Revenge tragedy

[1] The genre first appeared in early modern Britain with the publication of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy during the latter half of the 16th century.

As established through the precedent of early English playwrights like Thomas Kyd, a good revenge play must include the following:

Lawrence Danson suggested that Shakespeare and his contemporaries had a "healthy ability to live comfortably with the unruliness of a theatre where the genre was not static but moving and mixing, always producing new possibilities.

"[2] On the contrary, Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio famously depicts the printer-imposed (William Jaggard and Edward Blount) three genres of comedy, history, and tragedy, leading readers to falsely believe that plays are easily categorized and contained.

Infamous scenes like the cannibalistic feast in Thyestes introduce the audience to another dimension of the human experience, challenging them to reflect on extreme emotions and dig deeper into the conventions of the genre.

[9] Shakespeare's plays Hamlet, Othello and even King Lear may be referred to as revenge tragedies but it is Titus Andronicus that truly embraces this genre.

It is a play that contains: fourteen killings (nine on stage), six severed members, one rape, one live burial, one case of insanity, one incidence of cannibalism.

"[10] After ten long years of a hard-fought war, the Roman general Titus Andronicus returns triumphant; however, with only four out of his twenty five sons alive.

Titus' remaining son is banished when he tries to intercede on behalf of his sister to allow her to marry the person she loves and not her betrothed.

Shakespeare raised his revenge tragedy to a high intellectual and philosophical level by making Hamlet a virtuous, sensitive scholar.

In The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi the victims of the so called revenge are heroic women and the avengers blood thirsty villains.

Christopher Crosbie's book explores the connection between early modern revenge tragedies and the underlying philosophical influences, aiming to unveil how these plays addressed ontological questions rooted in classical philosophy.

Crosbie's in-depth analysis reveals how concepts from Aristotle, Galen, Lucretius, and Stoicism are interwoven into the plays, shedding new light on the philosophical underpinnings of early modern revenge tragedies.