ABSTRACT
The Revenger's Tragedy is a play that has long been plagued by questions of authenticity on the level of plot and beyond, having been ascribed to Cyril Tourneur for more than three centuries. Questions of legitimacy and disguise abound, such that at one point Castiza, the play's figure of female chastity, questions her own ability to recognise her mother: ‘Why, are you she? / The world's so changed, one shape into another, / It is a wise child now that knows her mother’ (2.1.160–2). Despite the satirical nature of this speech, it speaks to some of the confusion that permeates the entirety of Middleton's play, heightened by the social and political duplicitousness of its vengeful protagonist and the royal court. In a play where recognisably ‘monstrous’ bastards, panders, and dukes abound, the audience finds themselves drawn ever more into narratives of ‘black, wicked, and unnatural’ habits. By underscoring some of the play's deployment of psychological and physiological markers of ‘blackness’, this chapter identifies processes of racialisation in Middleton's works.
