Note 106 — LECTURE V
Reading edition
When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her brain,
Let nobody blame him: his scorn I approve.
Nature plays such strange tricks, and Shakespeare almost alone among poets seems to create in somewhat the same manner as Nature. In the same way, as Malone pointed out, Othello's exclamation, 'Goats and monkeys!' (iv. i. 274) is an unconscious reminiscence of Iago's words at iii. iii. 403.