Performed at St Paul's by the resident children's company the same time Shakespeare's Hamlet appeared at the Globe, John Marston's Antonio's Revenge has sat uneasily with its fellow revenge tragedies. Marston's play shares numerous distinctive features with Hamlet and, with the rival companies staging their plays within just months of each other, the trajectory of influence between the two has remained an open question. For all its temporal and thematic proximity to Shakespeare's most famous work, however, Antonio's Revenge has never fully emerged from the shadows of theatrical history. Like The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus before it, Marston's play has been faulted for its crude sensationalism, but where its predecessors have enjoyed rewarding theatrical runs in their own right as well as broader critical appreciation for their manifest performative appeal, Antonio's Revenge has remained comparatively neglected in both performance and criticism. If not outright parodic as some have claimed, the play nonetheless retains a satiric edge that can make it seem difficult to pin down. Self-conscious in its manipulation of audience expectation, the play famously exculpates its revengers in its final scene, a denouement that, when taken alone, defuses right at the moment of combustion but, when considered in light of its predecessors, generates its theatrical force precisely by defusing, by resolutely defying expectation, that is, to give one final, subversive thrill. In addition to the happenstances of literary history where the play remains tethered to Hamlet yet overshadowed by it, akin to Kyd's and Shakespeare's early work yet enjoying fewer advocates on its behalf, Marston's Antonio's Revenge contributes as well to its own sense of distinctiveness, perhaps dislocation, then, by depending as it does upon the very conventions of theatrical retribution it so enthusiastically traduces.

As with theatrical fortunes, so with philosophical engagements: Antonio's Revenge has seemed a play of curious mixtures. Aligned less with Hamlet, its nearest contemporary, than with The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, Marston's play has registered as less refined or expansive in its philosophical range, deliberative about even the afterlife only to a very limited degree and likewise not terribly troubled, on this mortal coil, about the potential complications of absolving its revengers in the end.