One they certainly have.  They are exceptional beings.  We 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.  His nature also is exceptional, and generally raises him in some respect much above the average 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 position 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 realise 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 interest, 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 mind, or genius, or immense force, we realise the full power and reach of the soul, and the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which 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 persons 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 Iachimo’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 Iachimo has no touch of tragic greatness.  But