Chapter 1 begins with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy by analysing the mimetic ethical exercise inherent to Kyd’s design. In particular, this chapter analyses the onstage uses in The Spanish Tragedy of disrupted missives, purloined letters and misquoted texts as offering the necessary space for the emergence of a new ‘counterfeiting’ theatrical ethic which eschews moral meaning beyond the immediate effects of what the staged performance can display. As this chapter shows, such mimetic ethical entanglement is often enacted through the theatrical translation of humanist ethical values of Christian Erasmian virtue into an epistolary emblem of writing, sending and intercepting letters. These letters and emblems of writing, in failing to arrive at their destination, frame a moral void in which the excesses of revenge unfold onstage in surprising and unpredictable ways.

Chapter 5, building directly on the impasse of Hamlet’s inaction, looks to Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in exploring how these near-contemporary plays react to Hamlet’s existential impasse and tragic theatrical deficiency. The chapter especially attends to how Chettle and Middleton translate Shakespeare’s ethics of ‘marking’ into a wild exploration of the transgressive limits of moral being on the margins of what remains, once the performance of action leaves behind it a ruined and malformed metaphysics of morality. They do so by re-focusing the genre’s theatrical energy on multiple acts of violent revenge and transgression, paradoxically framed by a moral idealism often on the verge of tipping into frantic paranoia. As this chapter finally shows, the emerging actorly agency explored in these plays bears surprising consequences for how their imagined audiences are asked to understand and experience the passions attending the revenge act.

Chapter 4 turns to the watershed moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the great anti-revenge play of its day, which by commenting on Kyd’s design and its diminished capacity for novelty, profoundly changed it. In the process, Shakespeare’s play became itself an ethically vacant theatrical space in the dramatic continuum of the period, which subsequent playwrights responded to viscerally. This chapter argues that Shakespeare introduces into the intra-theatrical ethics of the standard revenge plot a theatrical ethics of ‘marking’ which seeks to translate through spectacle and performance what is merely shown into that which is, in the world, finally marked and bearing the trace of a wound or a scar. In the process, the chapter reflects on Shakespeare’s wider intervention in the dramatic fortunes of Kyd’s dramatic legacy in raising the stakes for audience participation in the action to new levels of guilt and vexed ethical complicity.