They lay bare the path to his crimes, yet they seem to obey rather than to govern his inclinations. The embodiments of the desires hid in his bosom, they become, like the dagger in the air and the ghost of Banquo, the symptoms of his soul's disease. The disease of the soul is the theme, and the attention is centred upon crime and its accompaniments, as in many contemporary plays, but with less relief than in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. While the range of crime is confined, lust for instance never appearing as a motive, there is an unrelieved concentration on the evil course of ambition. The virtuous and noble have only minor parts. Lady Macbeth is an instigator and accomplice in crime. For the first time since Shakespeare's early plays, there is no idealized woman. The wickedness of Iago and the wolfish sisters was relieved by the lovableness of Desdemona and Cordelia, unavailing for the time but unforgettable in the sympathies of the reader. The eternal stars never glimmer through the blackness that broods over Macbeth. Because of this concentration on one process of evil and the absence of any idealization of goodness, the play has a less intense appeal to our sympathies than the three preceding tragedies. Again, because of its concern with historical and political results, it removes itself from immediate relationship to common experience. In these respects it links itself with the two Roman historical tragedies that followed it. "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Coriolanus," like "Julius Cæsar," are dramas of great historical characters already splendidly described in Plutarch. They are consequently far more limited by their sources than are the other tragedies. Shakespeare was circumscribed by the main historical facts of persons and events, and he was writing as the translator and interpreter of Plutarch; yet his conception and methods remained the same as in "Hamlet" or "Macbeth." An idealization of the tragic struggle of the protagonist is environed by a wealth of incidents and persons, and accomplished by a gathering and transformation of the methods and matters of current tragedy. The world of antiquity is not faithfully reproduced, but it is made alive and akin to our daily experience in the same fashion as are the Elsinore of Polonius and the grave-diggers, and the Britain of Osric and Kent. And the tragic conflicts that involve the great persons, if confused in the spectacles and actions of this varied stage, are the accompaniments of momentous national crises, themselves of hardly less imaginative appeal than the spiritual struggles which they parallel. The mental battles of Macbeth and Lear are reflected and magnified by the incantations of the weird sisters and the turmoil of the elements; those of Coriolanus and Antony by the battle of the powerful and the oppressed and by the throes of a dying civilization.