ABSTRACT
A distinguished Shakespearean scholar famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as Shakespearean Tragedy: there are only Shakespearean tragedies’. Attempts (he added) to find a formula applicable to every one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, defining and distinguishing them from those of other dramatists, invariably meet with little success. Yet when challenging one such attempt he noted its failure to observe what he termed ‘an essential part of the [Shakespearean] tragic pattern’;1 which would seem to imply that these plays do have some shared characteristics peculiar to them and familiar to informed students of Shakespeare.
