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 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 possible 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 be very difficult, and in his later tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect passages where he has allowed such freedom to the interest 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 complication.  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 destiny’ 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 untroubled lives); but it is the exaggeration of a vital truth.

This truth, with some of its qualifications, will appear more clearly if we now go on to ask what elements are to be found in the ‘story’ or ‘action,’ occasionally or frequently, beside the characteristic deeds, and the sufferings and circumstances, 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 of any dramatic moment.  Lady Macbeth’s sleep-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.