Anhanged was Cresus, the proude kyng;
     His roial trone myghte hym nat availle. 
     Tragedie is noon oother maner thyng,
     Ne kan in syngyng crie ne biwaille
     But for that Fortune alwey wole assaile
     With unwar strook the regnes that been proude;
     For whan men trusteth hire, thanne wol she faille,
     And covere hire brighte face with a clowde.

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,

     Soft you; a word or two before you go. 
     I have done the state some service, and they know it.[2]

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