Revenge Tragedy

A father goes mad when he tries to avenge the death of his son; a young woman is raped and mutilated; a mother is forced to eat a pie that contains the limbs of her sons; one mad revenger sprinkles his father’s grave with the blood of his opponent’s son; and another revenger uses the poisoned skull of his fiancée to kill her seducer. These are just some scenes from the plays we will discuss in this class, which might therefore necessitate a CN: revenge tragedy is not for the faint-hearted – these plays are gory and include rape scenes, depictions of madness, and gratuitous violence.

We will cover a range of (revenge) tragedies from the Elizabethan era through the Jacobean period, plays that are (in)famous for their imaginative killings and bloody catastrophes, excessive violence and gory details, their morbid atmosphere as well as their social criticism. In discussing these plays, we will look into early modern depictions of (sexual) violence and their dependence on generic developments (the revenge tragedy) and early modern discourses (anatomy, the anxiety about the stability of gender roles, the development of English law, the status of the English monarch). We will then analyse one ‘late’ example of the revenge mode and discuss what happens to a popular genre when it seems to have run out of steam.