From the first it 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 agonised 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 that the power from which they cannot escape is 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 Hamlet say: 

     Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own;

‘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