ABSTRACT
Three fundamental points are now clear. First, in their repeated presentations of such remembrance, and in their proximity to contemporary monuments like Paul’s Cathedral, early revenge tragedies, including the most prominent and influential, are suffused with remembrances of the dead, thus participating in a heated contemporary controversy. Second, by repeatedly stressing performance of funerary remembrance, these tragedies take on the most central matter of that controversy – performing remembrance. Third, early revenge tragedies are nothing like as Reformed as ‘Broudian’ critics have persistently implied. On the crucial matter of remembrance – of the dead firstly, but of the meaning of the materials of the Eucharist by extension1 – Antonio’s Revenge is divided, though lurching traditionally at the end; but The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet favour traditionalism almost throughout.
