The Revenger’s Tragedy Written by Cyril Tourneur

Unrealistic Revenge

In the play “The Revenger’s Tragedy” written by Cyril Tourneur, many characters are against each other and there is a lot of revenge planning. There is so much plotting against one another in the story that in the end, almost everyone dies. The short story “The Squaw”, by Bram Stoker is about a couple and a man that go on vacation. The man that accompanies the couple kills a kitten and in the end the kitten’s mother kills the man. Many revenge stories are unrealistic because in the real world not many people lead towards killing to get revenge. In many stories, death is what characters use to get revenge. Authors use a lack of realism because it makes the story more interesting for us to read. They could also be using unrealism because it allows them to explore their imagination and have fun with it. This type of unrealistic revenge would get people into serious trouble if it was executed. In the revenge stories that we have read, revenge is not used the way it is performed in real life situations because it is executed unrealistically.

Authors are extremely creative. Some authors use imagery as a technique in a way that allows people to perfectly visualize it. Bram Stoker describes every scene in “The Squaw” in such a detailed way that it allows the readers to picture how the character died. “Her claws seemed to be tearing wildly as one sees in the Chinese drawings of the dragon rampant, and as I looked I saw one of them light on the poor man’s eye, and actually tear through it and down his cheek, leaving a wide band of red where the blood seemed to spurt from every vein.” (Stoker 96). Moreover, a human getting killed by a cat is unrealistic, but perhaps in Stoker’s mind, it is how he would take revenge on someone if they killed his child. Instead of actually performing these actions, he and many other authors, such as Tourneur, wrote about them. The stories may sound unrealistic, but there are always reasons behind every story. Perhaps the authors’ stories were similar to the ones they wrote but adjusted them by adding unrealistic events. For instance, authors can make the story what they want it to be. By creating or making these adjustments to the stories, it creates a sort of pleasure for the authors because it allows their imagination to run wild.

In the real world no one performs this unrealistic revenge because we would most likely go to jail. In “The Revenger’s Tragedy”, many people die. Tourneur might have realized that death is the only type of revenge, but, he along with many others are not allowed to kill someone under any circumstances. By murdering the person who has caused harm towards oneself or others is something that we all dream of doing but usually do not because in reality, it is against the law. “The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy,” (Bacon). Bacon here explains to us that the best type of revenge is revenge that will not