In Sophocles, arrogance and audacity are accounted evil; in Marlowe and Chapman, it is intensity of desire that drives to disaster; but in Shakespeare the melancholy and reflective temper of Hamlet and the generous and credulous magnanimity of Othello are the allies of untoward circumstance and designing villany in bringing suffering to the good and failure to the potent. The greatness of Shakespeare's conception, however, results from the massing of all these combatants against the hero. The conflict thus gains in the comprehensiveness of its presentation of life; and human nature in the face of such odds becomes magnificent even in failure. Hero wars with villain; human intrepidity and wisdom with chance and destiny; conscience with sin; greatness of purpose with crippling defects of temperament. Such a conception of tragedy involves a recognition of the blindness of chance that cannot be squared with any theory of poetic justice or theological view of the rewards due to virtue. But it also involves a recognition of moral law that results in the punishment of its violators. The villains never escape as they do in comedy. The wages of sin are always death, though the reward of virtue is not happiness. The vastness of evil in the world, its malignant influence, its temporary triumphs are conceived in a manner not different from that of contemporary thought. The doctrines of total depravity and of moral responsibility go side by side as in medieval drama, theology, and psychology. In the depiction of the waste of effort, the expense of spirit, the crippling of greatness by weakness, the ineffectually of virtue, Shakespeare gave a far more comprehensive and a far more penetrating representation of tragic fact than the world had yet known, but without professing any solution of its mysteries. Such a conception gives unity to the action of each play, but not always a unity that governs details of structure. The structure of a tragedy cannot be described in terms of a system, for the dramatic presentation of each play differs from the others and conforms to the story it relates. There are many survivals of the early epic lawlessness, as in "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Lear"; and in no play is the main action kept entirely free from intruding incongruities. Neither act nor scene receives much regard as an integral unit of structure. The most noticeable structural division is due to an event of extraordinary importance reached somewhere in the middle of the play. This point, to which the terms climax or crisis are sometimes applicable, brings to an end one important development of the action, and thus divides the play into two parts. Cæsar's murder, Duncan's murder, Lear's madness complete one course of tragic incident and introduce us to another.