Revengers, as has been frequently observed, are ‘surrogate artists’ who devise intricate tortures both to overreach the crimes that have come before and to invest their acts of violence with specific meanings. But what happens when the revenge does not go to plan? Both John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1612–13) and John Ford's The Broken Heart (1633) feature victims of revenge who take charge of their suffering, seizing theatrical power in a manner that challenges the meaning of their punishment. In The Duchess of Malfi Ferdinand devises a series of spectacles to torment his twin sister before killing her; however, the duchess reacts to these with indifference, exhibiting a Christian confidence which upstages Ferdinand's revenge and spoils his satisfaction. And in The Broken Heart, when Orgilus imprisons Ithocles in a trick chair before murdering him (a contraption which prevents him from defending himself), Ithocles is able both to challenge Orgilus’ role of onstage playwright and to reconfigure the symbolic meaning of the chair in which he is trapped. Ithocles’ stoical self-resolve, like that of the duchess, exemplifies the battle for meaning at the heart of many revenge plots, and the way in which heroic dying can serve as a form of resistance and protest. Because the duchess and Ithocles seize control, their deaths appear self-authored, and they are able to counter the revenger's fantasies of power and his or her narrative control.

The shift in focus encountered in The Duchess of Malfi and The Broken Heart – away from the witty plotting of the revenger and towards the courage of the victim – corresponds to a wider shift that Mary Beth Rose has identified in the construction and gendering of heroism. According to Rose, during the early modern period there is a move away from the ‘heroics of action’ towards the ‘heroism of endurance’, an ideal that privileges ‘not the active confrontation with danger, but the capacity to endure it, to resist and suffer with patience and fortitude’. The variety of sources for this model (which include, for example, ‘Seneca and the stoics, the lives of the Catholic saints, the continuing popularity of medieval treatises on the art of dying, Patient Griselda stories, and the careers and tribulations of both Protestant and Jesuit martyrs’) suggests that both men and women can embody this ideal.