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Title: Revenger's Tragedy (New Mermaid Series) by Brian Gibbons, Cyril Tourneur ISBN: 0-393-90060-6 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.10 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Tourneur? Middleton? Who cares?
Comment: OK. The jury has more or less decided that "The Revenger's Tragedy" is not by Cyril Tourneur after all, but by Thomas Middleton. This is on strictly scholarly grounds. Either way, it scarcely matters, as this play is strictly sui generis. It's like nothing else either Tourneur or Middleton ever wrote.
The best way to think of it is as standing in a relation to the classic Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster and Middleton sort of like the way Quentin Tarantino's early films stand in relation to previous Hollywood classics. Whoever wrote this, they were Taking The P*ss. The play starts in next-to-top gear, and accelerates into warp speed fairly quickly. Few other plays of the era (this is roughly contemporaneous with "King Lear", to give you an idea) are so ruthlessly efficient. The basic plot is put in motion by two brothers, Vindice and Hippolito, who are a bit cheesed off because the egregious Duke (of wherever) killed Vindice's wife cause she wouldn't put out. From here proceeds a bizarre and increasingly unlikely series of revenges, climaxing in a frankly chortlesome mass slaying. Vindice is the juiciest role - a bit like Shakespeare's Richard III, he guides the audience through the action, but with far greater economy and far less wrangling of conscience, not that Crookback Dick is noted for his remorse.
By the end, the stage is littered with bodies, and Vindice and Hippolito cheerfully go off to execution, with barely a qualm in sight. This is truly the most cynical and the funniest of all Jacobean tragedies. Whoever wrote it, be it Cyril or Tom, was thinking along the same lines Howard Hawks was on when he (Hawks) turned "Rio Bravo" from a Western into a chamber comedy. It's all thoroughly reprehensible, and great fun. You want depth, try John Webster.
There aren't many four-hundred-year-old plays that I laugh aloud at whilst reading, but this is one of them. Pace the opinion below, it couldn't have less to do with Jonson's careful layering of reality if it tried. It's a brisk, bleak, savage cartoon. Full marks, whoever you were.
Rating: 5
Summary: great play! one of my favorites
Comment: PreShakespeare, but a lot of fun to read! I enjoyed it very much--- has to do with a man who is carrying around a murdered girlfriend for almost ten years-- he is planning revenge on the king...
Rating: 5
Summary: Dazzling Theater
Comment: This dark tragi-comedy resonates with the dramatic potential of Hamlet, but and edge particular to Jacobean Drama. A play which is still relevant today (many students related it to "The Godfather"), and brimming with cinematic violence, lust, deception, vengence, and, with all this, communicated through beautiful poetry.
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Title: The Shoemaker's Holiday (New Mermaids) by Thomas Dekker, Anthony Parr ISBN: 0393900622 Publisher: A&C Black Pub. Date: December, 1990 List Price(USD): $16.75 |
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Title: Volpone by Ben Jonson ISBN: 0486280497 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 20 May, 1994 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: The Changeling (New Mermaids) by Thomas Middleton, Joost Daalder, William Rowley ISBN: 0393900614 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 1991 List Price(USD): $11.40 |
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Title: The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster ISBN: 0486406601 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 09 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: Bartholomew Fair (New Mermaids Series) by Ben Jonson, George Hibbard ISBN: 039390038X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $11.40 |
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