Revenge Tragedies in England
Revenge tragedies in England emerged during the late sixteenth century as a significant dramatic genre and became especially popular through the seventeenth century. Rooted in the influences of ancient Roman playwrights, particularly Seneca, these plays often explored themes of intrigue and corruption within royal courts, focusing on personal vendettas provoked by familial or political rivalries. Set against exotic backdrops, usually in Italy or Spain, these narratives allowed audiences to engage with underlying social and political critiques of their own society through a lens of dramatized revenge.
Pioneering works like Thomas Kyd's *The Spanish Tragedy* established conventions such as the ghostly revelation of a crime and the subsequent quest for vengeance, which were further developed by playwrights like Shakespeare and John Webster. Over time, the genre evolved to include complex characters and moral dilemmas, often blurring the lines between heroism and villainy. By the mid-seventeenth century, the genre began to adapt to changes in audience demographics and tastes, leading to a playful self-awareness in later works. Revenge tragedies not only reflected the tumultuous socio-political climate of their time but also offered a means for audiences to grapple with issues of justice, morality, and the consequences of personal retribution.
Revenge Tragedies in England
Locale London, England
Date Early 17th century
Beginning with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, portrayals of the tragic consequences of seeking revenge became one of the dominant dramatic forms on the London stage for almost a century. Though William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is the major example of the genre, other revenge tragedies by such contemporaries as Thomas Middleton and John Webster were equally popular with theater audiences and continue to be performed
Key Figures
Thomas Kyd (1558-1594), English playwright and author ofThe Spanish Tragedy William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English playwright, actor, and poetJohn Webster (c. 1577/1580-before 1634), English playwrightThomas Middleton (1580-1627), English playwrightJames Shirley (1596-1666), prolific Caroline dramatist whose plays were revived and influential in the Restoration period
Summary of Event
When the Renaissance reached England in the sixteenth century, the study of Roman dramatists became part of school curricula. Prominent among these ancient playwrights was Seneca the Younger, whose plays probably were recited or read aloud by a single speaker. By the mid-1550’s Seneca’s plays were being translated from the Latin and performed at schools in England. In 1561, as part of a natural progression from translation to imitation, the first English tragedy—Gorboduc (pr. 1561, pb. 1565, authorized edition pb. 1570; also known as The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex)—was written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton and presented to their fellow lawyers at London’s Inns of Court. In 1576, the first of a number of public theaters opened, and about a decade later, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (pr. c. 1585-1589, pb. 1594?) introduced revenge tragedy to London audiences. A masterful blend of popular and academic traditions, The Spanish Tragedy may have been the most successful play of its age. It was often revived, and it begat a new genre that dominated the English stage for almost a century.
Generally set in royal courts, revenge tragedies portray intrigue and corruption thriving behind a facade of normality, conflicts spurred by sibling or political rivalry, and characters maneuvering for social or political advancement. Most of the plays are set in Italy or Spain, exotic and sinister locales about which most seventeenth century Englishmen knew little. These alien settings provided a useful distance from the action, enabling London audiences to observe parasitical flatterers with political aspirations and other evils of preferment at court with a comfortable detachment. At the same time, a London audience would have noticed parallels with the contemporary English court and the intrigues and political struggles of the day.
In the plays, people engage in private acts of revenge instead of relying upon the law, acts Elizabethans accepted when a son exacted revenge for the murder of his father, as in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601), or when a father avenged the killing of his son, as in The Spanish Tragedy. The latter play opens with a ghost revealing the details of a murder, as Hieronimo, a Spanish gentleman beset by melancholy and madness because of his son’s murder, learns the identity of the villains and plots his revenge. He presents a play in which he and the unwitting culprits take part and in which he kills them and himself. Shakespeare in Hamlet used this play-within-a-play device, which Kyd introduced, as did John Marston in Antonio’s Revenge (pr. 1599, pb. 1602). The concluding carnage in these plays also is present in most other revenge tragedies, such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (pr., pb. 1594), Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman: Or, A Revenge for a Father (pr. 1602, pb. 1631), and The Revenger’s Tragedy (pr. 1606-1607, pb. 1607), which was once attributed to Cyril Tourneur but is now believed to be by Thomas Middleton .
A revenger was typically meant to command the sympathy of the audience, at least at the start, but his mental state or actions over the course of the play could cause this sympathy to fade or be tempered with other judgments. To increase dramatic tension, the playwright introduced obstacles that slowed the protagonist’s pursuit of his goal, which may be why, in most of these plays (following Seneca’s pattern), a ghost or the spirit of revenge was present to prod and encourage his vengeance. Many also had dumb shows or pantomimes between the acts to exemplify the action, but these may have had their origin in medieval English drama.
There were other variations among the major Jacobean revenge tragedies: Some featured several revengers and conflicting intrigues. These include Marston’s The Malcontent (pr., pb. 1604), in which only one of the attempted revengers succeeds, and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (pr. c. 1610, pb. 1613) by George Chapman, a didactic play whose moral lessons almost overshadow the revenge framework of the plot. The medieval morality play tradition of personifying abstract qualities is apparent in The Revenger’s Tragedy, whose characters’ names are Italianate versions of such qualities. John Webster in The White Devil (pr. c. 1609-1612, pb. 1612) further expanded the parameters of the Kyd tradition by using events from the recent past for his plot, although he employed an Italianate setting to disguise his criticism of evils at the English court. In The Duchess of Malfi (pr. 1614, pb. 1623), largely a Kydian play, Webster made the revengers’ victim the play’s protagonist. The play’s Bosola, nominally a villain and the revengers’ instrument, is one of the most psychologically complex and indefinable characters in the genre.
Another departure from the Kyd tradition is exemplified by The Changeling (pr. 1622, pb. 1653), by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, in which Beatrice cannot cope psychologically with the consequences of her crimes, confesses to adultery and murder, and is killed by her accomplice Deflores, who then commits suicide. The murder and suicide of the play’s conspirators thwarts the proper revenger, denying him the satisfaction of taking his own revenge. By the 1620’, playwrights usually created revengers who were utter villains from the first act, making no attempt to encourage initial sympathy. Because audiences enjoyed seeing evil machinations perpetrated on the stage, playwrights catered to this predilection. Three plays of John Ford may serve as prime examples of this trend: The Broken Heart (pr. c. 1627-1631, pb. 1633), ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (pr. 1629?-1633, pb. 1633), and Love’s Sacrifice (pr. 1632?, pb. 1633).
As the decades passed, revenge tragedies, though increasingly imitative of earlier works, remained popular. Among the later plays in the genre is James Shirley’s The Cardinal (pr. 1641, pb. 1652), which appeared just before the closing of the theaters in 1642 during the English Civil Wars and was often revived in the decades after the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660. The Spanish Tragedy; Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; The Duchess of Malfi; The Broken Heart; and Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy: Or, The Honest Man’s Revenge (pr. c. 1607, pb. 1611) are obvious antecedents of The Cardinal, with such parallels as the murder of a rival by a jealous lover, support for the murderer by a Machiavellian villain eager for advancement or wealth, madness (real or feigned) as a result of grief, a play within a play, and revenge as an obsessive motive.
Shirley, however, departed from past practice with a lighthearted prologue that teased the audience about whether the play was a comedy or tragedy, even suggesting by his style and tone that it was the former. The prologue also engaged in self-mockery and made satiric comments about classical dramatic theory. These decisions may indicate that, in 1641, Shirley was sensitive to the risks of offering what was by then an old-fashioned revenge tragedy to sophisticated Londoners at a private theater. The ironic presentation of the genre by Shirley and other Restoration playwrights may account for their popularity on the Restoration stage.
Significance
Revenge tragedy, which became the dominant Elizabethan dramatic form soon after public theaters began to open in the late English Renaissance, maintained its preeminent position as the decades passed, attracting almost all of the leading playwrights. The genre continued to develop in the hands of these playwrights, whose plays not only made structural changes to the basic generic template but also contained subtle allusions to current issues, such as the conflicts with Spain that had climaxed with the defeat of the Spanish Armada; to the controversies over Catholicism and the royal succession that dominated the seventeenth century; and to intrigues at court, which could not safely be addressed in a more direct and open manner.
The playwrights, after all, wrote for London’s theatergoers, and they modified both the form and the content of revenge tragedies to cater to the interests of their audience. As the audience changed over the first half of the seventeenth century—becoming largely private and upper class by the late 1620’—the flexibility of the genre enabled revenge tragedy not only to survive but also to flourish, modifying its tone and concerns as necessary to accommodate new spectators. When the theaters reopened in 1660 after an eighteen-year hiatus, revenge tragedies by Shirley and others were revived, often with revisions, and they continued to influence new generations of dramatists into the eighteenth century.
Bibliography
Bowers, Fredson Thayer. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940. A seminal work that traces the origin of the form and sets the parameters for subsequent studies of revenge tragedy.
Braunmuller, A. R., and Michael Hattaway, eds. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. A valuable collection of essays by different specialists that reflects the latest scholarly reviews; also has useful biographies, bibliographies, and chronological tables.
Leggatt, Alexander. English Drama: Shakespeare to the Restoration, 1590-1660. London: Longman, 1988. Surveys English drama during its golden age, focusing upon individual playwrights and genres; useful appendices include biographical and bibliographical information as well as historical and cultural chronologies.
Ribner, Irving. Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order. London: Methuen, 1962. Chapters on six playwrights—George Chapman, Thomas Heywood, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and John Ford—include close examinations of their plays with extensive focus upon textual analysis.
Sanders, Julie. Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome. Plymouth, Mass.: Northcote House, 1999. A brief study of how the plays of four major dramatists reflected the social and political milieu of Caroline London.