Put another way: “Those who try to refuse suffering,” wrote W. H. Auden in an essay about characters in Shakespeare, “not only fail to avoid it but are plunged deeper into sin and suffering.” Everyone suffers in Shakespeare’s plays, according to Auden. The difference is that in tragedies, suffering leads to “self-blindness, defiance, hatred”; in comedies, it leads to “self-knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, love.”28
