The Revenger’s Tragedy

Abstract

Unreliable lists of plays issued as advertisements by two publishers, Edward Archer in 1656 and Francis Kirkman in 1661 and 1671, many years after the original stage production and publication of The Revenger’s Tragedy, provide virtually the only seventeenth-century attribution of authorship for this otherwise anonymous play. A manuscript ascription to ‘John W’ (possibly John Webster) in a single copy of the tragedy now in the British Library has been generally discounted. Archer, followed by Kirkman, named Cyril Tourneur (c. 1575–1626) as the writer of the tragedy, but in 1926 the scholar E. H. C. Oliphant initiated an as yet unresolved debate by arguing for Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) as its author. The linguistic and stylistic case for Middleton has been strongly put by bibliographers such as George R. Price and MacD. P. Jackson but it is not yet conclusively established or universally accepted. The author’s evident familiarity with a number of plays datable to 1602–7, by Marston (The Malcontent and The Fawn), Shakespeare (Hamlet and King Lear), and Jonson (Volpone), strongly suggests that the tragedy was written within a year or so of its publication in 1607/8; it may have been the work of an otherwise unknown but gifted amateur dramatist.