Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem.
Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture;
how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut
of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a
mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In
no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius
more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. We all remember
how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture,
and thus addresses them:
"Soft you; a word or two, before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know 't;
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum.
Pages:
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71