Excerpt from An Introduction to Dramatic Theory While in a work of this kind, dealing with the principles of tragedy and comedy, it was necessary to devote considerable space to the fundamental sources of comic and of tragic enjoyment, it must be pointed out that this book does not profess to present a new theory of laughter or a psychological analysis of the pleasure derived from tragedy. All through I have confined myself strictly to the theatre, and have endeavoured to analyse existing works of dramatic art rather than to probe back from these works to the more primitive sources of laughter and of tears. My aim has been to write an introduction to the study of drama, and for this purpose I have treated the dramatic productivity of Greece, Rome, France, Italy, Germany, and England as one, in an attempt to capture those essential characteristics by which all are linked together. My apology for writing this book, if apology be needed, is that there is at present no satisfactory work on comedy as a type of drama, and that, even with tragedy, critics have been more inclined to analyse particular branches of the subject than to treat all as one. It has been my object here to show that there is something fundamentally in common not only between AEschylus and Shakespeare, but between Shakespeare and Ibsen; that the finest productions of modern, Elizabethan, and classical dramatic art are bound together by ties which, although less visible, count for far more than the apparent differences in style, in spirit, and in construction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."