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This chapter examines the place of forensic rhetoric and of evidential uncertainty in two other innovative genres of the 1580s and 1590s: revenge tragedy and romantic comedy. In pre-Reformation penitential discourses on murder as sin, the concept of Purgatory as an intermediary or transitory place helped deal, conceptually, with the evidential problems of this-worldly justice, since sinful failures of justice might be atoned for in the purgatorial time/space between heaven and hell. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, like contemporary murder pamphlets, attempts to translate Purgatory's otherworldly intermediateness into the delay and deferral of justice by the processes of evidential inquiry in this world. The chapter then considers a scandalous aspect of the evidential uncertainty characteristic of Roman Comedy: the uncertainty of paternity that enables ‘romantic’ recognition. It shows how Lyly's Mother Bombie and Shakespeare's Lost Labour's Lost wittily adapt the forensic rhetoric of classical comedy to respond to this scandal.

This chapter examines the figure of ekphrasis in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and focuses on the so-called ‘Painter scene’ that appears in the 1602 quarto. This is the most obviously ekphrastic moment in the play, in which its protagonist, Hieronimo, encounters a Painter and commissions a visual artwork based on his plight. Critics of the play have tended to rely upon the traditional conception of ekphrasis as paragone, and argue that the representational contest implicit in this scene ultimately demonstrates the superiority of drama. By contrast, this chapter seeks to question the paragonal model of ekphrasis, and argues that The Spanish Tragedy highlights drama’s interdependence with, rather than superiority to, other forms of representation. The chapter also suggests that the play’s interest in ekphrasis opens up larger questions about borrowing, imitation, and collaboration. The Spanish Tragedy highlights the illusionistic aspects of theatrical representation, and its reliance upon a cunning juxtaposition of various forms of ‘counterfeit’ art.

There is debate about how and why Elizabethan play texts were revised. Did dramatists complete their plays in what were known as their ‘foul papers’ and then the players reduced them to playing length and form—like the 1600 quarto of Henry V? Are some texts garbled oral versions of more perfect originals that we possess, compiled perhaps by renegade actors or by shorthand, such as the first quartos of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet? This chapter argues that the earliest versions of these plays represent them, however inadequately, as first written and that their longer and more familiar versions were rewritings, probably for the court. It draws extensively on Philip Henslowe’s Diary and what it shows of playwrights like Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle being paid to revise plays ‘for the court’. Particular attention is paid to Dekker’s revision of Old Fortunatus, where we can reconstruct the process in some detail.

Female revengers feature in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and George Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois. Rather than pursuing vengeance by proxy these women become the active agents of their own revenge, taking a variety of weapons into their own hands. As they do so an implied dialectic between education and revenge emerges, with their ability to articulate revenge in their own terms linked to their wielding of the fatal dagger or vial. This paper will examine that dialectic by exploring the relationship between women’s words and women’s weapons on the early modern stage, as it pertains to the figure of the female revenger. While acknowledging the problematic morality (and the high cost) of vengeance, the chapter proposes that female revengers, rather than being simply trapped within misogynistic stereotypes, are instead active agents who interrogate stereotypes about women and determine their fates.

Chapter 2, “Imitating the Queen of Troy,” explores responses to Greek tragic women in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andronicus, two early revenge tragedies that both feature raging, grieving mothers and sacrificial young women framed among Greek allusions. Both plays also reflect metatheatrically on the nature of tragedy and link it with appeals to sympathy, suggesting that their attention to Greek legacies and tragic female icons accompanies a broader interest in the genre and its effects. Tracing Kyd’s Greek training at Merchant Taylors’ School, and Peele’s Greek literary experience at Oxford, the chapter identifies Greek debts in these two early commercial tragedies as establishing a crucial foundation for the genre’s development in England.

This chapter explores early modern responses to Hecuba, arguing that whereas Euripides’ Hecuba is a sympathetic tragic heroine and successful avenger, this model was not replicated in early modern plays. Instead the two aspects of Hecuba’s role, that of lamenting mother and ruthless avenger, bifurcate in English revenge tragedy. Pitiful, mourning mothers such as Isabella from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are unsuccessful, while savage ones, such as Tamora from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, are abhorrent and aberrant, inflicting violence from a position of power. In contrast to Germany and France – where artistic treatments of the Biblical Judith decapitating General Holofernes offer a heroic, political image of female vengeance – the chapter argues that in early modern England revenge was definitively not a woman’s business.

Shifting to the Reformation context, chapter three focuses on revenge drama—The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet -- in part as a way of bringing into focus Shakespeare’s distinctive contribution to political aesthetics. The surprising conjunction between revenge and meta-dramatic reflection can be understood in terms of aestheticization’s relation to the problem of giving form to the deontologized social space vividly manifest in the illimitability of the revenge cycle. Revenge also engages the aesthetic’s fundamental relation to economy and law as structuring categories. With Shakespeare, the aesthetic explicitly reflects back on or allegorizes itself as the ground of political being, and in doing so posits law, not as a normative category, but in relation to the more primordial opening that defines man as social being. In Hamlet, that aesthetic “solution” is ultimately enlisted in a structure that anticipates the modern, rationalized state, even while it suggests the ontological fragility and cost of such an historical ordering.

English theatre had always combined entertainment with the transmission of moral, Christian and political ideas and had developed its conventions accordingly. The rediscovery of classical dramatic texts for use in grammar schools and the advent of cheap printing made possible the writing and dissemination of translations and imitations that had a significant effect upon drama. Models that addressed the mother in new ways became available as the works of Greek and Roman dramatists, and appeared in translation throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. The mother figure was measured against her counterparts in newly available and popular narratives, notably the work of Seneca. In a discussion of the Latin play Roxana, William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, connections between maternity and the depiction of violence are traced to show how an assertion of the maternal, both in rhetoric and through dramatic spectacle, serves to emblematise both the causes and consequences of conflict and to elicit an affective response that invites reconsideration of the political in the light of the personal.

Chapter one argues that the genre of conduct literature participates in the cultural transition from private vengeance to the monarchy’s centralization of revenge by training young subjects in the principles of civil vengeance. Insofar as behavioral training instantiates a requisite split within the subject, the first chapter reads the self-estrangement demanded by conduct formation as civil vengeance. Because authors of conduct literature, which includes Erasmus, rely on and employ the aversive specter of vulgar laboring classes, it trains aspirational individuals to demonstrate their civility by repudiating incivilities as well as those who have historically displayed them, even if that includes aspirational subjects themselves. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy advances this claim to visualize the cruel promise of social mobility and its reliance on the logic of civil vengeance.

Once translated into English as the Tenne Tragedies, Seneca’s tragedies became available for vernacular English playwrights to imitate his style. Although they did not use Senecan plots, they typically applied senecan diction—especially as realized by the translators of the Tenne Tragedies—to other historical and mythological subject matter. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, and the anonymous Locrine are some examples. Shakespeare often uses this style as a foil to indicate that his protagonists do not belong in a senecan universe; Hamlet, for example, would like to be a revenger, but lacks the revenger’s obsessive single-mindedness. In the early seventeenth century, Ben Jonson revived some features of senecan dramaturgy in his history plays, while various revenge tragedies also show traces of familiar senecan tropes.

In three revenge tragedies, The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and Hamlet, the body of the protagonist enacts the pain of moral imbalance. Each plot leads to tragedy because the violence does not restore balance. The varieties of bodily pain displayed on the stage result from the unavailability of legal recompense for injury, making the plays’ central drama imbalance rather than revenge. The undeniably speculative claim is that these displays of imbalance and their tragic outcomes engaged the real-life anxieties of audiences in early modern London about the local unavailability of justice. The proposal is that the generic form of these plays—their tragic revenge plots—works homeostatically with a community that needs the problem of justice to be represented and re-represented (and re-represented) in the hope that new clarity will emerge from the interplay of normal cognitive processes with the imaginative fiction.