3. Morality and Revenge

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we consider the play in relation to two dramatic models that the author to have drawn on: the Morality Play and the Revenge Tragedy. We begin by thinking the names of the characters, most of which are simply descriptions of the character in question, before considering the extent to which the play operates as a standard revenge tragedy.

Course

In this course, we explore The Revenger’s Tragedy, a play which was written in the early years of the seventeenth century, but whose author is unknown. In the first two modules, we think generally about the Early Modern stage, before moving on in the final three modules to think about the play itself – its dramatic antecedents, its setting and language, and the presentation of its central character, the “Revenger” himself, Vindice.

Lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.