Twelfth Night is called a comedy, Othello a tragedy. We shall not
be concerned here with the definition of these terms, beyond ob-
serving that whereas Shakespeare (as already noted) seems delib-
erately to prevent the sad situations in his comedies from developing
beyond a certain stage, the tragedies are the plays in which he lets
them develop to the limit. If this observation is correct, the tragedies
and comedies differ, so to say, only in degree. As to plot, character,
theme and so forth, they have much in common.

A convenient starting-point for the study of Othello is the idea of
a contradiction between appearances and reality. It is an idea that
pervades Twelfth Night. "Nothing that is so is so." The whole story
of the twins enforces the idea: "I am ready to distrust mine eyes /
And wrangle with my reason. . . . There's something in't / That
is deceivable" (IV, 3, 13 ff.). In Othello Iago seems honest and isn't.
Othello does not seem jealous but is. Desdemona is given a double
twist. She seems chaste and is; but Othello doesn't think so; his
opinion is that, though she seems chaste, she isn't; his discovery is
that, though in Iago's accounts she seemed unchaste, she is actually
chaste. "Men should be what they seem" ( III. 3. 130).

Dramatic irony, then, the irony of things not being as they seem,
is equally pervasive in Twelfth Night and Othello. But, whereas in
the comedy the irony of a happy ending is added to it, in the trag-
edy it is allowed to work itself out to what is aptly termed the bitter
(i.e., unironical) end. In the last act of Twelfth Night the ironies are
straightened out by a time-honored comic device, the dénouement or
untying of the knots. At the beginning Viola says: "O time! Thou
must untie this knot, not I," and at the end the clown pronounces:
"And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." The dis-

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