian rule, " Men must endure 
 their going hence even as their coming hither." In the last great 
 speech to which he kills himself, he makes an ingenious confession 
 that he has lapsed to infidelity, and so rounds off the symbolism 
 which is hidden under the text from the first page to the last. 
 He reminds them that he had done the State some service — no 
 more of that ; bids them extenuate nothing, but speak of him as he 
 was, one that loved not wisely but too well ; he drops tears of pity for 
 his murdered wife, likens himself to the base Judsean (the folio 
 reading) who threw a pearl away, and poses himself " thus " as the 
 turbaned Turk whom he once took by the throat in Aleppo ; and, 
 having named a Jew and a Turk, he completes the triad of Jew, Turk, 
 and Infidel by taking himself by the throat and smiting himself as 
 he had done the Turk. Examining the structure of the great 
 speech closely, we discover joints in it: the base Jud^an and the 
 turbaned Turk are inserted to lead up to the idea of the speaker 
 himself as an infidel. 
 
 The transition from his Anabaptist to his infidel state is 
 
lAGO AT WORK 109 
 
 not shown, but it is clear that there could be only one way. When 
 his food luscious as locusts turned bitter as coloquintida in the 
 digesting (like the little book, sweet in the mouth, bitter in the belly), 
 the choice open to the disciple of Hooker, according to the Christian 
 Letter, was between atheism and popery : " Will you bring us 
 to atheism or to poperie? To make all people who read your 
 books to fall either flatly to atheism or backward to popery." The 
 Moor, after his Lollard life of dangers in the tented field, had no 
 mind to go to Rome. His discovery that he had inadvertently done 
 so, in effect, left him no alternative but to " fall flatly to atheism." 
 Why should honour outlive honesty ? 
 
 He had married the Sacrament to find that it was the Mass. 
 Yet all through his torture of "jealousy" or doubt, his suspicion of 
 Desdemona was always qualified by the perception of her undeniable 
 qualities : " If she be false, O, then, heaven mocks itself! " After he 
 is persuaded, he turns for a time (Act iv.) to sarcasm and mockery, 
 and even strikes her. But when at last he comes to destroy her, he is 
 in a calm, dispassionate mood (so Salvini played the scene, and so it 
 must be played), clear as to the cause in his soul, equally clear as to 
 her perfections : '' O thou weed, that art so lovely fair, and smell'st so 
 sweet that the sense aches." Then comes Shakespeare's tribute to 
 the essence of medieval Christianity : " Thou cunning'st pattern of 
 excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat that can 
 thy light relume." 
 
 Nay, had she been true, 
 
 If heaven would make me such another world 
 
 Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, 
 
 I'd not have sold her for it 
 
 — no, not for a flawless system of scientific truth. Such was the 
 medieval Sacrament of the Altar, which the Church had stolen from 
 Heaven as Prometheus stole the fire. 
 
 No sooner had he stifled her than he realised an awful blank : 
 
 My wife ! my wife ! what wife ? I have no wife. 
 O, insupportable ! O heavy hour ! 
 Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse 
 Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe 
 Should yawn at alteration. 
 
 That is how the poet improves upon Cinthio's incident of the 
 Ensign, with the Moor's connivance, breaking Desdemona's back 
 with three strokes of a stockingful of sand, the two together laying 
 her on the bed and battering in her skull, and pulling down the 
 ceiling to make it appear that she had been killed by its fall. It is 
 easy to say that the poet idealised. But on what terms, quo pacta, 
 could he idealise the matrimonial troubles of a negro and a white 
 
110 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 woman, and out of so repellent materials extract high tragedy — the 
 language of cosmic convulsion, eclipse of sun and moon, the affrighted 
 globe yawning at alteration ? This eclipse is the same as that of 
 the 6oth Sonnet on the Nativity : 
 
 Nativity, once in the main of light, 
 
 Crawls to maturity : wherewith being crown'd, 
 
 Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight. 
 
 And Time that gave doth now his gift confound. 
 
 There the crooked eclipses that fight against "his glory" are a 
 secular influence, the slow action of time ; here the eclipse is the 
 dramatic moment. 
 
 Lastly, there is a certain phase of the mind's progress brought 
 out by Othello's words at that strange incident in the death of 
 Desdemona which has been found so unintelligible in any literal 
 sense. By nothing short of a miracle she recovers her voice after 
 the breath is out of her. Ben Jonson makes satirical reference to 
 such a case, probably to this very one (" There be miracles, or you 
 make them so") in his Alchemist of 1610 (Act v., scene i): "Did'st 
 hear a cry, said'st thou ? — Yes, sir, like unto a man that hath been 
 strangled an hour, and could not speak." A modern critic also says 
 that Shakespeare "forgot that a person once stifled couldn't speak 
 again." He certainly forgot with much deliberation : 
 
 yE7nil. O, who hath done this deed ? 
 
 Desd. Nobody : I myself. Farewell ; 
 Commend me to my kind lord ; O, farewell. 
 
 0th. Why, how should she be murdered ? 
 
 ^mil. Alas ! who knows ? 
 
 Oth. You heard her say yourself, it was not I. 
 
 ySmil. She said so : I must needs report the truth. 
 
 Oth. She's like a liar gone to burning hell. 
 'Twas I that kill'd her. 
 
 yiEmil. O, the more angel she, 
 
 And you the blacker devil ! 
 
 Desdemona's recovery of her voice is such a miracle as might be 
 found in the Acta Sanctorum ; also, she uses the miraculous interposi- 
 tion to tell a white lie, which is another saintly accomplishment ; and 
 the whole is meant to elicit Othello's love of truth, and the fanaticism 
 thereof " She's like a liar gone to burning hell " is his love of truth 
 carried so far that it refuses to see the generous motive and the 
 innocence of a white lie. Had it been said by lago, the man of 
 science, we should have been the less shocked by it ; for it is the 
 blessed privilege of science that its love of truth can never be 
 fanatical enough. 
 
 In reading or seeing the play, one may well forget that it has an 
 undercurrent of allegory, such is the perfection of the art and the 
 
lAGO AT WORK iii 
 
 overpowering force of the feeling called forth by natural means. It 
 is only in cold moments of criticism and analysis that one feels the 
 need of some key to an enigma. But these become more frequent 
 the longer we know the play ; and then, if I may trust my own 
 experience, the perception of symbolism in the background will not, 
 only not interfere with our enjoyment, but will free it from all sense 
 of improbability. Tragedy, said Aristotle, should be an imitation of 
 one entire, great, and probable action, which the literal ' Othello ' is not. 
 
VII. EMILIA 
 
 When we hear first of lago's wife, she is appointed to attend on 
 Desdemona, and that is her unobtrusive part in most of the play- 
 But in the last act she emerges as a waiting-woman with no servile 
 blood in her veins. Then she dominates the whole action, becomes 
 an imperious commanding figure, sweeps across the stage with the 
 gait of a queen — vera incessu patuit dea — and by her bold words of 
 vindication and rebuke gives the whole theatre that relief to their 
 feelings which they sorely need. ^Emilia takes command like 
 Elizabeth at Tilbury — dux fcBinina. Her repression in the earlier scenes 
 is brought out by her husband's apology to Desdemona for her silence 
 (which has also a more special meaning to be given later) : 
 
 lago. Marry, before your ladyship, I grant 
 She puts her tongue a little in her heart 
 And chides with thinking. 
 
 In the business with the handkerchief her part is almost a 
 mechanical necessity of the plot, and does not appear to have any 
 moral for her. She is the wife of lago by an equal necessity, without 
 any other feeling for him than a deference to his superior will and a 
 belief in his honesty : 
 
 I know thou didst not, thou'rt not such a villain. 
 Speak, for my heart is full. 
 
 She was the first to divine that some busy and insinuating rogue 
 had devised the slander ; she wished her husband would " unfold such 
 companions, and put in every honest hand a whip to lash the rascals 
 naked through the world even from the east to the west" — suggesting 
 the peculiarly London scene of flogging at the cart tail from the city 
 to Tyburn. The " companions " and " rascals " are equally outside the 
 literal action of the play, for lago has no accomplices in that sense, 
 not even Roderigo. It is clear that Emilia must have had some 
 vague suspicion of lago at an early stage ; for when the truth comes 
 out, she exclaims : 
 
 Villainy, villainy, villainy ! 
 
 I think upon't, I think.— I smell't. — O villainy! 
 
 / thought so then : I'll kill myself for grief. 
 
 O villainy, villainy ! 
 
iEMILIA 113 
 
 I may as well give my conclusion at once, and leave the evidence 
 to follow, that Emilia is Elizabeth herself. " I smell't. I thought 
 so then," is her detection of the secret enemy from whose wounds 
 Hooker is said to have died. We have it on the authority of the 
 Archbishop that the Queen " received the sad news of his death with 
 very much sorrow," and she had probably been told the story about 
 the effects of the Christian Letter. 
 
 .Emilia comes into prominence first in a very equivocal relation. 
 She is feigned by Othello, in an imagined action, to be the bawd or 
 brothel-keeper who has " the office opposite to St Peter to keep the 
 gate of hell." This is an ingenious ambiguity depending on the word 
 " opposite." A bawd who has the office opposite to St Peter is really 
 a Protestant bawd, or the language commonly applied to Rome is 
 extended by Othello to that religion of which Emilia was the 
 guardian. 
 
 She endures Othello's contumelious treatment for the time, but 
 later she is given the opportunity to retaliate on him : " O gull ! 
 O dolt ! as ignorant as dirt ! O thou dull Moor ! O murderous 
 coxcomb! what should such a fool do with so good a wife?" It is 
 in her death that the poet's allegorical intention for .Emilia is most 
 clearly brought out. She appropriates to herself the ballad of the 
 maid called Barbara : 
 
 j£m. What did thy song bode, lady ? 
 
 Hark, canst thou hear me? I will play the swan 
 And die in music. \Singing\ Willow, willow, willow. 
 Moor, she was chaste, she loved thee, cruel Moor, 
 So come my soul to bliss, as I speak true ; 
 So speaking as I think, I die — I die. 
 
 When Desdemona said, " My mother had a maid called Barbaric," 
 her mother was the Church, and the maid was St Barbara, called by 
 the countrified name of Barbarie to mark the homeliness of the 
 saint in England in pre-Reformation times. It would seem that St 
 Barbara was the most familiar of the female medieval saints next to 
 the Virgin, and that she suited the poet's purpose better than the 
 latter, first, because he would have almost betrayed it if he had made 
 Desdemona say, " My mother had a maid called Mary," but chiefly 
 for another reason which I shall show. 
 
 In the various selections of a few offices for popular use from the 
 Sarum Missal, the Mass of St Barbara is usually found next after 
 the Missa Compassionis seu Lamentationis B. Marise. It has for 
 the Gospel the parable of the pearl of great price, or that of the wise 
 and foolish virgins, and a single sentence of the epistle, " For I am 
 jealous over you with godly jealousy ■'—^mulor enim ww— which is 
 the poet's source for the name of Desdemona's guardian Emilia. 
 The ballad with the refrain, " Willow, willow, willow," had to be 
 
 o 
 
ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Jo suit Barbara, being originally sung by the male lover, but 
 n to the maid by changing the pronouns. " It expressed 
 ne, and she died singing it," as zEmilia did literally, and 
 Desdemona did in anticipation. On that last night of her life the 
 old song would not leave Desdemona's mind, because it boded her 
 death, as Emilia said. It was this foreboding that led the poet to 
 think of the maid called Barbarie. In the Roman Missal, among 
 the prayers for local or occasional use at the end, is one belonging 
 to the office of St Barbara, which appears to be almost unique in 
 having the words " before the day of our death " : 
 
 " Lord, we pray that the intercession of thy blessed virgin martyr Barbara 
 may protect us from all adversity, and that by her intervention we may, before 
 the day of our death, be made worthy by a true penitence and a pure confes- 
 sion to partake of the most glorious sacrament, etc." 
 
 I am most desirous, above all places here, to import nothing 
 extraneous into the poet's thought ; but it seems that we are led by 
 him imperceptibly into a world of religious symbolism as we come 
 near the death of Desdemona. For Othello's part, that has been taken 
 in the last section. For Desdemona's part, it is mostly bound up 
 with Emilia's ; but one thing in it, not yet mentioned, belongs to the 
 scene with Othello. It is the lamp that burned by Desdemona's 
 bedside, the lamp of the wise virgin in the office for a virgin martyr. 
 The sight of the burning lamp calls forth the master-thought of the 
 tragedy. We may assume " And at midnight there was a cry made. 
 Behold, the bridegroom cometh." The literal bridegroom of the play 
 is utilised ironically for. him of the parable; Othello enters and is 
 arrested by the burning lamp: 
 
 Put out the light, and then — Put out the light ! 
 
 If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, 
 
 I can again thy former light restore 
 
 Should I repent me. But once put out thy light. 
 
 Thou cunning'st pattern of excehing nature, 
 
 I know not where is that Promethean heat 
 
 That can thy light relume. 
 
 But to return to Emilia, in the same Mass of St Barbara of the 
 Sarum Missal there is found the single sentence, ^mulor enim vos 
 Dei (E-inulatione (For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy), the 
 Latin verb being commonly supposed the source of the name of the 
 Gens Emilia. In the Roman Missal the passage of 2 Cor. x.-xi. is 
 given in full, and, for some reason, it is used only in the office Pro 
 virgine tantitni—¥ox a mere virgin : " Brethren, whoso glorieth, let him 
 glory in the Lord. For not he that commendeth himself is approved, 
 but whom the Lord commendeth. Would to God ye would bear 
 with me a little in my folly, and that ye would sustain me. For I 
 am jealous over you with godly jealousy. For I have espoused you 
 
EMILIA 115 
 
 to one husband that I may present you a chaste virgin to Christ." 
 These words of St Paul, said of himself, are for any virgo tantiim only 
 a fortuitous concurrence of sentences. But if the compilers of the 
 Missal had sought out a scripture passage to suit the great Virgin 
 Queen, they could have found none more curiously appropriate in 
 its variety. 
 
 Emilia used a figure for her womanly boldness which recalls the 
 name given by Fulke Greville to Elizabeth, " Star of the North " : 
 
 J^cigo- Come, hold your peace. 
 
 ALmil. 'Twill out, 'twill out : I hold my peace, sir ? no ; 
 No, I will speak as liberal as the North ; 
 Let heaven, and men, and devils, let them all, 
 All, all cry shame upon me, yet I'll speak. 
 
 The quarto gives "liberal as the air," which we should combine 
 with " liberal as the North " to get the full meaning. " Liberal as the 
 air" is the wind blowing where it listeth, which is the empirical good 
 sense of the North, not very particular about consistency, quick in 
 conscience, a law unto itself Emilia had a conversation with her 
 dear mistress about abuse of husbands, wherein she shocked the 
 gentler soul by her boldness : 
 
 jDesd. Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world ? 
 
 yEm. The world is a huge thing : 'tis a great price for a small vice. 
 
 Desd. In troth I think thou wouldst not 
 
 ^m. In troth I think I should, and undo't when I had done. Marry, I 
 would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for 
 gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition ; but for the whole world, 
 who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch ? 
 
 Desd. Beshrew me if I would do such a thing for the whole world. 
 
 ^m. Why, the wrong is but a wrong i' the world, and having the world 
 for your labour, 'tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it 
 right. 
 
 It appears that Warburton in one of his works (it is not in his 
 edition of Shakespeare) had seen the anti-Calvinist, or Arminian 
 and Erastian meaning of Emilia's speech, for Coleridge thus 
 rebukes him : " What any other man who had learning enough 
 might have quoted as a playful and witty illustration of his remarks 
 against the Calvinist thesis, Warburton gravely attributes to Shakes- 
 peare as intentional, and this too in the mouth of a lady's woman." 
 Warburton had no more perception than Coleridge of the consistent 
 symbolism of the whole play, and the criticism of the latter is valid 
 against the " intentional " wit of the poet if it be a mere passing hit 
 at Calvinism in the mouth of a waiting woman. But if it were not 
 intentional, how came it there ? Warburton's intuition was right ; but, 
 as in many other instances of his acute comments on Shakespeare, he 
 was, as Sir Thomas Hanmer said (cited by Isaac Disraeli), only useful 
 " in starting the game, he was not to be trusted in running it down" 
 
ii6 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Having defined ^Emilia as Queen Elizabeth, we may now go back 
 to lago's jaunty saying about his wife's habitual repression in the 
 presence of Desdemona : " Marry, before your ladyship, I grant she puts 
 her tongue a little in her heart, and chides with thinking." When 
 Elizabeth came to the throne, she accepted the Bible religion of the 
 English as a public duty. But it was known that her personal 
 inclination was to the rites of the old religion. When she had been 
 three or four years on the throne, Cardinal Bentivoglio, papal legate 
 in London, wrote that the Queen favoured the Mass, and that four- 
 fifths of the people would go either to Catholic or to Protestant worship 
 according as the Government wished, not because they were frivolous 
 or irreligious, but because they were indifferent to the subtleties of 
 doctrine. Elizabeth made no secret of her preference for a celibate 
 clergy, but as to the Mass, it might have been truly said, " She puts 
 her tongue a little in her heart and chides with thinking." 
 
 The dramatist was conditioned by his plot to make Emilia the 
 wife of lago ; but, even so, he contrives to bring out one or two things 
 in the relations between Elizabeth and Bacon. The most obvious 
 hit is in making lago stab ^Emilia, and then run out, this stage direc- 
 tion being correctly added from Gratiano's " He's gone." " Fie ! your 
 sword upon a woman," Gratiano had also said before. The point of this 
 " business," which is otherwise necessary to bring about the death of 
 Emilia in the scene, is that Bacon, the year after Elizabeth's death, 
 and three years after the execution of Essex, recalled the circum- 
 stances by an Apologie in Certain Imputations concerning the late Earl 
 of Essex, 1604. He had brought odium on himself by his conduct at 
 the State trial, and still more by his published Declaration of the 
 Treasons, etc., 1601. He begins his Apology : " I cannot be ignorant, 
 and ought to be sensible, of the wrong which I sustain in common 
 speech." His defence is, that his pamphlet Declarations, etc. (which 
 Clarendon calls "a pestilent libel"), was written under instructions 
 from the late Queen, he, simple man, having been but a secretary to 
 her wishes. 
 
 The Baconian grain of truth in this appears to be his own state- 
 ment that the Queen read the printed copy, and objected to the 
 executed peer being styled my Lord of Essex, " in almost every page 
 of the book " : she wished him to be called Essex, or the late Earl of 
 Essex, " whereupon of force it was printed de novo, and the first copies 
 suppressed by her peremptory commandment ! " Bacon says, " Her 
 Majesty commanded me to pen that book, which I did, but so as 
 never secretary had more particular and express directions and 
 instructions in every point how to guide my hand in it." Words 
 could not be more explicit; yet Dr Abbott finds that "Bacon's 
 Declaration is an artistic production adapted for a permanent life, 
 and admirably constructed for the purpose of blackening a character 
 
RODERIGO 117 
 
 for all posterity. Its great merit is that it rarely lies, and yet is 
 invariably producing the effect of a lie "—as if the author had been 
 lago. Shakespeare has made the Queen's memory some amends. 
 Amelia appropriated to herself Desdemona's song of "Willow, 
 willow," which had been varied thus : 
 
 Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve, 
 
 from the original line, 
 
 Let nobody blame fne his scorn I do prove. 
 
 "Nay, that's not the next," said Desdemona, perhaps to call the 
 reader's attention to what she added, which seems to have been 
 interpolated by the poet from some other place : 
 
 L called my love false love, but what said he then ? 
 " If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men." 
 
 The old ballad, as changed to be sung by the woman instead of 
 the man, and carefully touched up in several places, is not unsuited 
 to Desdemona's own feeling for Othello's strange conduct. But the 
 real point of the changes in its text, and especially of Let nobody blame 
 him, is Emilia's appropriation of it to herself, even making it her 
 swan-song in death, which is Elizabeth's melancholy on account of 
 Essex, preying upon her mind until the last days of her life. 
 
 VIII. RODERIGO 
 
 The part of Roderigo was added to the caste of Cinthio's story, 
 
 much to the enrichment of the dramatic action, as he is needed to talk 
 
 with lago, and to be his instrument wherever violence was required. 
 
 He is a suitor for Desdemona, but it is clearly a farcical suit in love 
 
 to start off in pursuit of a newly married woman, to sail in the same 
 
 ship with her, and never to come to speech with her from first to 
 
 last. He might just as well have been a suitor in law or in office ; 
 
 and indeed the sole reason for his existence is to be a suitor in genere, 
 
 upon whom lago may practise Bacon's principles as laid down in 
 
 the essay "Of Suitors." The only other suitor in the plays is Sir 
 
 Andrew Aguecheek, who can be proved by a dozen witticisms in 
 
 the text of ' Twelfth Night ' to have been drawn from John Davies, 
 
 landed proprietor, barrister, poet, and epigrammatist. Davies's real 
 
 suit (although his suite of acrostic poems on the words Elizabetha 
 
 Regina supplies the fun for Sir Andrew as the suitor of Olivia) was 
 
 to get himself reinstated as a member of the Middle Temple, from 
 
 which society, and from the bar, he had been expelled "for ever," 
 
 on account of a peculiariy aggravated assault in Hall on Richard 
 
 Martin afterwards Recorder of London. The strongest mterest had 
 
ii8 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 to be made in the highest legal quarters before Davies was re-admitted. 
 In 'Twelfth Night' Sir Toby (Sir John Harington) profits by Sir 
 Andrew's suit to the tune of two thousand or so, from which one 
 may probably conclude that someone, perhaps not Harington, had 
 profited in the real case. Davies was rich ; his ancestors had been 
 long in the front rank of the gentry at Tisbury, in Wilts, having 
 come from Wales with the Herberts when Henry VII. wrested the 
 crown from Richard III. His only daughter was an heiress, whose 
 hand was sought by Ferdinand, Lord Hastings and Earl of Hunting- 
 don. He was a friend of Bacon's, several of whose extant letters are 
 addressed to him, including the one asking Davies to be "good to 
 concealed poets" {i.e. Southampton), when he had gone post-haste 
 to Edinburgh on the accession of James. Little beyond the fact of 
 intimacy is known of the relations between the two ; but as Davies 
 was the weaker man, and rich withal, he was probably used by Bacon 
 as Roderigo was used by I ago. 
 
 While Roderigo is best understood as a suitor in genere, following 
 lago to part with his money and to receive excuses for non- 
 performance, just as if he were a suitor at Court or in Westminster 
 Hall, yet his original, Davies, may well have been the suitor of 
 Desdemona in her symbolic meaning, with a certain kind of admira- 
 tion, and a show of earnestness inspired by his ulterior ends. Davies 
 did indeed follow after religion when he was seeking to be reinstated 
 at the Bar. In his youth he had been not only a writer of indecent 
 and scurrilous verse, but also a reveller, as the Middle Temple records 
 show on several occasions. His outbreak in Hall upon Martin was 
 a turning-point in his life. After his expulsion he retired to Oxford 
 and executed a religious penance by the sobriety of his life and by 
 writing his poem Nosce Teipsum, which has for its chief theme the 
 immortality of the soul. If this metaphysical work be the homage 
 that Roderigo offered to Brabantio's daughter, it is easy to understand 
 why the Archbishop should have had nothing to say to him as 
 a son-in-law: 
 
 Brab. The worser -welcome : 
 
 I've charged thee not to haunt about my doors : 
 In honest plainness thou hast heard me say 
 My daughter is not for thee ; and now, in madness, 
 Being full of supper and distempering draughts, 
 Upon malicious bravery, dost thou come 
 To start my quiet. 
 
 But Roderigo assures him, " In simple and pure soul I come to 
 thee," and Brabantio, when he has realised the fact of Desdemona's 
 escape, softens so far to Roderigo as to say, " O would you had had 
 her!" He would rather have had the Sacrament entrusted to the 
 metaphysics of Davies than to the emotionalism of Hooker. Davies 
 
RODERIGO 119 
 
 on his part is to be understood as merely seeking to recover his 
 character ; nor is he the only instance of a man of position seeking to 
 use the Communion ostentatiously to that end. 
 
 I am assuming that Roderigo is Davies, because that hypothesis 
 best explains the poet's wit in the part. The following is an 
 example : 
 
 Brab. Is there not charms 
 
 By which the property of youth and maidhood 
 May be abused? Have you not read, Roderigo, 
 Of some such thing ^ 
 Rod. Yes, sir, I have indeed. 
 
 The quarto gives " youth and manhood" which was doubtless the 
 poet's primary thought of the action of charms, until he saw that it 
 did not suit Desdemona. Roderigo admits that he had read some- 
 where of charms by which the property of youth and manhood may 
 be abused, and Brabantio must have had some dim recollection of 
 some such thing in print. We ought, of course, to search Italian 
 literature for this passage, but in fact it is found in English translated 
 out of the poet Ovid. It is in the seventh elegy of the third book of the 
 Amores, a well-thumbed passage of a much-read work, where the poet 
 feelingly describes his own languor, strange to him and others except 
 in the hypothesis of " Thessalian charms," " spells and drugs," 
 " bewitch'd with blood of frogs new dead." The English translation 
 of this is found in a volume published at Middleborough, in Holland, 
 without date or printer's name, and bearing the authors' initials, I. D. 
 and C. M. — that is to say, John Davies and Christopher Marlowe. 
 There appear to have been two editions, in one of which certain of the 
 elegies are signed " C. Marlow," the rest being unsigned ; but in the 
 other the first part of the book is assigned to I. D., consisting of 
 original epigrams, the last part to C. M., consisting of all the transla- 
 tions from Ovid, while sandwiched between those two main parts 
 comes a sequence of three original sonnets by Ignoto, in a very 
 animated style, which one seems to recognise, from its similarity to 
 certain lines in ' Romeo and Juliet,' and in the opening monologue of 
 'Richard III.,' and, in method, to Sonnet 130. 
 
 An attempt to publish in London a book of" Amores, by I. D., with 
 certain othyr sonnettes by W. S.," appears to have been thwarted. It 
 was entered for copyright on 3rd January 1600, to Eleazer Edgar 
 (little heard of as a publisher), but no copy of it has ever been seen. 
 The Archbishop probably knew something of it, for it was one of his 
 multifarious duties to license works for publication. It was he who 
 licensed ' Venus and Adonis,' as appears from the Stationers' Register 
 of 1593; and it was he, along with Bishop Bancroft, who ordered 
 in 1599 the works of some half dozen poets to be burned on the 
 ground of their pruriency, not including Shakespeare's 'Venus 
 
120 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 and Adonis.' Brabantio is the Archbishop and Roderigo is Davies ; 
 hence the naive question of the former, " Have you not read, 
 Roderigo, of some such thing ? " and the answer, " Yes, sir, I have 
 indeed," which probably owed its candour more to W. S. than to I. D. 
 This was Brabantio's first mention of charms, and it was obviously 
 made for Roderigo's benefit. But, having been once introduced, the 
 charms or witchcraft are charged against Othello persistently after- 
 wards, to be dropped at length with the Moor's declaration, " This only 
 is the witchcraft I have used." 
 
 Although the witchcraft motive in ' Othello ' does not concern 
 
 o 
 
 Roderigo's part beyond the first thought of it, it is too prominent to 
 be passed over ; and this will be the most convenient place to deal 
 with it. Brabantio enlarged upon it twice with great earnestness, and 
 on the second occasion elicited from the Duke a very hearty response : 
 
 Duke. Whoe'er he be that in this foul proceeding 
 Hath thus beguiled your daughter of herself. 
 And you of her, the bloody book of law 
 You shall yourself read in the bitter letter 
 After your own sense ; yea, though our proper son 
 Stood in your action. 
 
 The Duke is King James, who had caused to be enacted in the 
 first year of his reign (cap. xii.) : " That if any person or persons should 
 take upon him or them by witchcraft, inchantment, charm or sorcery, 
 to the intent to provoke any person to unlawful love, and being 
 thereof lawfully convicted, should for the first offence suffer imprison- 
 ment for the space of one whole year," etc. 
 
 The opportunity for the Duke's speech was motive enough to the 
 poet to carry on the witchcraft plea to that point in the action. Also, 
 it is possible that the Archbishop may have believed in witchcraft as 
 seriously as Brabantio did. But it ought to have a meaning in the 
 symbolism which I have been finding in the marriage. Othello 
 disproved the charge of witchcraft by showing how he had won 
 Desdemona's heart with the story of his life of broil and battle, most 
 of all when he spake of some distressful stroke that his youth suffered. 
 This, as I read it, was the story of the sufferings of English Reformers 
 from the time of the Lollards — a motive which Hooker hardly uses at 
 all, having little sympathy with Lollard methods. That only was the 
 witchcraft which Othello had used, and it is substituted in the play 
 for the witchcraft which Brabantio felt so sure had been used, namely, 
 the charms and conjurations of Hooker's marriage between reason and 
 faith, truth and superstition. Protestantism and Catholicism. This 
 idea of a marriage celebrated under the influence of witchcraft is found 
 in a book which Shakespeare might easily have got to know, if he 
 had any curiosity in such matters at all, as it was one of the publica- 
 tions of his friend Richard Field, the original printer and publisher of 
 
RODERIGO 121 
 
 his own 'Venus and Adonis.' It is Meredith Hanmer's translation 
 of Eusebius, Socrates, and other church historians, which was originally 
 brought out by Vautrollier in 1576, and afterwards became the 
 property of Field, his son-in-law. Under the heresy of Marcion, 
 Eusebius has this, lib. iv. cap. xi. : 
 
 " Some prepare their wedding chamber, and accomplish the service to be 
 said over them that are to be consecrated with charmed words, and having 
 this done, they call it a spiritual marriage, conformable to the celestial 
 copulation. Some bring them to the water and in baptizing say thus, etc," 
 
 The marriage of Othello and Desdemona took place behind the 
 scenes, but doubtless with the usual rites. If it were "conformable" 
 as above, it was not by any use of " charmed words," but because the 
 poet meant it to be a spiritual allegory. Yet such a precedent as that 
 cited may have contributed to the emphasis with which Brabantio 
 brought his charge of witchcraft. It is witty as against Davies at the 
 outset, and as against the Act of i Jac. I. at the close, and probably 
 ironical as against Hooker in general. The author of the Ecclesiastical 
 Polity was indeed charged by the Christian Letter with seeking to 
 " beguile and bewitch the verie Church of God," and with having in 
 hand a theme and cause of " notable simples, whereof a skilful popish 
 apothecarie can readilie make some fine potion or sweet-smelling 
 ointment to bring heedlesse men into the pleasant dream of well- 
 weening, while they closelie set on fire the house of God." And as 
 that dream appears to be the meaning of Brabantio's " my dream," 
 which was broken by cries in the street as if of a fire-alarm, so he may 
 have got from the same source his thought of charms or of "drugs 
 and minerals to weaken motion " or paralyse the will in his daughter. 
 
 The name Roderigo is Spanish, like lago. Don Roderigo is 
 introduced into Don Quixote (pt. II. bk. III. chap, i.): 
 
 " ' I have heard say the devil lurks behind the cross ; all is not gold that 
 glitters. From the ploughtail Bamba was raised to the throne of Spain, and 
 from his riches and revels was Roderigo cast down to be devoured by serpents 
 — if ancient ballads tell the truth.' 'And how should they lie?' said the 
 duenna Rodriguez, who was among the attendants. ' I remember one that 
 relates to a king named Roderigo, who was shut up alive in a tomb full of 
 toads, snakes, and lizards ; and how, after two days' imprisonment, his voice 
 was heard from the tomb, crying in a dolorous tone, " Now they gnaw me, 
 now they gnaw me, in the part by which I sinned the most.'"" 
 
 Shakespeare could not then have known Don Quixote (1605-1615), 
 but it is probable that he knew those Roderigo ballads of earlier date. 
 Don Roderick of Spain, cast down from his riches and revels to suffer 
 a certain kind of retribution, was an excellent joke for such a penitent 
 as Davies. Moreover, Don Roderick of Spain falls very nearly in the 
 same period as St lago of Compostella, and both of them not far from 
 Otho the Great, the conqueror of the Turks, after whom Othello 
 appears to have been named. 
 
122 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Roderigo's unexpected wish to drown himself may have been 
 taken from his namesake, Don Roderick, who is supposed to have 
 drowned himself in the Quadalquete, his horse, his diadem, and his 
 robe having been found on the river bank ; but there is also an 
 allusion to another resort to water by Davies. Besides the fact that 
 lago employed him for deeds of violence, such as Davies is known to 
 have been capable of, his instruction to Roderigo, " Stand behind this 
 bulk. . . Wear thy good rapier bare," is an ingenious combination 
 of the salient things in Davies's attack on Martin in Middle Temple 
 Hall. He came up behind his victim as he was seated at dinner on 
 one of the plain benches still in use in that ancient hall, and fell upon 
 him a tergo (this is Aguecheek's " back trick " in ' Twelfth Night '). 
 After the assault, with a cudgel, he retired to the bottom of the hall, 
 and, seizing a sword from his servant, waved it naked over his head. 
 He then ran off to a boat at Temple Stairs. 
 
 The proof that Roderigo is Davies is not so easy as that 
 Aguecheek is Davies. But the latter proof, which I hold to be 
 complete, helps the former, inasmuch as the corollary from it is that 
 Shakespeare had some particular interest in Davies, and some motive 
 for making fun of him. What he wanted in the part of Roderigo 
 was someone to converse with lago and be his instrument ; and as 
 Davies was a friend of Bacon's, he suited the part, without any need 
 to put a more profound meaning into his pursuit of Desdemona than 
 into Sir Andrew's pursuit of Olivia. 
 
 IX. CASSIO 
 
 CasSIO is the same convivial person as Sir Toby Belch, namely. Sir 
 John Harington, adapted to the more serious business of tragedy. 
 Sir John was not only a good toper, but a good churchman. He was 
 a handsome man with curly hair and beard, liked by everyone, 
 literally the " curled darling " of Venice. His carouses, like Cassio's, 
 were followed by deep penitence : " Yesterday I was drunk, to-day I 
 am sick, to-morrow I shall be both sick and sorry." He tells a story 
 of his own inebriate wit (coming home drunk and wanting to light 
 his taper at the moon), which suits Cassio's confession of " talking 
 fustian with my own shadow." He attended the Hampton Court 
 Conference on Nonconformity, having an unaffected interest in all 
 church matters. It is from his account of the Conference that some 
 of the most interesting particulars are derived ; hence the propriety 
 of making Cassio an eye-witness of "a grievous wreck and sufferance 
 of most part of their [the Turkish] fleet." Among the subjects that 
 came up at Hampton Court were the doctrines of Predestination and 
 Election ; whence the following dialogue : 
 
CASSIO 123 
 
 Cassio. Well, God's above all; and there be souls must be saved, and 
 there be souls must not be saved. 
 
 lago. It's true, good lieutenant. 
 
 Cassio. For mine own part,— no offence to the general, nor any man of 
 quality — I hope to be saved. 
 
 lago. And so do I too, lieutenant. 
 
 Cassio. Ay, but by your leave, not before me: the lieutenant is to be 
 saved before the ancient. Let's have no more of this ; let's to our affairs. 
 God forgive us our sins ! Gentlemen, let's look to our business. Do not 
 think, gentlemen, I am drunk, etc. 
 
 Harington was the same strange mixture as Cassio; he would 
 have apostrophised religion with as much sincerity as the latter 
 Desdemona : " Hail to thee, lady. — Ye men of Cyprus, let her have 
 your knees." He had the same alTection for Essex, with whom he 
 served in Ireland, as Cassio had for Othello. (It is recorded in his 
 essay on the Succession to the Crown, Roxburgh Club, 1884.) It is 
 singular, in the play, that Cassio was not acquainted with Roderigo : 
 this appears to be the old joke that Harington, in his witty epigram 
 on Davies's poem " Orchestra," thought fit to explain that Davies was 
 personally unknown to him. 
 
 The old difficulty about Cassio is that he was " a fellow almost 
 damned in a fair wife." It has a meaning for Shakespeare's private 
 original of Cassio, but not for Cassio himself, as he was so far 
 unmarried as to be in a position to marry Bianca. Harington's fair 
 wife had become very well known to the public under the name of 
 Mall, through her husband's numerous epigrams to her, celebrating 
 their happy conjugal relations with a frankness which is rare. This is 
 Sir Toby's joke in 'Twelfth Night' about Mistress Mall's picture 
 being likely to take dust because it had no curtain before it. But 
 why was he " almost damned " in a fair wife ? Tyrwhitt pointed out 
 that " almost damn " is used in ' Merchant of Venice,' i. i , in the context 
 of " call their brothers fools," so that it meant that imprecation, not 
 quite a curse, which is expressed in the Gospels by " Woe unto you," 
 and by reason of " fair " corresponded with the particular instance, 
 "Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you." But as 
 Cassio was almost damned in a fair wife, the Gospel formula acquires 
 an additional richness and truth : " Woe unto you when all men shall 
 speak well of your wife." It happened that all men were enabled to 
 speak well of Harington's wife owing to his own amazing disclosures 
 of her charms. This is a good instance of Shakespeare's trick of 
 making his text picturesque without caring whether his readers 
 understood, perhaps even wishing to puzzle them, as the Cassio of the 
 play had no wife. 
 
 Some other things in Cassio's part which point to Harington as 
 his original are given in the next section, on Bianca. As to his 
 fitness to bear the suspicions cast upon him by Othello, the question 
 
124 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 does not arise, inasmuch as he is made co-respondent merely pro 
 forma. It is hardly possible to gather from Harington's Rabelaisian 
 wit whether he was the average Calvinist of the time or shared the 
 beliefs of the Queen, his godmother. He was certainly a keen 
 churchman of one colour or another, so that he may well be Cassio 
 in the three beautiful speeches on Desdemona at the opening of 
 Act n. To combine the religious devotion of those with the exhibi- 
 tion that Cassio makes of himself the same night, the whole world 
 might have been searched before a fitter than Harington were found. 
 It is clear that Cassio was wanted to make the speeches in question, 
 because he is brought to Cyprus in a separate ship and made to 
 arrive before Desdemona in one ship and before Othello in another. 
 I notice here one of Cassio's sayings, on his fears for Othello's safety 
 at sea, as it has been the subject of much comment. 
 
 Therefore my hopes, not surfeited to death, 
 Stand in bold cure. 
 
 This is a satire on Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour, which 
 would cure every man's humour by giving him excess of it. 
 Shakespeare saw numerous exceptions to the principle, one of them 
 Jonson's own drinking habit, which is shown up in ' Antony and 
 Cleopatra ' by the conspicuous failure in the case of Lepidus at the 
 banquet on board Pompey's galley. Another dubious success was 
 Orsino's (Jonson's) in the matter of music as the food of love : 
 
 Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting. 
 The appetite may sicken, and so die. 
 That strain again. . . . 
 
 Enough, no more. 
 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. 
 
 The principle of contraria contrariis asserts itself as if that were the 
 law of nature, and not similia similibus. 
 
 Cassio's hope is a third dubious instance. He assumed that his 
 hopes were not, in matter of fact, surfeited to death. Yet he is bold 
 enough to expect the cure without Jonson's condition for it. But it 
 is not a cure of his hopes, it is a cure of his fears, which are implied 
 as the correlative. In this instance the principle of curing every 
 man of his humour by giving him excess of it seems to be negatived, 
 but is merely shown to be wrongly stated. 
 
 X. BIANCA 
 
 The Lieutenant's mistress in Cyprus comes into Cinthio's original 
 story only in a single reference to her, which did not call for her 
 appearance on the stage; it is the Lieutenant's respectable house- 
 keeper, not his mistress, who is seen by the Moor at the window 
 
BIANCA 125 
 
 with the handkerchief in her hands. The dramatic version omits 
 the housekeeper and develops the mistress, giving to the latter all the 
 business w^ith the handkerchief. The playwright has taken more 
 than his usual licence with the part of Bianca. Cassio had been 
 only two days on the island, but she enumerates with curious 
 particularity the days and hours of a whole week since she had seen 
 him last ; he himself recalls an incident with her " on the sea-bank," 
 which, if it were in Venice, must have happened long enough before 
 to allow for his tedious voyage to Cyprus, and also requires Bianca 
 to be transported thither in some other ship ; if it were in Cyprus, it 
 requires a complete disregard of the time-scheme of the play. It is 
 clear that the author did not trouble himself about consistency in 
 these matters, having much more important matters in his mind for 
 the part of Bianca. Her allegorical meaning as the Scarlet Woman 
 has been pointed out in a former section ; here it remains to discover 
 from the text of her part what was the author's meaning in making 
 her Cassio's mistress, and in characterising her as he has done. 
 
 Cassio being drawn from Harington, who appears to have been 
 exemplary as a husband, the author's imagination would have felt 
 some compunction in making him spend his evenings with a real 
 and literal Bianca. In that difficulty, Harington himself had come 
 to his help by two several hints. The one is the description of 
 Cyprus in Sir John's translation of Orlando Furioso, the passage 
 being well known in the form of an elegant extract in England's 
 Parnassus, 1 600 : 
 
 With wanton damsels walking in each street 
 Inviting men to pleasure and repast. 
 
 No harm, then, in letting the poet accept the invitation held out 
 in the streets of Cyprus by his own poesy. But, secondly, Harington 
 tells in his epigrams how he would be invited to supper by a certain 
 disreputable person named Cinna, who is the subject of eight of his 
 epigrams and is mentioned in a ninth. He had been often pressed 
 to tell " who are meant by Cinna, Lynus, Lesbia, and the rest." As 
 he declined to tell, we can only guess. But as to Cinna, he is so 
 characterised as to be hardly mistakable for anyone but Barnabe 
 Barnes. (See under " Cloten " in the chapter on " Cymbeline.") In 
 two epigrams he brings out that very familiarity with Cinna which 
 was wanted for Cassio and Bianca in the play, namely, supping with 
 a disreputable associate : 
 
 Cinna, when I with thee do dine or sup, 
 Thou still dost offer me thy gossip-cup, etc. 
 
 And again (iii. 51): 
 
 I went to sup with Cinna 'tother night, 
 And, to say true (for give the Devil his right), 
 
126 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Though scant of meat we could a morsel get, 
 Yet therewith store of passing sauce we met. 
 
 You ask, What sauce, where pittance was so small? 
 
 This : Is not hunger the best sauce of all? 
 
 In Bastard's epigrams the identity of Barnes with one Scilla can 
 be proved beyond all doubt. The Scilla of the mythology was a 
 female monster, with barking dogs around her barren loins. This old 
 feminine name for Barnes becomes a precedent for Shakespeare to 
 pose him as Bianca ; and it may be inferred from three things said 
 of her, besides the fitness of her companionship with Cassio as 
 Harington, that such was the dramatist's intention. "'Tis such 
 another fitchew ! marry, a perfumed one," i.e. " What a perfumed 
 polecat it is " — this is a saying of Nash about Barnes under his real 
 name ; the same idea of perfume to cover a stinking savour is used 
 for the Basilisco of Soliman and Perseda, who is also Barnes just 
 after his return from the war in France, 1591 ; and again for Parolles, 
 who can be proved to be Barnes by very pointed hits (see under 
 "Cloten" in ' Cymbeline'). Another thing characteristic of Barnes 
 is Bianca's hanging on Cassio's neck : 
 
 Cas. She haunts me in every place. I was the other day talking on the 
 sea-bank [the Bankside] with certain Venetians, and thither comes this 
 bauble; and, by this hand, she falls me thus about my neck, ... so hangs, 
 so lolls, and weeps upon me ; so hales, and pulls me : ha, ha, ha ! 
 
 Barnes is Pistol, to whom Falstaff said : " Hang no more about 
 me ; I am no gibbet for you." Jonson parodied the relations of 
 Falstaff and Pistol, in Every Man out of his Humour, with Sogliardo 
 and Shift, varying the " hanging about me " to " hanging upon me," 
 Sogliardo, as the elder-tree on which Judas hanged himself. There is 
 also a literal description by Nash of someone who would " so fawn 
 and hang upon'' Sir Philip Sidney, which is so mixed up with what 
 is said of Barnes under his proper name that I formerly applied it to 
 him, although in the strict syntax it seems to apply to the latter's 
 friend Gabriel Harvey. The third fitness of Bianca for Barnes is in 
 her conduct over the handkerchief, which is a symbol of the Creed. 
 Cassio gave it to his mistress to " take out," or copy, the work, the 
 incident being based on Cinthio's, of the Lieutenant's respectable 
 housekeeper admiring the arabesque pattern and copying it, as she 
 was skilful with her needle. It was given to Bianca, who took it 
 without remark ; but she came running back in a fury : 
 
 " What did you mean by that same handkerchief you gave me even now ? 
 I was a fine fool to take it. I must take out the work ! . . . I'll take out 
 no more on't." 
 
 She had discovered the symbols on it, for she calls it a "token." 
 This is Barnes asked to "take out" the symbols of the Creed. His 
 unctuous profession of religion (he was a bishop's son), announced in 
 
GRATIANO AND LODOVICO 127 
 
 his Century of Spiritual Sonnets (1595), was so inconsistent with his 
 scandalous life as to be made a joke of by Nash, and is also one of 
 the chief themes in Harington's epigrams on Cinna. Hence the 
 humour of putting the Creed into his hands unawares, and asking 
 him to give his niinute attention to matters of belief which he scandal- 
 ously ignored in his life. 
 
 XI. GRATIANO AND LODOVICO 
 
 The only one of the minor characters whom' I do not profess to 
 identify with a real person is Gratiano. He was the brother of 
 Brabantio, who is Archbishop Whitgift ; therefore, he was probably 
 a high ecclesiastic, but I know no reason why he should have been 
 Bancroft, Bishop of London. The name Gratiano seems to mean 
 someone eminent in the canon law, Gratian being the great authority 
 on that subject. But Gratiano's part is too slightly characterised to 
 point to any individual in Church or State, nor does there seem to 
 be any real need for him in the action at all, unless it be to " keep 
 the house, and seize upon the fortunes of the Moor, for they succeed 
 to you." 
 
 His kinsman Lodovico is so characterised that he may be guessed 
 to be Fulke Greville. There are some half dozen plays, from 1601 
 onwards, into which Shakespeare has introduced Greville in minor 
 parts. It is he who seems to be, as Lodovico, the object of compli- 
 ments from both Desdemona and .^Emilia in the undressing scene : 
 
 Desd. No, unpin me here. This Lodovico is a proper man. 
 Emilia. A very handsome man. 
 Desd. He speaks well. 
 
 .iEmilia. I know a lady of Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine 
 for a touch of his nether lip. 
 
 Shakespeare sometimes went to the Calendar of Saints for a name. 
 Lodovico would appear to have been suggested by S. Ludovicus, 
 Louis IX. of France, who spent much time in Palestine in the last 
 Crusades against the infidel. The religious drama would have been 
 incomplete without a representative of the old-world chivalry. In the 
 court of Elizabeth and James, Greville was the man who suited the 
 part. He is "holy Gonzalo" of 'The Tempest'; Camden's eulogy 
 of him sustains the epithet, and the subjects of his own verse are 
 of a kind to confirm it. As he was a life-long celibate, a touch of 
 his nether lip would have been the more worth having; but why 
 his nether lip does not appear, unless there were some joke upon 
 Greville's luxuriant moustachios. Lodovico knew lago in Venice as 
 " a very valiant fellow." In the end he uses on him a figure of speech 
 which is at least charitable : 
 
128 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 O Spartan dog ! 
 More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea ! 
 
 The Spartan hound was a noble beast of his kind, solemn and 
 deep-mouthed like the hounds of Theseus in a wood of Crete. No 
 poet would ascribe malignity to the sea, or to hunger, or to anguish ; 
 they are all natural phenomena, and so is the thoroughbred hound 
 of Sparta. 
 
 XII. MONTANO 
 
 MoNTANO was the ordinary Governor of Cyprus, " trusty and most 
 valiant,'' " of most allowed sufficiency.'' There is no such person in 
 Cinthio's story, and he is not really needed in Shakespeare's. He 
 remains in the island under Othello in some anomalous position, 
 neither acting nor superseded, and resumes his place of "lord 
 governor " at the close, being specially charged with the execution 
 of justice on lago. It is clear that Othello's brief military command 
 is merely interpolated, just as he himself is an imaginary hero with 
 no historical counterpart. The Turks are the Nonconformists, Cyprus 
 is rites and ceremonies, and Montano is some conspicuous person "of 
 most allowed sufficiency " in maintaining the Anglican system against 
 " the Turks." What is unexpectedly said of him in the text points 
 to Hooker himself: 
 
 0th. Worthy Montano, you were wont be civil ; 
 The gravity and stillness of your youth 
 The world hath noted, and your name is great 
 In mouths of wisest censure : what's the matter, 
 That you unlace your reputation thus. 
 And spend your rich opinion for the name 
 Of a night-brawler? Give me answer to it. 
 
 Mont. Worthy Othello, I am hurt to danger : 
 Your officer, lago, can inform you — 
 
 While I spare speech, which something now offends me — 
 Of all that I do know ; nor know I aught 
 By me that's said or done amiss this night. 
 Unless self-charity be sometimes a vice, 
 And to defend ourselves it be a sin 
 When violence assails us. 
 
 The gravity and stillness of Signior Montano's youth is a personal 
 touch brought into the play from some outside source. If the author 
 had been drawing Montano from Izaak Walton's Life of Hooker, 
 written sixty years after on the information of those who knew him, 
 he could not have extracted anything more characteristic than " the 
 gravity and stillness of your youth the world hath noted." Walton 
 says: "His motion was slow, even in his youth, and so was his 
 speech, never expressing any earnestness in either of them, but an 
 
MONTANO 129 
 
 humble gravity suited to the aged. . . This being mixed with a 
 remarkable modesty, and a sweet, serene quietness of nature ; and with 
 them a quick apprehension of many perplext parts of learning imposed 
 then upon him as a scholar, made his master and others believe him to 
 have an inward blessed light, and therefore to consider him a little 
 wonder!' Not less literally true of Hooker, and distinctive of him 
 above all men, is Shakespeare's " unless to defend ourselves it be a 
 sin when violence assails us." It is so true of an episode in Hooker's 
 life as to be startling in its truth. It does not seem to be outside 
 the action of the play, like the gravity and stillness of Montano's 
 youth ; but the critics have remarked the strangeness of making him 
 join in Cassio's carouse, and some would even amend the text so as to 
 get him out of it. Montano is made the innocent victim for no other 
 purpose than to introduce the most remarkable thing in Hooker's 
 private life — a vile plot against his honour which Bishop Gauden 
 compares with that "of old against the great Athanasius." "Oh, 
 with what quietness," he exclaimed to his friend Dr Saravia, " did 
 I enjoy my soul after I was free from the fears of my slandei- ! " The 
 affair occupies a page or two of Walton's Life, but without the 
 particulars : these, however, had been given before in the Life by 
 Bishop Gauden (1662), who says: "I have long since, in my youth, 
 heard it at large from persons of credit." It appears to have happened 
 about the year 1590, when Hooker had been four or five years Master 
 of the Temple. One day when he " was diverting him in the fields 
 near London," he was " assaulted by an impudent woman." She was 
 joined by a man, who " came in as Mr Hooker was talking with the 
 woman, and challenged her for his wife." Their object was plunder. 
 Hooker, thinking to get away, gave them all the money he had with 
 him, which was only " a pittance " ; they clamoured for more, which 
 their victim at length promised, if they would come to his lodging 
 for it, which they agreed to do. Instead of having a constable 
 waiting for them, he gave them what he had promised ; they came 
 again and again many times during some four months. On one of 
 those occasions Hooker's old pupil, the diplomatist Sir Edwin 
 Sandys, happened to come in. He found his revered master in the 
 company of one, or two, persons whom he saw at once to be dis- 
 reputables. After they had gone, he asked who they were. Hooker, 
 much abashed, said they were poor persons whom he was befriending ; 
 but Sandys was not to be put off, and at length elicited the whole 
 matter. When they came next, Sandys was there with a brace of 
 constables, who carried the pair before a justice ; they were examined 
 separately, and as their statements contradicted each other, they were 
 committed without more ado to the purgatory of Bridewell. After a 
 time one of the couple confessed the imposture, and both were 
 released on making an apology and recantation in due form, which 
 
130 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 became known. Izaak Walton says that Hooker " laboured to 
 procure their pardon," which being denied him, he said he would pray 
 that they might have " patience to undergo their punishment." 
 Years after, when he was the friend of Dr Saravia, Prebendary of 
 Canterbury, he told him that his quietness of soul after he was free 
 from the fears of his slander was " much more after a conflict and 
 victory over my desires of revenge.'' Revenge on whom ? Walton 
 himself supplies the hint, but not the logic, for an answer. He had 
 been told the name of "a dissenting brother" who had "contrived" 
 the accusation ; the name was at the end of his pen, but he forbore 
 to write it, because " I have not so much confidence in the relation." 
 He did well, for he would have been mistaken about the dissenting 
 brother. Odium theologicum is capable of much, but the Puritans 
 did not fight with such foul weapons. A plot, or a practical joke of 
 the kind needs someone's Ganymedes and parasites in a descending 
 scale to the wretches who execute it — and pay themselves. A nod, or 
 a wink, or less than a wink, is enough to start it, striking the electric 
 chain wherewith the deed is darkly bound. 
 
 Bishop Gauden, who was a man of the world, is clear that the 
 good man walked innocently into a snare, and acted weakly when he 
 was enmeshed in it, from a horror of its very associations, as well as 
 from some alleged feeling of pity or charity, of which the wretched 
 instruments could alone have been the object. " He was so good," 
 he says, " that he knew not how to return evil but by well-doing." 
 Some such view is taken by Shakespeare of the character of Montano. 
 His part in the fray was necessarily different from Hooker's " in the 
 fields near London," but the moral of it is the same. He knew 
 nothing said or done amiss by him that night, " unless self-charity be 
 sometimes a vice, and to defend ourselves it be a sin when violence 
 assails us." This is indeed a more correct description of Hooker's 
 conduct than of Montano's so far as we can follow the latter; or it is 
 the moral that was in the poet's mind, which the action on the stage 
 does not fully bring out. Othello was sympathetic, seeing perhaps 
 more of the merits of the case than he said : " Sir, for your hurts, 
 myself will be your surgeon." 
 
 The gentle Montano, in order to be involved in the affair, is made 
 to join in Cassio's carouse : 
 
 Cas. To the health of our general ! 
 
 Mont. I am for it, lieutenant ; and I'll do you justice. 
 
 lago. O sweet England ! 
 
 \Sings\ King Stephen was a worthy peer. . . 
 
 'Tis pride that pulls the country down ; 
 Then take thine auld cloak about thee. 
 
 lago excuses this stave of an English or Scottish ballad by inter- 
 jecting "O sweet England," just after Montano had spoken. The 
 
MONTANO ^31 
 
 stanza is the last but one of a long ballad, the refrain of which in 
 every other verse is "Take thine auld cloak about thee," and the 
 subject a conversation between a wife and husband about going out 
 to tend a cow on a winter night. The husband is dissatisfied with his 
 old cloak, and the wife's moral is pride. The nagging wife, the auld 
 cloak, and the imputation of pride have a curious fitness to Hooker. 
 His matrimonial relations were well known to be just those of the 
 countryman and his wife Bell ; his coarse gown or cassock, equally 
 familiar, was the auld cloak ; and pride was what the Christian Letter 
 charged him with {supra, p. 68) as censoriously as the wife her 
 husband. 
 
 If the midnight brawl at Cyprus be taken as combining both the 
 scandal in Hooker's private life and the mystification of the attack 
 upon his book, in both of which he was "hurt to danger," we should 
 the better understand the words of lago as Bacon : 
 
 lago. I cannot speak 
 
 Any beginning to this peevish odds ; 
 And would in action glorious I had lost 
 Those legs that brought me to a part of it. 
 
 Peevishness is defined in the Christian Letter as " standing upon 
 trifles." This peevish odds, or a quarrel provoked by next to nothing, 
 is contrasted by lago with "action glorious," in which he would rather 
 have lost his legs than had them carry him to share in such a trivial 
 affair. His lofty superiority to small matters is just what King James 
 said of Bacon — de minimis non curat. Yet lago could notice such 
 things with the corner of his eye. It was really through his minute 
 attention to business that Montano became involved with Cassio. 
 Those two had caroused together, Montano drinking the health 
 proposed very heartily, although Cassio was then more than half-seas 
 over. As soon as the jovial lieutenant had gone off, lago turned 
 to Montano with a solemn discourse on Cassio's alleged habitual 
 drunkenness, which so affected the good simple man that he proposed 
 to bring it to Othello's notice. Accordingly, when Cassio re- 
 enters beating Roderigo, having been provoked by him (at lago's 
 instance) behind the scenes, Montano is no longer the jovial com- 
 panion, but the serious monitor, so that Cassio draws upon him : 
 " Men in rage strike those that wish them best," as lago explained it. 
 Montano referred the general to lago for particulars : " Your olificer 
 lago can inform you " ; and lago's account was truthful so far as it 
 went, while it produced a totally false impression. 
 
 As to Montano's unexpected willingness to join in Cassio's carouse 
 (" I am for it, lieutenant, and I'll do you justice "), there must have been 
 current some pleasantry about Hooker and wine ; for Landor has 
 brought the topic into his imaginary conversation between Hooker 
 and my Lord of Verulam. At the date assumed, after Bacon's fall. 
 
132 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 Hooker had been dead more than twenty years, and in his life had 
 been a man of feeble health. The earl's butler brings in a bottle of 
 choice Malmsey. Bacon says : " I keep it as a medicine for my many 
 and growing infirmities. You are healthy at present : God in His 
 infinite mercy long maintain you so. Weaker drink is more whole- 
 some for you." Hooker answers : " Of a truth, my knowledge in such 
 matters is but spare. My Lord of Canterbury once ordered part of a 
 goblet containing some strong Spanish wine to be taken to me from 
 his table. . Wine is little to be trifled with." 
 
 Montano's gentleness is further shown by his compassion for the 
 Turkish foe, which is Hooker's tone throughout his book to the 
 Nonconformists : 
 
 If that the Turkish fleet 
 Be not ensheltered and embayed, they are drowned : 
 It is impossible to bear it out. 
 
 Also, he uses a strangely intense phrase in expecting the arrival of 
 Othello after the storm, which appears to be modelled upon the 
 criticism of Hooker's method in the Christian Letter: "Do you mean 
 to bring in a confusion of all things, to reconcile heaven and earth, 
 and to make all things equal ? " 
 
 Montano. As to throw out our eyes for brave Othello, 
 Even till we make the main and th' aerial blue 
 An indistinct regard. 
 
 Again, it is to Montano that the censure of lago is left : 
 
 Lod. To you, lord governor. 
 
 Remains the censure of this hellish villain. 
 The time, the place, the torture : O, enforce it ! 
 
 " Hellish villain " is really a sop to the groundlings, like the epithets 
 at the close of '■ Macbeth ' : " this dead butcher and this fiend-like 
 queen." The censure and "torture " of lago, at Montano's own time 
 and place, are exactly the judgment that the public were led to expect 
 from Hooker on the secret author of the Christian Letter. Dr Covel, 
 who published an answer in [603, three years after Hooker's death, 
 and one year before the writing of the play, said : " But if this had 
 been by himself performed (which I hear he hath done, and I desire 
 thee to expect it), thy satisfaction, gentle reader, would have been much 
 more." Certain fragments of Hooker's reply are preserved at Trinity 
 College, Dublin, and what might be called the "torture ' in some of 
 his more spicy marginalia on the Oxford copy of the Christian Letter. 
 
 The name Montano is one suggested for Hooker by the very 
 interesting pages on the Montanist so-called heresy in Hooker's own 
 work. There are hardly any passages which bring out so clearly 
 the author's own point of view as those in which the name of Montanus 
 occurs (v. Ixxii. i): 
 
MONTANO 133 
 
 " We are therefore the rather to make it manifest in all men's eyes, that 
 set times of fasting appointed in spiritual considerations to be kept by all sorts 
 of men took not their beginning either from Montanus or any other whose 
 heresies may prejudice the credit and due estimation thereof, but have their 
 ground in the law of nature, are allowable in God's sight, were in all ages 
 heretofore, and may till the world's end be observed not without singular use 
 and benefit." 
 
 It might have been playfully urged against Hooker himself that 
 he was a re-incarnation of Montanus : 
 
 "These additions to be supplements of the gospel, whereunto the spirit of 
 prophecy did now mean to put as it were the last hand, and was therefore 
 newly descended upon Montanus, whose orders all Christian men were no 
 less to obey than the laws of the Apostles themselves." 
 
 That Shakespeare wanted the name of Montanus in ' Othello' for 
 a special reason is proved by the fact that, having used it for the 
 servant of Polonius (Corambis) in the first quarto of ' Hamlet,' he 
 changed it to Reynoldo in the second (1604), and thereby released it 
 for use in the new play which he had in hand at that date. 
 
 If, as I assume, Othello be an imaginary hero placed in certain 
 circumstances so as to put the sacramental principles of Hooker's 
 Ecclesiastical Policy to a test, there was every reason to have the 
 author of that work somewhere in the background of the play. 
 Hooker himself could not have been made the protagonist; the 
 honours and the valiant parts of Othello are extraneous to him, and 
 without them the action would have been impossible. The collision 
 of lago is with a magnanimous man of action, who has newly 
 embraced the Sacraments of the Church in the spirit of Hooker's 
 exposition of them. 
 
 Lastly, it is significant that Montano is the person to deprive 
 Othello of his sword, and that Othello alludes to him as a " puny 
 whipster." This was the sword that the Moor had worn throughout 
 the action of the play. But he had another weapon hanging up, a 
 sword of Spain, the icebrook's temper, a Toledo blade. Surely it was 
 the sword of the Spirit : 
 
 A better never did itself sustain 
 Upon a soldier's thigh. I've seen the day 
 That with this little arm and this good^-^ox^ 
 I've made my way through more impediments 
 Than twenty times you stop. 
 
 Those were the days of broil and battle, the story of which had won 
 the heart of Desdemona. He resumes that sword, and he seems to 
 be sorry that he had ever laid it aside. He uses it once more to 
 wound lago, but not to kill him ; for lago could no more be slam by 
 it than Satan by the sword of Michael. That also is wrenched from 
 the Moor, but he has still a dagger hidden in his bosom, which 
 serves him as a last resource. 
 
134 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 The proof of symbolism which I have attempted has been made 
 difficult by the infinity and subtlety of the invention, as well as by 
 the all-sufficing beauty of the poetry in its plain meaning. Had 
 Shakespeare been Bacon, we should not have been left in the 
 smallest doubt as to the symbolism of the tale. In Bacon's Wisdom 
 of the Ancients, we have an interesting application of scientific 
 method to elicit the profound meaning of " poetical fables," and in the 
 preface to that work an even more interesting statement of the 
 general principles of " concealed and secret meanings," and of the 
 indications which " proclaim an allegory even afar off." Bacon is here 
 the exact thinker, the man of clear-cut notions and definitions, the 
 logician reducing Ovid's Metamorphoses to the line and to the plumb 
 line. lago, as a poet, had a curious resemblance to Bacon in that as 
 in some other things : 
 
 lago. For indeed my invention 
 Comes from my pate as bird-lime comes from frieze, — 
 It plucks out brains and all. 
 
INDEX OF LINES EXPLAINED 
 
 ACT I 
 
 PAQK 
 49 
 
 49 
 
 Three great ones of the city in personal suit, etc. . 40 
 
 Forsooth, a great arithmetician . -q 
 
 A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife . ^2^ 
 
 Be-lee'd and calm'd by debitor and creditor . 50 
 
 I am not what I am ..... «r 
 
 Though he in a fertile climate dwell, plague him with flies . 67 
 
 Though that his joy be joy .... 6q 
 
 With like timorous accent and dire yell . g6 
 
 I've charged thee not to haunt about my doors . ng 
 
 This accident is not unlike my dream . 66 121 
 
 Another of his fathom have they none . . ' 3i 
 
 Have you not read, Roderigo, of some such thing? . . jio 
 
 But I pray, sir, are you fast married ? . .25 
 
 A voice potential, and double as the duke's . 26 
 
 I fetch my life and being from men of royal siege . . . 9, 34 
 
 My unhoused free condition . . g 
 
 My perfect soul ..... 31,78 
 
 Keep up your bright swords or the dew will rust them 27 
 
 Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals . 119,121 
 
 Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be . . 31 
 
 My letters say a hundred and seven galleys . . 7, 14 
 
 The Turkish preparations make for Rhodes 14 
 
 Have there injointed with an after fleet . 20 
 
 Marcus Luccicos, is not he in town ? . . . 22 
 
 Nor doth the general care take any hold on me . . 15 
 
 My particular grief is of so flood-gate and o'erbearing nature 16 
 
 The bloody book of law, yea, though our proper son . 120 
 
 Rude am I in my speech . . 34 
 
 Since these arms of mine had seven years' pith . 34 
 
 A maiden never bold ... 10 
 
 Send for the lady to the Sagittary . . . 29 
 
 As truly as to Heaven I do confess the vices of my blood . 35 
 
 I ran it through even from my boyish days . 32 
 
 Portance in my travellour's history . 32 
 
 Rough quarries, rocks, and hills . . . 27 
 
 The Anthropophagi and men whose heads, etc. . . 33 
 
 Still the house affairs would draw her thence . 27 
 
 And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her 33, 43 
 
 And as much duty as my mother show'd to you 42 
 
 I had rather to adopt a child than get it . .42 
 
 I here do give thee that with all my heart . . 17 
 
 For your sake, jewel . . • ■ • .18 
 
 When remedies are past the griefs are ended . 21 
 
 These sentences to sugar or to gall ... 22 
 
 I saw Othello's visage in his mind . . 30 
 
 I therefore beg it not to please the palate of my appetite . 80 
 
 She has deceived her father and may thee . 40 
 
 I will incontinently drown myself . . • 122 
 
 It is merely a lust of the blood ... . . 91 
 
 13s 
 
136 
 
 ALLEGORY OF OTHELLO 
 
 PAQE 
 
 Luscious as locusts, bitter as coloquintida . loi 
 
 If sanctimony and a frail vow . . 79 
 
 But for my sport and profit . . . 67 
 
 'Twixt my sheets has done my office . . 70 
 
 For mere suspicion in that kind will do as if for surety . 70 
 
 ACT II 
 
 If that the Turkish fleet be not ensheltered . 132 
 
 A noble ship of Venice hath seen .... 122 
 
 Even till we make the main and the aerial blue an indistinct regard 132 
 
 My hopes not surfeited to death stand in bold cure 124 
 
 In the essential vesture of creation does tire the ingener 37 
 
 The gutter'd rocks and congregated sands 38 
 
 Hail to thee, lady, and the grace of Heaven, etc. S4 
 
 She puts her tongue a little in her heart . 112 
 
 It plucks out brains and all . .134 
 
 O, most lame and impotent conclusion ! 72 
 
 O, my soul's joy . . . . . . 84 
 
 I'll set down the pegs that make this music, as honest as I am . . 85 
 
 The wine she drinks is made of grapes ... .80 
 
 Though peradventure I stand accountant for as great a sin . . 91 
 
 Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards . 51 
 
 O, man's life's but a span . 7I 
 
 Take thine auld cloak about thee . ... . 130 
 
 There be souls must be saved, and there be souls must not be saved . 123 
 
 Worthy Montano, the gravity and stillness of your youth the world hath noted . 128 
 
 And to defend ourselves it be a sin when violence assails us ,129 
 
 Look, if my gentle love be not raised up ! . . 92 
 
 Discourse fustian with one's own shadow . . 122 
 
 Contemplation, mark, and denotement of her parts and graces 93 
 
 A vice in her goodness not to do more than she is requested 88 
 
 And what's he, then, that says I play the villain? . . 87 
 
 His baptism, all seals and symbols of redeemed sin , 31 
 
 Divinity of Hell ! . . . . 87 
 
 Devils tempt with heavenly shows . 89 
 
 So will I turn her virtue into pitch 92 
 
 ACT III 
 
 These letters give to the pilot ..... . 92 
 
 Why, then, to-morrow night, or Tuesday morn, etc. . . 96 
 
 What ! Michael Cassio that came a-wooing with you . . -95 
 
 Nay, when I have a suit wherein I mean to touch your love indeed 93 
 
 Did Michael Cassio, when you woo'd my lady, know of your love ? 48, 95 
 
 Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more 47 
 
 And oft my jealousy shapes faults that are not . . . 57 
 
 It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on 98 
 
 Poor and content is rich, and rich enough . g8 
 
 To follow still the changes of the moon . . gg 
 
 ExsufHicate and blown surmises gg 
 
 Many proposed matches of her own clime .... . 10 
 
 My lord, I take my leave. {Reiurning] My lord, I would I might entreat your 
 
 honour to scan this thing no further . 47 
 
 Knows all qualities with a learned spirit . . gg 
 
 If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself . log 
 
 Faith, that's with watching . . oj 
 
 My wayward husband hath a hundred times woo'd me to steal it . 81 
 
 Not poppy nor mandragora ... go 
 
 Let him not know't, and he's not robb'd at all 100 
 
 Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war ! 100 
 
 And, O, you mortal engines, whose rude throats 100 
 
 Give me the ocular proof . . 102 
 
 Begrimed and black as mine own face 29 
 
 It were a tedious difficulty, I think 102 
 
 Like to the Pontic sea . . . iqt 
 
 I had rather have lost my purse full of cruzadoes . .83 
 
INDEX OF LINES EXPLAINED 
 
 This hand is moist, my lady . . . 
 
 That handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give 
 
 I have seen the cannon, like the devil, from his very arm puffed his own brother 
 
 They are not ever jealous for the cause 
 
 PAGE 
 
 104 
 
 82 
 
 34 
 
 71 
 
 ACT IV 
 
 By heaven, I would most gladly have forgot it 
 
 Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion 
 
 My lord is fallen into an epilepsy .... 
 
 The lethargy must have his quiet course ; if not, etc. 
 
 And his unbookish jealousy must construe 
 
 So hangs and lolls and weeps upon me 
 
 What did you mean by that same handkerchief? 
 
 Cough or cry hem if anybody come 
 
 Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, made to write 
 
 I took you for that cunning whore of Venice . 
 
 The office opposite to St Peter ..... 
 
 A beggar in his drink could not have laid such terms 
 
 To lash the rascals naked through the world even from the east to the west 
 
 He sups to-night with a harlotry 
 
 I've laid those sheets you bade me on the bed 
 
 My mother had a maid called Barbarie 
 
 This Lodovico is a proper man 
 
 Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve 
 
 'Tis a wrong in your own world and you might quickly make it right 
 
 42; 
 
 IDS 
 
 105 
 105 
 106 
 10 
 126 
 126 
 
 "3 
 10 
 96 
 107 
 106 
 112 
 
 I2S 
 
 93 
 113 
 127 
 117 
 "5 
 
 ACT V 
 
 Here, stand behind this bulk ; wear thy good rapier bare 
 
 This is Othello's ancient — a very valiant fellow 
 
 I am no strumpet, but of life as honest as you 
 
 It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul 
 
 Put out the light— and then 
 
 Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature . 
 
 My wife ! my wife ! what wife ? I have no wife 
 
 O, who hath done this deed ? Nobody ; I myself . 
 
 She's like a liar gone to burning hell . 
 
 Nay, had she been true . 
 
 O gull ! O dolt ! as ignorant as dirt 
 
 villainy ! I thought so then . 
 
 Pure grief shore his old thread in twain 
 
 But yet lago knows that she with Cassio hath 
 
 No, I will speak as liberal as the north 
 
 He's gone, but his wife's kill'd 
 
 Take you this weapon which I have recover'd from the Moor 
 
 Every puny whipster gets my sword 
 
 What did thy song bode, lady ? 
 
 It is a sword of Spain, the icebrook's temper 
 
 1 bleed, sir, but not kill'd . . . . 
 Demand me nothing ; what you know, you know 
 
 I've done the State some service, and they know't 
 
 Like the base Judsean threw a pearl away 
 
 I took by the throat the circumcised dog and smote him thus 
 
 O Spartan dog ! . 
 
 To you, lord governor, remains the censure . 
 
 122 
 
 44 
 108 
 109 
 114 
 109 
 109 
 no 
 no 
 109 
 
 "3 
 112 
 
 23, 40 
 
 94 
 
 US 
 
 116 
 
 133 
 
 133 
 
 42, 113 
 
 133 
 
 133 
 
 4 
 
 35 
 
 108 
 
 108 
 
 128 
 
 132 
 
INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 Abbott, Dr E. A., Ii6. 
 
 yEmilia, 112-117 ; meaning of the name, 114. 
 
 Andrewes, Lane, 41. 
 
 Anthropophagi, 33. 
 
 Archer, W., 97. 
 
 Bacon, Francis, his church polity, 52, 54, 
 65, 70. 
 
 his Medit. Sacrce, 55, 60, 61-62. 
 
 principles of his essays, 45. 
 
 publication of the essays, 46. 
 
 Adv. of Learnings 60, 68. 
 
 his grievance of non-promotion, 48-49. 
 
 his debts, 50. 
 
 his philosophical antipathies, 52, 63. 
 
 his style, 64 ; his Calvinism, 64. 
 
 his extant verse, 71. 
 
 his collision with Essex, 76. 
 
 his citations of scripture, 78. 
 
 on agape and eros, 92. 
 
 his metaphor of the belief of truth, 94. 
 
 shelters himself behind Elizabeth in the 
 Essex affair, 116. 
 
 his relations with Davies, 118. 
 
 his Wisdom of the Ancients, 134, 
 Bancroft, Bp., 55, 64, 70, 127. 
 Barbara, St, 42, 113-114. 
 Barlow, Dean, 23, 85. 
 Barnes, Barnabe, 125-127. 
 Bentivoglio, Card., 116. 
 Bianca, loS, 124-127. 
 Brabantio, 7, 15. 
 Bradley, A. C, 4, 28. 
 Browning, R. , 74- 
 Bunyan, 2, 105. 
 
 Carlyle, T., 98. 
 
 Cartwright, T., 7- 
 
 Cassio, 122 ; his fair wife, 123. 
 
 Cecil, Sir R., 22. 
 
 Christian Letter, S, 55~^5) ^^ j peroration of, 
 58-59 ; accuses Hooker of pride, 68, 77 ; 
 on the Real Presence, 80, 86 ; on works 
 of supererogation, 89 ; on devils tempt- 
 ing, 91 ; on the choice between atheism 
 and popery, 109. 
 
 Cinthio, Giraldi, 6, 38, 74. 
 
 Coke, Sir E., 26, 49, 52. 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 30, 50, 115. 
 
 Covel, Dr, 53, 57, 137. 
 
 Cunningham, Peter, 5. 
 
 Cyprus, 7, 20, 85. 
 
 Cyril, St, 102 note. 
 
 138 
 
 Davies, John, 66, 117. 
 
 Desdemona, 37-43, 80 ; her excess of gener- 
 osity, 89 ; her white lie, no ; her song 
 boding death, 113 ; meaning of name, 
 
 38.. 
 Dionysius, 91. 
 Disraeli, Isaac, 3, 26. 
 Douce, F., loi. 
 
 Edgar, Eleazer, 119. 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 112, 115-117. 
 
 Epiphanius, 90. 
 
 Essex, Earl of, 33-35, 50-51, 76, Ii5. 
 
 Eusebius, Engl, transl. of, 91, 121. 
 
 Field, Richard, 91, 121. 
 
 Fleming, Sergt. , 49. 
 Foxe, John, 32. 
 
 Gauden, Bp., 129, 130. 
 Given, Welcker, 93 note. 
 Gratiano, 44, 127. 
 Greville, Fulke, 127. 
 
 Hallam, H., 73. 
 
 ' Hamlet,' 3, 6. 
 
 Hampton Court Conference, 7, 21, 22. 
 
 Hanbury, Benj., 56 note. 
 
 Hanmer, Meredith, 91. 
 
 Hanmer, .Sir T., 115. 
 
 Harington, John, 21, 32, 87 note, 107 note, 
 122-124 ; his fair wife, 127. 
 
 Hathaway, Anne, 24. 
 
 Heine, Heinrich, 104. 
 
 Hilary, St, 99. 
 
 Hooker, Richard, his Eccles. Pol. attacked, 
 8 ; view of the Sacraments, 10, 86 ; 
 "the Turks," 19; the Enghsh Mon- 
 tanus, 43, 132 ; writes his book, 52 ; 
 antipathetic to Bacon, 54 ; attacked in 
 the Chr. Let., his marginalia for reply, 
 56 ; accused of Arianism, 58 ; Walton's 
 description of him, 65 ; sermon on 
 pride, 68 ; compared to Satan as an 
 angel of light, 91 ; qualities and in- 
 cidents taken from him for Montano, 
 128-132. 
 
 lago, his principles, 44-48 ; his grievance, 
 48-50 ; his motives, 50-51, 69, his fire- 
 alarm, 66 ; policy of pin-pricks, 67 ; 
 his song and epigrams, 71, 134 ; alludes 
 to the Moor's baptism and sanctimony, 
 
INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 139 
 
 79 ; and to the wine Desdemona drinks, 
 So ; asserts his honesty, S6 ; invokes 
 the divinity of hell, 87 ; tempts with 
 heavenly shows, 89 ; his view of love, 
 91 : warns against jealousy, 97 ; acquires 
 the handkerchief, 99 ; uses it to lead 
 to the door of truth, 103 ; treats the 
 epileptic fit, 106 ; stabs his wife and 
 runs out, 116; practises on Montano, 
 131 ; is left to Montano's censure, 132 ; 
 meaning of his name, 78. 
 
 James I., S, 10, 21, 120. 
 
 James II., 10. 
 
 James, St, 78. 
 
 [eronimo. First Part of, 30. 
 
 Jewel, Bp., 18, 80, 86, 106. 
 
 John Baptist, St, lot. 
 
 Jonson, B., no, 124, 126. 
 
 Keble, John, 8, 56-57. 
 
 ' King Lear,' 4. 
 
 Knolles, Hisl. of Turks, 20, 75. 
 
 Lamb, C, 30. 
 Lambeth Articles, 7, 21. 
 Lander, W. S., 65, 131. 
 Lennox, Mrs, 12. 
 Leontes, 100, 106. 
 Lodovico, 127. 
 Lollard, 9, 31-32. 
 Luccicos, Marcus, 15, 22. 
 Luther, 62, 63. 
 
 Macaulay, I, 12. 
 
 Mandeville, 27, 33. 
 
 Mark, St, 105. 
 
 Marston, John, 27, 102 note. 
 
 Millenary Petition, 7, 20. 
 
 Milton, 100. 
 
 Montano, 8, 43, 128-133. 
 
 Montanus, 43, 132-133. 
 
 Montegut, Emile, 5. 
 
 Nash, Th., 46. 
 
 Newman, Card., 39, 41, 43, 104. 
 Nicene Creed, 82, 103. 
 Nonconformists, 7, 21. 
 
 Othello, 28-36, 66-71 ; origin of the name, 
 75 ; his " sanctimony," 79 ; his baptism, 
 79; his handkerchief, 81-82; his platonic 
 marriage, 92-94 : his jealousy, 97 ; his 
 occupation gone, 100 ; demands ocular 
 
 proof, 102 ; becomes fanatical, 103 ; his 
 wife's moist hand, 104 ; has an epileptic 
 fit, 105 ; remains obsessed thereafter, 
 106; takes his own life, 108; mixes 
 admiration of his wife with his fanati- 
 cism, 109 ; resumes his old sword, 133. 
 Otho the Great, 75. 
 
 Paul, St, 89. 
 Peele, George, 35. 
 Philo, II, 105. 
 Prometheus, 109. 
 
 Rabelais, 3, 30. 
 Rhodes, 6, 7, 14, 20. 
 Ridley, 33. 
 Roderick, Don, 121. 
 Roderigo, 13, 44, 50, 11 7- 122. 
 Rymer, 12, 32. 
 
 Sagittary, 29. 
 Salvini, 29, 109. 
 Sandys, Sir E. , 129. 
 Saravia, 129, 130. 
 Schlegel, 28, 29, loi. 
 Shaftesbury, 32, 38. 
 Sibyl, the Cumsean, 83 note. 
 Snider, Denton, J., 23, 51. 
 Southampton, Earl of, 5 
 Spedding, James, 52, 55. 
 Spenser, 3. 
 Steevens, G., 96. 
 Stephen, Fitzjames, 77. 
 
 'Tempest, The,' 5. 
 Temple Grafton, 27. 
 Tolstoy, 12. 
 Travers, 41, 52. 
 Turks, the, 7, 14, 19, 75- 
 Tyrwhitt, 123. 
 
 Ulrici, 100. 
 
 Venice, Duke of, 14, 22. 
 ' Venus and Adonis,' 27. 
 Voltaire, 31. 
 
 Walton, Izaak, 128. 
 
 Warburton, Bp., 63, 115. 
 
 Whateley, Anne, 24, 27. 
 
 Whitgift, Archbp., 7, 15-17, 23, 24, 40, 
 
 loi, 119. 
 Willet, Andrew, 57. 
 Wordsworth, Chr., 56 note, 57. 
 Wordsworth, W., 86. 
 
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