that costs him his own life as well. However, the author's tone and treatment are markedly different from the standard Elizabethan treatment in ways that can be traced to both literary and historical causes. Already by 1606, the enthusiasm that accompanied James I's assumption of the English throne had begun to give way to the beginnings of dissatisfaction with the perception of corruption in his court. The new prominence of tragedies that involved courtly intrigues seems to have been partly influenced by this dissatisfaction. This trend towards court-based tragedy was contemporary with a change in dramatic tastes toward the satiric and cynical, beginning before the death of Elizabeth I but becoming ascendant in the few years following. The episcopal ban on verse satire in 1599 appears to have impelled some poets to a career in dramaturgy; writers such as John Marston and Thomas Middleton brought to the theatres a lively sense of human frailty and hypocrisy. They found fertile ground in the newly revived children's companies, the Blackfriars Children and Paul's Children; these indoor venues attracted a more sophisticated crowd than that which frequented the theatres in the suburbs. While The Revenger's Tragedy was apparently performed by an adult company at the Globe Theatre, its bizarre violence and vicious satire mark it as influenced by the dramaturgy of the private playhouses. Analysis and criticism Genre Ignored for many years, and viewed by some critics as the product of a cynical, embittered mind, The Revenger's Tragedy was rediscovered and often performed as a black comedy during the 20th century. The approach of these revivals mirrors shifting views of the play on the part of literary critics. One of the most influential 20th-century readings of the play is by the critic Jonathan Dollimore, which claims that the play is essentially a form of radical parody that challenges orthodox Jacobean beliefs about Providence and patriarchy. Dollimore asserts the play is best understood as "subversive black camp" insofar as it "celebrates the artificial and the delinquent; it delights in a play full of innuendo, perversity and subversion ... through parody it declares itself radically skeptical of ideological policing though not independent of the social reality which such skepticism simultaneously discloses". In Dollimore's view, earlier critical approaches, which either emphasise the play's absolute decadence or find an ultimate affirmation of traditional morality in the play, are insufficient because they fail to take into account this