Hereditary Succession and Death in The Wonderful Year and The Revenger’s Tragedy

This paper argues that Thomas Dekker, in his pamphlet The Wonderful Year, and Thomas Middleton, in his play The Revenger’s Tragedy, rely heavily upon King James’s succession propaganda but in a way that challenges its legitimacy. Their works accept the premises upon which James’s succession project was founded; their virgin-queen figures are not idealized, and their king figures are marked by royal pomp and fruitful virility. However, Dekker and Middleton force the royal propaganda from its sanctioned beginning to much darker conclusions that question the promise of the Jacobean regime. Behind their subtle subversions of the king’s strategy lurks an even more radical suggestion: the very system of hereditary succession insidiously promotes the decay and demise of the sociopolitical structures it is meant to uphold.