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The best way to think of it is as standing in a relation to the classic Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster and Middleton sort of like the way Quentin Tarantino's early films stand in relation to previous Hollywood classics. Whoever wrote this, they were Taking The P*ss. The play starts in next-to-top gear, and accelerates into warp speed fairly quickly. Few other plays of the era (this is roughly contemporaneous with "King Lear", to give you an idea) are so ruthlessly efficient. The basic plot is put in motion by two brothers, Vindice and Hippolito, who are a bit cheesed off because the egregious Duke (of wherever) killed Vindice's wife cause she wouldn't put out. From here proceeds a bizarre and increasingly unlikely series of revenges, climaxing in a frankly chortlesome mass slaying. Vindice is the juiciest role - a bit like Shakespeare's Richard III, he guides the audience through the action, but with far greater economy and far less wrangling of conscience, not that Crookback Dick is noted for his remorse.
By the end, the stage is littered with bodies, and Vindice and Hippolito cheerfully go off to execution, with barely a qualm in sight. This is truly the most cynical and the funniest of all Jacobean tragedies. Whoever wrote it, be it Cyril or Tom, was thinking along the same lines Howard Hawks was on when he (Hawks) turned "Rio Bravo" from a Western into a chamber comedy. It's all thoroughly reprehensible, and great fun. You want depth, try John Webster.
There aren't many four-hundred-year-old plays that I laugh aloud at whilst reading, but this is one of them. Pace the opinion below, it couldn't have less to do with Jonson's careful layering of reality if it tried. It's a brisk, bleak, savage cartoon. Full marks, whoever you were.
Despite its title, The Revenger's Tragedy is no more bloody than Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (fifteen years earlier) and it is certainly not as insanely gruesome and brutal as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594). No dismemberments and no cannibalism. Bloody, yes. But not excessively so.
Nonetheless, we learn of a murder, a rape leading to a suicide, and yet another aggressive seduction (or rape, if need be) that is in the planning stage. So ends Act 1. Revenge and mayhem follow.
The plot is not unduly complex. Vindice desires revenge for the poisoning death of his betrothed, Gloriana, by the lustful, aging Duke. Vindice also indirectly blames the Duke for his father's death, though "he died of discontent, the nobleman's consumption". Vindice is perhaps obsessive; he has retained Gloriana's skull and sometimes speaks directly to her.
In disguise he provokes discord between his enemies and leads them to plot against each other. (This ruse reminds me of Malevole's subterfuge in John Marston's play, The Malcontent.) A poisoned skull, a mistaken execution, and a murderous banquet highlight the later acts. The play concludes with an ironic twist, possibly added as a moral lesson, or simply to surprise the audience.
Hats off to either Cyril Tourneur or Thomas Middleton, or whoever may have authored this fascinating revenge play.
Update July, 2007: I recently encountered reference to this lesser known play in a murder mystery. Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972, wrote sophisticated mysteries under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake from the mid-1930s to the early 1960s. Thou Shell of Death (1936) is a revenge murder patterned on The Revenger's Tragedy. In the first scene Vindice speaking to the skull of his dead mistress says: "My study's ornament, thou shell of death, Once the bright face of my betrothed lady ...."
Not a tale for the squeamish!!! Very dark, but it is specifically an avenger's tale (same subgenre that _Hamlet_ is). If you liked Sondheim's _Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street_, you'll love this too! It is different from most avenger's tragedies, and is witty and scary both. I don't get scared by Hamlet; I get mad at him for his indecisiveness. Lack of decision is not a problem in this play!
If you've read Jonson, you'll get a clue to the characters here the same way, for their names tell you their nature. The style of wit is also reminiscent of Jonson, along the lines of _The Alchemist_ or _Epicoene_ perhaps.
I am sorry, but I don't care who wrote this [Cyril or Thomas]--but I appreciate whoever did enormously.
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