Better Health Care, Same Drama: Why Modern Readers Continue to Connect with Renaissance Revenge Tragedies Hermione Daguin College

Renaissance revenge tragedies, like all works of arts, are profoundly influenced by the state of the world around them. Thousands of years later, those state of affairs – wars, love triangles, and power struggles – have evolved, but not truly changed and arts continue to capture the evolution of family dynamics that accompanied them. Although one can argue that the family dysfunctionalities, such as fatal sibling rivalries and incest, presented in revenge tragedies such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy are beyond a modern audience because of the heavy presence of misogyny and murders, but it is not. The modern family still contains enough dysfunctionalities for modern readers to connect with the scenes presented in Renaissance revenge tragedies. The interest in dramatic family quarrels has not diminished over the years as one can witness in the literature accumulated over each passing historical period. During the Renaissance, revenge tragedies like The Spanish Tragedy portrayed the presence of primogeniture and deep patriarchy that caused trouble in the family. In modernism era, plays like Sam Shepard’s Buried Child and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? highlighted the alienation...