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The first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, is a chain of slaughter and revenge written in direct imitation of Seneca. (As it happens, Gorboduc does follow the form as well as the subject matter of Senecan tragedy: but only a very few other English plays—e.g.
The revenge tragedy, or revenge play, is a dramatic genre in which the protagonist seeks revenge for an imagined or actual injury. [1] The term revenge tragedy was first introduced in 1900 by A. H. Thorndike to label a class of plays written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras (circa 1580s to 1620s).
It is common to consider any tragedy containing an element of revenge a revenge tragedy. Lily Campbell argues that revenge is the great thematic uniter of all early modern tragedy, and "Elizabethan tragedy must appear as fundamentally a tragedy of revenge if the extent of the idea of revenge be but grasped". [5]
Thyestes is a first century AD fabula crepidata (Roman tragedy with Greek subject) of approximately 1112 lines of verse by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, which tells the story of Thyestes, who unwittingly ate his own children who were slaughtered and served at a banquet by his brother Atreus. [1]
Tragedies written by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who is also known as Seneca the Younger.Octavia is included in the category, as although it is very probably not by him, [1] it is usually included in collections of Seneca's plays, such as the Penguin Classics book of Seneca's plays, Four Tragedies and Octavia
Nine of Seneca's tragedies survive, all of which are fabulae crepidatae; a fabula crepidata or fabula cothurnata is a Latin tragedy with Greek subjects. Seneca appears as a character in the tragedy Octavia, the only extant example of fabula praetexta (tragedies based on Roman subjects, first created by Naevius), and as a result, the play was ...
Senecan stichomythia, while ultimately derived from Athenian stichomythia (as Roman theatre is derived from Greek theatre generally [7]) differs in several respects. First, Seneca uses the technique less than all but the earliest extant pieces of classical Greek tragedy. Secondly, the stichomythic form found in Seneca is less rigid.
Following the Senecan model of revenge tragedy, each of the play's five acts is preceded by a Prologue that features Atë, the ancient Greek goddess of folly and ruin. In each, Ate introduces and explicates a dumbshow ; the play's five dumbshows feature symbolic figures and animals, or personages of classical mythology .