Shakespeare's Pathos "The fact is, that Shakespeare never, whether in comedy or tragedy, ends in the pathetic key, a point to which I shall return later. That there is an admixture of compassion in these great scenes is true; but the passions with which it is commingled are so agitating, the action so frantic, the consequences so prodigious, that pity is smothered up in dismay. At the very end, to be sure, the winds fall and cease, and the waves break back on themselves in a mighty subsidence; but it is the calm of a supreme exaltation." J. F. Pyre. Read on...