SOURCE: Neill, Michael. “Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.” In Jonson and Shakespeare, edited by Ian Donaldson, pp. 35-56. London: Macmillan, in association with Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, 1983.

In the following essay, Neill discusses the theme of revenge in Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. He asserts that Hamlet and Macbeth are antitypes—the first seeking to preserve the past and the second to obliterate it—and contends that both are destroyed by their obsession. By contrast, Neill suggests, Prospero redeems the past not by revenging it but by restoring it.

In this paper I shall be looking at three plays—Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest—as versions of revenge tragedy. I am not proposing any contentious reclassification. Shakespeare's contemporaries did not envisage a distinct species of drama called ‘revenge tragedy’: and the ‘genre’ is really only a modern abstraction from a recurrent set...