ABSTRACT
A set of later tragedies such as King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and the recasting of Romeo and Juliet in Anthony and Cleopatra, and Ford's ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore further explicated the results of the further evolution of plot. One in particular, The Revenger's Tragedy, typified these developments in its extreme and satirical parody of earlier tragedies, culminating in the nominal “hero” or person of status kissing the poisoned skull of the ideal, long departed, arranged by scheming servants who, in a less gothic implementation, would have been the heroes of a New Comedy. With these developments, the “death” of tragedy reached its most complete expression, not, as Nietzsche thought, exactly through suicide or the corruption of opportunistic actors such as Euripides and Socrates but through the predictable outcome of the logic of its own form—the very logic, enacted on the level of the development of the form, so carefully elucidated in its internal development of the logic of “plot.” Both are manifestations of the same restructuring of representation, time, and action within the residually oral framework of the theatre in its transition towards the consolidation of literacy.
