Keith May discusses the development, and frequent misunderstanding of, tragedy - explaining the insights of Nietzsche in "The Birth of Tragedy". He looks at its history from the early Greek playwrights, to Renaissance drama, up to more modern writers of tragedy such as Ibsen and Hardy.

Apollo and Dionysus; Aeschylus; Sophocles; impious Euripedes; nature and purity in the renaissance; Ibsen and Hardy, nature's lost sons; Zarathustra and the rebirth of tragedy.