A
Glimpse of Theatre History
Tragedy of Blood/Revenge Tragedy
The best description of the genre is Horatio's closing lines from Hamlet Act V:
| …So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning, and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall'n on the inventors' heads |
Taste for the new genre came partly from the rediscovery of Seneca. His plays were translated into English between 1559-81 and quickly achieved a great popularity among the literary class. Seneca supplies the basic structure of a revenge tragedy in five acts:
| 1) Exposition of events just past which precipitate mandatory vengeance
(usually by a ghost who takes no part in the ensuing action) 2) Anticipation-usually detailed planning of the revenge by its chief agent. 3) Confrontation of the avenger and his victim 4) Partial execution or temporary thwarting of avenger's plan 5) Completion of the act of vengeance |
There was often a strong "Italian influence" based largely on Elizabethan misconceptions. Italy was seen as a hot-bed of vice, villainy, perversion, treachery, and vengeance. Poisoning was seen as an especially Italian vice; there was a dread of Popery; a suspicion of atheism; a Puritan dread of moral contamination. Italy was the excitingly dangerous and exotic land of the Borgias and Machiavelli…
The earliest example of any worth was Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedie (c. 1589) which is clearly the model for the best of the genre: Hamlet (1600). Nearly all the Jacobean playwrights wrote in this style.
