Influences in Jacobean Plays

Jacobean Plays had two main influences: Classic Roman/Greek plays and Spanish/Italian melodramas. 

CLASSIC PLAYS

Elizabethan universities studied, and sometimes performed, classic Greek and Roman plays in their original languages. During Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, the English translation of these plays became widely available and began their heavy influence over English playwrights. 

Greek and Roman plays were mainly divided into two categories: Tragedy and Comedy. The first full length English Comedy was Ralph Roister Doister, written around 1553 by Nicholass Udall. Its protagonist, Ralph, was based on Roman playwright Plautus’ Braggart character.

The first full English Tragedy was Gorboduc, written in 1561 by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. Gorboduc was written in a similar style to the Roman Senecan Tragedy play, complete with the Choruses and rhetoric speeches.

The first English tragedies and comedies closely imitated their parents---which meant exploring the concept in Aristotle’s Poetics (which include “plot”, “character”, “theme” and “spectacle”). Poetics also assumed that Tragedy and Comedy should never mix and that the play should occur according to the Unities of Time and Space (the stage should represent one place and all the action occurs within one fictional day, at most)---assumptions the English fortunately eventually rejected. 

“No author exercised a wider or deeper influence upon the Elizabethan mind upon the Elizabethan form of tragedy than did Seneca.” - T.S.Eliot

Seneca (c. 4 BC- 65 AD) was a Roman philosopher and dramatist. He is perhaps most well known for his tragedies, Oedipus, Octavia and Medea. His works were widely read in Europe and influenced Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights such as Shakespeare and Pierre Corneille. He is regarded as the inspiration for what became the popular “Revenge Tragedy”, beginning with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. 

ITALIAN MELODRAMA

A melodrama (“melodramma”) exaggerates characters and plots to appeal to emotions. Jacobeans had a popular taste for melodramatic sensationalism, featuring much violence, “blood and thunder”. 

From the point of view of story alone,  (Elizabethan playwright) Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta, and The Spanish Tragedy are all melodramas. Unlike those, however, Jacobean works succeeded only in covering the stage with revolting amounts of blood instead of delivering stories in more poetic styles. 

Additionally, the Italian/Spanish influence on English plays are evident in the plays’ settings; for example, The Revenger’s Tragedy is set in an Italian court with characters Hippolito, Piato, Castizia etc. The Duchess of Malfi featured the characters Antonio Bolgna, Silvio, Roderigo etc.  

Seneca's bust