Hamlet - Elizabethan Revenge In Hamlet

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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 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 ...

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or not to go through with the

revenge, which usually involves tough and 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 ...

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