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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 discusses the concept of revenge tragedy. It is shown that there is a fascination with reciprocal violence and what it does to things, which is in reality a hallmark of revenge tragedy. This discussion shows that theatrical metaphors help in shaping the perceptions of public life in the 1640s.

This chapter explores the notable reciprocity between revenge and repentance. This reciprocity, as well as the linguistic and conceptual pressures to which it was subjected during the Reformation, represent an unexplored core of English Renaissance revenge tragedy. At the center of this core is the role of satisfaction as the shared aim of both the revenger and the penitent. The promise of penitential satisfaction was rejected by Protestant Reformers who saw making enough as both an infringement on Christ's passion as well as a dubious assertion of human merit. The chapter suggests that Elizabethan revenge tragedy, a form whose development is “virtually synonymous” with the rise of Reformed religion, absorbed Protestantism's retailoring of the connection between vengeance and repentance, its sanctioning of penitential self-punishment, and its refusal of penitential satisfaction.

This chapter traces how revenge tragedy took shape on the early modern stage, outlining the model of violent, invasive hearing on which the genre would increasingly depend. Many late-sixteenth century plays delight in sonic excess, combining cannon fire, trumpets, and alarums with the rumbling thunder of bombastic speech. In these productions, loud noises are often associated with violence, and particularly vengeance. Revenge is said to ‘thunder’ into bodies, or to ‘shriek’ and ‘cry’ out; noise itself becomes a weapon. Contemporary anatomy texts support such thinking, as do early modern theories of theatrical influence and effects. Increasingly, revengers’ speeches become weapons to be wielded precisely -- that is, directly into the ears of specific, intended victims --rather than released indiscriminately into crowds of hearers. Through Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy andShakespeare’s 3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, this chapter argues that revenge tragedy is intimately bound up in thinking about what sound can do to listeners both on and off the stage. The theatrical form proves explicitly invested in the question of what it means to hear plays in performance.

This chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an early modern play deeply interested in, and highly self-consciously about, hearing. Possibly a revision of an earlier revenge tragedy, Hamlet is vitally shaped by the formal contests emerging at the turn of the century. Hamlet himself articulates a Jonsonian model of selective and tasteful theatrical reception, but his own hearing trouble frequently, tragically, undermines his ability to perform such audition. The Prince’s longing for complete and absolute control over his body’s sonic circulation is juxtaposed against Horatio’s more measured, partial reception; it is only in the play’s final moments that the dying Hamlet is released from this doomed, tortured struggle. Hamlet recuperates revenge from charges of embarrassing obsolescence by suggesting that all sounds can be processed thoughtfully, consciously, and carefully -- that no one dramatic sound or form forces its audiences to hear it so unthinkingly, or so violently. The chapter closes by examining Hamlet’s influence on the sound and structure of a handful of Jacobean revenge tragedies and city comedies, with particular attention to the highly sophisticated, generically self-aware The Revenger’s Tragedy.

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.

The book’s introduction maps out its contribution to ongoing critical conversations surrounding literary form, the history of the body and the senses, the experience and effects of sound, and historical phenomenology. Through brief readings of The Revenger’s Tragedy and Epicoene, it introduces the two forms, and the two auditory models, that are at the heart of this analysis. How these two forms developed, and how and why hearing became so central to their content, plot, and structure, are introduced as the key questions that motivate this study.

This chapter examines William Shakespeare's repudiation of the Ciceronian-humanist model through Hamlet's pervasive (and hitherto all but ignored) discourse of hunting, fowling, falconry, and fishing. Within the world of the hunt, the notion of acting—of performing a particular role—is just as important as it is within a stage production. But here the roles one plays are not measured by reason, virtue, propriety, verisimilitude, or even the pleasure they might give to an audience. Instead, one acts to mislead one's predators or one's prey and, just as frequently, to mislead oneself about the appetitive nature of one's existence. The chapter concludes by reading the “cynegetic paradigm” of Hamlet against the natura and fortuna of Senecan revenge tragedy, and proposes that as the hunt governs the way in which the cast of Hamlet interact with one another, Shakespeare uses it to expose the dangerously illusory foundations on which humanist moral philosophy was constructed.

This chapter concentrates on the play “Hamlet,” which is conventionally regarded as a revenge tragedy. It reviews the critical commentary that that centred on the topos of Hamlet's “delay” that was predicated upon that assumption. It also mentions the introduction of the genre called the Histories, in which the Folio dissolved the kinship between tragedy and history. The chapter examines how Hamlet speaks to contemporary political concerns and circumstances. It also describes staging of Hamlet from a crucial moment of dynastic change in Danish history, in which Denmark is portrayed as an elective monarchy. It also talks about the English monarchy that was essentially elective in its structure or considered as a free hereditary monarchy.

This chapter takes a look at revenge tragedy and the representations of mercenaries. It comments on two constructions of the term ‘mercenary’ and shows why the mercenary has become a problematic figure for a number of political ideologies. The chapter concludes that the mercenary represents the ability to break free from bonds, which may be unwelcome constraints or the sustaining ties of social life, and the freedoms that modern states still find hard to contain.

This chapter focuses on the play “Titus Andronicus,” which is considered not merely a revenge tragedy. It explains how Titus is suffused with evocations and references to the Aeneid and central elements in the plot that are taken from Ovid. It also mentions how Titus was described as a “noble Roman history” when it was entered in the stationer's register. The chapter discusses the Titus' central concerns: succession, tyranny, resistance and the nature and origins of monarchical legitimacy. It shows how Titus contains echoes of and parallels with the Henry VI and Richard III plays and how it was set within a meticulously evoked and entirely fictional version of Romanitas.