Interestingly, the difference between Seneca’s revenge tragedies and Shakespeare’s, is that in the Seneca’s all the bloodshed occurred offstage and was usually reported by a messenger. His father’s death is avenged by the end of the play but there has been no violence from Hamlet. Hamlet does not have to do a thing to any of them, and never intentionally kills anyone. Shakespeare, of course, as he always does, resolves this problem by having all the wrongdoers, including Claudius, the murderer of Hamlet’s father, caught in the traps they have set for the young prince. But forgiveness is not an option in revenge plays. The Christian way would always be forgiveness. It is an interesting situation because although the avenger has the right to realise justice by taking revenge it is simply not Christian. In some of the plays the avenger is not in any way a hero but utterly villainous. Conventionally, in revenge plays, the avenger is something of a hero but, in seeking revenge, is himself a killer. Audiences could not identify with the methods of the protagonist, but in Hamlet we have a thoughtful, decent, highly intelligent young man who would not normally do anyone any harm and, indeed, is unable to perform the violence that his call to revenge demands. Shakespeare’s revenge play, Titus Andronicusis quite possibly the most grotesque play of the period, with its unpalatable violence. While Hamlet uses it to prove the guilt of his target, Kyd’s hero, Hieronimo, takes part in the play and stabs the villain in the middle of the performance. In both plays the playwrights use the device of a play-within- a-play as a powerful weapon in the protagonist’s effort to move things on. In both plays that supernatural framework is set against a protagonist’s struggle to achieve justice by taking direct action. It contains a ghost as one of the dramatic devices, something that Shakespeare also employed in Hamlet. One of the first English revenge plays of note – a play that is still performed today – is Thomas Kyd’s 1587 play, The Spanish Tragedy, which became the model for the revenge plays of his contemporaries. In Hippolytus, for example, Theseus takes revenge on his son for the supposed rape of Phaedra in Agamemnon the ghost of Thyestes urges Aegisthus towards revenge. Most of Seneca’s plays concerned the heroic figures of classical legend, and in their stories there was a great deal of revenge. Seneca was of great interest to English dramatists, particularly the Jacobean writers because his plays were filled with such horrifying events as cannibalism, incest, rape, and violent death, things that Jacobean audiences really loved. In the second half of the sixteenth century, coinciding with the great age of English drama, the works of the Roman playwrights were being translated into English. Nevertheless, it is a play that depicts the revenge that a young man plans for the murder of his father. ![]() That’s particularly so of Shakespeare’s plays and, indeed, Hamlet, the greatest revenge play of all time, is about more things than can be described, even after four hundred years of its existence. That may be somewhat simplistic, however, as the plays of that era are never about just one thing. Revenge in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is more of a genre than a theme, as it generally applies to plays that are specifically about revenge. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.
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