English Revenge Drama Money, Resistance, Equality [Paperback]

This book explores the vengeance permeating English Renaissance drama, connecting bloodthirsty and blackly comic plays with economics and political resistance.Why was revenge drama so popular in Shakespeare's time, and why did supposedly forgiving Christian audiences relish such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays? Woodbridge addresses these questions, exploring black comedy and sensationalism, what it means that revengers use economic terms like 'pay', and revengers as political revolutionaries and egalitarians.Why was revenge drama so popular in Shakespeare's time, and why did supposedly forgiving Christian audiences relish such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays? Woodbridge addresses these questions, exploring black comedy and sensationalism, what it means that revengers use economic terms like 'pay', and revengers as political revolutionaries and egalitarians.Vengeance permeates English Renaissance drama  for example, it crops up in all but two of Shakespeare's plays. This book explores why a supposedly forgiving Christian culture should have relished such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays. A clue lies in the plays' passion for fairness, a preoccupation suggesting widespread resentment of systemic unfairness  legal, economic, political, and social. Revengers' precise equivalents  the father of two beheaded sons obliges his enemy to eat her two sons' heads  are vigilante versions of Elizabethan law, where penalties suit the crimes: thieves' hands were cut off, scolds' tongues bridled. The revengers' language of paying' hints at the operation of revenge in the service of economic redress. Revenge makes contact with resistance theory, justifying overthrow of tyrants, and some revengers challenge the fundamental inequity of social class. Woodbridge demonstrates how, for all their sensationalism, their macabre comedy and outlandish gore, Renaissance revenge plays do some serious cultural work.Part I. Rampant Revenge: 1. Getting what one deserves; 2. Can two wrongs ever make a riglS