F there any psychological validity in Blake's dictum-As a man is, so he sees-and if it true not only of the ordinary man, for instance the reader of Shakespeare's plays and the spectator in the theater, but also of the characters he created, then it suggests a criterion by which to judge the thoughts, speeches, and actions of men and women on the stage. For a man sees, so he seems the natural corollary to Blake's dictum. A man's sense-perceptions, his responsive contact with the outside world through his eyes, will determine his outlook on the world and its inhabitants, which, in turn, will give rise to forms of behavior open to moral judgment. This dependence of being on seeing will color man's knowledge, not only of others, but of himself as well. Man is not merely how he sees, but what he sees, as well as when he sees, and, not least of all, because he sees what he thinks he sees. The spectator in the theater (and even more so the reader of plays) may, as a rule, be supposed to possess a greater degree of insight than the actor on the stage, involved as the latter in intensely emotive situations. The onlooker, in his twofold function as passive recipient, on the one hand, yet carried along by the intensities of the action on the stage, on the other, and quite ready to identify himself with those characters who see rather than seen -this sympathetic witness of so frequently distorted vision and shortsighted violence need not necessarily be aware of the archetypal nature of the conflict between sight and insight arising from it. He may refer what he sees on the stage merely to the personal tortuosities of the characters concerned. Though the metaphor may seem to him psychologically significant, it may not convey that generalized truth which an archetypal pattern of experience meant to imply. The purpose of this paper, however, to show how, with the growing maturity of his art, Shakespeare lifted the conflict and the tension out of the realm of the merely personal and idiosyncratic. He, as it were, universalized it by emphasizing the ever-repeated, legendary, indeed mythical nature of man's distorted vision that leads from spiritual to actual blindness. The archetype of evil not necessarily expressed in terms of this or that character, the outcast, the alien, the envious, the greedy, the ambitious, the voluptuous, not in Iago, in Lady Macbeth, in Edmund, not even in Caliban-all of them being undoubtedly projections of what the artist apprehended as evil in human nature. The archetypal essence of evil so often conveyed through the metaphor of blindness itself that the many varieties of evil that men are capable of may be said to be not you are, but you see-or rather as you believe you see.