Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English Spring 5-5-2012 Carnival's Dance of Death: Festivity in the Revenge Plays of KYD, Shakespeare, and Middleton Benjamin O. Rollins Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Recommended Citation Rollins, Benjamin O., "Carnival's Dance of Death: Festivity in the Revenge Plays of KYD, Shakespeare, and Middleton." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2012. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/79 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CARNIVAL’S DANCE OF DEATH: FESTIVITIY IN THE REVENGE PLAYS OF KYD, SHAKESPEARE, AND MIDDLETON by BENJAMIN ROLLINS Under the Direction of Paul Voss ABSTRACT Through four hundred years of accumulated disparaging comments from critics, revenge plays have lost much of the original luster they possessed in early modern England. Surprisingly, scholarship on revenge tragedy has invented an unfavorable lens for understanding this genre, and this lens has been relentlessly parroted for decades. The all-too-familiar generic approach that calls for revenge plays to exhibit a recurring set of concerns, including a revenge motive, a hesitation for the protagonist, and the revenger’s feigned or actual madness, imply that these plays lack philosophical depth, as the appellation of revenge tends to evoke the trite commonalities which we have created for the genre. This dissertation aims to rectify the provincial views concerning revenge tragedies by providing a more complex, multivalent critical model that makes contemporary outmoded approaches to this genre.