Vengeance, Variously: Revenge Before Kyd in Early Elizabethan Drama

Abstract

In 1973, Ronald Broude observed that, though 'revenge tragedy ranks among the major dramatic forms left us by the English Renaissance, we know relatively little about its development prior to its remarkable vogue in the 1580s and '90s'. 1 In his subsequent investigation, Broude suggests that a search for antecedents to the Elizabethan revenge play might first consider the larger 'trends in religion and politics' that marked the contemporary cultural scene-a rich milieu that gave rise to certain 'forerunners' of the genre, such as the morality plays of the mid-sixteenth-century. Of course, in the decades following the publication of Broude's essay, scholars have greatly sharpened our sensitivity to this larger cultural context of revenge, and recent work on revenge tragedy-such as Thomas Rist's Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England (2008), the latest full-length treatment of the genre-has demonstrated how the classic Elizabethan revenge play is imbricated with a complex series of ideological and ritualistic investments. 2 But despite this renewed (and very welcome) contextual focus, there remains a more general sense in which the thrust of Broude's remark remains fundamentally unanswered: we have yet to produce a full account of literary revenge on the early Elizabethan stage, before the flowering of revenge tragedy proper in the century's final decades. Accordingly, this essay will respond to Broude's call for 'a systematic study of revenge tragedy's dramatic antecedents in England'. While the development and maturation of revenge tragedy has long been a locus of scholarly inquiry, the opposite is true of the genre's precursors: apart from scattered treatments of Senecanism, there has been little sustained discussion of how revenge fared as a theme in English plays before the advent of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and before revenge tragedy became a recognizable dramatic archetype. 3 This essay will amend this lacuna by examining revenge as it appears in the surviving corpus of pre-Kydian Elizabethan drama. With