I answer, I do not know. The question splits itself into two—first, “How did he _project_ the time?” Second, “How did he conceive it in the progress of the Play?” My impression is, that he projected extended time. If so, did he or did he not know that in managing the Seduction he departed from that design by contracting into a Day? Did he deliberately entertain a double design? If he did, how did he excuse this to himself? Did he say, “A stage necessity, or a theatrical or dramatic necessity”—namely, that of sustaining at the utmost possible reach of altitude the tragical passion and interest—“requires the precipitation of the passion from the first breathing of suspicion—the ‘Ha! Ha! I like not that,’ of the suggesting Fiend to the consecrated ‘killing myself, to die upon a kiss!’—all in the course of fifteen hours—and this tragical vehemency, this impetuous energy, this torrent of power I will have; at the same time I have many reasons—amongst them the general probability of the action—for a dilated time; and I, being a magician of the first water, will so dazzle, blind, and bewilder my auditors, that they shall accept the double time with a double belief—shall feel the unstayed rushing on of action and passion, from the first suggestion to the cloud of deaths—and yet shall remain with a conviction that Othello was for months Governor of Cyprus—they being on the whole unreflective and uncritical persons?” TALBOYS. And, after all, who willingly criticises his dreams or his pleasures? NORTH. And the Audience of the Globe Theatre shall not—for “I hurl my dazzling spells into the spungy air,” and “the spell shall sit when the curtain has fallen.” Shakspeare might, in the consciousness of power, say this. For this is that which he has—knowingly or unknowingly—done. Unknowingly? Perhaps—himself borne on by the successively rising waves of his work. For you see, Talboys, with what prolonged and severe labour we two have arrived at knowing the reality of the case which now lies open to us in broad light. We have needed time and pains, and the slow settling of our understandings, to unwind the threads of delusion in which we were encoiled and entoiled. If a strange and unexplained power could undeniably so beguile us—a possibility of which, previously to this examination, we never have dreamt, how do we warrant that the same dark, nameless, mysterious power shall not equally blind the “Artificer of Fraud?” This is matter of proposed investigation and divination, which let whoever has will, wit, and time, presently undertake. TALBOYS. Why, we are doing it, sir. He will be a bold man who treats of Othello—after Us. NORTH.