And Richard Crookback, predestined in the womb to play the villain, plays it indeed, to the hilt. Unlike these others, though, Hamlet chafes in his allotted persona and function. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right. Heaven hath pleased it so, To punish me with this and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister. For that s the genre that Hamlet s been dropped in.
Revenge tragedy is as old as tragedy itself.
The Oresteia of Aeschylus concerned a chain of killings in which each avenger became in turn the object of revenge. Sophocles Oedipus gave the form an early twist by making criminal and avenger the same person. First came Seneca translated into English, then original plays fashioned to Seneca s model. The Roman tragedy of blood had coarsened its Greek predecessors, its plots reaching for ever crueler and more perverse crimes inviting ever more inventive and thorough revenges. Their avengers played, in Bottom s words, a part to tear a cat in.