ABSTRACT

Complaining there existed ‘no systematic study of revenge tragedy’s dramatic antecedents in England’, and mocking the supposed eruption of the genre ‘as if by spontaneous generation’ from The Spanish Tragedy, in 1973 Ronald Broude influentially argued that revenge tragedy emerged mainly through sensitivity to the age’s ‘currents in religion and politics’.1 Describing a victim providentially guided to avenge the ‘Babylonian’ corruption of England’s Catholic enemies, and thus a Protestant outlook, the formula in which he then explained such ‘classic’ revenges as The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet and Antonio’s Revenge has been elaborated (as we shall see) and is now well known.2 At the centre of Broude’s analysis, however, was a view confidently inherited from discussion of The Spanish Tragedy by S.F Johnson: ‘To Protestant interpreters, the symbolic Babylon was of course Rome, the whore of Babylon, being equated with the Antichrist, in turn equated with the Pope, one of whose agents in Kyd’s day was the King of Spain.’3 Assuming Johnson’s reading of Reformed England was correct ‘of course’, Broude reasonably inferred that what was true of the King of Spain applied also to England’s other Catholic enemies. A systematic and ‘classic’ theory of revenge tragedy was born.