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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).
Revenge tragedy caught their imagination and writers attempted plays of this genre with their own variations of dramaturgy. Shakespeare raised his revenge tragedy to a high intellectual and philosophical level by making Hamlet a virtuous, sensitive scholar. Cyril Tourneur exploited the morbid and melodramatic in The Atheists Tragedy .
He is regarded as the source and inspiration for what is known as "Revenge Tragedy", starting with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and continuing well into the Jacobean era. [67] Thyestes is considered Seneca's masterpiece, [68] and has been described by scholar Dana Gioia as "one of the most influential plays ever written". [69]
Senecan tragedy specifically features a declamatory style, and most of his plays use exaggerations in order to make his points more persuasive. They explored the psychology of the mind through monologues, focusing on one's inner thoughts, the central causes of their emotional conflicts, dramatizing emotion in a way that became central to Roman ...
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 ...
Phaedra is a Roman tragedy written by philosopher and dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca before 54 A.D. Its 1,280 lines of verse tell the story of Phaedra, wife of King Theseus of Athens and her consuming lust for her stepson Hippolytus.
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 .