Genre
Ignored for many years, and viewed by some critics as the product of a cynical, embittered mind,[6] The Revenger's Tragedy was rediscovered and often performed as a black comedy during the 20th century. The approach of these revivals mirrors shifting views of the play on the part of literary critics. One of the most influential 20th-century readings of the play is by the critic Jonathan Dollimore, which claims that the play is essentially a form of radical parody that challenges orthodox Jacobean beliefs about Providence and patriarchy.[7] Dollimore asserts the play is best understood as "subversive black camp" insofar as it "celebrates the artificial and the delinquent; it delights in a play full of innuendo, perversity and subversion ... through parody it declares itself radically skeptical of ideological policing though not independent of the social reality which such skepticism simultaneously discloses".[8] In Dollimore's view, earlier critical approaches, which either emphasise the play's absolute decadence or find an ultimate affirmation of traditional morality in the play, are insufficient because they fail to take into account this vital strain of social and ideological critique running throughout the tragedy.
Themes and motifs
Gender
The Duchess, Castiza, and Gratiana are the only female characters in the play. Gratiana ("grace"), Vindice's mother, exemplifies female frailty. This is such a stereotyped role that it discourages looking at her circumstance in the play, but because she is a widow it could be assumed to include financial insecurity, which could help explain her susceptibility to bribery. Her daughter also has an exemplary name, Castiza ("chastity"), as if to fall in line with the conventions of the Morality drama, rather than the more individualized characterization seen in their counterparts in Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia. Due to the ironic and witty matter in which The Revenger's Tragedy handles received conventions, however, it is an open question as to how far the presentation of gender in the play is meant to be accepted as conventional, or instead as parody. The play is in accordance with the medieval tradition of Christian Complaint, and Elizabethan satire, in presenting sexuality mainly as symptomatic of general corruption. Even though Gratiana is the mother of a decent, strong-minded daughter, she finds herself acting as a bawd. This personality-split is then repeated, in an episode exactly reversing the pattern, by her ironic, intelligent daughter.[9]
Michael Neill notes that the name "Spurio" derives from the Latin term "spurius" which does not mean just any illegitimate offspring, but "one born from a noble but spouseless mother to an unknown or plebeian father." These children, who could not take the paternal name, were called "spurius" because they sprang in effect from the mother alone—the word itself deriving from "spurium," an ancient term for the female genitalia. As Thomas Laqueur puts it, "while the legitimate child is from the froth of the father, the illegitimate child is from the seed of the mother's genitals, as if the father did not exist." The idea of Spurio and his character provides the function of "bastardy in the misogynist gender politics of the play."[10]
Necrophilia
While the play does not quite imply sexual intercourse with a corpse, some critics have found a strong connection to desire that can be found in the instances where the skull is used. According to Karin S. Coddon, there is a sense of macabre eroticism that pervades the work. She notes that "Gloriana's skull is a prop endowed with remarkable spectacular and material efficacy."[11] Vindice has kept the skull long after his beloved's death and has used it to attract the duke to his death, a kiss of death was bestowed. Considering the description of the skull it should be impossible to discern its gender yet throughout in each section it is mentioned with the gender of a woman attributed to a woman. Vindice's use of the skull to kill the duke borders on a form of prostitution which also implies the sexual nature surrounding the partial corpse. Vindice, in act 3, scene 5 enters "with the skull of his love dressed up in tires"; in Coddon's view, the skull's gendering is clearly a contrivance.[11]
