Much that is said on our main preliminary subjects will naturally hold good, within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare beside _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, and _Macbeth_. But it will often apply to these other works only in part, and to some of them more fully than to others. _Romeo and Juliet_, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it is an early work, and in some respects an immature one. _Richard III._ and _Richard II._, _Julius Caesar_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, and _Coriolanus_ are tragic histories or historical tragedies, in which Shakespeare acknowledged in practice a certain obligation to follow his authority, even when that authority offered him an undramatic material. Probably he himself would have met some criticisms to which these plays are open by appealing to their historical character, and by denying that such works are to be judged by the standard of pure tragedy. In any case, most of these plays, perhaps all, do show, as a matter of fact, considerable deviations from that standard; and, therefore, what is said of the pure tragedies must be applied to them with qualifications which I shall often take for granted without mention. There remain _Titus Andronicus_ and _Timon of Athens_. The former I shall leave out of account, because, even if Shakespeare wrote the whole of it, he did so before he had either a style of his own or any characteristic tragic conception. _Timon_ stands on a different footing. Parts of it are unquestionably Shakespeare's, and they will be referred to in one of the later lectures. But much of the writing is evidently not his, and as it seems probable that the conception and construction of the whole tragedy should also be attributed to some other writer, I shall omit this work too from our preliminary discussions. LECTURE I THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY The question we are to consider in this lecture may be stated in a variety of ways. We may put it thus: What is the substance of a Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and from the differences in point of substance between one tragedy and another? Or thus: What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented by Shakespeare? What is the general fact shown now in this tragedy and now in that? And we are putting the same question when we ask: What is Shakespeare's tragic conception, or conception of tragedy?