16 
LAND 6? WATER 
November 21, 1918 
Life and Letters 6y J. C Squire 
"The Blackamoor 
WHEN I was writing Iiere recently on "Q's" 
new book about Shakespeare, I made some 
remarks about Othello. I will not inflict a 
literal repetition of these upon my readers 
(if, as the modest editor said, any such there be), 
but the gist of them was that the end of the play was not 
convincing. I argued that, although some men might kill 
their wives out of jealousy, the Othello whom we have got 
to know in the play, passionate though he is, would not 
have done it. All round, it is not an inevitable, but a forced 
— even a faked — ending, however this may be disguised by 
the verisimilitude of Shakespeare's detail and the natural 
splendours of his language. I had never e,\amined the 
sources of the play, but I suggested that probably the plot 
as Shakespeare found it hampered him : that Othello mur- 
dered his wife "in the original," and that the dramatist 
made him do it in his play in spite of the fact that as the 
play developed Othello's character grew into something 
quite unlike that of the murderer. I have now looked up 
the original, and find confirmation of the theory. 
The story is taken from a collection of fables {Hecatom- 
mithi) by Giovanbattista Giraldi, called Cinthio, who was a 
University professor at Ferrara, and published his book in 
1565. Each tale was supposed to illustrate a moral virtue, 
but which virtue was illustrated by the story of Othello my 
informant (the Yale Shakespeare) sayeth not. The book 
was not translated into English, so far as we know ; the 
conclusion being (we are used to these puzzling deductions 
about Shakespeare) that either Shakespeare knew 'Italian, 
French, or Spanish, or else he heard the story at second 
hand. In Cinthio's tale, "Disdemona" is the only person 
vrithaname. Othello is "the Moor" ; lago is " the Ensign " ; 
Cassio, "the Captain" ; Emilia, "the Ensign's wife" ; and 
Bianca, "a courtesan." Disdemona, against her parents' 
wishes, marries the valiant Moorish general, and insists on 
going with him to Cyprus. Mark what follows. lago falls 
in love with Disdemona, who is attached to lago's wife. 
Failing to seduce her, lago ascribes his failure to Cassio. 
Cassio gets into disgrace for striking a soldier ; Disdemona 
intercedes for him, and this gives lago his cue. He tells 
Othello that Disdemona is in love with Cassio and "has 
taken an aversion to your blackness." The handkerchief 
plot is developed, and the Moor, convinced, "fell to medi- 
tating how he should put his wife to death, and Hkewise the 
Captain, so that their death should not he laid to his charge. 
****** 
Then, lago and Othello together "consulted of one means 
and another" — poison and daggers — to kill Disdemona, but 
•ould come to no conclusions. At last the ingenious Ensign 
said : " A plan comes to my mind, which will give you satis- 
faction and raise cause for no suspicion. It is this : the 
house in which you live is very old, and the ceiling of your 
•hamber has many cracks ; I propose we take a stocking 
filled with sand, and beat Disdemona with it till she dies ; 
thus will her body bear no signs of violence. When she is 
dead we can pull down a portion of the ceiling, and thus 
make it seem as if a rafter falling on her head had killed the 
lady. Suspicion cannot rest on you, since, all men will 
impute her death to accident." The Moor was pleased with 
this advice, and accepted it. One night, when he and Dis- 
demona were in bed, the Ensign, who had been concealed m 
a closet opening into the chamber, made a noise, according 
to plan. The Moor said to his wife: "Did you not hear 
that noise ? " 
"Indeed, I heard it," she replied. 
"Rise," said the Moor, "and see what 'tis.' 
Disdemona got out of bed, and as she approached the closet 
the other villain rushed out "and beat her cruelly with the 
bag of sand across her back, upon which Disdemona fell to 
the ground, scarcely able to draw her breath " ; but with the 
little voice she had left, she called upon the Moor for aid. 
But the Moor, leaping from the bed, exclaimed: "Thou 
wickedest of women, thus has thy falseness found its just 
reward." The poor lady protests her innocence, but lago 
keeps pounding her until she is senseless. The two men 
then lay her on the bed, wounded her head, and pulled down 
the ceiling of the room. Then the Moor shouts that the 
house is falling down, and the neighbours come running in 
to find Disdemona dead under a rafter. The two murderers 
escape suspicion at the' time. Othello gets to hate lago, 
fears to kill him, but disgraces him. lago then tells Cassio 
about the crime, and both the murderers come ultimately 
to bad ends. "Thus did Heaven avenge the innocence of 
Disdemona" — and demonstrate, as I suppose, the Italian 
moralist contends, that it is unwise and unsafe to murder 
one's wife. 
This plot, accepted as Shakespeare's chief source, illu- 
minates three remarkable things. The first is Shakespeare's 
genius for clothing bare bones ; the second is his wonderful 
sense for noticing weaknesses in his originals, and remedying 
them ; and the third is his occasional failure (as I choose to 
think it) to let that sense guide him all the way. He saw 
that Cinthio's Othello was quite impossible as a hero. He 
could not be kept on that footing with lago ; the disgustingly 
calculated confederate murder was impossible ; Othello 
could not, if he was to obtain any sympathy, be the sort of 
man who would survive and indulge in recriminations with a 
blackmailing accomplice. Turn to the death-scene in the play : 
It is the cause, it is the cause, my sou), ; 
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars I 
It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood. 
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow. 
And smooth as monumental alabaster. 
Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men. 
Put out the hght, and then put out the light : 
If I quench thee, the flaming minister, 
I can again thy former light restore. 
Should I repent me ; but once put out thy light 
Thou cunningst pattern of excelling nature. 
I know not where is that Promethean heat 
That can thy light relume. 
So to the most beautiful and awful dialogue, the greatest 
dialogue in Shakespeare, and its close " But while I say one 
prayer!" "It is too late." That is what takes the place of 
Cinthio's abomination. Cinthio was scrapped. Othello's charac- 
ter was remade. He grew, under Shakespeare's hands, one 
of the noblest and most generous of men, a husband 
worthy of his wife. But he grew too noble and generous, 
and though Shakespeare used all the resources of his incom- 
parable art to palliate and explain the crime, though the 
murder in the play is committed by a demented man whose 
reason has temporarily been destroyed by the breaking of 
his ideal, and who immediately afterwards kills himself in 
remorse : 
I kiss'd thee ere I kiU'd thee ; no way but this. 
Killing myself to die upon a kiss. 
he did not succeed in making us feel that the thing, granted 
the characters, had to happen. Othello, I am heretic enough 
to think, should have ended happil}^ and been grouped with 
the "Comedies." But though Shakespeare took every sort 
of liberty with what, when he found it, was little more than 
a crude anecdote, it did not occur to him, or he did not choose, 
to alter the end, which — when he first began the play — was 
no doubt the thing which, by its dramatic possibilities, 
attracted him and towards which he was all the time work- 
ing up. 
***** « 
It is one more illustration of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's 
theory that Shakespeare was occasionally hampered by his 
plots. Sir Arthur's own chief illustration is drawn from the 
Merchant of Venice, where the silly arrangements about the 
caskets and the pound of flesh— ^which would never have 
sprung from the imagination of a Shakespeare, but were 
indolently retained since they were found in his original — 
tied him up badly, crippled his characterisation, and com- 
pelled him to concentrate upon a few persons and a few 
scenes for his really great effects. The conclusion is that, 
like Homer, Shakespeare sometimes nods : an admission 
that need not be left to those iconoclasts who, not knowing 
the greatest plays and the greatest poetry in the world when 
they see them, spend their time attempting to convince 
people that the general reverence for Shakespeare is absurd 
and that his plays are no better than anyone else's. The 
late Tolstoy was one of these. 
