SCENE IV.--_The Grove.

TIME--_After Lunch._

NORTH--TALBOYS--SEWARD--BULLER.

SEWARD.

On rising, sir, to----

NORTH.

Sit down--no gentleman speaks on his legs before, at, or after meals in a private Party.

SEWARD.

Except in Scotland. On sitting down, sir, to state MY THEORY, I trust that I shall not lay myself open to the im----

NORTH.

Speak with your natural tone as if you were sitting, Seward, and not with that Parliamentary sing-song in which Statesmen, with their coat-tails perked up behind, declaim on the State of Europe--

SEWARD.

I IMAGINE, SIR, THAT SHAKSPEARE ASSUMED THE MARRIAGE TO HAVE TAKEN PLACE SOME TIME BEFORE THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE PLAY--SUFFICIENTLY LONG TO ADMIT THE POSSIBILITY OF A COURSE OF GUILT BEFORE THE PLAY OPENS. I imagine that, with this general idea in his mind, he gave his full and unfettered attention to the working out of THE PLOT, which has no reference to the time, circumstances, or history of the Marriage, but relates exclusively to the Moor's Jealousy. Therefore the indications of past time at Venice are vague, and rarely scattered through the Dialogue.

TALBOYS.

A more astounding discovery indeed, Seward, than any yet announced by that Stunner, Christopher North. Pardon me, sir.

NORTH.

We have said our say, Shirra; let the Lord-Lieutenant of his County say his--

TALBOYS.

And the Chairman of the Quarter-Sessions, and President of the Agricultural Society of the Land's End say his.

BULLER.

I can beat you at Chess.

TALBOYS.

YOU!!!

NORTH.

Gentlemen, let there be no bad blood.

SEWARD.

Supposing that this was Shakspeare's general idea of the Plot, I would first beg your attention to the fact that the marriage has taken place--none of us know how long--_before the beginning of the Play_.

TALBOYS.

The same night--the same night.

SEWARD.

I said--none of us know how long; and as you are a Lawyer, Mr Talboys--

TALBOYS.

For goodness' sake, my dear Seward, don't mister me--

SEWARD.

The only evidence, my dear Talboys, as to the history of the marriage is that given by Roderigo in the First Scene. He, with the most manifest anxiety to prove himself an honest witness, declares that now, at midnight, Desdemona had eloped--NOT WITH _the Moor_, but with no "worse nor better guard, but with a knave of common hire, a gondolier, _to_," &c., &c. She has fled _alone_ from her father's house; and Roderigo, being interrogated, "Are they married, think ye?" answers, "Truly I think they are."

TALBOYS.

What do you say to Iago's saying to Cassio--

"Faith he _to-night_ has boarded a land Carrack: If it prove lawful prize, he's made for ever. _Cassio._ I do not understand. _Iago._ He's married."

SEWARD.

It cannot be inferred, from these words, that this was the first occasion on which Desdemona and Othello had come together as man and wife. The words are quite consistent with the supposition that their marriage had taken place some time before; also quite consistent with Iago's knowledge of that event. It was not his cue or his humour to say more than he did. Why should he?

TALBOYS.

It cannot be inferred! It can--I infer it. And pray, how do you account for Othello saying to Desdemona, on the day of their arrival at Cyprus,

"The purchase made--the fruits are to ensue; That profit's yet to come 'twixt me and you."

SEWARD.

"The purchase made"--refers to the price which Othello had paid for connubial delight with Desdemona awaiting him at Cyprus. That price was the peril which he had undergone during his stormy voyage. In his exuberant satisfaction, simply expressing a self-evident truth, that his happiness was _yet_ before him. Had Desdemona been then a virgin bride, Othello would hardly have used such language. Iago speaks in his usual characteristic coarse way--so no need to say a word more on the subject.

TALBOYS.

Very well. Be it so. But why should such a private marriage have been resorted to; and if privacy was desirable at first, what change had occurred to cause the public declaration of it?

SEWARD.

Othello had been nine months unemployed in war--the Venetian State was at peace--and he had been in constant intercourse with the Brabantios.

"Her father lov'd me--oft invited me;"

and he "took _once_ a pliant hour" to ask Desdemona to be his wife. That "once" cannot refer to the day on which the Play commences; and that their marriage took place some time before, is alike reconcileable with the character of the "gentle Lady," and with that of the impetuous Hero.

TALBOYS.

Truly!

SEWARD.

Still, a private marriage is, under any circumstances, a questionable proceeding; and our great Dramatist was desirous that as little of the questionable as possible should either be or appear in the conduct of the "Divine Desdemona;" and therefore he has left the private marriage very much in the shade.

TALBOYS.

Very much in the shade indeed.

SEWARD.

Her duplicity must be admitted, and allowance must be made for it. It was wrong, but not in the least unnatural, and perfectly excusable--

TALBOYS.

No.

SEWARD.

And grievously expiated.

TALBOYS.

It was indeed. Poor dear Desdemona!

SEWARD.

It is, you know, part of the proof of her capacity for guilt, that she so ingeniously deceived her father.

TALBOYS.

But why reveal it now?

SEWARD.

Circumstances are changed. The Cyprus wars have broke out, and Othello is about to be commissioned to take the command of the Venetian force.

"I do know, the State Cannot with safety cast him, for he's embarked With such loud reason to the Cyprus wars, Which even now stand in act, that for their souls Another of his fathom have they not To lead this business."

It was therefore necessary that the marriage should be declared, if Desdemona was to accompany her husband to Cyprus. And the elopement from her father _to_ her husband did take place just in time.

TALBOYS.

Is that what people call plausible?

SEWARD.

All the difficulties of Time are thus removed in a moment. In a blaze of light we see LONG TIME AT VENICE--SHORT TIME AT CYPRUS.

BULLER.

LONG TIME AT VENICE--SHORT TIME AT CYPRUS. That's the Ticket. You Scotsmen are not wholly without Insight; but for seeing into the heart of the bole--or of the stone--

TALBOYS.

Give me a Devonshire Cider-swiller or a Cornish Miner.

NORTH.

What! Can't we discuss a Great Question in the Drama without these unseemly personal and national broils. For shame, Talboys.

TALBOYS.

You Scotsmen indeed!

"Nay, but he prated, And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms Against YOUR HONOUR."

NORTH.

My dear Seward, let's hear how you support your Theory.

SEWARD.

A great deal of weight, my dear Mr North, is to be attached to the calm tone--the husbandlike and matronlike demeanour of Othello and Desdemona when confronted with the Senate. That scene certainly impresses one with the conviction that they had been man and wife for a considerable period of time.

NORTH.

Very good, Seward--very good.

SEWARD.

I do indeed think, sir, that the bride and bridegroom show much more composure throughout the whole of that Scene, than is very reconcileable with the idea that this was their nuptial night. Othello's "natural and prompt alacrity" in undertaking the wars was scarcely complimentary to his virgin Spouse upon this supposition; and Desdemona's cool distinguishings between the paternal and marital claims on her duty seem also somewhat too matronly for the occasion.

NORTH.

Very good--very good--my dear Seward, I like your observation much, that the demeanour of the married pair before the Senate has a stamp of composure. That is finely felt; but I venture to aver, my dear friend, that we must otherwise understand it. The dignity of their spirits it is that holds them both composed. Invincible self-collectedness is by more than one person in the Play held up for a characteristic quality of Othello. To a mind high and strong, which Desdemona's is, the exigency of a grand crisis, which overthrows weaker and lower minds, produces composure; from a sense of the necessity for self-possession; and involuntarily from the tension of the powers--their sole direction to the business that passes--which leaves no thought free to stray into disorder, and the inquietude of personal regards. Add, on the part of Othello, the gravity, and on that of Desdemona the awe of the Presence in which they stand, speak, and act; and you have ennobling and sufficing tragical, that is loftily and pathetically poetical, motives for that elate presence of mind which both show. Now all the greatness and grace vanish, if you suppose them calm simply because they have been married these two months. That is a reason fit for Thalia, not for Melpomene.

TALBOYS.

Let any one English among all the two of you answer that.

SEWARD.

The Duke says--

"You must hence to-night. _Desdemona._ To-night, my Lord? _Othello._ With all my heart."

This faint expression of Desdemona's slight surprise and reluctance, and no more--is I allow--natural and delicate in her--whether wife, bride, or Maid--but Othello's "with all my heart" is--

TALBOYS.

Equally worthy of Othello. You know it is.

NORTH.

My dear Seward--do the Doge--Brabantio--the Senate understand and believe what Othello has been telling them--and that he has now disclosed to them the fact of a private marriage with Desdemona, of some weeks' or months' standing? Is that their impression?

SEWARD.

I cannot say.

NORTH.

I can. Or has Othello been reserved--cautious--crafty in all his apparent candour--and Desdemona equally so? Are they indeed oldish-married folk?

TALBOYS.

Shocking--shocking. That Scene in the Council Chamber of itself deals your "Theory!" its death-blow.

SEWARD.

I look on it in quite another light. I shall be glad to know what you think is meant by Desdemona's to the Duke

"If I be left behind, _The rites for which I love him are denied me_."

What are the _rites_ which are thus all comprehensive of Desdemona's love for Othello? The phrase is, to the habit of our ears, perhaps somewhat startling; yet five lines before she said truly "I saw Othello's visage in his mind"--a love of spirit for spirit. And again--

"To his honour and his valiant parts Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate."

I think they had been married some time.

TALBOYS.

The word _rites_ is the very word most fitting the Lady's lips--used in a generous, free, capacious sense--as of the solace entire which the wife of a soldier has, following him; as to dress his wounds, wind his laurel, hear his counsels, cheer his darker mood, smile away the lowering of the Elements--

SEWARD.

You won't understand me.

NORTH.

No--no--no. It won't go down. I have opened my mouth far and wide, and, it won't go down. Our friend Isaac Widethroat himself could not bolt it. The moral impossibility would choke him--that Othello would marry Desdemona to leave her at her Father's House, for which most perilous and entangling proceeding, quite out of his character, no motive is offered, or imaginable. The love-making might go on long--and I accept a good interval since he drew from her the prayer for his history. The pressure of the war might give a decisive moment for the final step, which must have been in agitation for some time--on Desdemona's behalf and part, who would require some persuasion for a step so desperate, and would not at once give up all hope of her, father's consent, who "loved" Othello.

TALBOYS.

If they were married, how base and unmanly _to steal one's wedded Wife out of one's Father-in-law's house_! The only course was to have gone in the middle of the day to Brabantio and say, "this we have done"--or "this I have done. Forgive us, if you can--we are Man and Wife." Men less kingly than Othello have often done it. To steal in order to marry was a temptation with a circumstantial necessity--a gallant adventure in usual estimation.

NORTH.

The thing most preposterous to me in a long marriage at Venice, is the continued lying position in which it places Othello and Desdemona towards her father. Two months--say--or three or four--of difficult deception! when the uppermost characteristic of both is clear-souledness--the most magnanimous sincerity. By that, before anything else, are they kindred and fit for one another. On that, before anything else, is the Tragedy grounded--on his unsuspicious openness which is drawn, against its own nature, to suspect her purity that lies open as earth's bosom to the sun. And she is to be killed for a dissembler! In either, immense contrast between the person and fate. That These Two should truckle to a domestic lie!

TALBOYS.

No. The Abduction and Marriage were of one stroke--one effort--one plot. When Othello says, "That I have ta'en away--that I have married her"--he tells literally and simply that which has happened as it happened, in the order of events.

SEWARD.

Why should not Othello marry Desdemona, and keep her at her father's, as theorised?

NORTH.

It is out of his character. He has the spirit of command, of lordship, of dominion--an _animus imperiosus_. This element must be granted to fit him for his place; and it is intimated, and is consistent with and essential to his whole fabric of mind. Then, he would not put that which belonged to him out of his power, in hostile keeping--his wife and not his wife. It is contrary to his great love, which desires and would feed upon her continual presence. And against his discretion, prudence, or common sense, to risk that Brabantio, discovering, might in fury take sudden violent measures--shut her up in a convent, or turn her into the streets, or who knows what--kill her.

TALBOYS.

Then the insupportable consideration and question, how do they come together as man and wife? Does she come to his bedroom at his private Lodgings, or his quarters at the Sagittary? Or does he go to hers at her father's, climbing a garden wall every night like Romeo, bribing the porter, or trusting Ancilla? You cannot figure it out any way without _degradation_, and something ludicrous; and a sense of being entangled in the impracticable.

NORTH.

The least that can be said is, that it invests the sanctimony of marriage with the air of an illicit amour.

TALBOYS.

Then the high-minded Othello running the perpetual and imminent risk of being caught thieving--slipping through loop-holes--mouse-holes--key-holes. What in Romeo and Juliet is romance, between Othello and Desdemona is almost pollution.

NORTH.

What a desolating of the MANNERS of the Play! Will you then, in order to evade a difficulty of the mechanical construction, clog and whelm the poetry, and moral greatness of the Play, with a preliminary debasement? Introduce your Hero and Heroine under a cloud?

TALBOYS.

And how can you show that Othello could not at any moment have taken her away, as at last you suppose him to do, having a motive? Mind--he knows that the wars are on--he does not know he shall be sent for that night. He does not know that he may not have to keep her a week at his quarters.

NORTH.

My dear Seward--pray, meditate but for a moment on these words of Desdemona in the Council Chamber--

"My noble Father, I do perceive here A DIVIDED DUTY: My life and education both do learn me How to respect you; you are the LORD OF DUTY, I am hitherto your Daughter: BUT HERE'S MY HUSBAND; And so _much duty as my mother showed To you_, preferring you before her Father, So much I challenge that I may profess Due to the Moor, my Lord."

These are weighty words--of grave and solemn import--and the time has come when Desdemona the Daughter is to be Desdemona the Wife. She tells simply and sedately--affectionately and gratefully--the great primal Truth of this our human and social life. Hitherto her Father has been to her the Lord of Duty--the Lord of Duty henceforth is to be her Husband. Othello, up to that night, had been but her Lover; and up to that night--for the hidden wooing was nothing to be ashamed of or repented--there had been to her no "divided Duty"--to her Father's happiness had been devoted her whole filial heart. But had she been a married woman for weeks or months before, how insincere--how hypocritical had that appeal been felt by herself to be, as it issued from her lips! The Duty had, in that case, been "divided" before--and in a way not pleasant for us to think of--to her Father violated or extinct.

TALBOYS.

I engage, Seward, over and above what our Master has made manifest, to show that though this Theory of yours would remove some difficulties attending the time in Cyprus, it would leave others just where they are--and create many more.

NORTH.

Grant that Othello and Desdemona must be married for two months before he murders her--that our hearts and imaginations require it. The resemblance to the ordinary course of human affairs asks it. We cannot bear that he shall extinguish her and himself--both having sipped only, and not quaffed from the cup of hymeneal felicity. Your soul is outraged by so harsh and malignant a procedure of the Three Sisters. Besides, in proper poetical equilibration, he should have enjoyed to the full, with soul and with body, the happiness which his soul annihilates. And men do not kill their wives the first week. It would be too exceptional a case. Extended time is required for the probability--the steps of change in the heart of Othello require it--the construction and accumulation of proofs require it--the wheel of events usually rolls with something of leisure and measure. So is it in the real World--so must it seem to be on the Stage--else no verisimilitude--no "veluti in speculum." "Two mouths shall elapse between marriage and murder," says Shakspeare--going to write. They must pass at Venice, or they must pass at Cyprus. Place Shakspeare in this position, and which will he choose? If at Venice, a main requiring condition is not satisfied. For in the fits and snatches of the clandestine marriage, Othello has never possessed with full embrace, and heart overflowing, the happiness which he destroys. If an earthquake is to ruin a palace, it must be built up to the battlements and pinnacles; furnished, occupied, made the seat of Pleasure, Pomp, and Power; and then shaken into heaps--or you have but half a story. Only at Cyprus Othello _possesses_ Desdemona. There where he is Lord of his Office, Lord over the Allegiance of soldier and civilian--of a whole population--Lord of the Island, which, sea-surrounded, is as a world of itself--Lord of his will--Lord of his Wife.

TALBOYS.

I feel, sir, in this view much poetical demonstration--although mathematical none--and in such a case Poetry is your only Principia.

NORTH.

Your hand. But if, my dear Seward, Shakspeare elects time at Venice, he wilfully clouds his two excellent Persons with many shadows of indecorum, and clogs his Action with a procedure and a state of affairs, which your Imagination loses itself in attempting to define--with improbabilities--with impracticabilities--with impossibilities. If he was resolute to have a well-sustained logic of Time, I say it was better for him to have his Two Months distinct at Cyprus. I say that, with his creative powers, if he was determined to have Two Calendar Months, from the First of May to the First of July, and then in One Day distinctly the first suspicion sown and the murder done, nothing could have been easier to him than to have imagined, and indicated, and hurried over the required gap of time; and that he would have been bound to prefer this course to that inexplicable marriage and no marriage at Venice.

BULLER.

How he clears his way!

NORTH.

But Shakspeare, my dear Boys, had a better escape. Wittingly or unwittingly, he exempted himself from the obligation of walking by the Calendar. He knew--or he felt that the fair proportionate structure of the Action required liberal time at Cyprus. He took it; for there it is, recognised in the consciousness of every sitting or standing spectator. He knew, or he felt, that the passionate expectation to be sustained in the bosoms of his audience required a rapidity of movement in his Murder-Plot, and it moves on feet of fire.

SEWARD.

Venice is beginning to fade from my ken.

NORTH.

The first of all necessities towards the Criticism of the Play, Seward, is to convince yourself that there was not--could not be a time of concealed marriage at Venice--that it is not hinted, and is not inferable.

BULLER.

Shall we give in, Seward?

SEWARD.

Yes.

NORTH.

You must go to the TREMENDOUS DOUBLE TIME AT CYPRUS, knowing that the solution is to be had there, or nowhere. If you cast back a longing lingering look towards Venice, you are lost. Put mountains and waves between you and the Queen of the Sea. Help yourself through at Cyprus, or perish in the adventure.

TALBOYS.

Through that Mystery, you alone, sir, are the Man to help us through--and you must.

NORTH.

Not now--to-morrow. Till then be revolving the subject occasionally in your minds.

TALBOYS.

Let's off to the Pike-ground at Kilchurn.

_Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._

[Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.]