If genre is in part, as John Frow has argued, ‘a set of conventional and highly organised constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning’ as well as something which produces a ‘horizon of expectation’ for readers and spectators against which their experience in the moment might be understood or tested, then what might we say are the defining characteristics of revenge drama as a theatrical mode that early modern audiences could have expected (and indeed wanted) to engage with as part of the dramatic experience? Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, generally understood as the prototype Elizabethan revenge drama, and first performed c. 1590 at the Rose Theatre, has many of the elements that became firmly associated with the form: bloody spectacle, ghosts (the play is framed in fact by the Ghost of Don Andrea in conversation with the personification of Revenge), madness both feigned and real, corpses piled on corpses by the final act and a thread of self-aware theatricality, not least in the enacting of revenge itself. Revenge is achieved here, for example, by a play within a play performed in ‘sundry languages’ (4.4.10 s.d.) and supposedly authored by the grieving protagonist, Hieronimo the Knight Marshal.

Hieronimo is our avenging hero, determined to achieve justice following the brutal murder of his son Horatio, but he also becomes the memorable exponent of what would become yet another recurring feature of revenge drama, the lengthy rhetorical and expository soliloquy which frequently lays bare his grief, despair and sheer mental fragility for the consideration of spectators:

1. O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;

2. O life, no life, but lively form of death;

3. O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,

4. Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!

5. O sacred heavens! if this unhallowed deed,

6. If this inhuman and barbarous attempt,

7. If this incomparable murder thus

8. Of mine, but now no more my son,

9. Shall unrevealed and unrevengèd pass,

10. How should we term your dealings to be just,

11. If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?

12. (3.2.1–11)