[47] The Fall of Robespierre (1794), by Southey and Coleridge, and Southey's Wat Tyler (1817), written in 1794, hardly require even mention as tragedies.
[48] In this and the two following paragraphs the bracketed dates are those of the first performances in London. Some of the plays were first acted elsewhere.
[49] "I mean the mire of a bad reputation which is continually rising against me. My name with the literary fashionables is vulgar. I am a weaver-boy to them. A tragedy would lift me out of this mess." Letter to his sister, December, 1819.
[50] The translation of Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen (1799), The House of Aspen (1830), Halidon Hill (1822), Macduff's Cross (1823), The Doom of Devorgoil (1830), Auchindrane (1830).
[51] Herford, Age of Wordsworth, p. 227.
CHAPTER XI
CONCLUSION
The questions with which the first chapter began should now have found their answers. The plays considered in our historical sketch have many common characteristics, they do separate themselves from other plays of their periods, they are connected from one period to another in a continuous development. English tragedies constitute a dramatic type, a literary form. This type has, to be sure, permitted many variations,—revenge tragedy, chronicle play, tragicomedy, domestic tragedy, sentimental tragedy, heroic play, or the closet tragedy of the romanticists—but every one of these species has had its connections with others, and in every period the tragedies of varying kinds have been related not only to one another but to those that have gone before. With changing theatrical conditions, with new literary impulses, with new views of the old traditions, with new influences from Spain or France or Germany, the type has taken new characteristics or made new alliances, but has never lost its integrity. At any time during the three centuries it would have been possible to frame a definition of tragedy that would include over nine tenths of the tragedies of the period, and the other tenth would offer only definable variations. However strong the foreign influences, tragedy has maintained the national tradition; however great the innovations, it has never broken with the past. From Marlowe to Shelley there has been an unbroken continuity in themes, stories, types of persons, nature of emotional appeal, structure, and even in the blank verse.