For nothing human is ever for a moment above the reach or beyond the scope or beneath the notice of his all but superhuman genius. In this very play he sets before mankind forever not only the perfect models of heroic love and honor, of womanly sweetness and courage, of intelligent activity and joyous energy in evil, but also an unsurpassable type of the tragicomic dullard. Roderigo is not only Iago's but (in Dryden's masterly phrase) "God Almighty's fool." And Shakespeare shows the poor devil no more mercy than Iago or than God. You see at once that he was born to be plundered, cudgelled, and killed—if he tries to play the villain—like a dog. No lighter comic relief than this rather grim and pitiless exhibition of the typic fool could have been acceptable or admissible on the stage of so supreme a tragedy.
Such humorous realism—and it is excellent of its kind—as half relieves and half intensifies the horror of Cinthio's tale may serve as well as any other point of difference to show with what matchless tact of transfiguration by selection and rejection the hand of Shakespeare wrought his will and set his mark on the materials left ready for it by the hand of a lesser genius. The ancient waylays and maims the lieutenant on a dark night as he comes from the house of a harlot "with whom he was wont to solace himself"; and when the news gets abroad next morning, and reaches the ears of Disdemona, "she, who was of a loving nature, and thought not that evil should thence befall her, shewed that she had right great sorrow for such a mishap. Hereof the Moor took the worst opinion that might be, and went to find the ancient, and said to him, 'Thou knowest well that my ass of a wife is, in so great trouble for the lieutenant's mishap that she is like to run mad.' 'And how could you,' said he, 'deem otherwise, seeing that he is her soul?' 'Her soul, eh?' replied the Moor. 'I will pluck—that will I—the soul from her body.'"
Shakespeare and his one disciple Webster alone could have afforded to leave this masterly bit of dialogue unused or untranslated. For they alone would so have elevated and ennobled the figure of the protagonist as to make it unimaginable that he could have talked in this tone of his wife and her supposed paramour with the living instrument of his revenge. Could he have done so, he might have been capable of playing the part played by the merciless Moor who allows the ancient to thrash her to death with a stocking stuffed with sand. No later master of realistic fiction can presumably have surpassed the simple force of impression and effect conveyed by this direct and unlovely narrative.
