Our consideration of "Hamlet" has been prolonged partly because its relations to contemporary drama can be traced more readily than those of Shakespeare's other tragedies, and partly because it is the first of his plays to afford a full definition of tragedy, a conception of prime importance both in the development of Shakespeare's art and in the future history of the drama. A sensational struggle is presented, and the abounding incidents are wrought into effective if loosely connected stage-scenes, dealing with material similar to that then current in the theatres,--villains, ghosts, murders, insanity, grim farce, meditations, aphorisms. But the scenic presentation and the dramatic structure are to express not only an external conflict between hero and counter-force, but an inner struggle of the hero himself. They are to be the effects and results, nay, the very mirror of the inner thought and feeling. And the disaster that falls upon the hero and those by him beloved comes home to us as due not merely to external forces or circumstances or to evil working within, but also to an inherent unfitness of his own. This conception of tragedy found further exemplification in "Othello,"[19] freer from Elizabethan methods than any of the other tragedies, and the most masterful of all as a play. The fable was found in an Italian novella that related, like so many of its class, a bald story of love, jealousy, and villany. The very baldness of the narrative in comparison with the fullness of incident and characterization of the chronicles or Plutarch, gave Shakespeare's imagination an untrammeled opportunity. The ingredients of the story, common in romantic comedy and already combined by Shakespeare in "Much Ado about Nothing," were also not unfamiliar in tragedy, but Shakespeare enlarged and interpreted them to fit the conception of his two preceding tragedies, the presentation of a spiritual struggle in which goodness is attacked by evil at its point of greatest vulnerability. The credulity of Othello, however, is assaulted by a more active agent of evil than in "Julius Cæsar" or "Hamlet." Malignant evil is embodied in Iago, and it is against his machinations that the nobly idealized characters of Othello and Desdemona prove incompetent and defenseless. He is the person who dominates the action and gives explanation and plausibility to the circumstances. He not only opposes the hero in the external action, he creates through his insinuations all the evil suspicions that struggle in Othello's mind. He might almost be considered the protagonist of the tragedy.