Antonio's Revenge

Act III: Antonio visits his father's tomb and encounters Andrugio's ghost, who tells him that he was poisoned by Piero, whom Maria has consented to marry.

The Dukedom of Venice is offered to Antonio, who refuses and vows to live a religious life and remain celibate in honor of Mellida's memory.

[7][6] Emma Smith has suggested that some of these plays may have been written partly in response to the popularity of The Spanish Tragedy and disputes over its performance rights.

[5] Antonio's Revenge was entered into the Stationer's Register in October 1601 by Matthew Lownes and Thomas Fisher, and it was printed in quarto the following year.

Stage directions within the 1602 Quarto refer to two of the original actors by surname rather than character, which seems to indicate that—like Antonio and Mellida—the source for the printed text may have been a prompt book.

An abundance of highly similar plot devices—including Piero's murder of his romantic rival by poison and the appearance of Andrugio's ghost—has invited criticism of the play as being derivative.

However, other critics have contended that Shakespeare and Marston were working at roughly the same time on competing revenge plays and may have both used the supposed Ur-Hamlet for their source material, making similarities probable.

This moral quandary is further complicated by the religious ethics of the early modern period, including conflicting Protestant and Catholic ideas about the relationship between the living and the dead.

Andrugio, like the ghosts of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, personifies the period of unrest between death and interment, sometimes interpreted as an allusion to Catholic purgatory.

This dramaturgical parallel is not only a visual representation of culpability but a means of foregrounding one of the other common themes of revenge tragedy, namely the inevitable mirroring of the villain and the tragic hero.

[11][10][5] At stake here is a physical manifestation of what Jonathan Dollimore describes as "discontinuous identity," or the plight of characters experiencing social and psychic dislocation as they struggle against an inherently corrupt society.

The conceit continues with Strotzo's performance of guilt and grief before the court at Mellida's mock-trial, and with Antonio's various disguises—first as a fool, and then as a masquer in the company of Alberto, Pandulpho, and Balurdo.

The language of the play is similarly self-conscious and possibly parodic, the stoic Pandulpho forswearing "apish action, player-like" (1.5.84) and Antonio promising that he "will not swell like a tragedian" (2.3.112) in response to grief, before both proceed to demonstrate exactly the fits of passion which they have renounced.

[14] In addition to these visual devices, the play includes a number of songs and stage directions requiring music and other sound effects.