ABSTRACT
Death has of course long been a central subject of literature. This chapter focuses on drama, defining opera as musical drama. The two reigning forms of drama from Classical literature until the present are tragedy and comedy, and the presence or absence of death is precisely what separates the two. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, to cite one familiar and apposite example, is clearly a tragedy well informed by Aristotelian genre theory. As has sometimes been noted, the play should really be called Brutus, as the death of Julius Caesar early in the play initiates the real action rather than in any sense closing it. What is tragic in a modern, post-classical perspective about Romeo and Juliet is not just the conventional sign of the tragic genre, the fact that both die: the fact of dying may be necessary for a tragedy, but it is surely not sufficient.
