Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England

When we speak of ‘revenge tragedy,’ we are often unaware of the extent to which our approach to these important Renaissance plays has been conditioned by the name we have given them. Elizabethans themselves recognized no distinct dramatic type called revenge play. The term is a modern one, made current at the turn of the century by A. H. Thorndike, and first defined at length by Fredson Bowers more than thirty years ago. As a critical term, it depends upon the modern meaning ofrevenge, and it simultaneously reflects and shapes both modern assumptions about the subject matter of the plays and modern prejudices about the ethical principles upon which they are assumed to be predicated.