In 1588, with England facing the threat of Spanish invasion, Elizabeth I visited her troops assembled at Tilbury to deliver some rousing words: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ This assertion, the idea that the body politic was eternal and existed in a sacred realm beyond historical time, was ideally suited to a moment of national crisis. But rhetorical force notwithstanding, Elizabeth was propounding a fiction. In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis explores how William Shakespeare was able to use the tragic form to interrogate those ‘fictions of order, stability, and perpetuity’ that humans deploy in their desire to make sense of a random universe. Beginning with Titus Andronicus and ending with Coriolanus, Lewis shows how each play is a response to a particular set of aesthetic challenges. Shakespeare’s motivations lay in exploring the possibilities of the tragic genre. Through plays as various as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear, he explored ‘never-settled notions’ of what tragedy could achieve.