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Hamlet is a play written by William Shakespeare that 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 plays. After the Greeks came Seneca who

was very influential to all Elizabethan tragedy writers. Seneca who

was Roman, basically set all of the ideas and the norms for all

revenge play writers in the Renaissance era including William

Shakespeare. The two most famous English revenge tragedies written in

the Elizabethan era were Hamlet, written by Shakespeare and The

Spanish Tragedy, written by Thomas Kyd. These two plays used mostly

all of the Elizabethan conventions for revenge tragedies in their

plays. Hamlet especially incorporated all revenge conventions in one

way or another, which truly made Hamlet a typical revenge play.

“Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of many heroes of the Elizabethan and

Jacobean stage who finds himself grievously wronged by a powerful

figure, with no recourse to the law, and with a crime against his

family to avenge.”



Seneca was among the greatest authors of classical tragedies

and there was not one educated Elizabethan who was unaware of him or

his plays. There were certain stylistic and different strategically

thought out devices that Elizabethan playwrights including Shakespeare

learned and used from Seneca’s great tragedies. The five act

structure, the appearance of some kind of ghost, the one line

exchanges known as stichomythia, and Seneca’s use of long rhetorical

speeches were all later used in tragedies by Elizabethan playwrights.