SOURCE: Doran, Madeleine. “History and Tragedy: Italianate Tragedy of Intrigue.” In Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama, pp. 128-42. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1954.

In the excerpt below, Doran discusses revenge in Elizabethan drama as an overarching “motive” rather than a “class” of tragedy.

Besides tyranny, Seneca has another repeated theme in his tragedies, revenge incited by jealousy, and this is a theme which leads us into the second great class of English renaissance tragedy, the Italianate tragedies of intrigue centered about crimes of passion. The revenge theme furnished invaluable dramatic motivation to English dramatists; though they shifted its moral implications, they never let go of it as a dramatic device until the closing of the theaters.¹ They did not have to look to Seneca for it, of course, for it was often a component of narrative Mirror tragedies, it was familiar through...