The Bloody Banquet

The Bloody Banquet is an early 17th-century play, a revenge tragedy of uncertain date and authorship, attributed on its title page only to "T.D." It has attracted a substantial body of critical and scholarly commentary, chiefly for the challenging authorship problem it presents. It has been attributed to a collaboration between Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton.

The Bloody Banquet was never entered into the Register of the Stationers Company, but an order from the Lord Chamberlain (then Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke), dated 19 August 1639, lists it among forty plays that are the property of William Beeston and can be performed only by his company, Beeston's Boys. It was first published in quarto in the same year, 1639, by Thomas Cotes, with the attribution to "T. D." on its title page.

The play draws its plot from Pan His Syrinx (1584, 1597) by William Warner. The playwright(s) took elements from four of the seven stories in Warner's volume, to create a revenge tale in which a Tyrant serves up a cannibal banquet, only to be assassinated at the dining table, yielding the "bloody banquet" of the title. The sole extant text of the play is only about 1900 lines in length, roughly 500 lines shorter than the average for plays of its era; discontinuities in the text suggest that it was edited before publication. The drama's date is uncertain, although its general style and tone place it sometime after 1600.

Some seventeenth-century sources point to Thomas Dekker as the "T. D." of the title page. Nineteenth-century critic F. G. Fleay identified T. D. as Thomas Drue on the strength of the common initials – but since virtually nothing is known about Drue (the author of only one acknowledged play, The Duchess of Suffolk), the attribution offered little enlightenment, and left the field open for other candidates. Robert Davenport was also suggested as a possibility.

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