Revenge and Hamlet

Revenge Tragedy
In the Elizabethan drama

Revenge tragedy
 dominant motive: revenge for a wrong deed or

injury
 favorite form of English tragedy in the
Elizabethan and Jacobean periods
 derived originally from the Roman tragedies of
Seneca
 established on the English stage by Thomas
Kyd with The Spanish Tragedy
 found its highest expression in William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Basic Elements of Revenge
Plays
 a play within a play
 madness (feigned)
 a vengeful ghost
 the urge for revenge is usually awakened by the
ghost of the dead person
 tragic hero inward struggle
 tragic hero as the anti-thesis of himself
 hero generally good in nature with some defects,
thus wins sympathy of the audience.
 His fall moves the audience
The Senecan Model
 The translation amount of the works of Seneca into
English in the last half of the sixteenth century was
immense.
 In Hippolytus, Theseus takes revenge on his son for the
supposed rape of Phaedra; in Agamemnon, the ghost of
Thyestes urges Aegisthus towards revenge.
 Blood shed, murders, mutilation, carnage, massacre,
cannibalism, incest, rape…committed on the stage
 Supernatural elements: ghosts, spirits, abstractions, abnormal
weather conditions, witches, prophecies
 Elaborate language, highly ornamented expressions, soliloquies.
Other models
 Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) -The Prince. A treatise
on power, in the early years of the sixteenth century.
 he gives some directions to be the ideal ruler.
 a Machiavel is a moral-lacking, power-hungry ruler
 he can do anything for the benefit of the realm and the continuity
of his rule
 “End justifies the means”
 “It is better to be feared than to be loved”
 “Trust nobody”
 “People lie, therefore lie to them”
 “Make war” “It is no bad to act like a hypocrite when necessary”
 generated a type of villain who is the stereotypical
vengeful, cunning and bloodthirsty hero.

Representative revenge tragedies
in Elizabethan Drama
-George Chapman’s
Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1610-11)
-Henry Chettle
The Tragedy of Hoffman (1603)
-Thomas Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy(1585-90)
-John Marston
Antonio's Revenge(1600)
The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas
Kyd
 first famous revenge tragedy in Elizabethan

drama
 deals with Hieronimo, a Spanish gentleman who
is driven to melancholy by the murder of his son
 opens with the Ghost of Andrea and Revenge
(personified abstraction)
 other characters: Horatio,Bel-Imperia, Balthazar,
Lorenzo, very similar to latter Hamlet
Revenge theme with Shakespeare
 Titus Andronicus
 Shakespeare’s first tragedy
 Bloodiest and most violent play of Shakepeare
 The story of fictional Roman general Titus Andronicus trying to
taking revenge on the Goth Queen Tamora
 Hamlet
 English Revenge Tragedy reached its peak with Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
 thought to be based on Thomas Kyd’s earlier play called the Ur-
Hamlet
Sources for Hamlet
 Saxo Grammaticus’s Historia Danicae

(1140-1160): historical figures like Amleth, Gerutha,
Horwendil, Feng.
 Belleforest’s Histories Tragiques
a collection of tragic stories
 Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy
 Kyd’s Ur-Hamlet
 Robert Burton’s An Anatomy of Melancholy
 Timothy Bright’s A Treatise on Melancholy
 Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly
HAMLET
a revenge tragedy
 loss of Shakespeare’s son (Hamlet) at the age of 11 and
his father two years later
 paradoxical charachter of Hamlet, death and life
dichotomy
 play within the play scene
 long elaborate speeches,
 several soliloquies,
 feigned madness,
 inner conflict of the tragic hero,
 hesitation,
 deception and adultery
The Supernatural in Hamlet
 The ghost reveals that he is, in fact, (the ghost
of) Hamlet’s father.
 The revenge plot is established with the Ghost’s
utterance, "So art thou to revenge, when thou
shalt hear" (1.5.7).
 He tells Hamlet that he was poisoned by his
brother Claudius as he slept in his orchard.
 The idea of revenge is awakened in the mind of
the hero by the ghost.
The Theme of Madness
 both feigned and real:
 the loss of his father
 the ill nature of his mother
 the betrayal of his uncle
 Ophelia who betrays him to her father
 his school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spy on him.
 Hamlet’s madness is also a kind of escape or concealment of the self.
Hamlet knows that Polonius will tell the court of his madness and thus
he will move more freely (feigned madness)
 Ophelia’s madness:
 she is torn between her love for Hamlet and her attachment to her father
and brother.
 Both rejected by her family and her lover,
 grieved too deeply that she commits suicide in a histeric state of mind
(real madness)
Play within a play scene(The
Mouse Trap):
 To make sure wether the ghost told the
truth or not, Hamlet decides to put a play
on the stage for the king. The Murder of
Gonzago. If the king gets disturbed by the
play, it will mean that he is guilty
 In Hamlet's words:
“The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the
king”(2.2.606-07).

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Revenge Tragedy

In the Elizabethan drama

 dominant motive: revenge for a wrong deed or

 first famous revenge tragedy in Elizabethan

 Saxo Grammaticus’s Historia Danicae

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