Francis Bacon described revenge as a 'kind of wild justice'. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchi

The Revenge Tragedy flourished in Britain in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period for both literary and cultural reasons. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (

As the Elizabethan era gave way to the reign of James I, England grappled with corruption within the royal court and widespread religious anxiety. Dramatists re