The directness of his plays springs in part
from the fact that it is humanity and not circumstance that Shakspere
respects. Circumstance he uses only for the setting forth of humanity;
and for the plot of circumstance, so much in favour with Ben Jonson, and
others of his contemporaries, he cares nothing. As to their looking too
natural to have any design in them, we are not of those who believe that
it is unlike nature to have a design and a result. If the proof of a
high aim is to be what the critics used to call _poetic justice_, a kind
of justice that one would gladly find more of in grocers' and
linen-drapers' shops, but can as well spare from a poem, then we must
say that he has not always a high end: the wicked man is not tortured,
nor is the good man smothered in bank-notes and rose-leaves. Even when
he shows the outward ruin and death that comes upon Macbeth at last, it
is only as an unavoidable little consequence, following in the wake of
the mighty vengeance of nature, even of God, that Macbeth cannot say
_Amen_; that Macbeth can sleep no more; that Macbeth is "cabined
cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears;" that his very
brain is a charnel-house, whence arise the ghosts of his own murders,
till he envies the very dead the rest to which his hand has sent them.
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