Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500-1700

Unlike the contrast between the sacred and the taboo, the opposition of "e;comic"e; and "e;tragic"e; is not a way of categorizing experience that we find in cultures all over the world or even at different periods in Western civilization. Though medieval writers and readers distinguished stories with happy endings from stories with unhappy endings, it was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth ce...