to arrive at a right appreciation of his genius and its transcendent contribution to tragedy. For the purpose of our survey we may have the four great tragedies chiefly in mind. The early tragedies are manifestly the products of an experimental period and the precursors of the latter plays; and the three Roman histories have a subordinate and contributory rather than an essential and preëminent part in his achievement in tragedy. Whatever can be said of the four great tragedies applies in its essentials to all. All these plays taken together illustrate the extraordinary amalgamation of the medieval and classical inheritances that English tragedy had received as a birthright. No play escapes from its narrative sources, and some are bound closely by them; yet the choice of sources often indicates the influence of the Senecan formula, sensational externals giving opportunity for an introspective analysis of emotional crises, notably in the stories of crime, revenge, and retribution. Their enormous variety of incident, their mingling of the comic and the tragic, their admission of physical horrors, deaths, and spectacles mark the survival of the medieval tradition, while the aphoristic and heightened style, the ghosts and the soliloquies are derivatives from Seneca. The freedom of the medieval stage to the presentation of all sorts of matters accounts in part for their splendid comprehensiveness, while classical theory is partly responsible for their restriction to momentous events and supernormal persons. Their structure remains epic and popular, but progress toward dramatic unity seems conditioned by the Senecan five-act scheme. The medieval idea of the pagan deity Fortune is preserved; and conceptions of good and evil, like those of the morality, stand side by side with classical conceptions of the struggle between the individual and fate. The union of these diverse elements has become too close for disentanglement. "Macbeth," based upon Holinshed's chronicle, comes nearest in conception and treatment to classical tragedy; "Antony and Cleopatra" in structure and method reverts the nearest to medieval models.