Not By Shakespeare

Middleton: The Revenger's Tragedy

In this course, we explore The Revenger’s Tragedy, a play which was written in the early years of the seventeenth century, but whose author is unknown. In the first two modules, we think generally about the Early Modern stage, before moving on in the final three modules to think about the play itself – its dramatic antecedents, its setting and language, and the presentation of its central character, the “Revenger” himself, Vindice.

Not By Shakespeare

When thinking about Early Modern theatre, students and scholars tend to focus on the major authors of the time: Shakespeare especially, but also playwrights such as Jonson and Marlowe. In this module, we highlight the fact that Shakespeare is the exception rather than the norm, and that the Revenger’s Tragedy is in many ways a more representative of drama in the period.