George Oppitz-Trotman begins his book The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy by highlighting one of the central tensions facing most critics of Renaissance drama: the temptation to treat characters as people, and the opposing impossibility of separating characters from the idea of their embodiment on stage. This tension is only heightened by the context of revenge tragedy, famous for its attention to memory and memorial. Characters within these plays question how they will be remembered after the close of the play's events, demanding that the audience imagine their lives and afterlives. The arguments are deeply engaged with criticism of metatheater and the figuration of characters on the Renaissance stage. Oppitz-Trotman explores how the revenge context heightens these phenomena that can be seen across the majority of the Renaissance canon.

The first chapter is a tour de force, investigating the historical context of the Knight Marshal's jurisdiction of the Verge within The Spanish Tragedy. Oppitz-Trotman realized that no other critic has paid substantial attention to Hieronimo's rank, one of historical yet waning importance in Kyd's England. He finds the Verge to be a shifting and temporal space directly linked to the presence of the monarch. This invisible circumstance heightens Hieronimo's urgency for revenge, necessitates its performance before the monarch, and draws attention to the similarly temporally—and spatially—bounded circumstance of the theater. The lost piece of nuance of Hieronimo's positionality is a profound contribution to revenge criticism. Chapter 2 brings into focus the importance of physical objects on the stage, in this case, the various sharp objects in Hamlet. Oppitz-Trotman focuses on the ways in which these objects always possess the capacity to stab, promising destruction through their sharp presences. The latter part of the chapter interrogates the concluding duel of the play, focusing on the way its extemporizing messiness adds a layer of reality to the duel and mimics improvisational acting.

Chapters 3 and 4 move from props and setting to Oppitz-Trotman's main focus of the embodied characters on the stage. First, he investigates the revenge canon's inheritance of the Vice figure in the form of the ghost. The result of this investigation is the realization of the theater's ambiguous presence in the moral landscape of early modern England. Chapter 4 continues the question of the actor's moral overlap with his character, linking the public service of acting to the servants of the revenge canon. In particular, Webster's Bosola highlights the problem of the contemporary servant: caught between an ancient model of hereditary, identity-based service and a more capitalistic model in which service works on pay, not substantively linked to the performer's identity. In chapter 5, Oppitz-Trotman ties together many earlier threads, negotiating the boundary between prop and person with Duchess's wax figures. He uses this oddly liminal figure as a jumping-off point to return to the question of memorialization, ghosts, and the tragic body on stage. In chapter 6, the book concludes that investigating the historical significance of words and details within the plays becomes increasingly important as we gain temporal distance from their embodied realities.

The book had a few places where attention to more plays might have benefited the argument; in a book concerned with revenge revenants, it was surprising not to find any treatment of The Second Maiden's Tragedy with its heroine's body made a prop and her soul a ghost. Likewise, the focus on embodiment neglected the diversity of character bodies, not thinking about differences pertaining to gender or race, as in the Lady's female ghost, Carola's female service, or Aaron's Black reinterpretation of Vice. These additions would have added depth to the argument, as well as embedding the work in other current discourses in our field. Overall, though, this book is a fantastic contribution to the fields of both revenge drama and metatheatricality. It is grounded in deep historicist understandings while firmly keeping a focus on literary and theatrical outcomes. The revelation of the Knight Marshal's control over the Verge is probably the most profound discovery, but the whole book sheds important new light on the connections between page and stage, imagination, and figuration.