ABSTRACT
Shakespeare does not finally, then, offer people merely a set of horrifyingly defective alternatives, though he indicates that at the level of experience life may often seem to fall into such a pattern. Nor does he bitterly claim pre-eminent value for nakedness, disease, suffering, age, injury, blindness, and madness because these states coincide with higher spiritual perception. The unmodified horror of the blinding scene, and of the madness as clinical fact, should guard against the view that Shakespeare is sardonically glorifying states which terrify mankind. Shakespeare is able to imagine humanity having discarded all its essential humanizing influences, to see evil at work and to analyze that evil in fundamental terms, that is, as the product of rootless intellect. At the same time he can imagine some human beings clinging to the insights, to the imaginative integrity, through which their personal honor is secured.
