Comedy or Tragedy?

(Courtroom. A large baldheaded man sitting on the floor, half-dressed, fingering cuts and bruises on his body.)

A SMALLER MAN (entering): Heaven and hell, what has become of you, Judge Adam? You’ve stumbled over something?

ADAM: Must there always be a something one stumbles over, Mr. Light?

LIGHT: Ha?

ADAM: Is not homo sapiens a stumbler? Who has his stumbling block within? That’s philosphy, Mr. Light.

LIGHT: Theology, Judge Adam: we all go back to the first Adam who fell in Act One, Scene One, of the comedy.

ADAM: Tragedy.

—Eric Bentley, Concord: A Comedy, based on Kleist’s The Broken Jug