In this impression the play has a kinship with the tragedies, even the poor and the maimed, that had preceded it. Tragedies so far have been strangely free from Christian teaching or sentiment. Compared with the medieval drama, early Elizabethan tragedy seems not only secular but pagan. This is partly because it followed its sources and treated of Romans, Moors, Scythians, and heroes of myths and legends; partly because it derived stoic and fatalistic sentiments from Seneca and other classical writers; but it also represents an entire departure from the medieval point of view, a departure necessarily emphasized in tragedy. In the medieval drama, death had been a translation to final reward or punishment,--the portals of heaven and hell were open on the stage. In the Renaissance conception of tragedy death was the point and pith of tragic fact. Faith, forgiveness, reliance on Providence, assurance of immortality are rarely alluded to. Chance, mysterious fate, the emissaries of the devil, the powers of evil in the mind of man are the forces to which tragedy must attend; and they lead to a death terrible and pitiful, to be met bravely and defiantly, it may be, but not peacefully and hopefully. And this emphasis of the gloom of death required an equal emphasis on the glory and beauty of life. Tragedy was the passing into darkness from under this majestic roof fretted with golden fire, the loss of noble reason and infinite faculty; and it must needs proclaim the beauty of the world as well as the quintessence of dust.