WHEN THE EDITORS OF THE FIRST COLLECTED EDITION OF Shakespeare's plays (the First Folio of 1623) decided on a classification of the thirty-six plays they had assembled, they divided them into three groups, namely ‘Comedies’, ‘Histories’ and ‘Tragedies’. In this they were making use of traditional generic terms that had hardly ever been seriously questioned and are still in use today, even though an exact definition or a clear distinction between them may not be possible in each particular case. The history play, to be sure, is largely a product of the Renaissance and has always occupied a rather special place, but comedy and tragedy have been firmly established types of drama almost from the beginnings of Western literature and theatre; they are among the most long-lived of all literary genres. Thus, tragedy, in spite of many variations in form and substance, has proved remarkably consistent, and this can hardly be explained by literary reasons alone. In common usage the word ‘tragedy’ denotes not just a form of drama, but a particular kind of event, a specific experience, or even a general view of our world-order. ‘Tragedy’ can mean some strikingly unhappy accident or a merciless, arbitrary destiny, a moral exemplum of just retribution or an unfathomable catastrophe, suggesting an essentially malevolent fate. As a rule, to be properly called tragedy, the disaster has to have an element of heroic pathos or some sensational and astounding quality. In the context of literature, tragic suffering implies an idea of dignity and of inevitability, of more than average stature, even though this may not be true of every single stage tragedy.