Is Othello a puppet, an Englishman, or a Moor? No less estimable a Shakespeare scholar than Professor Stoll has pointed out what he has called the “great heap of contradictions” in the character of Othello and has come to the conclusion that Shakespeare is merely following a dramatic jealousy tradition in the play of Othello—that he “but leans on the convention of slander and ‘diabolical soliciting’… . Only, in order to expedite matters, Shakespeare leans hard, and Othello presents little or no resistance to temptation, is eager, excited, is, for all his protestations of faith, won over in a trice.” One cannot help feeling, according to Stoll, that Othello is “wrenched and altered” by the dramatist in the temptation scene. A. C. Bradley, on the other hand, whose opinions I cite as typical of the opposite point of view, insists that “any man situated as Othello was, would have been disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous.” Othello, in other words, is behaving like a normal human being of our own race. Bradley repudiates the “mistaken view” that Othello “retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood.” His nationality is incidental, and “in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important.” He even goes so far as to say that “if anyone had told Shakespeare that no Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.”