People are motivated to seek revenge — to harm someone who has harmed them — when they feel attacked, mistreated or socially rejected. Getting an eye for an eye, Old Testament-style, is thought to bring a sense of catharsis and closure.

The popular expression “revenge is a dish best served cold” suggests that revenge is more satisfying if enacted when unexpected or long feared, inverting traditional civilized revulsion toward “cold-blooded” violence. The idea’s origin is obscure.

“The long-standing tradition of virtue ethics initiated by the works of Aristotle and Aquinas has recognized the virtues of vengeance,” Tassi said. “These philosophers articulate the conditions under which revenge and its passions (anger, moral outrage, resentment) gain moral credence.”

retaliation against

The revenge drama derived originally from the Roman tragedies of Seneca but was established on the English stage by Thomas Kyd with The Spanish Tragedy (performed c. 1587).

Lear’s threats bestow four unique aspects that apply not only to his character but they also apply to Shakespearean tragic heroes. Lear’s speech tells us that he is determined to have an awful type of revenge on his daughters. This pattern is examined, described and analyzed in King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet.

The revenge tragedy, or revenge play, is a dramatic genre in which the protagonist seeks revenge for an imagined or actual injury. The term, revenge tragedy, was first introduced in 1900 by A. H. Thorndike to label a class of plays written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras (circa 1580s to 1620s).

Commanded by his father’s ghost in Act 1 to ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ by his brother Claudius, who has robbed him of his wife and throne as well as his life, Hamlet swears that ‘with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love,’ he will ‘sweep to [his] revenge’ (1.5. 25, 29–31).

Hamlet is tragedy because the want of poetic justice, for them and the hero, keeps it a painful mystery; and because the chain of cause and effect prevents it equally from being ‘Absurd’ drama, as does Hamlet’s final acceptance of Providence at work in it to ‘shape our ends’.

Othello. Othello is a play that is a mainstream Shakespearean tragedy and therefore is an obvious text for Paper 1. It is both a tragedy of love and a revenge tragedy; it is also the tragedy of what happens when soldiers are hotly prepared for war but have no war to occupy them.

Characteristics of Shakespearean Tragedy… A tragedy is a drama in which a series of actions leads to the downfall of the main character, called the tragic hero. The plot builds to a catastrophe, or a disastrous final outcome, that usually involves the death of the hero and many others.

Othello was frequently performed as an Arab Moor during the 19th century. He was first played by a black man on the London stage in 1833 by the most important of the nineteenth-century Othellos, the African American Ira Aldridge who had been forced to leave his home country to make his career.