III - DESDEMONA

Summary

“My fair warrior.” “Oh, she was heavenly true!”

YES, my dear friend, I will try to gratify your wish, that I should put before you in words the Desdemona that was in my heart and mind in the days when I was first called to personate her upon the stage. It was among my earliest efforts, and I was then a very young girl; but she had been long for me a heroine into whose life I had entered with a passionate sympathy which I cannot even now recall without emotion. In the gallery of heroes and heroines which my young imagination had fitted up for my daily and nightly reveries, Desdemona filled a prominent place. How could it be otherwise? A being so bright, so pure, so unselfish, generous, courageous—so devoted in her love, so unconquerable in her allegiance to her “kind lord,” even while dying by his hand; and all this beauty of body and mind blasted by the machinations of a soulless villain, who “out of her own goodness” made the net that enmeshed her too credulous husband and her absolutely guileless self!

The manner, too, of her death increased her hold upon my imagination. Owing, I suppose, to delicate health and the weak action of my heart, the fear of being smothered haunted me continually. The very thought of being in a crowd, of any pressure near me, would fill me with terror.