If we attempt to fortify our working definition so that it may more effectively separate tragedy on the one hand from melodrama and on the other from comedy and the more or less neutral species, we are driven to consider the numerous and shifting conceptions that have marked the progress of the classical tradition in modern Europe. Although some approach to the tragic may have been manifest from the beginnings of the drama in the mimetic ceremonies of primitive culture, our present distinction between tragedy and comedy traces back to Athens, where tragedy as a form of literature had its first great development and where it received its first critical definition. Nothing closely corresponding to the two forms, as there developed and defined, is to be found in the dramas of China, India, or medieval Europe. Tragedy is an inheritance from Greece and Rome, not received by Western Europe until the Renaissance. There was, to be sure, much that was tragical in the widespread religious drama of the Middle Ages; and there were a number of plays that in content and effect might claim a place with later tragedies; but it was not until the revival of the classics that the revelation of a highly developed form of drama led to the creation of a distinct species called tragedy, in the vernacular literatures of Spain, Italy, France, and England. The classical tradition in the beginning was affected by the mistaken theories of medieval encyclopedists and by humanistic misinterpretations of the classics. In every nation it came into conflict with the traditions of the medieval drama, and underwent great modifications; in England an amalgamation of the two traditions resulting in a tragedy widely different from either. During four centuries the changing theatrical conditions, the changing social conditions, the diversity of national peculiarities, have resulted in ideas of tragedy at variance with one another and with the classics. Shakespeare's conception of tragedy was very different from Aristotle's, and very different from Brunetière's or Ibsen's. Indeed, the conceptions formed by various of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, and Fletcher, so far as we can determine, have pronounced differences though they have common resemblances. It would require a larger book than the present one to consider adequately the differences and agreements merely of critical theory and dogma in modern Europe. Yet the literary tradition, in spite of all these changes and variations, has remained continuous. Whether fixed in the form of rules, or discernible only in the general resemblances of current practices, or represented by the great models of Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Racine, it has influenced every playwright. He has striven to write more or less in accord with some critical theory, in imitation of some author, or in conformity to some fashion; or he has written in opposition to theory, example, or fashion.