SOURCE: Hallett, Charles A. and Elaine S. Hallett. “The Revenge Experience as Tragedy.” In The Revenger's Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs, pp. 101-27. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.

In the following essay, the Halletts maintain that the Elizabethan dramatists—led by Thomas Kyd—employed the revenge tragedy motif in their plays to symbolize late sixteenth-century England as a civilization in crisis.

And know ye all (though far from all your aims, Yet worth them all, and all men's endless studies) That in this one thing, all the discipline Of manners and of manhood is contain'd; A man to join himself with th'Universe In his main sway, and make (in all things fit) One with that All, and go on, round as it. Not plucking from the whole his wretched part, And into straits, or into nought revert, Wishing the complete Universe might be Subject to such...