Write a short essay on Elizabethan Revenge
Tragedy
Revenge Tragedy is a form of
tragic drama in which someone, usually a hero or a villain rights wrong.
According to the literary historians, the earliest instance of a kind of revenge tragedy is the Oresteia of Aeschylus. During the Renascence period two main ‘revenge’
traditions are discernible : first, the French-Spanish tradition, best
exemplified in the work of Lope de Vega (1562-1635), Calderon (1600-81) and
Corneille ( 1606-84 ). In their treatment of revenge themes, the emphasis is on
the point of honour and the conflict between love and duty. The second, and
more important, was Senecan.
Though tragic narrative, as
illustrated in the Fall of Princes
and Mirror for Magistrates, had a great hold on the readers,
there was hardly any tradition of tragedy on the English stage when Elizabeth
came to the throne. English tragedy developed from the classical models of
Seneca. Early Elizabethan tragedy is Senecan tragedy. The Latin dramatist of
the first century A.D. writing for a sophisticated, aristocratic audience had
produced tragedies notable for the horrors which filled them, for their
exaggerated character-drawing, their violently rhetorical language coupled with
emotional hyperboles, and a wealth of epigram. His influence was first felt in
the Latin plays of the universities, especially Cambridge, where between 1550
and 1560, the theatre was very Senecan and his appeal was so great that, by
1581, he had become the first classical dramatist to have the entire canon of his ten tragedies
translated into English by different hands and in 1581, they were published
together in an impressive volume. From the universities where many of the
up-coming dramatists such as Marlowe, Peele and Greene were students during the
peak period of Senecan influence, by way of the Inns of Court, the Senecan
influence reached the popular stage.
Seneca’s Thyestes perhaps influenced the structure of
English tragedy more than any other. The earliest English tragedy was written
by two members of Parliament and
presented before Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall on January 18, 1562, by the
gentlemen of the Inner Temple. The first edition (1565) of the play was called Tragedy
of Gorboduc ; in the second edition ( c. 1570) which does not
materially differ, it was called Tragedy
of Ferrex and Porrex. The first three acts are said to be the work of
Thomas Norton (1532-1548) and the last two of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608). The
division is borne out by stylistic evidence. Both writers employ an admirable
blank verse not before attempted in drama. There is a heavy embellishment of
dumb shows after the Italian style and of atmospheric music by violins,
coronets, flutes, hautboys and drums successively. Gorboduc renounces the
classical unities and presents a fifth act which is a dramatic irrelevance
since the important characters are already dead. Politically, the fifth act is
far from being irrelevant, for it shows a nightmarish picture of ignorant
armies clashing and selfish soldiers advancing their claims through fifty years
of anarchy. The poetry has here the dark grandeur of Sackville’s Induction and
the play ends with two great, and greatly anachronistic orations – respectively
65 and 100 lines in length – in praise of parliamentary government.........................................................................................................................
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