ARE MOST SHAKESPEARE PLAYS REVENGE PLAYS? I had missed the Shakespeare Geek blog discussion in 2009 of this post I made in 2009. (In my post I discussed a friend’s question—which Shakespeare play should she assign to her 8th graders. I suggested Hamlet because her students would understand revenge. My friend replied that she was thinking of assigning The Tempest because her students understood revenge.)
In a comment on my post, Duane of Shakespeare Geek asked here whether most Shakespeare plays deal with revenge. “Is what Edmund does, revenge? How about Iago to Othello (if we assume, as the text hints at, that Iago does in fact have some previous slights from Othello, and he’s not just a sociopath). What about Romeo killing Tybalt?”
He then asked: “How about Dream? Is Oberon’s spell cast over Titania a form of revenge for the way she’s been treating him?”
He concluded with a question: “I’m just curious, if you tried, whether you could find some level of revenge in just about all the plays, short of the silliest comedies.”