4.]
It is the imagining of the sensual act that drives him to incoherence
and the verge of madness, as it drove Othello. In all these characters
Shakespeare is only recalling the stages of the passion that desolated
his life.
The part that imagination usually plays in tormenting the jealous man
with obscene pictures is now played by Iago; the first scene of the
fourth act is this erotic self-torture put in Iago's mouth. As Othello's
passion rises to madness, as the self-analysis becomes more and more
intimate and personal, we have Shakespeare's re-lived agony clothing
itself in his favourite terms of expression:
"O! it comes o'er my memory,
As doth the raven o'er the infected house,
Boding to all,--he had my handkerchief."
The interest swings still higher; the scene in which Iago uses Cassio's
conceit and laughter to exasperate further the already mad Othello is
one of the notable triumphs of dramatic art. But just as the quick
growth of his jealousy, and its terrible sensuality, have shown us that
Othello is not the self-contained master of his passions that he
pretends to be and that Shakespeare wishes us to believe, so this scene,
in which the listening Othello rages in savagery, reveals to us an
intense femininity of nature.
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