The Revenger's Tragedy - References in Literature and Popular Culture

References in Literature and Popular Culture

  • An eleven-line passage from this play appears without attribution in T. S. Eliot's famous essay Tradition and the Individual Talent.
  • The title is referenced by that of Alan Ayckbourn's play The Revengers' Comedies.
  • The title of Nicholas Blake's detective novel Thou Shell of Death is a quotation from the Revenger's Tragedy. The plot of the novel is a twentieth-century adaptation of the play.
  • Mary Stewart references the play in several books. Her book titles Nine Coaches Waiting and Wildfire at Midnight are both taken from lines in the play. In Nine Coaches Waiting, the main character reflects on similarities between her situation and Castiza's, and lines from the play are extensively quoted in the chapter headings. "Hell would look like a lord's great kitchen without fire in't!" is quoted in This Rough Magic. All quotes are attributed to Tourneur.
  • The play is put on by several of the major characters in Pamela Dean's novel Tam Lin.
  • One of the two possible final missions in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV is titled "The Revenger's Tragedy".
  • The play is discussed, as is Jacobean drama more generally, in the penultimate episode of Boardwalk Empire Season Two during a flashback to Jimmy Darmody's days at Princeton University. The themes of the play are apparent over the course of the episode as well.
  • It is mentioned in The List Of Seven by Mark Frost.

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