Lycanthropy

John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and the anonymous The Revenger’s Tragedy are both typically cynical Jacobean revenge tragedies. They share in common imagery of flesh and anatomy, carrying with it connotations of the human body as a fragile, corporeal shell, and the assertion that human existence is either fundamentally corrupt or corrupted. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, the human forms of the degraded ducal family are likened to hollow vessels of sin by the aptly named revenger Vindice, this…