In this presentation, Shakespeare flashes the sense of life
with all its complexities of heart and brain into us. He does not
stand, as it were aside, as a commentator on the faults or weaknesses
of his characters, but he wafts us out of our circumscribed lives, out
of our limitation of thought, we know not how, into an atmosphere
quivering with passion, and felt by us all the keener, because we
recognise that the Poet never thought about _us_ at all. He excites
our sympathies by his own intuitions into the clashing ideas, which he
represents in the tragedy of a passionately loving and a jealous
nature. We learn truths, not of fact, but of life, focussed and
arranged as an artist arranges them, and permeated with that strange
sense of wonder which only Life can give. We feel the suggestion of an
inevitable dim something beyond, to explain the unexplainable, the
tragedy of character, and the tragedy of circumstance.
These make the great crises which break up lives. But the play goes on
with all the wild force of life itself. We feel the Idea of jealousv
forming itself in the noble nature of Othello, and bringing with it
anguish, the bitterer throes of life, those intense and hopeless
moments when struggle only makes the coil close tighter round the
victim.
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