Thomas Middleton's Vindice asserts that murder is a (perhaps the) tenant to tragedy in his 1607 The Revenger's Tragedy, offering a straightforward, if minimalist, way to recognize tragedy. Tragedy's tenants change throughout the period, and if murder is a pretty constant one, others move in and out of tragedy. Inventing such categories as the “tragedy of blood,” “Jacobean tragedy,” or “revenge tragedy” helps to specify some of those changes but does not do much to explain where they come from. As I have just argued, narratives of decline pervade discussions of the “history play” as well and are belied by both print and performance history. Placing plays before authors and before genre in this chapter locates them in the moment of production and reception before making larger conclusions about the shape of the field or about generic change more generally. These changes take place in a field that enables, structures, and is structured by such changes. Old plays like The Spanish Tragedy or Titus Andronicus remained popular enough to draw Ben Jonson's ire well into the seventeenth century in the induction to Bartholomew Fair. Multiple editions of both old plays (especially of Kyd’s) in the first decades of the seventeenth century support Jonson's claims that they remained popular with the theatre-going public. The fact that these notionally out of date plays remained in the bookstalls suggests in turn that they remained in the repertory, which means that these plays from the 1580s and 1590s continued to shape part of the conversation in the field.

This chapter opens with a brief discussion of the “invention” of revenge tragedy, an invention that only took place in the early twentieth century, to suggest that such labels are useful but do not necessarily reflect the thinking of the writers whose work falls under such labels. I turn to a series of inductions, prologues, choruses, and epilogues because they offer contemporary insight into how playwrights and acting companies saw the genre system. These performed paratexts offer representations of dramatic kinds, stage confrontations among them, and outline a hierarchy. Unlike the prefatory materials added by stationers for readers, they are designed to introduce plays to theatrical audiences. The chapter treats John Marston's Antonio plays, George Chapman's Bussy plays, Thomas Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy, and Shakespeare's (and Middleton’s) Timon of Athens before returning to Middleton and his Women Beware Women.