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IN THIS ESSAY, I consider the genre of The Winter's Tale by situating the play in the intertheatrical context of London in 1611.1 Through comparison to the language, structure, and staging of plays by Kyd, Marston, Chettle, and Middleton, I argue that The Winter's Tale's dramatic project stems from its close relationship to contemporaneous revenge tragedies.2
Of course, neither Shakespeare nor his audiences referred to plays as "revenge tragedies." A. H. Thorndike coined the term in 1902 to describe plays which, following Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1587) dramatize a disenfranchised hero's retribution for wrongs.3 Mid-twentieth century critics, including Ronald Broude, Fredson Bowers, and Lily Campbell, identify the genre by certain recurring tropes: vendettas, corrupt courts, ghosts, madness, poison, plays-within-plays, etc.4 Around thirty extant early modern tragedies fall into the category as it is most strictly defined.5 More recently, scholars have pushed revenge tragedy's generic boundaries. Linda Anderson studies revenge as "a benignly punitive forgiveness that awakens the offender's conscience" in Shakespeare's comedies; Harry Keyishian classifies revenge as a psychological pattern across genres that can be either "redemptive" or "vindictive."6 Linda Woodbridge, noting that the word "revenge" occurs in all but two of Shakespeare's plays, argues for a "revenge drama" inclusive of tragedies and histories.7 Despite the fact that "revenge tragedy" is, like all genres, constructed and challenged by critics, it allows us to identify plays that derive meaning from the same materials arranged and rearranged in increasingly self-referential patterns. Though The Winter's Tale is not a revenge tragedy, the generic template is useful to think with when considering how Shakespeare constructed his play and, perhaps, construed its relationship to earlier works. Indeed, a close reading of the The Win- ter's Tale with an eye to revenge tragedy's formal features reveals surprising continuities.
However, the purpose of this essay is neither to suggest a new generic label for the play nor to allege insight into Shakespearean "intentions." Rather, it is to consider The Winter's Tale as a link in a longer chain of events in theater history, to recuperate a sense of the play as a product of the creative and commercial networks of the Jacobean playhouses. Inherent in this claim is the contention that playwrights saw what we call "revenge tragedy" as a tradition-or at...