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.
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