Abstract
Whenever issues of justice have preoccupied our culture, the question of revenge has always followed close behind. The thirst for revenge is revived every time reports surface of the terrible hurt and destruction humans regularly wreak upon one another, from the mass slaughter of war to the private domestic cruelties committed from day to day, and debates about retribution and fitting the punishment to the crime remain current, even if the terms of those debates have shifted significantly over the past four hundred years.1
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Notes
Katharine Eisaman Maus (ed.), Four Revenge Tragedies (Oxford, 1995), Introduction, p. xiv.
Ian Jack, ‘The Case of John Webster’, Scrutiny, 16 (1949), 43;
L. G. Salingar, ‘Tourneur and the Tragedy of Revenge’, in Boris Ford (ed.), The Age of Shakespeare, The Pelican Guide to English Literature (Harmondsworth, 1955; revd edn 1982), p. 451.
Jonathan Bate (ed.), Titus Andronicus, Arden 3rd series (London, 1995), p. 3.
For a very full and accessible philosophical engagement with these debates, see Noel Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford, 1998).
For more discussion of popular culture in relation to early modern drama, see Michael Bristol, ‘Theater and Popular Culture’ in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1997), pp. 231–48.
Lord David Cecil, Poets and Storytellers (London, 1949), p. 34.
The authorship of the play remains in dispute; it has traditionally been assigned to Cyril Tourneur, although a case for Thomas Middleton as author, in circulation for some time, is probably now the more dominant view. For discussion of the authorship question, see Samuel Schoenbaum, Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship (Evanston, IL., 1966);
D. J. Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays: Internal Evidence for the Major Problems of Authorship (Cambridge, 1975); the introduction to the Penguin Thomas Middleton: Five Plays, edited by Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor (London, 1988) and
Martin White, Middleton and Tourneur (Basingstoke, 1992) Appendix I, pp. 166–71.
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2nd edn, Hemel Hempstead, 1989; first published 1984), p. xxix.
Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London, 1992), p. 32.
Citations from Keith Sturgess (ed.), The Malcontent and Other Plays (Oxford, 1997). The human banquet motif recurs in the genre; it also appears in William Heminge’s The Jew’s Tragedy (1628) and Thomas Drue’s The Bloody Banquet (1620). The story originates in the Greek myth of Thyestes, dramatised by Seneca in the play of the same name.
Citations from Simon Barker (ed.), ’Tis Pity She’s Whore (London, 1997).
For a full survey of this phenomenon, see Nicholas Brooke, Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy (London, 1979).
For more detailed discussion, see John Orrell, ‘The Private Theatre Auditorium’, Theatre Research International, 9 (1984), 79–94;
Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London, 1987), esp. chs 1–4;
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (3rd edn, Cambridge, 1992), esp. pp. 154–64;
Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge, 1999; first published 1992), pp. 101–3.
This has been hotly debated: see W. A. Armstrong, ‘The Audience of the Elizabethan Private Theatres’ in Review of English Studies, n.s. 10 (1959), 234–49;
Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1996);
Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642 (Princeton, NJ, 1981);
Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge, 1984);
Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London, 1987);
J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca, NY, 1991);
For debates about early modern acting styles in relation to ‘naturalism’, see R. A. Foakes, ‘The Player’s Passion: Some Notes on Elizabethan Psychology and Acting’, Essays and Studies, n.s. 7 (1954), 62–77;
Andrew Gurr, ‘Who strutted and bellowed?’, Shakespeare Survey, 16 (1963), 95–102;
B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting (2nd edn, London, 1964);
Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London, 1982);
Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (London, 1985);
Martin Buzacott, The Death of the Actor: Shakespeare on Page and Stage (London, 1991);
David Mann, The Elizabethan Player: Contemporary Stage Representation (London, 1991); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage;
Bert O. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character (Baltimore, MD, 1992);
Peter B. Murray (Basingstoke, 1996).
Alexander Leggatt, English Drama: Shakespeare to the Restoration, 1590–1660 (London, 1988), p. 229.
Citations from Richard Dutton (ed.), Women Beware Women and Other Plays (Oxford, 1999).
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed–Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (1993), p. 89.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (first published London, 1977; 1991 reprint), p. 50.
C. L. Barber, ‘Unbroken Passion: Social Piety and Outrage in The Spanish Tragedy’ in his Creating Elizabethan Tragedy (Chicago, 1988), p. 135.
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Simkin, S. (2001). Introduction. In: Simkin, S. (eds) Revenge Tragedy. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21397-5_1
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