When Francis Bacon deemed revenge ‘a kind of wild justice’, he provided an apothegm that would prove irresistible to scholars studying retribution on the early modern stage. The phrase has seemed perfectly apposite for a genre principally known for its spectacularly brutal violence. For what justice could be considered wilder than that administered by razing an entire court, then biting out one's own tongue, by grinding a mother's children into her pudding, or by offering a poisoned skull for one furtive, fatal, necrophilic kiss? Adopted as paradigmatic of the ethos and even aesthetics of theatrical retribution, Bacon's assessment has served to emphasise the barbarity and brutishness of the genre. Fredson Bowers’ seminal Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (1940), for instance, opens by figuring ‘Blood revenge as […] universal among primitive people’ and ‘the only possible action for the primitive individual’, before concluding that ‘Francis Bacon, with his usual acumen, recognized such a condition when he called revenge “a kind of wild justice”.’ In a similar vein, Frederick Boas, in an influential reading of The Spanish Tragedy, accounts the final scene ‘sheer savagery’ as ‘the wild justice of revenge turns to mere massacre, and a situation inspired by the true genius of tragedy collapses into a series of bloodcurdling incidents’. As a means of highlighting the genre's savagery, such appropriations of Bacon abound. Bacon's full statement, however, emphasises not savagery but disorder of a different sort as he deploys a horticultural trope to advance a judicial point: ‘Revenge,’ declares the essayist, ‘is a kind of wild Justice, which the more Man's Nature runs to the more ought Law to weed it out.’ If Bacon's famous dictum can be thought of as representative of early modern revenge tragedy, perhaps we might think of it as paradigmatic of the ways in which the plays’ intense brutality exerts a profound gravitational pull on our critical hermeneutic, inviting us to see these plays principally in terms of sensationalism – in terms of primitive impulses, mere massacres and blood-curdling incidents – rather than as works marked by subtlety, nuance and the innovative engagement with some of the era's most foundational philosophical traditions.