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 and murder. _Julius Caesar_ is the only tragedy in which one is
even tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is
obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the