is answered in the play by "Not a jot, not a jot," Salvini tries to speak, but chokes with the words, and lifting his hand with a motion of denial and deprecation, tells us what he would fain say, but cannot; or by an intonation of voice, as when in answer to Iago's "You would be satisfied?" he replies, marking the difference between conditional and imperative with a tone that would of itself betray him born to command-- Vorrei, che dico--io voglio (Would?--Nay, I _will_). And when in his desperate pain and fury, maddened by the poison working within, he drags Iago to the front of the stage, and holding him by the throat speaks Shakespeare's meaning, if not Shakespeare's words, thick and fast, as if he were not an actor, but Othello himself, and while his audience listen with bated breath and quick-beating hearts, he hurls him to the ground, and in the uncurbed fury of his mood raises his foot to spurn him like a dog,--then he rises far above ordinary dramatic effect: his art does "hold the mirror up to Nature." We feel that we have seen Othello. Again, in the fourth act, when Iago brings home to him the realization of his wife's infidelity, what can be finer than the sharpening of his voice from stress of pain, changing from the full roundness of its usual masculine robustness to a high womanish key, as he asks the fatal questions, "Che disse? Che? Che fece?" What words could have said so much as the dumb show with which he signifies that terrible fact of which he can neither ask nor hear in words? And who can doubt when he hears that cry of agony that bursts from his lips at Iago's gross confirmation of his suggestion that it is the cry of a man stabbed to the heart? His suffering is as real to us as the agony of a lion would be if we stood by and saw some one drive a knife into the beast up to the hilt. It equals in reality any exhibition of simple unfeigned bodily pain, with all its intensity of violence. The word "rant" never once comes into our minds. Salvini expresses everything. He demands nothing from his audience but eyes and ears; he _acts_ the part in every detail; he does just what he aims to do. His motion is as unconscious and unfettered as that of a deer or a tiger: whether he paces with a stealthy, restless tread up and down the back of the stage, reminding us irresistibly of a caged wild beast, or whether he half crouches, then drags himself along, and then darts upon Iago in the last scene, it is always plain that his body is the servant of his mind: he moves in harmony with his mood.