Thyestes and Revenge Structure

Abstract

Given the extraordinary impression that the plays of Seneca made upon the imagination of Elizabethan writers of tragedy, it is only to be expected that his agents of fate, his ghosts and Furies, should persist in their various transformations in the tragedy of revenge. What is surprising is that the structure of his revenge action, the structure above all of Thyestes, should prove so enduring a model. The action of this play, the revenge of Atreus upon his brother, falls essentially into three parts; and these phases recur so faithfully in the relevant plays of Kyd and Marston that it is tempting to see them as comprising a kind of deep structure of revenge tragedy, an elemental pattern of meaning.