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    Influence of Greek and Roman Tragedy: Achilles Written Before 1390 by

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    Greek and Roman tragedies greatly influenced the development of tragedy in Europe. Between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, interest in classical Greek drama was revived. Early Italian tragedies in the 14th century drew from Roman models, particularly the works of Seneca. In the 15th-16th centuries, humanists began translating Greek and Roman tragedies, adapting their themes and conventions. This led to the first true vernacular tragedies in Italian and helped establish tragedy as a major literary genre in Renaissance Europe, with plots and styles continuing to reference classical influences into later periods.

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    Influence of Greek and Roman Tragedy: Achilles Written Before 1390 by

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    trisha
    104 views3 pages
    Greek and Roman tragedies greatly influenced the development of tragedy in Europe. Between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, interest in classical Greek drama was revived. Early Italian tragedies in the 14th century drew from Roman models, particularly the works of Seneca. In the 15th-16th centuries, humanists began translating Greek and Roman tragedies, adapting their themes and conventions. This led to the first true vernacular tragedies in Italian and helped establish tragedy as a major literary genre in Renaissance Europe, with plots and styles continuing to reference classical influences into later periods.

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    Greek and Roman tragedies greatly influenced the development of tragedy in Europe. Between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, interest in classical Greek drama was revived. Early Italian tragedies in the 14th century drew from Roman models, particularly the works of Seneca. In the 15th-16th centuries, humanists began translating Greek and Roman tragedies, adapting their themes and conventions. This led to the first true vernacular tragedies in Italian and helped establish tragedy as a major literary genre in Renaissance Europe, with plots and styles continuing to reference classical influences into later periods.

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    104 views3 pages

    Influence of Greek and Roman Tragedy: Achilles Written Before 1390 by

    Uploaded by

    trisha
    Greek and Roman tragedies greatly influenced the development of tragedy in Europe. Between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, interest in classical Greek drama was revived. Early Italian tragedies in the 14th century drew from Roman models, particularly the works of Seneca. In the 15th-16th centuries, humanists began translating Greek and Roman tragedies, adapting their themes and conventions. This led to the first true vernacular tragedies in Italian and helped establish tragedy as a major literary genre in Renaissance Europe, with plots and styles continuing to reference classical influences into later periods.

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    Influence of Greek and Roman tragedy

    Classical Greek drama was largely forgotten in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the
    beginning of the 16th century. Medieval theatre was dominated by mystery plays, morality plays,
    farces and miracle plays. In Italy, the models for tragedy in the later Middle Ages were Roman,
    particularly the works of Seneca, interest in which was reawakened by the Paduan Lovato de'
    Lovati (1241–1309).[39] His pupil Albertino Mussato (1261–1329), also of Padua, in 1315 wrote
    the Latin verse tragedy Eccerinis, which uses the story of the tyrant Ezzelino III da Romano to
    highlight the danger to Padua posed by Cangrande della Scala of Verona.[40] It was the first
    secular tragedy written since Roman times, and may be considered the first Italian tragedy
    identifiable as a Renaissance work. De casu caesenae, a contemporary account in Latin prose by
    Lodovico da Fabriano of Perugia of the sack in February 1377 of the city of Cesena and the
    massacre of its inhabitants by Breton mercenaries led by Giovanni Acuto (the English-born
    condottiere John Hawkwood), under the command of Robert, Cardinal of Geneva, is entitled
    "tragedy" by some copyists. The earliest tragedies to employ purely classical themes are the
    Achilles written before 1390 by Antonio Loschi of Vicenza (c.1365–1441) and the Progne of the
    Venetian Gregorio Correr (1409–1464) which dates from 1428–29.[41]

    In 1515 Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) of Vicenza wrote his tragedy Sophonisba in the
    vernacular that would later be called Italian. Drawn from Livy's account of Sophonisba, the
    Carthaginian princess who drank poison to avoid being taken by the Romans, it adheres closely
    to classical rules. It was soon followed by the Oreste and Rosmunda of Trissino's friend, the
    Florentine Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai (1475–1525). Both were completed by early 1516 and
    are based on classical Greek models, Rosmunda on the Hecuba of Euripides, and Oreste on the
    Iphigenia in Tauris of the same author; like Sophonisba, they are in Italian and in blank
    (unrhymed) hendecasyllables. Although these three are often cited, separately or together, as
    being the first regular tragedies in modern times, as well as the earliest substantial works to be
    written in blank hendecasyllables, they were apparently preceded by two other works in the
    vernacular: Pamfila or Filostrato e Panfila written in 1498 or 1508 by Antonio Cammelli
    (Antonio da Pistoia); and a Sophonisba by Galeotto del Carretto of 1502.[42][43]

    From about 1500 printed copies, in the original languages, of the works of Sophocles, Seneca,
    and Euripides, as well as comedic writers such as Aristophanes, Terence and Plautus, were
    available in Europe and the next forty years saw humanists and poets translating and adapting
    their tragedies. In the 1540s, the European university setting (and especially, from 1553 on, the
    Jesuit colleges) became host to a Neo-Latin theatre (in Latin) written by scholars. The influence
    of Seneca was particularly strong in its humanist tragedy. His plays, with their ghosts, lyrical
    passages and rhetorical oratory, brought a concentration on rhetoric and language over dramatic
    action to many humanist tragedies.

    The most important sources for French tragic theatre in the Renaissance were the example of
    Seneca and the precepts of Horace and Aristotle (and contemporary commentaries by Julius
    Caesar Scaliger and Lodovico Castelvetro), although plots were taken from classical authors
    such as Plutarch, Suetonius, etc., from the Bible, from contemporary events and from short story
    collections (Italian, French and Spanish). The Greek tragic authors (Sophocles and Euripides)
    would become increasingly important as models by the middle of the 17th century. Important
    models were also supplied by the Spanish Golden Age playwrights Pedro Calderón de la Barca,
    Tirso de Molina and Lope de Vega, many of whose works were translated and adapted for the
    French stage. Greek tragedy was not the first.

    Revenge play: The only clear precedent and influence for the Renaissance genre is the work of
    the Roman playwright and Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger, perhaps most of all his
    Thyestes. It is still unclear if Seneca's plays were performed or recited during Roman times; at
    any rate, Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights staged them, as it were, with a vengeance, in
    plays full of gruesome and often darkly comic violence. The Senecan model, though never
    followed slavishly, makes for a clear definition of the type, which almost invariably includes

     A secret murder, usually of a benign ruler by a bad person


     A ghostly visitation of the murder victim to a younger kinsman, generally a son
     A period of disguise, intrigue, or plotting, in which the murderer and the avenger scheme
    against each other, with a slowly rising body count
     A descent into either real or feigned madness by the avenger or one of the auxiliary
    characters
     An eruption of general violence at the end, which (in the Renaissance) is often
    accomplished by means of a feigned masque or festivity
     A catastrophe that utterly decimates the dramatis personae, including the avenger

    Both the stoicism of Seneca and his political career (he was an advisor to Nero) leave their mark
    on Renaissance practice. In the English plays, the avenger is either stoic (albeit not very
    specifically) or struggling to be so; in this respect, the main thematic concern of the English
    revenge plays is the problem of pain. Politically, the English playwrights used the revenge plot to
    explore themes of absolute power, corruption in court, and of factional concerns that applied to
    late Elizabethan and Jacobean politics as they had to Roman

    In English drama, a domestic tragedy is a tragedy in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary
    middle-class or lower-class individuals. This subgenre contrasts with classical and Neoclassical
    tragedy, in which the protagonists are of kingly or aristocratic rank and their downfall is an affair
    of state as well as a personal matter.

    The Ancient Greek theorist Aristotle had argued that tragedy should concern only great
    individuals with great minds and souls, because their catastrophic downfall would be more
    emotionally powerful to the audience; only comedy should depict middle-class people. Domestic
    tragedy breaks with Aristotle's precepts, taking as its subjects merchants or citizens whose lives
    have less consequence in the wider world.

    In Britain, the first domestic tragedies were written in the English Renaissance; one of the first
    was Arden of Faversham (1592), depicting the murder of a bourgeois man by his adulterous
    wife. Other famous examples are A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), A Yorkshire Tragedy
    (1608), and The Witch of Edmonton (1621).
    Domestic tragedy disappeared during the era of Restoration drama, when Neoclassicism
    dominated the stage, but it emerged again with the work of George Lillo and Sir Richard Steele
    in the eighteenth century.

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