belief. If this belief be well-founded it must greatly modify
his character as a purely wanton and mischievous criminal, a
supreme villain, and lower correspondingly the character of
Othello as an honourable and high-minded man. If it be a morbid
suspicion, having no ground in fact, a mental obsession, then
Iago becomes abnormal and consequently more or less irre-

sponsible. But this suggestion of Emilia's faithlessness made in
the early part of the play is never followed up by the dramatist,
and the spectator is left in complete uncertainty as to whether
there be any truth or not in Iago's suspicion. If Othello has
played his Ancient false, that is an extenuating circumstance in
the otherwise extraordinary guilt of Iago, and would no doubt be
accorded to him as such, were he on trial before a French jury.

The most successful, and therefore perhaps the greatest, criminal
in Shakespeare is King Claudius of Denmark. His murder of his
brother by pouring a deadly poison into his ear while sleeping,
is so skilfully perpetrated as to leave no suspicion of foul
play. But for a supernatural intervention, a contingency against
which no murderer could be expected to have provided, the crime
of Claudius would never have been discovered. Smiling, jovial,
genial as M. Derues or Dr. Palmer, King Claudius might have gone
down to his grave in peace as the bluff hearty man of action,
while his introspective nephew would in all probability have
ended his days in the cloister, regarded with amiable contempt by
his bustling fellowmen. How Claudius got over the great dif-

ficulty of all poisoners, that of procuring the necessary poison
without detection, we are not told; by what means he distilled