_ You heard her say herself, it was not I.
_Emil._ 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.
_Emil._ O, the more angel she,
And you the blacker devil!
_Oth._ She turn'd to folly, and she was a whore.
This is a strange passage. What did Shakespeare mean us to feel? One is
astonished that Othello should not be startled, nay thunder-struck, when
he hears such dying words coming from the lips of an obdurate
adulteress. One is shocked by the moral blindness or obliquity which
takes them only as a further sign of her worthlessness. Here alone, I
think, in the scene sympathy with Othello quite disappears. Did
Shakespeare mean us to feel thus, and to realise how completely confused
and perverted Othello's mind has become? I suppose so: and yet Othello's
words continue to strike me as very strange, and also as not _like_
Othello,--especially as at this point he was not in anger, much less
enraged. It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a touch of
personal animus in the passage. One remembers the place in _Hamlet_
(written but a little while before) where Hamlet thinks he is unwilling
to kill the King at his prayers, for fear they may take him to heaven;
and one remembers Shakespeare's irony, how he shows that those prayers
do _not_ go to heaven, and that the soul of this praying murderer is at
that moment as murderous as ever (see p.
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