Elizabethan Tragedy

William Shakespeare's Hamlet very closely follows the dramatic conventions of revenge in Elizabethan theater. All revenge tragedies originally stemmed from the Greeks, who wrote and performed the first organized plays. After the Greeks came the Roman, Seneca, who had a great influence on all Elizabethan tragedy writers. Seneca basically laid the foundation for the ideas and the norms for all Renaissance tragic revenge playwrights, including William Shakespeare. The two most famous Elizabethan revenge tragedies were "…

…circumstance. "That no revenger, no matter how just, ever wholly escapes the penalty for shedding blood, even in error." This was a very important point that Shakespeare brilliantly dealt with, by finding a way to kill Hamlet justly, even though he was required to kill Claudius. "Hamlet" has served as the model for revenge plays, even to this date. Shakespeare worked with the past to entertain the present, and affect the future of theatre indefinitely.