SOURCE: Black, James. “Shakespeare and the Comedy of Revenge.” In Comparative Critical Approaches to Renaissance Comedy, edited by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, pp. 137-51. Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation Series, no. 9. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions Canada, 1986.

In the following essay, Black suggests that The Tempest may be read as a “revenge comedy” that features a protagonist who has the power to retaliate for wrongs done to him yet chooses not to do so. He calls attention to the many elements the play has in common with conventional revenge tragedy, particularly Hamlet.

Renaissance revenge tragedy is a widely recognized and clearly definable literary form whose most famous—indeed supreme—example is Shakespeare's Hamlet.¹ Fredson Bowers, tracing the development of revenge tragedy up to and past Hamlet, into its Jacobean decadence, convincingly argues that in Hamlet the form had developed as far as it could go.² Certainly after Titus Andronicus...