Fixing his mind on
the Idea of two human beings, a man and a woman who trespass from the
law of the great moral powers ordering the Universe (Man along with it)
and are overtaken in that trespass and punished, Shakespeare
disencumbers it of all that is trivial, irrelevant, non-essential. He
takes the wickedest crime of which man can be guilty; not a mere naked
murder, nor even a murder for profit, but the murder of a king by his
sworn soldier, of a guest by his host, of a sleeping guest by the hand
on which he has just bestowed a diamond. Can criminality be laid barer?
He illustrates it again in two persons lifted above the common station;
and he does this not (as I think) for the practical reason for which
Aristotle seems to commend it to tragic writers--that the disasters of
great persons are more striking than those of the small fry of
mankind--that, as the height is, so will be the fall--or not for that
reason alone; but, still in the process of "idealising," because such
persons, exalted above the obscuring petty cares of life, may reasonably
be expected to see the Universe with a clearer vision than ours, to have
more delicate ears for its harmonies.
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