Elizabethan Revenge Drama
| Often called the horror movies of their time, revenge plays were (...) extremely popular. On stage they typically featured murders..., insanity (or feigned insanity) and supernatural visitations. --Charles Boyce, Shakespeare A to Z, N.Y, Roundtable Press, 1990, p.534. |
Elizabethan revenge plays are commonly thought of as enormously complex and perverse Italinate dramas, traditionally set in an environment in which Machiavelli typifies the dominant spirit. They appear to celebrate personal violence, and the variety of killing that take place in these dramas push at the limits of the imagination. It is commonly thought that audiences enjoyed the celebration of revenge even though they recognized that such murders were considered illegal, immoral and unhealthy. This discrepancy mirrors our contemporary fascination with violence in our cinema at the same time that we publicly abhor such violence.
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The tragedy of revenge is - to borrow Thorndike's apt definition - "a tragedy whose leading motive is revenge, and whose main action deals with the progress of this revenge, leading to the death of the murderers and often the death of the avenger himself."* Its principal agents, then, are the murderer and the avenger. The one is instigated to crime through such motives as ambition or lust; the other is prompted to revenge by a sense of duty, also usually by reminders of the dead; and both are involved in an action of delays or intrigue, of crime and bloodshed, through which the final act of justice is reached. --Donald Joseph McGinn,Shakespeare's Influence on the Drama of his Age, New Brusnswick, Rutgers Univ. Press. 1938, pp.13-14. * -- A.H. Thorndike, "The Relatons of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays," PMLA, XVII (1902), p. 176. |
