PLAYER. I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory--they're all blood, you see.

--Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Act One

Many thanks to the English Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the Mary Adams Dissertation Fellowship I received for the fall semester, 2002.

Mille remerciements to Heather Dubrow, my dissertation director, for going above and beyond at the drop of a hat.

Thanks to: Susanne Wofford and David Loewenstein, my committee; Patricia Rosenmeyer and Eric Rothstein, my outside readers; Matthew Gumpert, who read Seneca with me and was instrumental in the genesis of Chapter Two; Tisha Turk, for being the best reader a girl ever had; Jean Merrill, for helpful comments on the Introduction and Chapter Four. Thanks to everyone who came, listened, and asked questions when part of Chapter Four was presented as a talk for the English Department's Renaissance Colloquium, March 12, 2002, and thanks to more people than I can count or remember for expressing enthusiasm when I told them about my topic.

Special thanks to Tom Bishop, who taught me how to love Shakespeare and why.

And, above all, thanks to my husband, Allen Monette, sine quo non.

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: SENECA'S NIGHTMARE ROME

CHAPTER TWO: REVENGE IN LONDON: KYD'S SPANISH TRAGEDY

CHAPTER THREE: ANGLICIZED SENECA, SENECANIZED ENGLAND

CHAPTER FOUR: THE GHOST OF HAMLET: REMEMBERING, REVENGING, BECOMING THE FATHER

CHAPTER FIVE: THE TWILIGHT OF THE REVENGERS: JACOBEAN REVENGE TRAGEDY

CONCLUSION

CODA: SENECA FOR THE MODERN AGE

WORKS CITED

© Sarah Monette 2004     Feel free to link to this academic trial-by-ordeal, but please do not reproduce it without permission.