Hamlet as a typical revenge tragedyShakespeare's Hamlet follows very closely the dramatic conventions of revenge in the Elizabethan theatre. All revenge tragedies originally came from the Greeks, who wrote and performed the first plays. After the Greeks came Seneca who had a lot of influence on all the writers of Elizabethan tragedies. Seneca, who was Roman, essentially established all the ideas and standards for all writers of revenge plays in the Renaissance era, including William Shakespeare. The two most famous English revenge tragedies written in the Elizabethan era were Hamlet, written by Shakespeare, and The Spanish Tragedy, written by Thomas Kyd. These two plays mainly used all the Elizabethan conventions for revenge tragedies in their plays. Hamlet in particular incorporated all the conventions of revenge in one way or another, which truly made Hamlet a typical revenge play. "Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of the many heroes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage who finds himself gravely wronged by a powerful figure, with no recourse to the law and with a crime against his family to avenge." Seneca was among the greatest authors of classical literary tragedy and there was not a single educated Elizabethan who was not aware of him or his plays. There were a few stylistic and several strategically thought-out devices that Elizabethan playwrights, including Shakespeare, learned and used from Seneca's great tragedies. The five-act structure, the appearance of a kind of ghost, the one-line exchanges known as stichomythia, and Seneca's use of long rhetorical speeches were all later used in tragedies by Elizabethan playwrights. Some of Seneca's ideas were originally taken from the Greeks when the Romans conquered Greece, and with them they brought home many Greek theatrical ideas. Some of Seneca's stories that originated from the Greeks such as Agamemnon and Thyestes, which dealt with bloody family stories and revenge, fascinated the Elizabethans. Seneca's stories were not really written for the purpose of performance, so if English playwrights liked his ideas, they had to find a way to make the story theatrically workable, relevant, and exciting for Elizabethan audiences who were very demanding. Seneca's influence was part of a developing tradition of tragedies whose plots revolved around political power, forbidden sexuality, family honor, and private revenge. “There was no author who exerted a wider or deeper influence on the Elizabethan mind or on the Elizabethan form of tragedy than Seneca did.” For Italian, French and English Renaissance playwrights, classical tragedy meant only the ten Latin plays of Seneca and not Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles..