Revenge Tragedy

Core Idea

Revenge tragedy is a kind of tragedy, popular on the English stage from the late 1580s to the 1620s, in which a wronged character seeks private vengeance for a murder or other crime and is destroyed in the process. Thomas Kyd's *The Spanish Tragedy* (c. 1587) set its pattern, drawing on the Roman tragedies of Seneca. Its conventions include a ghost who demands revenge, the revenger's delay, real or feigned madness, a play-within-the-play, and a final scene heaped with bodies. *Hamlet*, *The Revenger's Tragedy* and *The Duchess of Malfi* belong to the tradition.

How It's Best Learned

Make a list of revenge conventions from *The Spanish Tragedy*, then check each against *Hamlet* and note where Shakespeare follows, delays or questions it. Read Francis Bacon's short essay "Of Revenge" for the period's official view, and ask how a play can make audiences sympathize with an act the church and law condemned. Stage or read aloud a play-within-the-play scene to see how theatre itself becomes a weapon.

Common Misconceptions

• Elizabethan audiences regarded private revenge as a duty, so the revenger is simply a hero. (Church teaching and the law forbade private revenge. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord" was a familiar text, and the revenger's act usually damns or destroys him even when his cause is just.)
• *Hamlet* invented the revenge play. (Kyd's *The Spanish Tragedy* came earlier and was hugely popular. An earlier, lost *Hamlet* play, sometimes linked to Kyd, also existed.)
• Revenge tragedies are only about blood and spectacle. (They also explore justice when the state fails, the corruption of courts, and the moral cost of becoming a killer to punish one.)

Explainer

Imagine a society where the powerful can commit murder and the courts will not touch them. What should a victim's family do? English playwrights of the late 1500s and early 1600s returned to that question again and again, and their answer became a dramatic form called revenge tragedy.

The model came from Rome. Seneca, a first-century philosopher and playwright, wrote Latin tragedies full of ghosts, murders and long, intense speeches. English schoolboys read them, and an English collection of translations appeared in 1581. Around 1587 Thomas Kyd turned this material into *The Spanish Tragedy*. In it, Hieronimo, a Spanish official, finds his son Horatio murdered and hanging in his garden. The killers are protected by rank, so he cannot get justice. He grows mad with grief, delays, and finally stages a court entertainment in which the stabbings are real. The play was one of the most popular of its age.

Kyd's play fixed the main conventions. A ghost or spirit appears and calls for revenge. The revenger must first prove the crime and is often blocked by those in power. He delays, sometimes from doubt and sometimes for a better chance. He goes mad or pretends to. A play or masque becomes the trap. The last act ends in a pile of bodies, often including the revenger's own.

Audiences felt real tension in these plays. Church teaching quoted the text "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord," and the law reserved punishment for the state. Francis Bacon later called revenge "a kind of wild justice." The revenger is wronged, but in taking justice into his own hands he becomes a killer, and the genre rarely lets him survive.

Shakespeare's *Hamlet* (c. 1600) uses every convention and examines each one. The Ghost may be a devil. Hamlet's madness may be partly real. His play, *The Mousetrap*, is designed to test the king's guilt, not to kill him. Jacobean writers then darkened the form. *The Revenger's Tragedy* (1606), now usually attributed to Thomas Middleton, opens with its hero holding the skull of his poisoned beloved. John Webster's *The Duchess of Malfi* (c. 1613) shows a duchess destroyed by her brothers for marrying for love, and the hired killer who then turns avenger.

When you read a revenge tragedy, ask where justice has failed, and what becoming an avenger costs.