ABSTRACT
In promoting a London production of Middleton, BBC Radio 4 anachronistically labelled Middleton The Tudor Tarantino. Regardless of whether the comparison of auteurs is apt, the figure of the revenger is common in Middleton's and Tarantino's works, and this chapter explores their vigilante irony and its potential consequences. Focusing on The Revenger's Tragedy, the chapter first unpacks the critical history around Middletonian irony that plausibly echoes 1990s and millennial aesthetics, before drawing upon new media within Alex Cox's film adaptation Revengers Tragedy (2002) in exploring the potential dangers associated with vigilante irony. The chapter then turns to the appropriation of Revenger's in the video game Batman: Arkham Knight (2015), wherein the player discovers that the play is staged at a theatre in downtown Gotham. Ultimately, the chapter argues through these contemporary equivalents, adaptations, and appropriations that our contemporary fascination with Middleton may in fact risk reinforcing toxic masculinities, or at the very least points to irony's dangerous capacity to fuel that which it ostensibly seeks to critique.
