Tragedy

"[...]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 Brunetiere'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[...].""