TRAGEDY, as it was anciently composed, hath been ever held the gravest,
moralest, and most profitable of all other poems; therefore said by Aristotle
to be of power, by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those
and such-like passions -- that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure
with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well
imitated. Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion;
for so, in physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against
melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours. Hence philoso-
phers and other gravest writers, as Cicero, Plutarch, and others, frequently
cite out of tragic poets, both to adorn and illustrate their discourse. The
Apostle Paul himself thought it not unworthy to insert a verse of Euripides
into the text of Holy Scripture, I Cor. xv. 33; and Paræus, commenting on
the Revelation, divides the whole book, as a tragedy, into acts, distinguished
each by a Chorus of heavenly harpings and song between. Heretofore men
in highest dignity have laboured not a little to be thought able to compose
a tragedy. Of that honour Dionysius the elder was no less ambitious than
before of his attaining to the tyranny. Augustus Cæesar also had begun his
Ajax, but, unable to please his own judgment with what he had begun, left
it unfinished. Seneca, the philosopher, is by some thought the author of those
tragedies (at least the best of them) that go under that name. Gregory
Nazianzen, a Father of the Church thought it not unbeseeming the sanctity
of his person to write a tragedy, which he entitled Christ Suffering. This is
mentioned to vindicate Tragedy from the small esteem, or rather infamy,
which in the account of many it undergoes at this day, with other common
interludes; happening through the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff
with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons:
which by all judicious hath been counted absurd, and brought in without
discretion, corruptly to gratify the people. And, though ancient Tragedy
use no Prologue, yet using sometimes, in case of self-defence or explanation,
that which Martial calls an Epistle, in behalf of this tragedy, coming forth
after the ancient manner, much different from what among us passes for best,
thus much beforehand may be epistled -- that Chorus is here introduced
after the Greek manner, not ancient only, but modern, and still in use among
the Italians. In the modelling therefore of this poem, with good reason, the
Ancients and Italians are rather followed, as of much more authority and
fame. The measure of verse used in the Chorus is of all sorts, called by the
Greeks Monostrophic, or rather Apolelymenon, without regard had to Strophe,

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