The Revenger's Tragedy - Surely we are all mad people, and they / Whom we think are, are not

The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606 or so) has been the subject of much fuss about its author. Much of T. S. Eliot’s “Cyril Tourneur” essay is about attribution. How he would like the play to be written by Toueneur, who is nearly anonymous himself, just so Eliot can knock it up against The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611). Maybe that is why the authorship consensus has shifted to Thomas Middleton, who wrote lots of plays, giving scholars lots to do. I will assume the author is unknown. I do like, and happily borrow, Eliot’s idea that he was very young when he wrote this strange, comic, Gothic fantasy, this brilliant distillation of the revenge genre. The cynicism, the loathing and disgust of humanity, expressed consummately in The Revenger’s Tragedy, are immature in the respect that they exceed the object. Their objective equivalents are characters practicing the grossest vices; characters which seem merely to be spectres projected form the poet’s inner world of nightmare, some horror beyond words……