Revenge Realness

Would you believe that a dressed-up skull is a beautiful and willing maiden? Would you struggle to distinguish between an actor pretending to be dead and one who actually dies? Likely the answer to these questions is no, yet these plot points are meant to be believed in the context of English revenge tragedies. Not only do characters fall for these schemes, but there is a degree to which even the audience may be confused, or at least must suspend their disbelief to follow the dramatic logic. Throughout the canon of early modern revenge drama, revengers carry out their revenge in ways that range from realism to the surreal to the hyperreal. The way that the revengers play with both characters’ and audiences’ sense of the real undermines the notion of reality itself. 1