If Marlowe's poems and dramas continually flirt with the idea of never consummating, The Revenger's Tragedy consummates continually. It plays with and parodies – but nevertheless participates in – the model of a self-defining, self-defeating phallic orgasm and death that is central to conventional tragedy. While the text effectively anatomizes and criticizes the structures of misogyny and the erotics of patriarchy, it simultaneously delights in them, never seriously attempting to imagine an alternative.

Images of swelling and detumescence pervade the play: revenge and rhetoric, as well as conventional sexuality (from which they seem inseparable), are conceived in these terms. The bastard Spurio, for example, exclaims at one point:

In this speech, the action of “swelling” seems – to use another central term in the play – to “slide” between adultery and revenge (as it does in fact: Spurio's revenge is to sleep with his father's wife). The “brain” of the play's hero, Vindice, similarly “swell[s] with strange invention” as he “works” himself up verbally – and then is cut off in mid-sentence (1.3.120–4). As J. L. Simmons and Peter Stallybrass have noted, tongues are repeatedly associated throughout the play with phallic assertiveness and deflation.