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 experience.  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 judge.  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 is, to say the least, full of danger.[13]

Let us attempt then to re-state the idea that the ultimate power in the tragic world is a moral order.  Let us put aside the ideas of justice and 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 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, opens the action in Macbeth.  Iago 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