When we speak of ‘revenge tragedy,’ we are often unaware of the extent to which our approach to these important Renaissance plays has been conditioned by the name we have given them. Elizabethans themselves recognized no distinct dramatic type called revenge play. The term is a modern one, made current at the turn of the century by A. H. Thorndike, and first defined at length by Fredson Bowers more than thirty years ago. As a critical term, it depends upon the modern meaning of revenge, and it simultaneously reflects and shapes both modern assumptions about the subject matter of the plays and modern prejudices about the ethical principles upon which they are assumed to be predicated.

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During the fifteenth century, many musici thought of counterpoint as an improvisational practice in which certain procedures were employed to produce a musical texture in which interest lay in the interplay of two or more melodic lines. The improvisational practice was called singing upon the book (cantare super librum): it required one singer to realize a pre-existing melody (called a cantus firmus) inscribed in a text while one or more other singers (called concentors), reading from that same text, devised, ex tempore, a countermelody or melodies that obeyed the rules of counterpoint with respect to the cantus firmus. Similar procedures, applied in writing, produced res facta, contrapuntal texture in textual form. Counterpoint and res facta were alternative means of providing music for occasions both sacred and secular. During the sixteenth century, several factors combined to alter the relationship between improvised and written counterpoint, and by the end of the century the importance of the former was greatly diminished. The growth of music printing provided an abundance of music for a growing community of amateurs who could read music but were not interested singing upon the book. The composers responsible for this new music embraced emerging ideas that stressed the advantages of written music, which enjoyed permanence that improvised counterpoint lacked, which was usually more observant of the rules than improvised counterpoint could be, and which enhanced the reputations of the composers who created it. As a result of these developments, emphasis shifted from improvised to written counterpoint, from the procedures that produced a contrapuntal texture to the texture itself, and singing upon the book came to be seen by many not as an end in itself but as a way to sharpen composers’ skills. Marginalized by print, improvised counterpoint survived in a much reduced community, largely in Catholic France and Iberia, and eventually, for want of a musical community large enough to sustain it, ceased to be a living musical tradition.

Textual scholarship has dealt at length with the socialization of the texts of novels, poems, and essays, genres that audiences experience by reading texts directly off the page (texts thus read might be called "page texts"). But much less attention has been given to the socialization of the texts of plays, music and choreographed dance (these might be called "stage texts"). There is a reciprocity between stage texts and the performers who use them that has no counterpart in the relationship between page texts and their reading audiences. Performers often depart from their received texts when performing, and they often alter the texts from which they perform to reflect such departures. They add memoranda for performance, they cut or change content, and they add material, sometimes to meet the requirements of specific productions, venues, or audiences, and sometimes to accommodate their own performing strengths or weaknesses. Moreover, performing works travel through time in both textual and (textless) performing traditions; often elements from performing traditions pass into textual traditions. Performing works traditionally seek novelty of interpretation, and this means that in their "natural" states, performing works are continuously changing, responding to the imperative "adapt or die". The texts of performing works both insure a measure of stability and accommodate controlled change by selectively incorporating altered or added material into the textual tradition.

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