Reviewing Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy (2002), Peter Bradshaw describes the film as:

Bradshaw's review puts into focus several key issues arising from the corpus of films of non-Shakespearean Renaissance tragedies that have emerged under the influence of counter-cinematic directors like Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway to challenge the aesthetics and values embodied by mainstream Shakespeare films. For Bradshaw, Cox's Revengers is representative of all 'Jacobean horror comic[s]' and of the ideologically inflected modes of representation and politicised schools of thought (the '-isms') that threaten neutral Shakespeare with their 'terriblemess' which must be 'kept under control'. Shakespeare, by implication, is neither 'Jacobean' (regardless of dates), nor the author of horror comics of 'uncompromising bad taste' (regardless of Titus Andronicus). Shakespeare is the ultimate point of reference against which not-Shakespeare can be judged and found to have failed.