Revenge and Vengeance in Shakespeares Hamlet - Typical Revenge Tragedy :: GCSE Coursework Shakespeare Hamlet

Hamlet as a Typical Revenge Tragedy Shakespeares Hamlet very closely follows the dramatic conventions of revenge in Elizabethan theater. All revenge tragedies origin on the wholey stemmed from the Greeks, who wrote and performed the first plays. After the Greeks came Seneca who was very influential to all Elizabethan tragedy writers. Seneca who was Roman, basically set all of the ideas and the norms for all revenge play writers in the Renaissance era including William Shakespeare. The two most famous English revenge tragedies written in the Elizabethan era were Hamlet, written by Shakespeare and The Spanish Tragedy, written by Thomas Kyd. These two plays use mostly all of the Elizabethan conventions for revenge tragedies in their plays. Hamlet especially structured all revenge conventions in one way or a nonher, which truly made Hamlet a typical revenge play. Shakespeares Hamlet is one of umteen heroes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage who finds himself grievously wronged by a powerful figure, with no recourse to the law, and with a crime against his family to avenge. Seneca was among the greatest authors of mere tragedies and there was not one educated Elizabethan who was unaware of him or his plays. There were certain stylistic and different strategically thought out devices that Elizabethan playwrights including Shakespeare learned and used from Senecas great tragedies. The five act structure, the appearance of some kind of ghost, the one line exchanges known as stichomythia, and Senecas use of long rhetorical speeches were all later on used in tragedies by Elizabethan playwrights. Some of Senecas ideas were originally taken from the Greeks when the Romans conquered Greece, and with it they took home many Greek theatrical ideas. Some of Senecas stories that originated from the Greeks like Agamemnon and Thyestes which dealt with bloody family histories and revenge captivated the Elizabethans. Senecas stories werent really written for performanc e purposes, so if English playwrights liked his ideas, they had to figure out a way to make the story theatrically workable, relevant and exciting to the Elizabethan audience who were very demanding. Senecas influence formed part of a developing tradition of tragedies whose plots hinge on political power, forbidden sexuality, family keep an eye on and private revenge. There was no author who exercised a wider or deeper influence upon the Elizabethan mind or upon the Elizabethan form of tragedy than did Seneca. For the dramatists of Renaissance Italy, France and England, classical tragedy meant only the ten Latin plays of Seneca and not Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles.