Introduction

This chapter traces the emergence of revenge tragedy as a distinct dramatic form on the early modern stage. While the term ‘revenge tragedy’ is a twentieth-century invention, the body of plays to which it refers share a number of important features that early modern theatregoers likely would have recognised as recurring: the use of foreign settings; the frustrated revenger's descent into madness, whether real or feigned; the presence of ghosts. I argue that part of what made revenge tragedies recognisable as such was their vividly violent representation of sound, which slices and seeps into the bodies of those who hear it both on and off the stage. While stabbing or wounding words appear in a wide variety of plays, and are by no means the exclusive property of any one dramatic genre, they occur in tragedies of revenge with such ferocious frequency as to serve as a generic tag or mark. This recurring dramatic feature would have shaped thinking about the genre's reception in performance in important ways, and, since the revenge tragedy form would prove to have such longevity on the early modern stage, its violent speeches helped to keep current a sense of the theatre's awesomely transformative potential well into the seventeenth century.

I locate the development of this trend in a fashion for sonic excess that dominated the commercial theatre of the late sixteenth century. Filled with blaring trumpets, explosions, thunder and other sound effects, these early plays (a mix of comedies, tragedies and heroic romances) positively revel in their own noisiness. Revenge figures heavily in many of these productions, but it functions less as a central motive of the plot than as an exhaustively deployed motif, its performance as seemingly purposeless, and its effects as diffuse, as the cacophonous sounds that suffuse the action. It is not until the very end of the sixteenth century that a single, delayed act of vengeance becomes the driving force of the plot, a structural shift that I tie to the increasingly fixed association in performance of vengeance with violent speech.

Although I am arguing for a shift, or development, in dramatic form, I am not making an evolutionary claim of the sort criticised by Alan Dessen, in which various formal features emerge out of an almost inevitable process of increasing literary sophistication.