The Thyestean Language of English Revenge Tragedy on the University and Popular Stages

Summary

In the London playhouses, the sound of Latin was a regular feature of the auditory experience, albeit in bitesize bursts. At the same time, although Latin was firmly entrenched at the universities as the language of academic drama, Oxford and Cambridge students did, on occasion, write plays in English. Running counter to what many early modern writers liked to claim, therefore, neither side had exclusive use of the language with which their production centre was associated: professional dramatists did not stick to English, and amateur dramatists at the universities did not stick to Latin. To understand English revenge tragedy, we must keep Latin in the picture and be open to the idea of multiple streams of influence running between the different production centres of Oxford, Cambridge and London. To this end, in this article I present a new way of viewing English revenge tragedy that allows us to embrace the corpus in all its variety. I show how, in the world of early modern drama in England, there exists a common language which transcends the choice of Latin or English: the Thyestean language, steeped in a tradition of ambition and one-upmanship.