Revenge in Its Social Contexts: Early Modern Tragedy

Abstract

Any attempt to understand the popularity of the revenge tragedy genre in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama must take into account not only the socio-political context, but also the cultural heritage: it is a commonplace that the early forays into the genre in the last years of the sixteenth century were influenced heavily by the Senecan tradition. From Seneca, the dramatists inherited the call to blood-revenge, often via the spirits of the dead or visions of the Furies, as well as a basic structure of exposition of a revenge plot, development, confrontation, delay and catastrophic action. However, as John Kerrigan points out in his study of representations of the execution of Charles I in relation to revenge tragedy conventions, ‘[t]he attractions of Seneca were always partial … and in themselves political’, entwined as they were with concerns about counselling rulers against tyranny and poor government.1 While it is important not to neglect the Senecan influence – particularly on the earliest experiments in early modern English revenge tragedy – the present study’s main concern is with the relationship between cultural artefacts and their socio-political context; in other words, the cyclical action and reaction of the lived experience of a people and what can be recovered of their popular culture.