Revenge tragedy

Revenge tragedy (less commonly referred to as revenge drama, revenge play, or tragedy of blood) defines a genre of plays made popular in early modern England. Ashley H. Thorndike formally established this genre in his seminal 1902 article "The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays," which characterizes revenge tragedy "as a tragedy whose leading motive is revenge and whose main action deals with the progress of this revenge, leading to the death of the murderers and often the death of the avenger himself." Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (c.1580s) is often considered the inaugural revenge tragedy on the early modern stage. However, more recent research extends early modern revenge tragedy to the 1560s with poet and classicist Jasper Heywood's translations of Seneca at Oxford University, including Troas (1559), Thyestes (1560), and Hercules Furens (1561). Additionally, Thomases Norton and Sackville's play Gorbuduc (1561) is considered an early revenge tragedy (almost twenty years prior to The Spanish Tragedy). Other well-known revenge tragedies include William Shakespeare's Hamlet (c.1599-1602) and Titus Andronicus (c.1588-1593) and Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (c.1606).

The genre of revenge tragedy is a modern generic invention, developed as a means to talk about early modern tragedies that maintain a theme or motif of revenge in varying degrees. In respect to early modern drama more broadly, generic classification is difficult and, at times, contentious, and revenge tragedy is by no means exempt from this. More or less, the genre came into existence simply because it had to.

Lawrence Danson, for example, suggests that Shakespeare and his contemporaries had a "healthy ability to live comfortably with the unruliness of a theatre where genre was not static but moving and mixing, always producing new possibilities. Contrastively, Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio's frontispiece famously depicts the printer-imposed (Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount) three genres of comedy, history, and tragedy, which can erroneously lead readers to believe that plays are easily categorized and contained. While these three genres have remained staples in discussions of genre, other genres are often either invoked or created, including not only revenge tragedy but also city comedy, romance, pastoral, and problem play, among others, in order to accommodate the generic slipperiness of early modern drama. While Thorndike is rather conservative in his definition of a revenge tragedy, it has become common to consider any tragedy that maintains an element of revenge in it a revenge tragedy. Lily Campbell even argues that revenge is the great thematic uniter of all early modern tragedy, and "all Elizabethan tragedy must appear as fundamentally a tragedy of revenge if the extent of the idea of revenge be but grasped. Furthermore, Fredson Bowers's groundbreaking work (1959) on this genre significantly widened and complicated not only what revenge tragedy is but also augmented its function as a productive lens in the work of dramatic and dramaturgical interpretation. A revenge tragedy thus can also be any tragedy where revenge is, more or less, a minor part of the overall narrative rather than just a narrative's major driving force. As long as revenge is an underlying theme or motivation throughout the piece, it can be labeled as revenge tragedy.

...
Wikipedia