criminals that ever breathed and the worthy father of a criminal
son--was no doubt forced to a certain extent on Richard by the
exigencies of his situation, one of those crimes to which bad men
are driven in order to secure the fruits of other crimes. But
the Richard of Shakespeare is no child of circumstance. He
espouses deliberately a career of crime, as deliberately as Peace
or Holmes or Butler; he sets out "determined to prove a villain,"
to be "subtle, false and treacherous," to employ to gain his ends
"stern murder in the dir'st degree." The character is sometimes
criticised as being overdrawn and unreal. It may not be true to
the Richard of history, but it is very true to crime, and to the
historical criminal of the Borgian or Prussian type, in which
fraud and violence are made part of a deliberate system of so-
called statecraft.

Shakespeare got nearer to what we may term the domestic as
opposed to the political criminal when he created Iago. In their
envy and dislike of their fellowmen, their contempt for humanity
in general, their callousness to the ordinary sympathies of human
nature, Robert Butler, Lacenaire, Ruloff are witnesses to the
poet's fidelity to criminal character in his drawing of the
Ancient. But there is a weakness in the character of Iago
regarded as a purely instinctive and malignant criminal; indeed
it is a weakness in the consistency of the play. On two
occasions Iago states explicitly that Othello is more than
suspected of having committed adultery with his wife, Emilia, and
that therefore he has a strong and justifiable motive for being
revenged on the Moor. The thought of it he describes as
"gnawing his inwards." Emilia's conversation with Desdemona
in the last act lends some colour to the correctness of Iago's