ABSTRACT
The question of the laws and nature of tragedy, so constantly agitated for some two centuries, from the later Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, has long ceased to occupy much attention, except in more or less scholastic handlings of its great text, the Poetics of Aristotle. The tragic object in Othello is not Desdemona, save in a minor degree, though here also Shakespeare has pointed to the truth in his royal laconic way, putting the whole thing in one line. From the first appearance of the play till a period probably within living memory, it was not merely the popular but to a very great extent the critical ideal of a tragedy. For the adequacy, the necessity, and at the same time the justice of the true tragic connection of doing and suffering we need not go beyond Shakespeare.
