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Updated: June 24, 2025
Desdemona loved the Moor, though he was black, and devoted her heart and fortunes to his valiant parts and qualities.
The fact was he had parted with Desdemona that evening under rather painful circumstances. In the early evening he had journeyed with her to the cave she carrying a large mutton-bone which she made no pretense of offering to share with her mate and her attitude throughout had been one of really unaccountable chilliness and reserve.
The new Garcia, who dashed so boldly into the lists, was a young, untried, inexperienced girl, who had never yet appeared in opera. One can fancy the excitement and curiosity when Pauline stepped before the footlights of the King's Theatre, May 9, 1839, as Desdemona in "Otello," which had been the vehicle of Malibran's first introduction to the English public.
Othello, mad with rage and jealousy, strikes Desdemona to the earth, and drives every one from the hall. Then his overtaxed brain reels, and he sinks swooning to the floor.
Juliet, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and all the rest of 'em, whatever their names are, might as well have no legs at all, for anything the audience know about it, Pip. Why, in that respect they're all Miss Biffins to the audience, Pip. I'll tell you what it is. What the people call dramatic poetry is a collection of sermons. Do I go to the theatre to be lectured? No, Pip.
Let it suffice to say, that, by universal consent, I was preferred to Kean; and the only fault the most critical observer could find to the representative of Desdemona, was a rather unlady-like fondness for snuff. But, whatever little demerits our acting might have displayed, were speedily forgotten in a champagne supper.
Perhaps a woman may play Hamlet with a less shocking effect than a man may play Desdemona, but all the same she must not play Hamlet at all. That sublime ideal is the property of the human imagination, and may not be profaned by a talent enamoured of the impossible. No harm could be done by the broadest burlesque, the most irreverent travesty, for these would still leave the ideal untouched.
To throw out still more clearly the angelic purity of Desdemona, Shakspeare has in Emilia associated with her a companion of doubtful virtue. From the sinful levity of this woman it is also conceivable that she should not confess the abstraction of the handkerchief when Othello violently demands it back: this would otherwise be the circumstance in the whole piece the most difficult to justify.
His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle King, too, is gone in good time.
As a matter of fact, the evening meeting with Desdemona, the frolic on the Downs, and, at the last, the running down of that rabbit, had combined to stir Finn more than anything else had stirred him since he had fought for the Master's life in a drought-smitten corner of the bush in Australia.
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