ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's early revenge tragedy extended the paradigm established in The Spanish Tragedy, while also developing a sophisticated metadramatic commentary. Rather than explaining the causal plot to its audiences, it rapidly introduced a set of causal chains and migrated plotting from suspect characters, similar to those used by Marlowe, to more valorized ones, rehabilitating their Machiavellian associations as the kinds of understanding of action necessary to survival and success in the emerging social structures of prediction and investment. In the competition between characters who closed the play, the valorized character, Hieronimo, emerged as the triumphant plotter over more antiquated rivals. Titus began the progression in which knowledge of the linkages of the causal Aristotelian plot became the necessary hallmark of the sophisticated and competent.
