SOURCE: " The Revenger's Tragedy," in Middleton's Tragic Themes, Peter Lang, 1984, pp. 1-11.

In the following excerpt, the critics trace Vindice's moral degradation in the course of The Revenger's Tragedy, finding his decline representative of the spiritual decay of the entire society depicted in the play.

The Revenger's Tragedy, the earliest tragedy that can be assigned to Middleton, already reveals his interest in some of the themes that distinguish his later works and his attempts at the parallel structures that also characterize them. The chief themes of the play develop from the subjects of loss of identity, which appears later in The Changeling and The Spanish Gipsy, and of moral degradation, also seen in The Changeling. In The Revenger's Tragedy, Middleton shows the results of immoral action, the loss of one's original guiltless identity, and the moral degradation in which one sin leads to another until the original identity...