“It is about time someone wrote a new Poetics,” my friend said. He was thinking of Tragedy, of course, and he looked hopefully at me, or so my vanity led me to believe. And it occurred to me at once how easy it would be to join this enterprise of drafting new or modified “laws” for tragedy, and how difficult to extricate oneself from it. There hasn’t been a generation since the fifteenth century that hasn’t tried to rewrite Aristotle’s text whether by interpretation or augmentation. Yet nothing absolute has ever been said on the subject that went perceptibly beyond the prejudices or ambitions of a period, a nation, a species of litterateur, or a class of play-goers and readers. The very effort to define the limits of tragedy appears to have introduced more confusion into criticism and playwriting than it has eradicated.