Courier's tragedy

[Diana York Blaine]

Glad to pass on something I had to learn in graduate school "breadth"
courses:  The revenge tragedy, of which the Courier's Tragedy is a dead-on
parody (no surprise there), was a popular genre of renaissance drama
beginning in the 1580's and extending long past (several decades) 
Shakespeare's Elizabethan age. Famous examples include Cyril Tourneur's
The Revenger's Tragedy and Thomas Kidd's The Spanish Tragedy (Tourneur is
even mentioned in COL49 if I remember correctly).  Often they draw upon
Seneca and have the ghastly and ghostly stuff that type of drama had.
Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a revenge tragedy, as, of course, is
Hamlet (though my Renaissance specialist spouse tells me it is a
problematic example of the genre for various reasons.)  Perhaps one of the
swellest conventions of the revenge tragedy (and my personal
favorite) would be the Thystean banquet, in which the lucky diner is
served up the limbs of his or her children.  See Titus Adronicus.  Diana