Revenge and ambition, past and present

Revenge and ambition had meanings in Shakespeare's world significantly different from what they mean now. Yet we can still easily recognize them in Shakespeare's plays, allowing us both an emotional connection to the human past, and an intellectual perspective on it.

Shakespeare's brilliant contemporary, Francis Bacon, called revenge 'a kind of wild justice', and it must have been an important supplement to official justice in an era of very limited police powers and severely enforced social hierarchy. The Tudor monarchies made some progress in controlling lawlessness, but there must have been some basis for the persistent jokes about incompetent constables and watches in Elizabethan comedy. With so many crimes unsolved, so many criminals immune to punishment, and so many outrages (against women, the poor, and ethnic and religious minorities) not even considered crimes, it is hardly surprising that the public developed an appetite for revenge stories.