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Updated: June 4, 2025


Cassio, Montano, and others rush in; Iago's treachery is unmasked, and Othello in despair stabs himself, dying in a last kiss upon his dead wife's lips. In 'Otello' Verdi advanced to undreamed-of heights of freedom and beauty. 'Aida' was a mighty step towards the light, but with 'Otello' he finally shook off the trammels of convention.

Iago's self, or his master, smooth-tongued Belial, could not have managed matters better. The incredulous knight, scarcely able to discover how far it might not still be all a joke, especially after his Yorkshire expedition, rushed up to Lady Dillaway; on her usual sofa, quietly knitting, and thinking of her Maria's second day of happiness.

What words could have said so much as the dumb show with which he signifies that terrible fact of which he can neither ask nor hear in words? And who can doubt when he hears that cry of agony that bursts from his lips at Iago's gross confirmation of his suggestion that it is the cry of a man stabbed to the heart?

Rumor's hundred tongues wag with the announcement, that his Excellency is no longer inconsolable for his wife's death; and desires to testify to the happiness of conjugal relations, by a renewal of the sweet bondage; a curiously subtile compliment to the deceased. If I may be pardoned the enormity of the heresy, I think Shakspeare blundered supremely, when he gave Iago's soul to a man.

To our northern thought, the free and noble nature of the Moor is wrecked through a single infirmity, by a fiend in the human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago's keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable as Othello's daring appears to us, and Othello himself little better than a fool and a savage.

His worst villains are all theorists, who cheat and murder by the book of arithmetic. They are men of principle, and are ready to expound their principle and to defend it in argument. They follow it, without remorse or mitigation, wherever it leads them. It is Iago's logic that makes him so terrible; his mind is as cold as a snake and as hard as a surgeon's knife.

Sometimes he thought his wife honest, and at times he thought her not so; sometimes he thought Iago just, and at times he thought him not so; then he would wish that he had never known of it; he was not the worse for her loving Cassio, so long as he knew it not: torn to pieces with these distracting thoughts, he once laid hold on Iago's throat, and demanded proof of Desdemona's guilt, or threatened instant death for his having belied her.

In his obvious though silent suffering at the disgrace and dismissal of Cassio; in the dazed, forlorn agony that blended with his more active passion throughout the scene of Iago's wicked conquest of his credulity; in his occasional quick relapses into blind and sweet fidelity to the old belief in Desdemona; in his unquenchable tenderness for her, through the delirium and the sacrifice; and in the tone of soft, romantic affection always spiritualised, never sensual that his deep and loving sincerity diffused throughout the work, was shown the grand unity of the embodiment; a unity based on the simple passion of love.

The declamations of Marina produce no effect on the action, and the vindictiveness of Loridano, though effectively pointed in the closing words, "He has paid me," is not rendered interesting, either by a well established injury, or by any trace of Iago's subtle genius. In the same volume appeared Sardanapalus, written in the previous May, and dedicated to Goethe.

The second act opens with recitative which reveals all of Iago's malignity, and is followed by his monologue, in which he sings a mock Credo which is Satanic in utterance. It is accompanied with tremendous outbursts of trumpets, and leads up to a furious declamatory duet with Othello. The next number brings a grateful change.

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