The revenger's tragedy by Cyril TourneurMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Takes the revenge tragedy genre established by Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy to its limit and beyond – stripping out any potential for pathos or catharsis and replacing it with farce. Middleton (more likely to have been the dramatist than Tourneur) was best known for acerbic heavily-plotted city comedies, and those inclinations are present here – with disguises creating absurd situational comedy and the revengers deploying wildly inventive methods of murder. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus had a similar blackly comic tone, but The Revenger’s Tragedy refines the formula and introduces a contempt for the machinations of courtly life that points towards Webster’s nihilistic White Devil and Duchess of Malfi. A lot of fun.
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