More distinct contemporary influences reappear similarly amalgamated and transformed. In "Hamlet" we have a play closely related to those of a particular species; but in the other plays of Shakespeare's maturity nothing like close relationship can be found to the great examples of Marlowe, to the peculiar type introduced by Kyd and developed by Marston, or to the contemporary efforts of Chapman and Jonson. Any one play doubtless responded to a tangle of influences not now to be separated. Current popular plays, practices on the stage, the personalities of the actors, Shakespeare's own preceding plays, contemporary non-dramatic literature, current events such as the Essex rebellion or the Gunpowder Plot, and hosts of other influences were at work directing the development of an old story into a tragedy. Taking the plays as a body, some of the more important of these limiting and directing influences still remain discernible in the transformed result. All the tragedies but "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet," only partial exceptions, relate the falls of princes and the revolutions of kingdoms. These stories of princes are of the same kind as in other Elizabethan tragedy. In a setting of court and camp they place sensational crimes, and trace the accompaniments and consequences. Their themes are revenge, madness, tyranny, conspiracy, lust, adultery, and jealousy. They abound in villany, intrigue, and slaughter. They avoid Senecan atrocities and the abnormal phases of lust; but the tearing out of Gloster's eyes recalls the horrors of the early plays; while revenge, conspiracy, and villany are as prominent as in the contemporary tragedies of Marston, Jonson, and Chapman. Three of the stories include ghosts, while in "Macbeth" the weird sisters offer an opportunity for a most original treatment of the supernatural. Comedy is always combined with tragedy, and the medieval tradition and the popular taste for an emotional contrast receive artistic vindication in the grotesqueness of "Hamlet" and "Lear." Each plot, like those of Marlowe's plays, centres about a great personality and illustrates a temperament dominated by passion. It traces the course of folly, mistake, or sin to the wages of death as in "Lear," "Othello," and "Antony and Cleopatra"; or it begins with a murder and records its progeny of crime and death as in "Julius Cæsar," "Hamlet," and "Macbeth."