...the tree, A balmy breath, that dost almost persuade Justice herself to break her sword: once more: Be thus, when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, And love thee after: once more, and this the last, So sweet was ne'er so fatal: I must weep, But they are cruel tears; this...

...(Kisses her) O balmy breath, that doth almost persuade Justice to break her sword! One more, one more. Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee And love thee after. Once more, and this the last! So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep, But they are cruel tears. This...

...her.] O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade Justice to break her sword!157 One more, one more. Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee And love thee after. One more, and that's the last. [He kisses her.] So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep, 20 122 5,2...

..."monumental alabaster" (5.2.5) that memorializes her death, he can safely acknowledge his own desire: "Be thus, when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, / And love thee after" (5.2.18-19).60Thus preserved, she can be all his: the purifying murder undoes the sexuality that was...

...when she was alive; he reminds us of Othello, who stands over the sleeping Desdemona and promises, "Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee / And love thee after" (V.ii. 18-19), and of Admetus who will sleep with Alcestis's likeness after she has died for him: "In...

...the world of things. As not, as dead woman, Othello will be able to love his wife, who is "no wife": "Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, / And love thee after" (5.2.18-19). Necrophilia is a psychological phenomenon Othello shares with other Shakespearean protagonists....

...literally, too?). After that literalist reading Cavell's comments on Othello's admiration for her beauty — 'Be thus, when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, / And love thee after' — come with an awful predictability: Necrophilia is an apt fate for a mind whose reason is suffocating...

...slow and moving finger at" [4.2.52—4]). from life to death (and back). The hinted at necrophilia ("Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, / And love thee after") confuses the monumental form of the sleeping Desdemona with the eroticized (addressed) dead. Having...

...the tree. O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade Justice to break her sword! One more, one more! Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, And love thee after. One more, and that's the last! So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep, But they are cruel tears....

...which I have given some attention, that clinch the comparison on the level of the story's dialectic: Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee And love thee after. And as we absorb the end of Othello's speech, the likeness to what might have inspired Abraham's own...