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Audiences watching Hamlet when it was first performed around 1603 would probably recognize the play as belonging to a specific genre that was popular at the time and which modern scholars call revenge tragedy. In a revenge tragedy the hero has suffered a great wrong, usually the murder of someone he loves, and the plot is driven by his desire for revenge. At the end of the play, the hero murders the person who has wronged him, and typically the hero also dies. The first widely popular revenge tragedy play was The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, which tells the story of Hieronimo, a Spanish nobleman who seeks justice for the murder of his son, Horatio. It was written in 1592, about a decade before Hamlet, and it was still being performed when Hamlet was first staged. Many in Shakespeare’s original audience would have noticed that Hamlet borrows several features from Kyd’s play, including a vengeful ghost, a play-within-a-play and a hero who goes mad. But while Shakespeare used these common elements as a basis for his play, he then subverted many of the tropes of revenge tragedy, in addition to exploring and questioning the nature of revenge itself.
Hamlet varies from the genre’s usual format by removing the usual obstacles to the hero’s vengeance. In a prototypical revenge tragedy such as The Spanish Tragedy, the hero faces two obstacles: finding who the murderers are, and then to getting into a position to kill them. But in Hamlet, the hero quickly learns the identity of his father’s murderer (Claudius) at the end of Act 1, and he is repeatedly well positioned to kill Claudius throughout most of the play, with no other characters thwarting him in his desire for revenge. Shakespeare’s most brilliant (and decidedly modern) twist to the genre is that Hamlet’s only true obstacle is in his head: he is uncertain what he should believe and how he should act. By making the obstacles to Hamlet’s revenge internal Shakespeare introduces philosophical questions to the revenge tragedy which had not appeared in the genre before. These questions include:
• Can we believe the evidence of our eyes?
• Is revenge justified?
• Can we predict the consequences of our actions?
• What happens when we die?
While Hamlet, being a tragedy, is generally seen as a highly serious play, in some ways it seems to poke fun at the revenge tragedies that came before it. When Hamlet cries “Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless Villain! / O, vengeance!” (2.2.) he sounds like a less serious version of Hieronimo. The play-within-a-play that Hamlet stages in Act 3, Scene 2 is itself a parody of a revenge tragedy: its rhymes would have made it sound absurdly old-fashioned to an audience in Shakespeare’s time. With the character of Laertes, who seeks vengeance after the death of his sister Ophelia, Shakespeare parodies the traditional heroes of revenge tragedy. Unlike Hamlet, Laertes is eager to rush to his revenge, but Claudius is easily able to manipulate him, and Laertes ends up begging forgiveness from the man he wanted to murder. By making traditional revenge tragedies look ridiculous, Shakespeare shows us that the troubling philosophical doubt of the title character of Hamlet is more realistic than the unquestioning passion and fury of plays such as The Spanish Tragedy, as well as Shakespeare’s own earlier revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus (believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593) which might best be described as an unrelenting bloodbath.
Revenge tragedy plays written after Hamlet would typically include humor as a central element, including humor at the expense of the genre itself. This includes an English revenge tragedy written after Hamlet called The Revenger’s Tragedy, by Thomas Middleton, which was first performed in 1606. Despite its title, The Revenger’s Tragedy is as much a black comedy as a revenge tragedy. Its violence is deliberately over-the-top and its plot absurdly complicated. Middleton was also influenced by the philosophical questions within Hamlet. Where Hamlet doubted the morality of seeking revenge, Middleton’s hero Vindice is openly immoral in pursuing his: by the end of the play Vindice is more a villain than a hero.
Modern action movies also owe a great deal to Shakespeare’s comic take on the revenge plot in Hamlet. Movies such as the Kill Bill films and the John Wick franchise share the amoral heroes and complex revenge plots ending in comically gory action sequences first enjoyed by audiences about 400 years earlier in Hamlet.
