Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama

Noam Reisner is Associate Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is author of Milton and the Ineffable (2009) and John Milton's Paradise Lost: A Reading Guide (2011), and has published widely on early modern religious poetry, sermons and drama.

• Introduction: the mimetic ethical exercise; 1. Plot holes and empty spaces: the ethics of Thomas Kyd's revenge paradigm; 2. Dramatic hyperboles: Marlowe's and Shakespeare's early engagement with Kyd; 3. Wild child's play: antitheatrical moral censure and Marston's revenge satire; 4. Marking the ground of revenge: Hamlet's impasse and the question of spectator guilt; 5. Ghosting Shakespeare's Hamlet: Hamlet's violent afterlives in the plays of Chettle and Middleton; 6. Passive aggressors: Chapman's and Tourneur's moralistic revenge; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

'Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama offers fresh, historically and philosophically grounded insights into early modern revenge tragedy, opening up new ways of understanding works by Marlowe, Marston, Chettle, Middleton, and others. Reisner makes a compelling case for how these playwrights used Kyd's precedent to interrogate the gap between abstract moral thought and the possibilities of ethical action.' Gretchen E. Minton, Professor of English, Montana State University