Influence of Classical Tragedies on Renaissance Playwrights
- Submitted by: bflanagan
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- Category: English: Plays
- Date Submitted: 03/28/2010 01:43 PM
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As a Renaissance playwright, there are several aspects of classical tragedy that are imperative to your knowledge and play major roles in an effective tragedy. These elements include plot, character, rhetoric, entertainment and theme. They should be utilized in your plays, as the success of the tragedies will rely on the foundation set by playwrights such as Seneca, Sophocles, and Euripides, and many other classical dramatists.
Plot is imperative to any tragedy, as it is the basis of entire story. The plot is the sequence of events that is, in essence, the structure to the drama itself. The play begins with an opening that prefaces what this story entails, has a middle that involves all of the messy situations, and an end that ties up the series of events and illustrates a message to the audience. Throughout the plot, there is often rising and falling of tension and release in the audience as the protagonist makes his or her way through each high and low point. The plot should give the audience a feeling of suspense, pity, fear, or disgust. Other factors that are often included are a secret murder, a sexual betrayal, bloody family vendettas, ghosts, and some sort of eruption of general violence at the end. There is usually a “reversal of fortune”, which has the protagonist’s initial happiness completely turned around and creates this tragic drama, due to a mistake made along the way. Seneca’s Thyestes demonstrates many of these elements of plot, as the concept of revenge is the main basis of the play. Thyestes and Atreus, brothers and enemies, are trying to outdo one another in their lifelong battle. This bloody family vendetta involves Atreus trying to outdo Thyestes for sleeping with his wife, a sexual betrayal, and ends in the murder of his brother’s three sons, which is an incredibly vicious, inhumane display of evisceration, known as the eruption of violence. Atreus is plotting throughout most of the play, as he slowly drifts between the line of...
Plot is imperative to any tragedy, as it is the basis of entire story. The plot is the sequence of events that is, in essence, the structure to the drama itself. The play begins with an opening that prefaces what this story entails, has a middle that involves all of the messy situations, and an end that ties up the series of events and illustrates a message to the audience. Throughout the plot, there is often rising and falling of tension and release in the audience as the protagonist makes his or her way through each high and low point. The plot should give the audience a feeling of suspense, pity, fear, or disgust. Other factors that are often included are a secret murder, a sexual betrayal, bloody family vendettas, ghosts, and some sort of eruption of general violence at the end. There is usually a “reversal of fortune”, which has the protagonist’s initial happiness completely turned around and creates this tragic drama, due to a mistake made along the way. Seneca’s Thyestes demonstrates many of these elements of plot, as the concept of revenge is the main basis of the play. Thyestes and Atreus, brothers and enemies, are trying to outdo one another in their lifelong battle. This bloody family vendetta involves Atreus trying to outdo Thyestes for sleeping with his wife, a sexual betrayal, and ends in the murder of his brother’s three sons, which is an incredibly vicious, inhumane display of evisceration, known as the eruption of violence. Atreus is plotting throughout most of the play, as he slowly drifts between the line of...