is only in the love-tragedies, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony and
Cleopatra_, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the
hero. The rest, including _Macbeth_, are single stars. So that, having
noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the
sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being
concerned primarily with one person.

The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the _death_ of the hero. On
the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the
end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense,
a tragedy; and we no longer class _Troilus and Cressida_ or _Cymbeline_
as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story
depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and
leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by
'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is,
in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to
death.

The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a
conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are
also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or
glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease,
poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous
or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.

Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero,
and--we must now add--generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as
to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in
tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of
pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by