Part I papers with a dissertation and a portfolio of essays, and two Part II dissertations leave only three sat exam papers. Tragedy is the toughest Part II paper, and still has the power of reducing able candidates to fear and trembling. Its compulsory Greek element was intended, at the inception of the Cambridge Tripos, to give scholarly rigour to a subject the opponents of which dubbed it 'the novel-reading tripos'. Tragedy is generously defined, and can include anything from The Duchess of Malfi to Ken Sarawivo. Although the critical philosophy behind this is out of fashion in a climate where 'context' is the big word, it still provides a useful exercise in literary interpretation.
Students have to get in amongst the words and put the big ideas on the back burner.
And contrary to received opinion, Cambridge undergraduates are still good at prosody and close reading. In Part II, Shakespearean Tragedy is obviously an important part of the compulsory paper, and there is, in addition, a popular Part II Special Subject paper on 'Shakespeare in Performance' which includes a week at Stratford watching the RSC do their stuff. Both have involved inter-disciplinary work with colleagues from the Departments of History and Philosophy of Science and Art History, and I'm sure that this kind of collaboration is the way forward for English studies. I should also mention the increasing amount of time that University Lecturers in my Faculty are spending on Graduate teaching, in my case a significant portion of my teaching time. Much college supervising is done by unsung heroes who have no contractual employment with either College or Faculty.