When Elizabethan playwrights found the public loved gruesome tales of revenge, they embarked on a new genre. And it became a monster...
In Elizabethan London, competition between rival theatres was frantic. Theatre managers put on whatever shows they thought would pull in the crowds, whether that involved fencing displays, wrestling matches, bear baiting, or interspersing the high literary tragedies of renaissance drama with Morris dancing. Catching the attention of the notoriously fickle theatre audiences meant providing them with continually new and thrilling spectacles, and playwrights quickly learnt that if they wanted to be paid, they needed to come up with crowd-pleasers.
One genre which quickly became popular with Elizabethan audiences was revenge tragedy. The playwright Thomas Kyd pioneered the style, which was influenced by the gory tragedies of Seneca and usually involved plots about intrigue at Continental courts, with his Spanish Tragedy (1587). This frankly sensational play included several murders, a mad hero, a letter written in blood, a ghost returning from the Underworld and the Spirit of Revenge, and it became an instant hit. Kyd cashed in by writing a sequel, and several authors followed suit, producing plays with titles like Antonio’s Revenge, The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, The Tragedy of Hoffman, and The Revenger’s Tragedy.
Like modern horror movies, each revenge tragedy attempted to top the last in gruesome ingenuity. Characters were variously killed by poisoned candles, poisoned helmets, red-hot crowns, hanging, disembowelling, and two were tricked into kissing a poisoned skull and a poisoned Bible (poison was something of an obsession.) The earliest Shakespeare tragedy was a revenge tragedy which attempted to out-do all his predecessors with the horror of Titus Andronicus (1590s). This tour-de-force contains two human sacrifices, three severed hands, one severed head, one severed tongue, and a pie baked from the flesh of murder victims. The later and considerably subtler Hamlet (1601) draws on the conventions of revenge tragedy, which can still be seen in the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the poisoned wine and swords, and the machinations of Claudius.
In The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), the genre overbalanced in deliberate spoof. The grotesque antics of the protagonist Vindice, who carries the skull of his dead mistress around with him, climax in two sets of would-be murderers stalking the same set of victims around in disguise at a masked dance. The denouement sets off a chain reaction of murders and counter-murders within the space of five minutes, until the bemused heroes are left surrounded by a heap of bodies, and they in turn are condemned to death by the king they have just put on the throne.
Though they were often written in haste to satisfy the audience’s craving for lurid and sensational drama, many revenge tragedies have stood the test of time. The best of this mad bunch, such as Titus Andronicus and The Duchess of Malfi, are still regularly performed today, valued as much for their dark humour and elegantly cynical poetry as for their gruesome plots.
