WHEN THOMAS RYMER PRONOUNCED his notorious judgment upon Othello in A Short View of Tragedy, he believed he had discovered a serious aesthetic flaw in one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. Warming to the pleasurable anatomy he was about to perform, Rymer declared, "Nothing is more odious in Nature than an improbable lye; And certainly never was any Play fraught like this of Othello with improbabilities."' Whereupon he proceeded, in his own distinctive blending of Aristotelian purposefulness and Jagian malignity, to hold up to derision the improbabilities he thought he had detected in the plot, character, sentiments, and language of Shakespeare's tragedy. Although Rymer's evaluation of Othello was repudiated almost immediately, the canon of judgment he invoked was not called in question. Within a year after the publication of A Short View, Charles Gildon, the critic and dramatist, wrote an essay addressed to Dryden in which he took it upon himself to defend the events, characters, and language of Othello, and the standard to which he framed his argument was the probable, which he defined as "what is agreeable to common Opinion."2 With an admonitory glance at the intemperate Rymer, Gildon went over a number of points that had attracted the latter's hostile regard. It is "rational and probable," he patiently explained, for Venetians to hire an African as their general (a plot assumption that had particularly strained Rymer's suspension of disbelief) if we suppose him "the Son or Nephew of the Emperor of Monomotopa, Aethiopia, or Congo, forc'd to leave his Country for religion (or any occasion), coming to Europe by the convenience of the Portugueze Ships" and, after some years of service, attaining a position of trust and dependency in the Venetian republic-a little fiction Gildon developed from Othello's own autobiographical touches. The interracial marriage-disturbing not only to Rymer but to nearly everyone in the play except Desdemona-he easily referred to "Experience," which "tells us that there's nothing more common than Matches of this kind where the Whites and Blacks cohabit, as in both the Indies." As to the extravagance of Othello's recollected courtship (which Rymer had declared the "Cant in the Bill of a High-German Doctor . .. and as likely to charm a Senator's daughter"), Gildon pointed out that a distinguished classical precedent lay behind it: "Dido in