The easiest way to bring home to oneself the nature of the tragic
character is to compare it with a character of another kind. Dramas like
_Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's Tale_, which might seem destined to end
tragically, but actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely
to the fact that the principal characters fail to reach tragic
dimensions. And, conversely, if these persons were put in the place of
the tragic heroes, the dramas in which they appeared would cease to be
tragedies. Posthumus would never have acted as Othello did; Othello, on
his side, would have met Iachimo's challenge with something more than
words. If, like Posthumus, he had remained convinced of his wife's
infidelity, he would not have repented her execution; if, like Leontes,
he had come to believe that by an unjust accusation he had caused her
death, he would never have lived on, like Leontes. In the same way the
villain Iachimo has no touch of tragic greatness. But Iago comes nearer
to it, and if Iago had slandered Imogen and had supposed his slanders to
have led to her death, he certainly would not have turned melancholy and
wished to die. One reason why the end of the _Merchant of Venice_ fails
to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic character, and that we cannot
believe in his accepting his defeat and the conditions imposed on him.
This was a case where Shakespeare's imagination ran away with him, so
that he drew a figure with which the destined pleasant ending would not
harmonise.

In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait,
which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these
circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have
given, but which the hero cannot give. He errs, by action or omission;
and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. This is
always so with Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero
as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien
to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his
destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal
imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and
degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo,
which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the
murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error
involves no conscious breach of right; in some (_e.g._ that of Brutus