The revenger occupies a unique position among the heroes of tragedy. As John Kerrigan argues:

Revengers begin as victims, as survivors of trauma. Typically, they are dazed, disorientated, full of grief. They have been wronged, yet they have no way to find justice through the usual channels. They are thus forced initially into a condition of passivity and impotence that, for a male revenger, can be read as emasculating. Moreover, the male revenger's grief, his inability to forget or overcome his losses, might seem to confirm that emasculation. Mourning was not an exclusively female activity, of course, either in the drama of this period or in reality, but the idea of excessive mourning, of an immoderate, tearful wallowing in sorrow, was seen as connected to the feminine. In Hamlet, for example, Claudius reprimands the prince for his ‘unmanly grief’ over his father, in his refusal to move on from the death, his determination to ‘persever / In obstinate condolement’ (1.2.92–3).

However, in much literature of this period, revenge is seen as a way to escape from this ‘feminine’ mode of tearful impotence. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo muses that, ‘To know the author were some ease of grief, / For in revenge my heart would find relief’, and later reflects that ‘naught but blood will satisfy my woes’ (2.5.40–1; 3.7.68). He imagines that letting the blood of his oppressors will help him to purge his own sorrow and suffering. Similarly, in The Rape of Lucrece, Brutus reprimands the weeping, potentially suicidal father and husband of the dead Lucrece, asking them,