There is a
decided difference here between _Othello_ and our three other tragedies,
but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere private
person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning we see him
in the Council-Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his high
position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no
longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great
world, and his last speech begins,
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know it.[2]
And this characteristic of Shakespeare's tragedies, though not the most
vital, is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every
death-bed is the scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning,
but it would not be true if the word 'tragedy' bore its dramatic sense.
The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the
same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be
so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the
triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His
fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls
suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall
produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the
omnipotence--perhaps the caprice--of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of
private life can possibly rival.
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