Popular Styles in Jacobean Theatre

The Revenge Tragedy

The revenge play is a form of tragedy which was extremely popular during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. 

Though never closely followed, the Senecan model tragedy play includes:

• A secret murder
• Ghostly visitations of the murder victim to a younger kinsman
• Period of disguise, intrigue or plotting in which the murderer and the avenger scheme agaiinst each other, with a slowly rising body count.
• Descent into real or feigned madness by the avenger or other principal characters.
• Eruption of general violence at the end 
• A catastrophe that kills most characters, including the avenger. 

Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy are examples of plays which follow the Senecan model. However, they are both different in their intentions. Shakespeare’s Hamelet complicates and deepens the psycological aspects of its characters. The plain desire for revenge in The Revenger’s Tragedy was, for Prince Hamlet, morally ambivalent. 

Whilst some dramatists (e.g. Shakespeare) embraced character psychology in their revenge plays,  many more relied on the bloody sensationalism of murder and other immoralities to increase the size of their audience. In such plays, the revenger is usually a hero of some sort, out to avenge an undeserved death but is also a killer himself.

“Revenge is all the ambition I aspire;

To that I’ll climb or fall: my blood’s on fire”

- ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore

The above quote sums up the fundamental objective of a typical Jacobean revenge play. 

Jacobean City Comedy

The Jacobean age brought into fashion a more realistic comedy aimed to satirize the follies, life and manners of people---especially those of London. 

Two examples of this style are Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. 

The Alchemist satirizes human greed and gullibility through its characters from varying social classes. It also focuses on what happens when people seek advantage over one another. Con-artist trio, Subtle, Dol and Face, are ultimately undermined by the very vices they exploit from their victims. This play also manifests the playwright’s own anti-Puritan values through not allowing his Puritan characters to solicit a moment’s pity from the audience.

“I’ll strip the ragged follies of the time

Naked as their birth;

And with a whip of steel

Print wounding lashes on their iron ribs”

- Ben Jonson