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Shakespearean tragedy is the designation given to most tragedies written by playwright William Shakespeare. Many of his history plays share the qualifiers of a Shakespearean tragedy, but because they are based on real figures throughout the history of England , they were classified as "histories" in the First Folio .
Under the influence of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, however, c. 1587, with its lofty poetry and its focus on a single unifying figure, of Shakespeare's Contention plays, c. 1589–90, and of the machiavels of revenge tragedy, chronicle-plays rapidly became more sophisticated in characterisation, structure, and style.
For Shakespeare, as he began to write, both traditions were alive; they were, moreover, filtered through the recent success of the University Wits on the London stage. By the late 16th century, the popularity of morality and academic plays waned as the English Renaissance took hold, and playwrights like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe revolutionised theatre.
Revenge tragedy caught their imagination and writers attempted plays of this genre with their own variations of dramaturgy. Shakespeare raised his revenge tragedy to a high intellectual and philosophical level by making Hamlet a virtuous, sensitive scholar. Cyril Tourneur exploited the morbid and melodramatic in The Atheists Tragedy .
In the Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages volume on Hamlet, editors Bloom and Foster express a conviction that the intentions of Shakespeare in portraying the character of Hamlet in the play exceeded the capacity of the Freudian Oedipus complex to completely encompass the extent of characteristics depicted in Hamlet throughout the tragedy ...
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, often shortened to Romeo and Juliet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about the romance between two Italian youths from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most
For example, adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, including his histories, were extremely popular. [16] In the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison's neo-classical Cato, a Tragedy could be classified as a history play according to the same broad, generalized definition that would apply to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
In The Death of Tragedy (1961) George Steiner outlined the characteristics of Greek tragedy and the traditions that developed from that period. In the Foreword (1980) to a new edition of his book Steiner concluded that 'the dramas of Shakespeare are not a renascence of or a humanistic variant of the absolute tragic model.