ABSTRACT

The Revenger’s Tragedy, first staged in 1606 at the Globe and printed anonymously in a quarto in 1607, is a peculiar text. Several critics over the years have singled out the play for its idiosyncratic artistic merit, even while drawing sharp qualifications about its relative merit when weighed against other tragedies in the same genre. Its unique energy of language and relentless theatrical pacing have been roundly praised, but its underlying poetic and thematic effects remain mooted. Like many other Jacobean tragedies of its time, its profounder effects arise from its conscious response to earlier Elizabethan models. It is a deeply competitive play, competing at once with Marlowe, Shakespeare and Marston, laying claim to novelty in its irreverent handling of stock themes and images taken from these loftier precursors. The little criticism that there is on the play, however, has shifted in emphasis from considering more narrow dramaturgical and literary questions of influence to look at the play’s wider debts to socio-historical influence. Indeed most recent introductions to scholarly editions of Jacobean revenge drama in general, and The Revenger’s Tragedy in particular, gloss the play’s grotesque meditation on the abuses of power as symptomatic of the great change in culture that swept the English court during the early years of James I’s reign. 1 But to insist too strongly on the socio-historical context is to risk suggesting that the resulting spectacle of violence and transgression owes everything to a certain Jacobean zeitgeist and very little to more immediate artistic influences. The distinction is a false one. The theatrical legacy of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Marston is itself deeply implicated in the wider cultural-literary context within which the next generation of Jacobean playwrights operated, and which accounts therefore for much of what makes Jacobean drama so distinct by comparison.