![]() The plot of Seneca's tragedy Thyestes is a good example of his work. His interest was to unfold, with unremitting inevitability, the horror of human wickedness, the hopelessness of human experience. Seneca had a very different moral purpose from the great Greek dramatists who preceded him, and whose subject matter he imitated. Seneca wrote several tragedies, with plots based upon the great stories of Greek drama, but here we must draw a distinction between his work and those of his Greek forebears such as Sophocles. The Renaissance period saw an immense interest in and revival of classical thought, art and literature, and Seneca was a beneficiary of this. As his play unfolds, Shakespeare self-consciously reflects upon, toys with, mocks and reinvents the genre, which had its origins in classical times with the tragedies of Lucius Annaeus Senecaįor a few brief decades in Elizabethan and Jacobean England the Latin plays of Seneca (4 BC-AD 65) were remarkably popular and had an influence well beyond their dramatic and literary merit. Whatever else it may be, says Glyn Austen, Hamlet is a study of revenge tragedy. ![]() ![]() ![]() The place of Hamlet in the evolution of revenge tragedy ![]()
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