Polonius, ever ready to expatiate upon the obvious, would inform us that the dramatic repertory has many different genres; it could encompass such hybrid modalities as the "tragic aI-comical-historic aI-pastoral. " Tragedy and comedy had set up their classic polarity, but they were not turning out to be mutually exclusive, and the ever-widening middle ground offered room for multiform possibilities. The principal new mode devised by Elizabethans would be canonized - between the two old ones, and along with the playwright who had made it his very own - on the title page of the First Folio; Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Now history, in its generic sense, takes the form of story, the same word serves for both in Romance languages; and early English novels have been presented as "histories." Ordinarily it had been expected to narrate, rather than dramatize, what it attested to have actually taken place somewhere in the public domain. Tudor England had become history-conscious to an unprecedented degree. Its chroniclers evoked the past to sustain the present, to justify and glorify the regime, to consolidate a patriotic attitude within a nationalistic ideology. Among its increasingly eloquent means of expression, the drama was outstandingly in the ascendance, and dramatists were continually faced with the need for popular and spectacular material. Hence it seems inevitable that those two distinctive forms should have been temporarily conflated into the English history-play.