Many consider the tragedy of «Hamlet» to be Shakespeare's masterpiece and one of the greatest plays of all time. It has entertained audiences for centuries and the role of Hamlet is one of the most sought after by actors. It is the story of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark who learns of the death of his father at the hands of his uncle, Claudius. Claudius murders Hamlet's father, his own brother, to take the throne of Denmark and to marry ...
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 BCE – 65 AD), known commonly as Seneca, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman and dramatist of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He is most noted for developing a new type of drama, the Senecan tragedy, which differed greatly from Greek tragedy. While the Greek tragedies were expansive and periodic, Senecan tragedies are more succinct and balanced. In Senecan tragedy, characters do not undergo much change, there ...
It is entirely probable that the date of «The Tempest» is 1611, and that this was the last play completed by Shakespeare before he retired from active connection with the theater to spend the remainder of his life in leisure in his native town of Stratford-on-Avon. The main thread of the plot of the drama seems to have been some folk-tale of a magician and his daughter, which, in the precise form in which Shakespeare knew it, has not been recove ...
One of the few known plays of Sophocles, the great Greek tragedian, «The Trachinian Maidens» or «The Trachiniae» gives an insightful account of the wife of Hercules. Her name is Deianeira, and she struggles with the neglect she and her family suffer from the frequent and lengthy adventures of Hercules. When she discovers that her husband has laid siege to a city just to obtain the beautiful Iole, Deianeira is determined to create a charm that wi ...
Euripides (480 BC-406 BC) is revered as one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, and produced the largest body of extant work by any ancient playwright. He is considered to be the most modern of the three, and he laid the foundation for Western theatre. His works are characterized by their moral ambiguity, plots of intrigue, and a separate character (usually a deity) who introduces the play with ...
Though little is known for certain of his early life, Euripides was probably born around 460 b.c.e. to the farmer Mnesarchus and his wife Clito, and his studious nature quickly led him to a literary life in Athens. His work sticks out from that of his contemporaries for his attention to the political and social problems around him, although he never held public office. His plays are often ironic, pessimistic, and display radical rejection of cla ...
Euripides, along was Sophocles and Aeschylus, is largely responsible for the rise of Greek tragedy. It was in the 5th Century BC, during the height of Greece's cultural bloom, that Euripides lived and worked. Of his roughly ninety-two plays, only seventeen tragedies survive. Both ridiculed and lauded during his life, Euripides now stands as an innovator of the Greek drama. Collected here are four of Euripides' tragedies: «Alcestis», «M ...
Among the tragedies of Shakespeare, «Macbeth» is noted for the exceptional simplicity of the plot and the directness of the action. Here is no underplot to complicate or enrich, hardly more than a glimpse of humor to relieve the dark picture of criminal ambition, only the steady march toward an inevitable catastrophe. This tragedy illustrates in its close the conventional poetic justice that demands the triumph of the righteous cause and the dow ...
The beginning of Shakespeare's 'First Tetralogy,' which includes two other plays about King Henry VI and one on Richard III, it is so named because it was written in 1588, among some of the Bard's earliest works. This first history play in the cycle commences just after the death of Henry V, when England is at war with France. Across the Channel, Sir John Talbot battles Joan of Arc, or 'La Pucelle,' while the dissen ...
