indignation (‘Out, strumpet! Weep’st thou for him to my face?’) that ‘it is too late.’
(2) V. ii. 286 f.
[Wounds Iago.If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee.
Lod. Wrench his sword from him.
Iago. I bleed, sir, but not killed.
Are Iago’s strange words meant to show his absorption of interest in himself amidst so much anguish? I think rather he is meant to be alluding to Othello’s words, and saying, with a cold contemptuous smile, ‘You see he is right; I am a devil.’
NOTE O.
OTHELLO ON DESDEMONA’S LAST WORDS.
I have said that the last scene of Othello, though terribly painful, contains almost nothing to diminish the admiration and love which heighten our pity for the hero (p. 198). I said ‘almost’ in view of the following passage (V. ii. 123 ff):
Des. Nobody; I myself. Farewell:
[Dies.Commend me to my kind lord: O, farewell!
Oth. Why, how should she be murder’d?[1]
Emil. Alas, who knows?
Oth. 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
- ↑ He alludes to her cry, ‘O falsely, falsely murder’d!’
