ABSTRACT
Although Shakespeare wrote in a wide range of genres, his popular reputation today rests especially on his comedies and tragedies. These genres are often assumed to have been well established in the early modern period because of their classical roots, but their re-emergence was still new, and Shakespeare's interventions in defining them were both substantial and influential. Although the terms "comedy" and "tragedy" have been in use more or less continuously in European languages since their Greek origins, their association with staged performances re-emerged only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when classical tragedies and comedies became increasingly visible. Just as the ghost of Seneca, along with the subtler specters of Euripides and Plautus, hovers behind Shakespeare's early experimentation with tragedy, Shakespeare's first approaches to comedy lean especially heavily on classical models. Shakespeare engages self-consciously with Amphitryo in a number of plays, both early and late.
