Revengers are often embittered over unrewarded merit. The Andronicus family give Rome military service, the lives of twenty-six young Andronici, two heads, three hands, and a tongue; and yet the emperor spurns its patriarch, leaving him no recourse but revenge. Hoffman avenges his father, whose heroic military service was neglected. Revenge plays rectified unfairness of reward by meting out fair punishment. This society didn't distinguish restitution firmly from punishment: “reward” could mean cash or a flogging; one could “pay” money or a beating. Reward and punishment belonged to the same system. Avengers talk like bookkeepers partly because the imperative to avenge a relative was a debt, analogous to money owed.

Conceiving of revenge as a debt helps make sense of a revenger's desire to exceed the crime he avenges. Muir notes the widespread idea that “escalation of retaliatory killings” is “a kind of interest payment” (68). This had special meaning in Renaissance England, which witnessed an epidemic of personal and family indebtedness. As Craig Muldrew shows, few Englishmen paid cash for anything: