Abstract
Two assumptions are apt to be made about Elizabethan revenge plays: first, that all of them, except for Hamlet, are unproblematic in structure to the point of naïveté; and, second, that all of them, including Hamlet, are concerned centrally with the ethical dilemma of revenge. Both assumptions are incorrect, and the source of endless misleading critical labour.
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Notes
T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet’, in Selected Essays (London, 1932) p. 142.
Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton, NJ, 1940) p. 89.
See J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924; Harmondsworth, Middx, 1955);
Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Oxford, 1956);
John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956).
See, for example, L. B. Campbell, ‘Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England’, in Modern Philology, XXVIII (1931), and
Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (Cambridge, 1930);
F. T. Bowers, ‘The Audience and the Revenger of Elizabethan Tragedy’, Studies in Philology, XXXI (1934), and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy;
Roy Walker, The Time is out of joint (London, 1948);
G. R. Elliott, Scourge and Minister (Durham, NC, 1951);
John Vyvyan, The Shakespearean Ethic (London, 1959);
Irving Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy (New York, 1960);
Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (Oxford, 1959);
Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford, Calif. 1967).
R. M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton, NJ, 1984) ch. 2.
G. K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition (Liverpool, 1978) p. 185.
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© 1987 Peter Mercer
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Mercer, P. (1987). Introduction. In: Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge. Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09217-8_1
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