The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy

Bradley developed this essay from his lectures at several British universities and Published it in its present form in 1904 as the first chapter (or lecture) of Shakespearean Tragedy. The complete chapter is reprinted here, as it appears in A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (N.Y.: Meridian Books, 1955) Some of Bradleys footnotes have been omitted, and those which appear here are followed by his name and their original num ber. All notes not followed by Bradley’s name are the present editor’s.

The question we are to consider in this lecture may be stated in a variety of ways. We may put it thus: What is the substance of a Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and from the differences in point of substance between one tragedy and another? Or thus: What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented by Shakespeare? What is the general fact shown now in this tragedy and now in that? And we are putting the same question when we ask: What is Shakespeare’s tragic conception, or conception of tragedy?

These expressions, it should be observed, do not imply that Shakespeare himself ever asked or answered such a question; that he set himself to reflect on the tragic aspects of life, that he framed tragic conception, and still less that, like Aristotle or Corneille,1 he had a theory of the kind of poetry called tragedy. These things are all possible; how far any one of them is probable We need not discuss; but none of them is presupposed by the question we are going to consider. This question implies only that, as a matter of fact, Shakespeare in writing tragedy did represent a certain aspect of life in a certain way, and that through examination of his writings we ought to he able, to some extent, to describe this aspect and way in terms addressed to the understanding. Such a description, so far as it is true and adequate, may, after these explanations, be called indifferently an account of the substance of Shakespearean tragedy, or an account of Shakespeare’s conception of tragedy or view of the tragic fact.

Two further warnings may he required. In the first place, we must remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton’s way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth’s or at Shelley’s, by examining almost any one of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these poets at their best always look at things in one light; but Hamlet and Henry IV~. and Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct positions, and Shakespeare’s whole dramatic view is not to be identified with any one of these reflections. And, in the second place, I may repeat that in these lectures, at any rate for the most part, we are to be content with his dramatic view, and are not to ask whether it corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed outside his poetry the opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes oddly call “Shakespeare the man.” It does not seem likely that outside his poetry he was a very simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as some have maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we can, that in his works he expressed his deepest and most Cherished convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. And in his dramatic conceptions there is enough to occupy us.

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are reckoned among them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person, the “hero,”2or at most the "hero" and "heroine." Moreover, it is only in the love-tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest, including Macbeth, are single stars. So that, having noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being concerned primarily with one person.

The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the death of the hero. On the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense, a tragedy; and we no longer class Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline as, such, as did the editors of the Folio.3 On the other hand, the story depicts also the troubled part of the hero’s life which precedes and leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by “accident”in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is, in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.

The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease, poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.

Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero, and — we must now add — generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in tragedy, and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example, has a much larger part in King Lear than in Macbeth, and is directed in the one case chiefly to the hero, in the other chiefly to minor characters.

Let us now pause for a moment on the idea we have so far reached. They would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy meant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from Chaucer. Chaucer’s Monk's Tale is a series of what he calls “tragedies”; and this means in fact a series of tales de Casibus lilustrium Virorum stories of the Falls of Illustrious Men, such as Lucifer, Adam, Hercules and Nebuchadnezzar. And the Monk ends the tale of Croesus thus:

A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who “stood in high degree,” happy and apparently secure — such was the tragic fact to the mediaeval mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and pity; it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some other name — a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.

Shakespeare’s idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored. Tragedy with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of “high degree”; often with kings or princes; if not, with leaders in the state like Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least, as in Romeo and Juliet, with members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a decided difference here between Othello and our three other tragedies, but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere private person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning we see him in the Council-Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his high position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great world, and his last speech begins,

And this characteristic of Shakespeare’s tragedies, though not the most vital, is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every death-bed is the scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning, but it would not be true if the word tragedy” bore its dramatic sense. The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the omnipotence — perhaps the caprice —of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of private life can possibly rival.

Such feelings are constantly evoked by Shakespeare’s tragedies — again in varying degrees. Perhaps they are the very strongest of the emotions awakened by the early tragedy of Richard II, where they receive a concentrated expression in Richard’s famous speech about the antic Death, who sits in the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king, grinning at his pomp, watching till his vanity and his fancied security have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful there. In the figure of the maddened Lear we see

and if we would realise the truth in this matter we cannot do better than compare with the effect of King Lear the effect of Tourgenief’s parallel and remarkahle tale of peasant life, A King Lear of the Steppes.

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man, descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story. Job was the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly from actions, and those the actions of men.

We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances; and we see, arising from the cooperation of their characters in these circumstances, certain actions. These actions beget others, and these others beget others again, until this series of interconnected deeds leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe. The effect of such a series o~ imagination is to make us regard the sufferings which accompany it, and the catastrophe in which it end~, not only or chiefly as something which happens to the persons concerned, but equally as something which is caused by them. This at least may be

said of the principal persons, and, among them, of the hero, who always contributes in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes.

This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs greatly from the first. \~fen, from this point of view, appear to us primarily as agents, them-selves the authors of their proper woe”; and our fear and pity, though they will not cease or diminish, will be modified accordingly. ~Ve are now to consider this second aspect, remembering that it too is only one aspect, and additional to the first, not a substitute for it.

The “story” or “action” of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in the full sense of the word; not things done “‘tween asleep and wake,” but acts or omissions thoroughly /20/ expressive of the doer — characteristic deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing in action.

Shakespeare’s main interest lay here. To say that it lay in mere character, or was a psychological interest, would be a great mistake, for he was dramatic to the tips of his fingers. It is p05sible to find places where he has given a certain indulgence to his love of poetry, and even to his turn for general reflections; but it would he very difficult, and in his later tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect passages where he has allowed such freedom to the io’~erest in character apart from action. But for the opposite extreme, for the abstraction of mere “ plot” (which is a very different thing from the tragic ~‘ action”), for the kind of interest which predominates in a novel like The Woman in White,’ it is clear that he cared even less. I do not mean that this interest is absent from his dramas; but it is subordinate to others, and is so interwoven with them that we are rarely conscious of it apart, and rarely feel in any great strength the half-intellectual, half-nervous excitement of following an ingenious cor,,plication. What we do feel strongly, as a tragedy advances to its close, is that the calamities and catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main source of these deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare, “character is des-

‘,.~ novel by Wilkie Collins, ptibll~ed in :860, a forerwiner 0’ the modern sus~~ tale or myltery ~llct.

tiny” is no doubt an exaggeration, and one that may mislead (for many of his tragic personages, if they had not met with peculiar circumstances, would have escaped a tragic end, and might even have lived fairly untrou~ lives); hut il is the exaggeration of a vital

This truth, with some of its ~~~tifications, will appear more clearly, if we now go on to asli what elements are to be found in the “ story” or “action,” ocensionally or frequently, beside the characteristic deeds, and the sufferings and cit. cumstances, of the persons. I will refer to three of these additional factors.

(a) Shakespeare, occasionally and for reasons which need not be discussed here, represents abnormal conditions of mind; insanity, for example, somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are certainly not what we called deeds in the fullest sense, deeds expressive of character. No; but these abnormal conditions are never introduced as the origin of deeds /21/ of any dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth’s slee~ walking has no influence whatever on the events that follow it. Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in the air he saw the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan. Lear’s insanity is not the cause of a tragic conflict any more than ophelia’s; it is, like Ophelia’s, the result of a conflict; and in both cases the effect is mainly pathetic. If Lear were really mad when he divided his kingdom, if Hamlet were really mad at any time in the story, they would cease to be tragic characters.

(b) Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge. This supernatural element certainly cannot in most cases, if in any, be explained away as an illusion in the mind of one of the characters. And further, it does contribute to the action, and is in more than one instance an indispensable part of it: so that to describe human character, with circumstances, as always the so~e motive force in this action would be a serious error. But the supernatural is always placed in the closest relation with character. Ir gives a confirmation and a distinct form to inward movements already present and exerting an influence; to the sense of failure in Brutus, to the stifled workings of conscience in Richard, to the half-formed thought or the horrified memory of guilt in Macbeth, to suspicion in Hamlet.

Moreover, its influence is never of a compulsive kind. It forms no more than an element, how-ever important, in the problem which the hero has to face; and we are never allowed to feel that it has removed his capacity or responsibility for dealing with this problem. So far indeed are we from feeling this, that many readers run to the opposite extreme, and openly or privately regard the supernatural as having nothing to do with the real interest of the play.

(c) Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his tragedies allows to “chance “or”accident” an appreciable influence at some point in the action. Chance or accident here will be found, I think, to mean any occurrence (not supernatural, of course) which enters the dramatic sequence neither from the agency of a character, nor from the obvious surrounding circumstances.8 It may be called an accident, in this sense, that Romeo never got the Friar’s message about the potion, and that Juliet did not awake /22/from her long sleep a minute sooner; an accident that Edgar arrived at the prison just too late to save Cordelia’s life; an accident that Desdemona dropped her handkerchief at the most fatal of moments; an accident that the pirate ship attacked Hamlet’s ship, so that he was able to return forthwith to Denmark. Now this operation of accident is a fact, and a prominent fact, of human life. To exclude it who/ly from tragedy, therefore, would be, we may say, to fail in truth. And, besides, it is noL merely a fact. That men may start a course of events but can neither calculate nor control it, is a tragic fact. The dramatist may use accident so as to make us feel this; and there are also other dramatic uses to which it may be put. Shakespeare accordingly admits it. On the other hand, any large admission of chance into the tragic sequence would certainly weaken, and might destroy, the sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and catastrophe. And Shakespeare really uses it very sparingly. We seldom find ourselves exclaiming, “What an unlucky accident “ I believe most readers would have to search painfully for instances. It is, further, frequently easy to see the dramatic intention of an accident; and some things which look like accidents have really a connection with character,

If it were the deed of a very minor person whose character had not been indicated: because such a deed would not i,5ue from the little we’rld to which the ~na~Lit had co~fifled our stteutiuo. ~r~dley’i feotnot. j~

and are therefore not in the full sense accidents. Finally, I believe it will be found that almost all the prominent accidents occur when the action is well advanced and the impression of the causal sequence is too firmly fixed to be impaired.

Thus it appears that these three elements in the “action” are subordinate, while the dominant factor consists in deeds which issue from character. So that, by way of summary, we may now alter our first statement, “A tragedy is a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate,” and we may say instead (what in its turn is one.sided, though less so), that the story is one of human actions producing exceptional calamity and ending in the death of such a man.’

Before we leave the “action,” however, there is another question that may usefully be asked. Can we define this action ‘ further by describing it as a conflict?

The frequent use of this idea in discussions on tragedy is ultimately due, I suppose, to the influence of Hegel’s theory on /2~/ the subject, certainly the most important theory since Aristotle’s. But Hege~s view of the tragic conflict is not only unfamiliar to English readers and difficult to expound shortly, but it had its origin in reflections on Greek tragedy and, as Hegel was well aware, applies only imperfectly to the works of Shakespeare.iG I shall, therefore, confine myself to the idea of conflict in its more genera~ form. In this form it is obviously suitable to Shakespearean tragedy; but it is vague, and I will try to make it more precise by putting the question, Who are the combatants in this conflict?

Not seldom the conflict may quite naturally be conceived as lying between two persons, of

just considered is to strengthen the tendency, produced by the sufferings considered first, to ‘egard the tragic persons as paaaiYe rather than as agents. ~radley’s fcotnote si

Co. Hegel’s theory is developed in the final section of his A~Ihc’~k. His vicw, briefly stated, is that Greek tragedy pr~ seots a cooffict between two ethical principles (in Sophocles’ An~ig~~, which he takes as his model, the condict is between the dictates of family obligation espoused by Antigone and of political obligation espoused by Creon), each of which is valid in itself hut becomes destructive when asserted to the e~clusion of the opposing principle. In his lecture, “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy” (publithed in his Ozf~d L~£wu e’i P’c~~, 1Q00), Bradley a’,cg”ts some mOdi~cations in ategel’s positi~n which would bring it very close to the theory lie Is developing ~

whom the hero is one; or, more fully, as lying between two parties or groups, in one of which the hero is the leading figure. Or if we prefer to speak (as we may quite well do if we know what we are ahout) of the passions, tendencies, ideas, principles, forces, which animate these persons or groups, we may say that two of such passions or ideas, regarded as animating two persons or groups, are the combatants. The love of Romeo and Juliet is in conflict with the hatred of their houses, represented by various other characters. The cause of Brutus and Cassius struggles with that of Julius, Octavius and An-tony. In Richard ii. the King stands on one side, Bolingbroke and his party on the other. In Macbeth the hero and heroine are opposed to the representatives of Duncan. In all these cases the great majority of the dramatis personae fall without difficulty into antagonistic groups, and the conflict between these groups ends with the defeat of the hero.

Yet one cannot help feeling that in at least one of these cases, Macbeth, there is something a little external in this way of looking at the action. And when we come to some other plays this feeling increases. No doubt most of the characters in Ham let, King Lear, Othello, or Antony and Cleopatra can be arranged in opposed groups; and no doubt there is a conflict; and yet it seems misleading to describe this conHict as one between these groups. It cannot be simply this. For though Hamlet and the King are mortal foes, yet that which engrosses our interest and dwells in our memory at least as much as the conflict between them,- is the conflict within one of them. And so it is, though not in the same degree, with Antony and Cleopatra /24/ and even with Othello; and, in fact, in a certain measure, it is so with nearly all the tragedies. There is an outward conflict of persons and groups, there is also a conflict of forces in the hero’s soul; and even in Julius Caesar and

is. The reader. however, will find considerable diffical~ in placing some very important charactera in the’ae and othe~ plays. I will give only two or three illustration,’. Edgar is clearlw not on the same aide as Edmund. and yet it seems awkward to range him on Gloater’s side when Gloster wiabti to put him to death. Ophelia is in love with Hamlet, but how can abe be said to be of Hamlet’s party against the King and Polonius, or of their party agai~st Hamleti De’dem~na worthips Othello, yet it sounds -tid to say that Othell~ ii on t~, ~m- with a

Macbeth the interest of the former c’n hardly be said to exceed that of the latter.

The truth is, that the type of tragedy in whi~ the hero opposes to a hostile force an undivided soul, is not the Shakespearean type. The souls of those who contend with the hero may be thus undivided; they generally are; but, as a rule, the hero, though he pursues his fated way, is, at least at some point in the action, and sometimes at many, torn by an inward struggle; and it is frequently at such points that Shakespeare shows his most extraordinary power. If further we compare the earlier ragedies with the later, we find that it is in the latter, the maturest works, that this inward struggle is most emphasised. In the last of them, Cariolanus, its interest completely eclipses towards the close of the play that of the outward conflict. Romeo and Juliet, Richard lii., Richard If., where the hero contends with an outward force, but comparatively little with himself, are all early plays.

If we are to include the outer and the inner struggle in a conception more definite than that of conflict in general, we must employ some such phrase as “spiritual force.” This will mean whatever forces act in the human spirit, whether good or evil, whether personal passion or impersonal principle; doubts, desires, scruples, ideas — whatever can animate, shake, possess, and drive a man’s soul. In a Shakespearean tragedy some such forces are shown in conflict. They are shown acting in men and generating strife between them. They are also shown, less universally, but quite as characteristically, generating disturbance and even conflict in the soul of the hero. Treasonous ambition in Macbeth collides with loyalty and patriotism in Macduff and Malcolm: here is the outward conflict. But these powers or principles equally collide in the soul of Macbeth himself: here is the inner. And neither by itself could make the tragedy.12

We shall see later the importance of this idea. Here we need only observe that the notion of tragedy as a conflict emphasises the fact that

52.1 have given name: to the “,pirltllal forces” in M~e*A merely to illustrate the idea, and without any pretension to adequacy. Perhaps. in view of some interpretation of Shaat~ speare’s plays, it will be as well to add that I do not dream of suggesting that in any of his drunas Shakespeare imagined two abstract principles or passiors coft&cting. and incorporated them in ~~ona: or that there is any necesaity for a reader to define for himself the partictalar forces which cohilict Ia a given cm~ ~rIdIiy’a footnote 13

action is the centre of the story, while the concentration of interest, in the greater plays, on the inward struggle /25/ emphasises the fact that this action is essentially the expression of character.

Let us now turn from the “action” to the central figure in it; and, ignoring the characteristics which distinguish the heroes from one an-other, let us ask whether they have any common qualities which appear to be essential to the tragic effect.

One they certainly have. They are exceptional heings. ~Ve have seen already that the hero, with Shakespeare, is a person of high degree or of public importance, and that his actions or sufferings are of an unusual kind. But this is not all. Hi5 nature also is exceptional, and generally raises him in some respect much above the aver-age level of humanity. This does not mean that he is an eccentric or a paragon. Shakespeare never drew monstrosities of virtue; some of his heroes are far from being “good”; and if he drew eccentrics he gave them a subordinate p0-Sition in the plot. His tragic characters are made of the stuff we find within ourselves and within the persons who surround them. But, by an intensification of the life which they share with others, they are raised above them; and the greatest are raised so far that, if we fully reajise all that is implied in their words and actions, we become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any one resembling them. Some, like Hamlet and Cleopatra, have genius. Others, like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand scale; and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. in almost all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction, a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one Inter‘est, object, passion, or habit of mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait. It is present in his early heroes, Romeo and Richard II., infatuated men, who otherwise rise comparatively little above the ordinary level. It is a fatal gift, but it carries with it a touch of greatness; and when there is joined to it nobility of mind5 or genius, or im

mense force, we realise the full power and reach of the soul, and the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which /26/ stirs not only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe.

The easiest way to bring home to oneself the nature of the tragic character is to compare it with a character of another kind. Dramas like Cymbeline and the Winter’s Tale, which might seem destined to end tragically, but actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely to the fact that the principal characters fail to reach tragic dimensions. And, conversely, if these per. sons were put in the place of the tragic heroes, the dramas in which they appeared would cease to be tragedies. Posthumus would never have acted as Othello did; Othello, on his side, would have met fachimo’s challenge with something more than words. If, like Posthumus, he had remained convinced of his wife’s infidelity, he would not have repented her execution; if, like Leontes, he had come to believe that by an unjust accusation he had caused her death, he would never have lived on, like Leontes. In the same way the villain lachimo has no touch of tragic greatness, But lago comes nearer to it, and if lago had slandered Imogen and had supposed his slanders to have led to her death, he certainly would not have turned melancholy and wished to die. One reason why the end of the Merchant 0/ l”enice fails to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic character, and that we cannot believe in his accepting his defeat and the conditions imposed on him. This was a case where Shakespeare’s imagination ran away with him, so that he drew a figure with which the destined pleasant ending would not harmonise.

In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait, which is also his great-ness, is fatal to him. To meet these circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have given, but which the hero cannot give. He errs, by action or omission; and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. This is always so with Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal imperfection or error, which is never absent, je

of different kinds and degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of R~ meo, /27/ which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the murdcrous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error involves no conscious breach of right; in some (e.g. that of Brutus or Othello) it is accompanied by a full conviction of right. In Hamlet there is a painful consciousness that duty is being neglected; in Antony a clear knowledge that the worse of two courses is being pursued; but Richard and Macbeth are the only heroes who do what they themselves recognise to be villainous. ~ is important to observe that Shakespeare does admit such heroes,1’ and also that he appears to feel, and exerts himself to meet, the difficulty that arises from their admission. The difficulty is that the spectator must desire their defeat and even their destruction; and yet this desire, and the satisfaction of it, are not tragic feelings. Shakespeare gives to Richard therefore a power which excites astonishment, and a courage which extorts admiration. He gives to Macbeth a similar, though less extraordinary, greatness, and adds to it a conscience so terrifying in its warnings and so maddening in its reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the hero’s ruin.

The tragic hero with Shakespeare, then, need not be “good,” though generally he is “good” and therefore at once wins sympathy in his error. But it is necessary that he should have so much of greatness that in his error and fall we may be vividly conscious of the possibilities of human nature. Hence, in the first place, a Shakespearean tragedy is never, like some miscalled tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the book with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched and he may he awful, but he is not small. His lot may be heart-rending and mysterious, but it is not contemptible. The most confirmed of cynics ceases to be a cynic while he reads these plays. And with this greatness of the tragic hero (which is not always confined to him) is connected, secondly, what I venture to describe as the centre of the tragic impression. This central feeling is the impression of waste. With Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity and fear which are stirred by the tragic story

seem to unite with, and even to merge in, a pr~ found sense of sadness and mystery, which is due to this impression of waste. “ What a piece of work is man,” we cry; “so much more beautiful and 50 /28/ much more terrible t”.an we knew! Why should he be so if this heaL, .~..d greatness only tortures itself and throws it5L~L away .~ “ We seem to have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery, because that great-ness of soul which it exhibits oppressed, conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It forces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realise so vividly the worth of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the reflection that all is vanity.

In this tragic world, then, where individuals, however great they may be and however decisive their actions may appear, are so evidently not the ultimate power, what is this power? What account can we give of it which will correspond with the imaginative impressions we receive? This will be our final question.

The variety of the answers given to this question shows how difficult it is. And the difficulty has many sources. Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come in-to real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact. Some are so much influenced by their own habitual beliefs that they import them more or less into their interpretation of every author who is “sympathetic” to them. And even where neither of these causes of error appears to operate, another is present from which it is probably impossible wholly to escape. What I mean is this. Any answer we give to the question pr~ posed ought to correspond with, or to represent in terms of the understanding, our imaginative and emotional experience in reading the tragedies. We have, of course, to do our best by study and effort to make this experience true to Shake-

touch with Shakespeare’s mind and can oliserve /‘o/ his own. Indeed such a reader is rather likely to coroplain that they are painfully obvious. But if they are true as well as obvious, something follows from them in regard to our present quest::

From the ~ •:t follows that the ultimate power in the tragic world is not adequately described as a law or order which we can see to be just and benevolent—as, in that sense, a “moral order”: for in that case the spectacle of suffering and waste could not seem to us so fearful and mysterious as it does. And from the second it follows that this ultimate power is not adequately described as a fate, whether malicious and cruel, or blind and indifferent to human happiness and goodness: for in that case the spectacle would leave us desperate or rebellious. Yet one or other of these two ideas will be found to govern most accounts of Shakespeare’s tragic view or world. These accounts isolate and exaggerate single aspects, either the aspect of action or that of suffering; either the close and unbroken connection of character, will, deed and catastrophe, which, taken alone, shows the individual simply as sinning against, or failing to conform to, the moral order and drawing his just doom on his own head; or else that pressure of outward forces, that sway of accident, and those blind and ago. nised struggles, which, taken alone, show him as the mere victim of some power which cares neither for his sins nor for his pain. Such views contradict one another, and no third view can unite them; but the several aspects from whose isolation and exaggeration they spring are both present in the fact, and a view which would be true to the fact and to the whole of our imaginative experience must in some way combine these aspects.

Let us begin, then, with the idea of fatality and glance at some of the impressions which give rise to it, without asking at present whether this idea is their natural or fitting expression. There can be no doubt that they do arise and that they ought to arise. If we do not feel at times that the hero is, in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others drift struggling to destruction like helpless creatures borne on an irresistible flood towards a cataract; that, faulty as they may be, their fault is far from being the sole or sufficient cause of all they suffer; and

speare; but, that done to the best of our ability, the experience is the matter to be interpreted, and the test by which the interpretation must be tried. But it is /29/ extremely hard to make out exactly what this experience is, because, in the very effort to make it out, our reflecting mind, full of everyday ideas, is always tending to transform it by the application of these ideas, and so to elicit a result which, instead of representing the fact, conventionalises it. And the consequence is not only mistaken theories; it is that many a man will declare that he feels in reading a tragedy what he never really felt, while he fails to recogrn’se what he actually did feel. It is not likely that we shall escape all these dangers in our effort to find an answer to the question regarding the tragic world and the ultimate power in it.

It will be agreed, however, first, that this question must not be answered in “ religious” language. For although this or that dramatis persona may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of Satan, of heaven and of bell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from another world, these ideas do not materially influence his representation of life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery of its tragedy. The Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular; and while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the world of nontheological observation and thought, so that he represents it substantially in one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian or Christian. He looked at this “secular” world most intently and seriously; and he painted it, we cannot but conclude, with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his own, and, in essentials, without regard to anyone’s hopes, fears, or beliefs. His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary power; and if, as a private person, he had a religious faith, his tragic view can hardly have been in contradiction with this faith, but must have been included in it, and supplemented, not abolished, by additional ideas.

Two statements, next, may at once be made regarding the tragic fact as he represents it: one, that it is and remains to us something piteous, fearful and mysterious; the other, that the representation of it does not leave us crushed, rebellious or desperate. These statements will be accepted, I believe, by any reader who is in

relentless and immovable, we have failed to receive an essential part of the full tragic effect.

The sources of these impressions are various, and I will refer only to a few. One of them is put into words by Shakespeare himself when he makes the player-king in Haml~t say:

their ends” are the issues or outcomes of our thoughts, and these, says the speaker, are not our own. The tragic world is a world of action, and action is the translation of thought into reality. We see men and women confidently attempting it. They strike into the existing order of things in pursuance of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they intended; it is terribly unlike it, They understand nothing, we say to ourselves, of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the dark, and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of a design which is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they meant well or ill. No one could mean better than Brutus, but he contrives misery for his country and death for himself. No one could mean worse than lago, and he too is caught in the web he spins for others. Hamlet, recoiling from the rough duty of revenge, is pushed into blood-guiltiness he never dreamed of, and forced at last on the revenge he could not will. His adversary’s murders, and no less his adversary’s remorse, bring about the opposite of what they sought. Lear follows an old man’s whim, half generous, half selfish; and in a moment it looses aU the powers of darkness upon him. Othello agonises over an empty fiction, and, meaning to execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and strangles love. They understand themselves no better than the world about them. Coriolanus thinks that his heart is iron, and it melts like snow before a fire. Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own child’s brains, finds her£elf hounded to death by the smell of a stranger’s blood. Her husband thinks that to gain a crown he would jump the life to come, and finds that the crown has brought him all the horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this tragic world, man’s thought, translated into act, is ua~

formed /~~/ into the opposite of itself. His act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a moment of time, becomes a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom. And whatsoever he dreams of doing, he achieves that which he least dreamed of, his own destruction.

All this makes us feel the blindness and helplessness of man. Yet by Itself it would hardly suggest the idea of fate, because it shows man as in some degree, however slight, the cause of his own undoing. But other impressions come to aid it. It is aided by everything which makes us feel that a man is, as we say, terribly unlucky; and of this there is, even in Shakespeare, not a little. Here come in some of the accidents already considered: Juliet’s waking from her trance a minute too late, Desdemona’s loss of her handkerchief at the only moment when the loss would have mattered, that insignificant delay which cost Cordelia’s life. Again, men act, no doubt, in accordance with their characters; but what is it that brings them just the one problem which is fatal to them and would be easy to another, and sometimes brings it to them just when they are least fitted to face it? How is it that Othello comes to be the companion of the one man in the world who is at once able enough, brave enough, and vile enough to ensnare him? By what strange fatality does it hap pen that Lear has such daughters and Cordelia such sisters? Even character itself contributes to these feelings of fatality. How could men escape, we cry, such vehement propensities as drive R~ meo, Antony, Coriolanus, to their doom? And why is it that a man’s virtues help to destroy him, and that his weakness or defect is so intertwined with everything that is admirable in him that we can hardly separate them even in imagination?

If we find in Shakespeare’s tragedies the source of impressions like these, it is important, on the other hand, to notice what we do nO~ find there. We find practically no trace of fatalism in its more primitive, crude and obvious forms. Nothing, again, makes us think of the actions and sufferings of the persons as somewhat arbitrarily fixed beforehand without regard to their feelings, thoughts and resolutions. Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so presented that it seems to us as if the supreme power, whatever it may he, had a special spite against a family /33/ or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the

impression (which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family, owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins. Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in heredity, or to have attached much importance to it.

What, then, is this “ fate “ which the impressions already considered lead us to describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to be a mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which seems to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and their circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast and complex that they can scarcely at all understand it or control its workings; and which has a nature so definite and fixed that whatever changes take place in it produce other changes inevitably and without regard to men’s desires and regrets. And whether this system or order is best called by the name of fate or

it can hardly be denied that it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world, and that it has such characteristics as these. But the name “fate” may be intended to imply something more — to imply that this order is a blank necessity, totally regardless alike of human weal and of the difference between good and evil or right and wrong. And such an implication many readers would at once reject. They would maintain, on the contrary, that this order shows characteristics of quite another kind from those which made us give it the name of fate, characteristics which certainly sho’ald not induce us to forget those others, but which would lead us to describe it as a moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity.

14.1 have raiaed no objection tn the use of the idea of fate, because it occurs 10 often both in conversation and in books about Shakespeare’s tragedies that I must suprole it to be natural to many readers. Yet I doubt whether it would be 10

if Greek tragedy had never been written: and I most in candour conies’ that to me it does not often occur wbile I am reading. or when I have j~t read. a tragedy of Shakespeare. Words-worth’s tines, for example. sbout

do n~t repre~nt the ivnpfe~ion I receive: much less do ins~es whiLh compare mar to a puny creaturC helpless in the claws of a bird of prey. The reader ihould ezamine himself closely on this ‘£&ttCt. fBrafley’s footnote 12]

Let us turn, then, to this idea. It brings into the light those aspects of the tragic fact which the idea of fate throws into the shade. And the argument which leads to it in its simplest form may be stated briefly thus: “Whatever may be said of accidents, circumstances and the like, human action is, after all, presented to us as the central fact in tragedy, and also as the main cause /34/ of the catastrophe. That necessity which so much impresses us is, after all, chiefly the necessary connection of actions and consequences. For these actions we, without even raismg a question on the subject, hold the agents responsible; and the tragedy would disappear for us if we did not. The critical action is, in greater or less degree, wrong or bad. The catastrophe is, in the main, the return of this action on the head of the agent. It is an example of ustice; and that order which, present alike within the agents and outside them, infallibly brings it about, is therefore just. The rigour of its justice is terrible, no doubt, for a tragedy is a terrible story; but, in spite of fear and pity, we acquiesce, because our sense of justice is satisfied.”

Now, if this view is to hold good, the “justice” of which it speaks must be at once distinguished from what is called “poetic justice.” “Poetic justice” means that prosperity and adversity are distributed in proportion to the merits of the agents. Such “ poetic justice” is in flagrant contradiction with the facts of life, and it is absent from Shakespeare’s tragic picture of life; indeed, this very absence is a ground of constant complaint on the part of Dr. Johnson.15Ap~~n~r’ irdOEZy, “the doer must suffer “— this we find in Shakespeare. We also find that villainy never remains victorious and prosperous at the last. But an assignment of amounts of happiness and misery, an assignment even of life and death, in proportion to merit, we do not find. No one who thinks of Desdernona and Cordelia; or who remembers that one end awaits Richard III. and Brutus, Macheth and Hamlet; or who asks himself which suffered most, Othello or lago; will ever accuse Shakespeare of representing the ultimate power as “ poetically “ just.

And we must go further. I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at all these terms of justice

zs. Samuel Johnson. one of the foremost literary critics of the eighteenth century, who edited Sb&kesneare’s wor~

and merit or desert. And this for two reasons. In the first place, essential as it is to recognise the connection between act and consequence, and natural as it may seem in some cases (e.g., Mac-beth’s) to say that the doer only gets what he deserves, yet in very many cases to say this would be quite unnatural. We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, sellishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any /35/ healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would appear to us to follow “justly” from them. And, this being so, when we call the order of the trag ic world just, we are either using the word in some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond what is shown us of this order, and are appealing to faith.

But, in the second place, the ideas of justice and desert are, it seems to me, in all cases —even those of Richard III. and of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth — untrue to our imaginative cx perience. When we are immersed in a tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror, perhaps hatred; but we do not j~dge. This is a point of view which emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or the dramatist’s, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking about the play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and moral notions. But tragedy does not belong, any more than religion belongs, to the sphere of these notions; neither does the imaginative attitude in presence of it. While we are in its world we watch what is, seeing that so it happened and must have happened, feeling that it is piteous, dreadful, awful, mysterious, but neither passing sentence on the agents, nor asking whether the behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is just. And, therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our imaginative experience in terms of the understanding 15, tO say the least, full of danger.15

is. It is dangerous, I think, in raference to all really good tragedies, but I am dealing here only wlth Sbake’peare’L In not a few Greek tragedies it is almost inevitable that we should thin~ of justice and retribution, not only becau,5 the dr5~41’J p~rio~ae often speak of the”’, but also because there is something

casuistical about the tragic problem itself. The poet treats the story in such a way that the questiots, Is the hero doing right

Let us attempt then to restate the idea that the ultimate power in the tragic world is a moral order. Let us put aside the ideas of justice arid merit, and speak simply of good and evil. Let us understand by these words, primarily, moral good and evil, but also everything else in human beings which we take to be excellent or the reverse. Let us understand the statement that the ultimate power or order is “ moral” to mean that it does not show itself indifferent to good and evil, or equally favourable or unfavourable to both, but shows itself akin to good and alien from evil. And, understanding the statement thus, let us ask what grounds it has in the tragic fact as presented by Shakespeare.

Here, as in dealing with the grounds on which the idea of /36/fate rests, I choose only two or three out of many. And the most important is this. In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character. The main source, on the contrary, is in every case evil; and, what is more (though this seems to have been little noticed), it is in almost every case evil in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection but plain moral evil. The love of Romeo and Juliet conducts them to death only because of the senseless hatred of their houses. Guilty ambition, seconded by diabolic malice and issuing in murder, open the action in Macbeth. lago is the main source of the convulsion in Othello; Goneril, Regan and Edmund in King Lear. Even when this plain moral evil is not the obviously prime source within the play, it lies behind it: the situation with which Hamlet has to deal has been formed by adultery and murder. Jz~lius Caesar is the only tragedy in which one is even tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the world, this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent between evil and good, any more than a body which is convulsed by poison is friendly to it or indifferent to the distinction between poison and food.

or wrong~ is almost forced upon us. But this Is not sowith Shak~ spears. J~£~iuj Ca,sor is probably the only one of his tragedici in which the question suggests itseLf to us, and this is one of the reasons why that play baa something of a claaaic air. Even here, if we ask the question, we have no doubt at all about the answer. EBtadley’s footnote :s~

~gain, if we con~ne our attention to the hero, and to those cases where the gross and palpable

him but elsc’vhere, we lind that the ~,il is not 0 innocent hero still shows some

~arked imperfection or defect irresolution, precipitancy~ pride, cr~’dulousness, excessive simplicity~ excessive susceptibility to sexual emorions, and the like. These defects or imperfectiofl5 are certainly, in the wide sense of the word, evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict and catastrophe. Arid the inference is again ob~ious. The ultimate power~ which shows itself disturbed by this evil and reacts ag~inst it, must have a nature alien to it. Indeed its reactiOn is so vehement and “ relentless “ that it would seem to be bent on nothing short of good in perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it.

To this must be added another fact, or an-other aspect of the same fact. Evil exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren, weakening, destructive, a principle of death. It /~7/ isolates, disunites, and tends to annihil~te not only its opposite but itself. That which keeps the evil man 17 prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him to exist, is the good in him (I do not mean only the obviously “moral” good). When the evil in him masters the good and has its way, it destroys other people through him, but it also destroys him. At the close of the struggle he has vanished, and has left behind him nothing that can stand. What remains is a family, a city, a country, exhausted, pale and feeble, but alive through the principle of good which animates it; and, within it, individuals who, if they have not the brilliance or greatness of the tragic character, still have won our respect and confidence. And the inference would seem clear. If existence in an order depends on good, and if the presence of evil is hostile to such existence, the inner being or soul of this order must be akin to good.

These are aspects of the tragic world at least as clearly marked as those which, taken alone, suggest the idea of fate. And the idea which they in their turn, when taken alone, may suggest, is that of an order which does not indeed award “ poetic justice,” but which reacts through

‘?.It a mo’t ~ntial to remember that an evil man is muen more than the evil in him. I may add that in thia ,,“ragraph I have, for the e~e of clearness considered evil in its mo~ pr~ nounced fo’m; but what is 3ax.d would apply, m~~as mae’iRdu’, to evii 55 imperfection, etc. ~~radley’s footnote i~3

the necessity of its own 11moral” nature both ag~’ inst attacks made upon it and against failure to conform to it. Tragedy, on this view, is the exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less distinet perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power, a power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters themselves. This perception produces something like a feeling of acquiescence in the catastrophe, though it neither leads us to pass judgment on the characters nor diminishes the pity, the fear, and the sense of waste, which their struggle, suffering arid fall evoke. And, finally, this view seems quite able to do justice to those aspects of the tragic fact which give rise to the idea of fate. They would appear as various cxpressions of the fact that the moral order acts not capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws — a necessity or law which of course knows no exception and is as “ruthless” as fate. /‘8/

~t is impossible to deny to this view a large measure of truth. And yet without some amend. ment it can hardly satisfy. For it does not in. dude the whole of the facts, and therefore does not wholly correspond with the impressions they produce. Let it be granted that the system or order which shows itself omnipotent against individuals is, in the sense explained, moral. Still

— at any rate for the eye of sight — the evil against which it asserts itself, and the persons whom this evil inhabits, are not really something outside the order, so that they can attack it or fail to conform to it; they are within it and a part of it. It itself produces them — produces lago as well as Desdetnona, lago’s cruelty as well as lago’s courage. It is not poisoned, it poisons itself. Doubtless it shows by its violent reaction that the poison is poison, and that its health lies in good. But one significant fact cannot remove another, and the spectacle we witness scarcely warrants the assertion that the order is responsible for the good in Desdenaona, but lago for the evil in [ago. If we make this assertion we make it on grounds other than the facts as presented in Shakespeare’s tragedies

Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or want of conformity an-

swer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic character. We do not think 0£ Hamlet merely as failing to meet its demand, of Antony as merely sinning against it, or even of Macbeth as simply attacking it. What we feel corresponds quite as much to the idea that they are its parts, expressions, products; that in their defect or evil it is untrue to its soul of goodness, and falls into conflict and collision with itself; that, in making them suffer and waste themselves, it suffers and wastes itself; and that when, to save its life and regain peace from this intestinal struggle, it casts them out, it has lost a part of its own substance

— a part more dangerous and unquiet, but far more valuable and nearer to its heart, than that which remains — a Fortiobras, a Malcolm, an Octavius. There is no tragedy in its expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of good.

Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two sides or aspects which we can neither separate nor reconcile. The whole or order against which the individual part shows itself powerless seems to be animated by a passion for perfection: we /39/ cannot otherwise explain its behaviour towards evil. Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in its effort to overcome and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless good. That this idea, though very different from the idea of a blank fate, is no solution of the riddle of life is obvious; but why should we expect it to he such a solution? Shakespeare was not attempting to justify the ways of God to men, or to show the universe as a Divine Comedy.15 He ‘~‘as writing

iR. EarLy in Par~ijg L~~g Milton stat~ tbat his purpose .5 to ~ert Eternal providence./And ju’titv the ways oL God to men” (It. ‘s—26). (See Itrutch’s e~ay, p. Ss) Dante Li

tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if it were not a painful mystery. Nor can he be said even to point distinctly, like some writers of tragedy, in any direction where a solution might lie. We find a few ~ ~~ences to gods or God, to the influence of the ~ to another life. some of them certainly, all of them perhaps, merely dramatic — appropriate to the person from whose lips they fall. A ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a secret out o£ the reach of its hearer — who presently meditates on the question whether the sleep of death is dreamless. Accidents once or twice remind us strangely of the words, There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.” More important are other impressions. Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a conviction seems borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this agony counts as nothing against the heroism and love which appear in it and thrill our hearts. Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these mighty or heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the ~ittle space in which they move, and that they vanish not into nothingness but into freedom. Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a presentiment, form~ess but haunting and even profound, that all the fury of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than half the truth, even an illusion, “such stuff as dreams are made on.” But these faint and scattered intimations that the tragic world, being but a fragment of a whole beyond our vision, must needs be a contradiction and no ultimate truth, avail nothing to interpret the mystery. We remain confronted with the inexplicable fact, or the no less. inexplicable appearance, of a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with glorious good an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy. /40/

1 Pierre Corneille, a French playwright of the seventeenth century who also wrote some essays on the theory of tragedy.

2 Julius Caesar is not an exception to this rule Caesar, whose murder comes in the Third Act, is in a sense the dominanting figure in the story, but Brutus is the “hero.” [Bradley’s footnote]

[i] freely rendered in modem English: Croesus, the proud king (of ancient Lydia) was hanged his royal rower could not help him. Tragedy is no other sort of thing and this is the only theme the tragic poet cam lament or bewail in his song: that Fortune always will assail with an unexpected stroke those rulers who have been proud; for when men trust Fortune, them she will fail them and cover her bright face with a cloud.