All these plays taken together illustrate the extraordinary amalgamation of the medieval and classical inheritances that English tragedy had received as a birthright. No play escapes from its narrative sources, and some are bound closely by them; yet the choice of sources often indicates the influence of the Senecan formula, sensational externals giving opportunity for an introspective analysis of emotional crises, notably in the stories of crime, revenge, and retribution. Their enormous variety of incident, their mingling of the comic and the tragic, their admission of physical horrors, deaths, and spectacles mark the survival of the medieval tradition, while the aphoristic and heightened style, the ghosts and the soliloquies are derivatives from Seneca. The freedom of the medieval stage to the presentation of all sorts of matters accounts in part for their splendid comprehensiveness, while classical theory is partly responsible for their restriction to momentous events and supernormal persons. Their structure remains epic and popular, but progress toward dramatic unity seems conditioned by the Senecan five-act scheme. The medieval idea of the pagan deity Fortune is preserved; and conceptions of good and evil, like those of the morality, stand side by side with classical conceptions of the struggle between the individual and fate. The union of these diverse elements has become too close for disentanglement. "Macbeth," based upon Holinshed's chronicle, comes nearest in conception and treatment to classical tragedy; "Antony and Cleopatra" in structure and method reverts the nearest to medieval models.
More distinct contemporary influences reappear similarly amalgamated and transformed. In "Hamlet" we have a play closely related to those of a particular species; but in the other plays of Shakespeare's maturity nothing like close relationship can be found to the great examples of Marlowe, to the peculiar type introduced by Kyd and developed by Marston, or to the contemporary efforts of Chapman and Jonson. Any one play doubtless responded to a tangle of influences not now to be separated. Current popular plays, practices on the stage, the personalities of the actors, Shakespeare's own preceding plays, contemporary non-dramatic literature, current events such as the Essex rebellion or the Gunpowder Plot, and hosts of other influences were at work directing the development of an old story into a tragedy. Taking the plays as a body, some of the more important of these limiting and directing influences still remain discernible in the transformed result.