Elizabethan Revenge In Hamlet

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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 Seneca’s great tragedies. The five act
structure, the appearance of some kind of ghost, the one line
exchanges known as stichomythia, and Seneca’s use of long rhetorical
speeches were all later used in tragedies by Elizabethan playwrights.
Some of Seneca’s ideas were originally taken from the Greeks when the
Romans conquered Greece, and with it they took home many Greek
theatrical ideas. Some of Seneca’s stories that originated from the
Greeks like Agamemnon and Thyestes which dealt with bloody family
histories and revenge captivated the Elizabethans. Seneca’s stories
weren’t really written for performance 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 ...

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complex planning. Other
features that were typical were the appearance of a ghost, to get the
revenger to go through with the deed. The revenger also usually had a
very close relationship with the audience through soliloquies and
asides. The original crime that will eventually be avenged is nearly
always sexual or violent or both. The crime has been committed against
a family member of the revenger. “ The revenger places himself outside
the normal moral order of things, and often becomes more isolated as
the play progresses-an isolation which at its most extreme becomes
madness.” The revenge must be the cause of a catastrophe and the
beginning of the revenge must start ...

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