The
revenge tragedy genre of English literature generally refers to a body of
dramatic works written from the mid-1580s to the early 1640s, from the
Elizabethan to the Caroline period. Typically, these works feature such themes
and devices as a wronged revenge-seeker, ghosts, madness, delay, sinister
intrigue, a play-within-the-play, torture, multiple murders, and the realistic
depiction of bloody violence onstage. Nearly all of the major playwrights of
the time contributed to this class of drama, including Thomas Kyd, William
Shakespeare, John Marston, George Chapman, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton,
John Webster, James Shirley, and John Ford. Most literary scholars have
credited Kyd with initiating the dramatic archetype w ith his The
Spanish Tragedy and the so-called Ur-Hamlet—a
drama no longer extant but which is believed to have been written before 1589,
and upon which Shakespeare likely based his great tragedy—and have credited
Shakespeare with bringing the genre to its artistic maturity with Hamlet . Critics have maintained that revenge tragedy was a markedly dynamic
genre, observing that while Kyd invented the basic formula, his successors
added ingenious new layers of dramatic suspense, characterization, symbolism,
and ideological representation to the theatrical form.
