Act i. Sc. 3, and compare them with the speech of Othello in Act iv. Sc. 2,
Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction.
He appealed to any expert whether this was not in Shakespeare's easy fourth budding manner, with, too, various other points already touched on. On the other hand, take the opening of Brabantio's speech—
So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile;
We lose it not so long as we can smile.
That, he said, was in Shakespeare's difficult second flowering manner—the style of the later part of the earlier stage of Shakespeare's rhetorical first period but one. It was no more possible to move the one passage up to the date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet. Here, then, putting aside for the moment the part of the play supplied by Shakespeare's assistants in the last three acts—miserably weak some of it was—they were able to disentangle the early love-play from the latter work in which Iago was principally concerned. There was at least fifteen years' growth between them, the steps of which could he traced in the poet's intermediate plays by any one who chose to work carefully enough at them. Set any of the speeches addressed in the Shakespeare part of the last act by Othello to Desdemona beside the consolatory address of the Duke to Brabantio, and see the difference of the rhetoric and style in the two. If they turned to characters, Othello and Desdemona were even more clearly the companion pair to
