‘You mean some strange revenge’: The Jacobean Intersections of Revenge and the Strange

In Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, we learn that a revenger must be “strange-disposed” or “strange-composed” (1.1.86/96), and in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy the vengeful Amintor claims “[w]hat a strange thing am I” (2.1.298). In these utterances, the speakers tie their desires for vengeance into their affective state. As both plays progress however, the evocations of strangeness shift, moving from an association with the revenger to an association with the act of revenge itself.
In working to unpack the interrelationships between the revenger, the strangeness of their affective experience and the strangeness of the act of revenge itself, this article considers what questions these plays ask regarding the tension between embodiment and disembodiment in the act of revenge.