『복수자의 비극』에 재현된 죽음과 네크로필리아

Death and Necrophilia in The Revenger’s Tragedy

This study aims to examine the representation of death and necrophilia in Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1670). People in Renaissance England were interested in death, which was bound up with the trend of ‘Dance of Death’ in medieval Europe. Dance of death refers to a series of paintings and poetry that describe dancing people who go to the grave according to their social statuses. The theme of death features heavily in the tragedy genre in Renaissance England. and the description of death contains sexual allusions of the time. Thus the death that is presented in The Revenger’s Tragedy can be connected to ‘necrophilia’, which means ‘desire for the dead’. Necrophilia is another aspect of the desire for life because it includes sexual desire, which implies that life and death exists in The Revenger’s tragedy. In this regard, The Revenger’s Tragedy is a drama which recalls that death is directly connected to life by showing regeneration after death of the characters.