The Revenger’s Tragedy

In their dramatizations of men kissing poisoned corpses, these two plays translate this pollution and corruption of idols into material, and fatal, form. The Tyrant and Sforza die from contact with the contaminating power of the lifeless idols they have created. The theatrical nature of their deaths, as well as the broader popular associations between the stage, cosmetics, and idolatry, suggests that the poisons which kill them are also those of the theater. Their fatal invasion by seductive spectacles holds out a threat for the play s audience as well, a threat even more explicitly dramatized in an earlier but more self-conscious treatment of this motif. The Revenger s Tragedy. 

In each of these plays—The Second Maiden s Tragedy, The Duke of Milan, and The Revenger s Tragedy—men drawn into an idolatrous fascination with the artificial painted beauty of the female corpse offer models for theatrical spectatorship. The poisonous kiss, with its power to dissolve boundaries between spectator and spectacle, epitomizes the vulnerability of the spectator trapped between these precarious positions. Even while warning their audiences against the threat of seduction by alluring spectacles, these plays simultaneously embody the theatrical contamination they depict and critique. 

Jonathan Crewe notes this ambivalence in The Theatre of the Idols Marlowe, Rankins, and Theatrical Images, Theatre Journal 36 (1984), 321-33, as does Peter Stallybrass in Reading the Body The Revenger s Tragedy and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption, Renaissance Drama 18 (1987), 121-48. 

The Revenger s Tragedy, The Second Maiden s, and The Duke of Milan are examined in more detail in Chapter 4. As discussed in Chapter i, cosmetics are also closely juxtaposed with poisons in Jonson s Sejanus (1603) numerous other plays feature similar variations on this theme. 

This hollowness stands in sharp contrast to Hamlet, a play with which The Revenger s Tragedy has much in common and is often compared. Preoccupations with interiority in Hamlet are explored in the following chapter. 

The Revenger s Tragedy, ed. R. A. Foakes, Revels Plays Edition (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1966). All following citations refer to this edition. On the question of the play s authorship, see n. 3, above. 

The Revenger s Tragedy and the Morality Tradition, Scrutiny 6 (1938), 402,-44, reprinted in Salingar, Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the ]acobeans (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1986), 206-21 Alvin Kernan also discusses the relationship in The Cankered Muse (New Haven Yale University Press, 1959), 223-32. 

The True and False Families of The Revenger s Tragedy. In English... 

Brucher, Richard T. Fantasies of Violence Flamlet and The Revenger s Tragedy. Studies in English Literature 21 2 (1981), 257-70. 

Coddon, Karin. For Show or Useless Property Necrophilia and The Revenger s Tragedy. English Literary History 61 (1994), 71-88. 

Holdsworth, R. V. The Revenger s Tragedy as a Middleton Play. In Three Revenge Tragedies. Ed. R. V. Holdsworth, 79-105. Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990. 

McMillin, Scott. Acting and Violence The Revenger s Tragedy and Its Departures from Hamlet. Studies in English Literature 24 2 (1984), 275-91. 

Mullaney, Steven. Mourning and Misogyny Hamlet, The Revenger s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth 1,1600-1607. Shakespeare Quarterly 4 2. (1994), 139-62. 

On attribution, see MacDonald P. Jackson s edition of The Revenger s Tragedy, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. eds.), Thomas Middleton The Collected Works (Oxford Clarendon Press, 2007), 546, and Jackson s Early Modern Authorship Canons and Chronologies , in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture (Oxford Clarendon Press, 2007), 80-97. 

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