We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
By the commercial theater’s closure in 1642, frequent playgoers commanded a vast trove of knowledge regarding the devices, tropes, character types, and genres of the commercial theater. But those conventions were as exploitable as they were familiar, and Chapter 5 shows how theater practitioners managed to surprise those spectators with especially long horizons of dramatic expectation. The chapter examines the striking durability of revenge tragedy in the commercial theater by juxtaposing two plays that nearly bookend its heyday: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. In revealing the ways that The Roman Actor exploits spectators’ knowledge of Kyd’s play, as well as the tropes of revenge tragedy more broadly, the chapter outlines the techniques by which Caroline theater practitioners made the eminently familiar newly strange.