0. Preliminaries provide the usual guides to contents and graphics, and an unusual statement of acknowledgments. It also provides a preface which explains my approach to prevent possible misapprehensions because of its debt to, but also its departure from, source and influence studies. It addresses various critical issues: genre because of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, the greater emphasis on romantic structures and motifs than on protagonists, differences with New Historicism and Presentism, and periodization.