There is no point denying that England's golden age of revenge drama – the 1580s through the Jacobean decades – luxuriated in sensationalism. Hieronimo stabs a duke with a penknife and bites out his own tongue. The Jew of Malta poisons a nunnery, dynamites an army, and plunges to his death into a cauldron of boiling oil. Titus Andronicus rejoices in rapes, dismemberments, insanity, cannibalism. Antonio's Revenge features a dismembered child. The Revenger's Tragedy's hero talks to a skull, and poison eats away an evil duke's lips. In The Atheist's Tragedy, a duke tries to rape his daughter-in-law in a graveyard and accidentally brains himself while striving to behead innocent subjects. In The Revenge of Bussy, five ghosts dance to celebrate vengeance. Hamlet and Women Beware Women end like grand operas of spectacular death. Renaissance audiences loved sensational gore. Modern audiences love sensational gore. But no one would reduce, say, Hamlet to the titillation of violence. And much more transpires in other revenge plays too.