ABSTRACT
In the Middle Ages the term ‘tragedy’ lost all connection with idea of performance. The quotations from Diomedes, Isidore of Seville, and Chaucer show that it had become simply descriptive of pattern of a narrative. Only gradually in the centuries following the fall of Rome did the drama come back to Europe — first in the form of presenting parts of the Christian interpretation of world-history, and then as a vehicle for a moral lesson, in an allegorical form, which would help the individual soul to salvation. No comment on tragic drama can disregard Ibsen’s Brand and Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman or Strindberg’s The Father and Miss Julie. During the twentieth century writing on, as distinct from of, tragedy has been abundant. A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy was not merely a summation of nineteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare: it was also a book that aimed at a serious and profound consideration of the nature of tragic art.
