Five Revenge Tragedies

As the Elizabethan era gave way to the reign of James I, England grappled with corruption within the royal court and widespread religious anxiety. Dramatists responded with morally complex plays of dark wit and violent spectacle, exploring the nature of death, the abuse of power and vigilante justice. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy a father failed by the Spanish court seeks his own bloody retribution for his son's murder. Shakespeare's 1603 version of Hamlet creates an avenging Prince of unique psychological depth, while Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman is a fascinating reworking of Hamlet's themes, probably for a rival theatre company. In Marston's Antonio's Revenge, thwarted love leads inexorably to gory reprisals and in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, malcontent Vindice unleashes an escalating orgy of mayhem on a debauched Duke for his bride's murder, in a ferocious satire reflecting the mounting disillusionment of the age. Emma Smith's introduction considers the political and religious climate behind the plays and the dramatic conventions within them. This edition includes a chronology, playwrights' biographies and suggestions for further reading.

“" Five Revenge Tragedies makes the core texts of the genre available to students in an affordable, accessible edition.”

"Five Revenge Tragedies makes the core texts of the genre available to students in an affordable, accessible edition. Emma Smith's introduction is scholarly and at the same time engaging, and will likely prove useful to undergraduate and graduate students a like. This is a volume which is long overdue, and a welcome edition to the Penguin catalog." --Gabriel A Rieger, Assistant Professor, Languages and Literature, Concord University

Emma Smith is Fellow and Tutor in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She has published widely on Shakespeare and on early modern drama, particularly on the plays in print and in performance. She is co-editor of The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2012) and is working on a book on the Shakespeare First Folio.

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