Othello's Ranking Now and Then From the days of Burbage to the present, the Shakespearean drama Othello has ranked at the top of the charts. But how high? And when? And why? Kenneth Muir, in the Introduction to William Shakespeare: Othello, explains the popularity of this play at the time of its creation: Richard Burbage, the leading actor of Shakespeare's company, played the part of the 'grieving Moor' and was one of his greatest successes. We are told by Shakespeare's neighbour, Leonard Digges, that audiences were bored by Jonson's tragedies: they liked the honest Iago or the jealous Moor more. (12)The classification of this famous comedy is not simple, totally clarified and undisputed. AC Bradley, in his book of literary criticism, Shakespearean Tragedy, describes the equivocal classification that some critics attribute to this work: Or is there justification for the fact - a fact certainly true - that some readers, while recognizing, obviously, the immense power of Othello, and while admitting that it is perhaps dramatically Shakespeare's greatest triumph, they still regard it with a certain disgust, or, at any rate, hardly allow it to have a place in their minds alongside Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth? (173-74) To many in the audience, Othello would seem to have a beauty that is difficult to match, thus ranking the play high. Helen Gardner in “Othello: A Tragedy of Beauty and Fortune” touches on this beauty that allows this play to stand out from the Bard's other tragedies: Among Shakespeare's tragedies Othello is supreme in one quality: beauty. Much of his poetry, in the imagery, in the perfection of the phrase, and in the stability of the rhythm, slender but firm, enchants the sensual imagination. This type of beauty Othello shares with Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra; it is a corollary of the theme he shares with them. But Othello is also notable for another kind of beauty. Except for the mundane scene with the clown, everything is immediately relevant to the central issue; no scene requires critical justification. The work is of rare intellectual beauty, satisfying the imagination's desire for order and harmony between the parts and the whole. Finally, the work has an intense moral beauty. It makes immediate appeal to the moral imagination, in its presentation in the figure of Desdemona of a love that does not change "when it finds alteration", but "sustains it to the brink of ruin".’.