re's
several dramatic portraits or stories is of doubtful utility. There is
a genuine danger of reading into Shakespeare's plots and characters
more direct ethical significance than is really there. Dramatic art
never consciously nor systematically serves obvious purposes of
morality, save to its own detriment.

Nevertheless there is not likely to be much disagreement with the
general assertion that Shakespeare's plots and characters
involuntarily develop under his hand in conformity with the
straightforward requirements of moral law. He upholds the broad canons
of moral truth with consistency, even with severity. There is no
mistaking in his works on which side lies the right. He never renders
vice amiable. His want of delicacy, his challenges of modesty, need
no palliation. It was characteristic of his age to speak more plainly
of many topics about which polite lips are nowadays silent. But
Shakespeare's coarsenesses do no injury to the healthy-minded. They do
not encourage evil propensities. Wickedness is always wickedness in
Shakespeare, and never deludes the spectator by masquerading as
something else. His plays never present problems as to whether vice is
not after all in certain conditions the sister of virtue. Shakespeare
never shows vice in the twilight, nor leaves the spectator or reader
in doubt as to what its features precisely are. Vice injures him who
practises it in the Shakespearean world, and ultimately proves his
ruin. One cannot play with vice with impunity.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.

It is not because Shakespeare is a conscious moralist, that the wheel
comes full circle in his dramatic world. It is because his sense of
art is involuntarily coloured by a profound conviction of the ultimate
justice which governs the operations of human nature and society.

Shakespeare argues, in effect, that a man reaps as he sows. It may be
contended that Nature does not always work in strict accord with this
Shakespearean canon, and that Shakespeare thereby shows himself more
of a deliberate moralist than Nature herself. But the dramatist
idealises or generalises human experience; he does not reproduce it
literally. There is nothing in the Shakespearean canon that runs
directly counter to the idealised or generalised experience of the
outer world. The wicked and the foolish, the intemperate and the
over-passionate, reach in Shakespeare's world that disas