In consequence of this integration of character and action, the characters are, more than in the other tragedies, distinct and unmistakable. As if to make stronger the contrast between good and evil, the good man is a Moor, apparently, as in the case of the Moors in "Titus Andronicus" and "Selimus," hardly distinguishable from a negro; and the bad man is deprived of the motive which in the _novella_ rendered his wickedness intelligible. Yet nowhere, even in Shakespeare, are generosity and greatness of soul more admirable than in Othello, nowhere is villany more human than in Iago. The stage villain here receives his apotheosis as the avenging hero did in "Hamlet." The source of all the evil in the play, the Machiavellian machinator, the subtle hypocrite whose every action is a pose to conceal its purpose, the simulator of honesty and bluntness, the shameless egoist who proudly avows his villany and bawls it to the gallery, the intellectual master who plays every one for a dupe, and especially his accomplice--all this had been embodied in the villains of Kyd and Marlowe. Although intelligible to Elizabethan psychology and theology, and credible in the light of Tudor politics and feuds, such a type would seem to lack enduring truth. While preserving all the attributes of the stage type, Shakespeare made it the means for that searching analysis of human depravity to which his contemporaries were less successfully dedicating their efforts. This soliloquizing devil becomes identified with the suggestions and sinuosities of evil that partake of the flux of our consciousness. Hypocrisy, cynicism, cruelty, the absence of human sympathies, the pride and malignity of intellectual superiority have henceforth their symbol in Iago. Impossible, diabolical, inhuman as Barabas or Richard III, he is never for a moment unplausible, because he ever unearths a corresponding potentiality in us. The persons of the play, while unusually effective on the stage, and while human and real in their discourse, have a universality of appeal essential in the greatest works of art, desired by Aristotle and dimly foreshadowed in Elizabethan efforts after greatness and typicality. Othello, Desdemona, and Iago create fresh reflection and new impulse in every reader of every generation. And to each they are not only real persons but also symbols and ideals of the generosity, sweetness, and iniquity of the universe. This idealization of character is accomplished with wonderful clarity by means of an expression, splendidly eloquent, untroubled by conceit or obscurity, equally masterful in prose or verse, magnificently adapted to the representation of every mood or temperament. Shakespeare here realized the ideal toward which English tragedy under the leadership of Marlowe had been struggling, the presentation of human greatness in blank verse beautiful and dramatic.