hese lectures, at any rate for the most part, we are to
be content with his _dramatic_ view, and are not to ask whether it
corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed outside his poetry--the
opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes oddly call 'Shakespeare
the man.' It does not seem likely that outside his poetry he was a very
simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as some have
maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we can,
that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished
convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. And in his
dramatic conceptions there is enough to occupy us.

1

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to
shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start
directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of
Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a
tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more
than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are
reckoned among them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person,
the 'hero,'[1] or at most of two, the 'hero' and 'heroine.' Moreover, it
is only in the love-tragedies, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony and
Cleopatra_, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the
hero. The rest, including _Macbeth_, are single stars. So that, having
noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the
sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being
concerned primarily with one person.

The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the _death_ of the hero. On
the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the
end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense,
a tragedy; and we no longer class _Troilus and Cressida_ or _Cymbeline_
as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story
depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and
leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by
'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is,
in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to
death.

The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a
conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are
also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happines