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430 In Shakespeare's Shadow (with Michael Blanding)

The History of Literature

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Shakespeare's Seneca Tragedy

Some of Shakespeare's plays are really kind of looked at as throwbacks to older types of writing like for example there's this genre writing called Seneca Tragedy which was popular in the 1550s and 1560s. People look at Hamlet now as sort of a kind of neo Seneca Tragesy that was written much later. It could have been that Thomas North wrote this Seneca Tragey based on this tale of this Norse prints you know back in the day when that form is popular but then years later Shakespeare took it and converted into what we all read today as sort of the pinnacle of literature.

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