In collaboration with Cyril Tourneur
The Revenger’s Tragedy was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 7 October 1607 and was first performed in 1606 by the King’s Men. It was staged at the Globe Theatre, the Blackfriars Theatre and at Court shortly after it was composed. It was originally published anonymously, but in 1656 it was attributed to Cyril Tourneur and he was long believed to be the sole author. It was not until the 20th century that scholars began to question whether the play might have been written by Middleton instead. In the 1970’s two scholars, David Lake (The Canon of Middleton’s Plays, Cambridge University Press, 1975) and MacDonald P. Jackson (Middleton and Shakespeare: Studies in Attribution, Salzburg, 1979) attributed the play to Middleton, and since then there has not been a serious rebuttal to their assertions, or any new arguments supporting Cyril Tourneur as the author. The play is a revenge tragedy: a genre of drama that became popular in the Elizabethan era and continued into the Jacobean period. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Hamlet are famous examples of the genre, characteristically involving the destruction of both the object of revenge and the avenger themselves.
The play is set in an unspecified Italian court and opens with Vindice vowing to wreak revenge on the Duke for the murder of the young man’s beloved nine years ago. Vindice’s brother Hippolito, informs him that the Duke’s son and heir Lussurioso, is in search of a procurer to help him attain a young virgin he desires. Vindice determines to disguise himself and offer to help Lussurioso, in the hopes of extracting revenge against the Duke. There is an overlapping plot involving the Duchess’ infidelity with the Duke’s bastard son and a bloody power struggle between the other potential heirs. The machinations and intrigues result in a predictably violent conclusion, symbolising a cleansing of the social and political ills blighting the kingdom. The conservative reading of the work, and in fact most revenge tragedies, is that ‘order’, and the political status quo — one based on the notion of the divine right — is affirmed in the conclusion.
However, this interpretation came under criticism during the 20th century, particularly from the critic Jonathan Dollimore, who, in his influential book Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (University of Chicago Press, 1984) argues that the play is a form of radical parody, undermining the prevailing Jacobean ideology. Dollimore argues that the play ‘exposes the hypocritical moral appeals that characters make to the providential order’ (Radical Tragedy, University of Chicago, 1984, p141) and highlights the example of the Duchess moralising about the horrors of illegitimacy while seducing her stepson and encouraging him to murder someone. He also underlines how the moral and providential ‘rationalisations’ made by Antonio at the close of the play are undermined and subverted by the mocking and playful retorts of Vindice (Radical Tragedy, University of Chicago, 1984, p143).
Though the play was popular at the start of the 17th century, it fell out of favour during the Restoration period before re-emerging to prominence in the 20th century. In 1965 it was produced at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, and the following year Trevor Nunn staged a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company starring Ian Richardson. There were a handful of productions during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and in 2008 there were two major renewals of the work: Jonathan Moore produced the play for the Royal Exchange Manchester, and the National Theatre staged a production which featured Rory Kinnear as Vindice. The play has also inspired film adaptations including the 1976 French language movie Noroit, and the 2002 British picture entitled Revenger’s Tragedy, starring Christopher Eccleston and Eddie Izzard.