Falstaff (opera) knight, Sir John Falstaff, to seduce two married women to gain access to their husbands' wealth. Verdi was concerned about working on a new opera at his advanced age, but he yearned to write a comic work and was pleased with Boito's draft libretto. It took the collaborators three years from mid-1889 to complete. Although the prospect of a new opera from Verdi aroused immense interest in Italy and around the world, "Falstaff" did not prove to be as popular as earlier works in the composer's canon. After the initial performances in Italy, other European countries and the US, the
Shakespearean tragedy and the classics that inspired them, was the use and popularity of violence and murder on stage. Select exemplary (non-Shakespearean) Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies: Shakespearean tragedy Shakespearean tragedy is the designation given to most tragedies written by playwright William Shakespeare. Many of his history plays share the qualifiers of a Shakespearean tragedy, but because they are based on real figures throughout the History of England, they were classified as "histories" in the First Folio. The Roman tragedies—"Julius Caesar", "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Coriolanus"—are also based on historical figures, but because their source stories were foreign and ancient they are almost