Gretchen E. Minton has assembled an admirable collection of essays of current scholarship on The Revenger's Tragedy (ca. 1606). The book's three parts—on “Religion and Genre,” “History and Topicality,” and “Performance”—accurately represent the current major debates around this play. Taken together, the essays and introduction provide the reader with a solid understanding of the “state of play” for The Revenger's Tragedy in scholarship, on film, and on the stage. Minton has brought together a range of perspectives without imposing a singular point of view or interpretation, and the result is a volume that speaks to the liveliness of current scholarship on Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy, and revenge tragedy. The appeal of the volume is therefore broad; it will prove differently but equally useful to academics looking for a deep dive and students meeting the play for the first time.

As Minton notes in the introduction, “part of what has been so difficult in understanding The Revenger's Tragedy is the way in which it interweaves genres” (2). One of the great strengths of this collection is the authors’ willingness to grapple with the play's juggling of multiple generic registers. As Linda Woodbridge notes in her afterword, the essays highlight “many instances of discordia concors … or maybe just discordia” (255). Erin E. Kelly's essay “The Revenger's Tragedy and the Morality Play Tradition” is especially noteworthy in this respect, as she resists binary modes of thought that still have a foothold in early modern scholarship. This is especially useful for those, like myself, who do not have Kelly's facility with morality plays as influencers of later drama.

Shakespeare is a powerful ghost both in The Revenger's Tragedy and this collection. The many comparisons between Middleton's Vindice and Shakespeare's Hamlet are perhaps inevitable, but the essays that truly stand out are those that take stock of the broader corpus of drama in the period. Karen Marsalek, for example, expertly links The Revenger's Tragedy and Hamlet with Measure for Measure, with particular attention to head tricks and bed tricks. And Lucy Munro looks in detail at swearing in the play, with particular attention to its chronological proximity to the Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players: coming just before this law against oaths on stage, the play marks a particular “cultural moment” that “had a marked effect on the ways in which plays were written and performed” afterward (142). Also noteworthy is Katherine Gillen's important and timely work on “Fashioning English Whiteness.” Her deft use of The Ghost of Lucrece and early modern constructions of race are insightful and bring important perspectives to present-day readings of The Revenger's Tragedy. Gillen's essay highlights, however, just how desperately our field needs to diversify. Gillen quite rightly makes use of work by Kim Hall, Ayanna Thompson, and Arthur J. Little, but it strikes me that we—as a field—have a long way yet to go in terms of amplifying voices of color.

There are also a couple of moments in Ian McAdam's essay on “Calvinism and the Problematic of Character” that I want to touch upon. The essay does not spend enough time unpacking its “most controversial claim”: that “the narcissistic erosion of clear patterns of masculine identification in this historical case accentuates the misogynistic cultural formulations” (100). The argument is not given sufficient space to develop, and the historicizing that might have made it more effective is obscured behind what—at first glance—appears to be a paternalistic claim. I share McAdam's conviction that Vindice and Hamlet should not be cast as “proto-feminist”; but his essay does not do enough to contextualize, for example, casual equations of “effeminization” with the “undermining of human agency” (101). It is not always clear enough where Calvin's arguments end and McAdam's begin.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the final section of this volume, with three very different and valuable contributions to the study of this play in performance. This is necessarily limited by its sparse performance history, but this volume will certainly be a starting point for me in looking at the play on film and on stage in the future.