because jonquil asked (follow-up to Q&A 16)

[truepenny]

Reading list for a hypothetical class on revenge tragedy. I'm assuming a graduate seminar and students who are willing to do a lot of extra reading. I'm also assuming everyone's already read their Shakespeare--at least Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and, you know, the basics.

Seneca, Thyestes (just to get a feel for him)
Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
Shakespeare, Richard III (read with 1, 2, & 3 Henry VI)
Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
Shakespeare, Hamlet (read with Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)
Tourneur, The Atheist's Tragedy (read with Marlowe, The Jew of Malta--have to get some Marlowe in here somehow, his inky fingerprints are all over the genre--and Jonson, Volpone)
Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness (which is sort of the opposite of a revenge tragedy, and therefore interesting in this context)
Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling
Webster, The White Devil
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Tourneur(?), The Revengers Tragedy
Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (which, okay, only a revenge tragedy if you squint, but it's got the Senecan aesthetic in spades)

Plus for secondary reading (even for a graduate seminar, and even with intelligent and eager students, I probably wouldn't assign more than the Pentzell and the Braden and some chapters from Adelman and Bate):
Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest
Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid
Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (not about revenge tragedy, but still the single most enlightening work of literary criticism on Renaissance drama I've ever read)
Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny.'" (Yeah, I know. A lot of Freud's theories are pernicious nonsense, but the thing in this essay about the return of the repressed and the unheimlich is really useful.)
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Raymond J. Pentzell, "The Changeling: Notes on Mannerism in Dramatic Form" (also intensely enlightening)
Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

In principle, yes. I mean, revenge tragedy is my dissertation topic because I love it. I'm not likely to post about these plays the way I do about, for example, Due South, because I've said it all already (http://www.sarahmonette.com/dis-pref.html). What sort of discussion did you have in mind?

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Could we start with "what is a revenge tragedy"? I'd love to know how Richard III fits in. Does Macbeth as well?