Lillian Williams and her twin brother, Anthony, have been through thick and thin together, especially lately since Anthony has been the victim of bullying in their high school. But on the day she is prepared to surprise Anthony with an awesome eighteenth birthday present, Lily is the one who ends up receiving the biggest shock of her life when she opens the boys’ bathroom door and finds her brother’s body on the floor--mercilessly murdered by the jocks of her school. Driven by rage that her brother’s death has been labeled a suicide not murder, Lily runs away during winter break to determine how to seek revenge and justice. As days turn into weeks, she meets a charming guy who helps her transform from a shy Goody Two-shoes to a strong woman prepared to place the jocks’ heads on a silver platter. But when she finally returns to school, someone from her past resurfaces with an evil plan that prompts crazy thoughts to fill her head. As she attempts to muddle through her fight--with help from her friends--only time will tell if Lily will win or if her thoughts will take control of her actions. I’m Back and with Revenge is the powerful tale of a teenager’s vengeful journey after her twin brother is murdered by bullies.

We call it justice—the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the incarceration of corrupt politicians or financiers like Rod Blagojevich and Bernard Madoff, and the climactic slaying of cinema-screen villains by superheroes. But could we not also call it revenge? We are told that revenge is uncivilized and immoral, an impulse that individuals and societies should actively repress and replace with the order and codes of courtroom justice. What, if anything, distinguishes punishment at the hands of the government from a victim’s individual desire for retribution? Are vengeance and justice really so very different? No, answers legal scholar and novelist Thane Rosenbaum in Payback: The Case for Revenge—revenge is, in fact, indistinguishable from justice. Revenge, Rosenbaum argues, is not the problem. It is, in fact, a perfectly healthy emotion. Instead, the problem is the inadequacy of lawful outlets through which to express it. He mounts a case for legal systems to punish the guilty commensurate with their crimes as part of a societal moral duty to satisfy the needs of victims to feel avenged. Indeed, the legal system would better serve the public if it gave victims the sense that vengeance was being done on their behalf. Drawing on a wide range of support, from recent studies in behavioral psychology and neuroeconomics, to stories of vengeance and justice denied, to revenge practices from around the world, to the way in which revenge tales have permeated popular culture—including Hamlet, The Godfather, and Braveheart—Rosenbaum demonstrates that vengeance needs to be more openly and honestly discussed and lawfully practiced. Fiercely argued and highly engaging, Payback is a provocative and eye-opening cultural tour of revenge and its rewards—from Shakespeare to The Sopranos. It liberates revenge from its social stigma and proves that vengeance is indeed ours, a perfectly human and acceptable response to moral injury. Rosenbaum deftly persuades us to reconsider a misunderstood subject and, along the way, reinvigorates the debate on the shape of justice in the modern world.

This study demonstrates not only that the devices of revenge are structurally useful in comedy, but also that there is a consistent conception of revenge as an ethical social instrument in the comedies of Shakespeare.

The revenge motif appears in a number of arenas and in different cultures. We need to be mindful of its existence in order to discover how common it is. We can then learn to recognize when destructive revenge spirals are developing. By extension, we thus gain a basis for stopping these spirals successfully before they have gone too far. We can also learn what function revenge plays and has played in various contexts. A short overview of revenge as a motif in literature, film, culture, religion, and at work is therefore given as an introduction to our study of revenge.

Revenge on the English stage has long been associated with Elizabethan and Renaissance revenge tragedies and has been all but ignored in Restoration theater history. While the shortage of scholarly work on revenge in Restoration drama might seem to indicate that revenge is not a vital part of Restoration drama, I argue that revenge on stage in the Restoration is connected with important late seventeenth-century anxieties about monarchy and political subjecthood in the period. This dissertation examines how Restoration tragic drama staged during Charles II's reign (1660-1685) depicts revenge as a representation of an unrestrained passion that contributes to the 'seditious roaring of a troubled nation' of which Thomas Hobbes writes in Leviathan. This dissertation suggests that we need to assess Restoration tragic drama's employment of acts of vengeance in order to better understand how tragic drama of the period narrates crises of kinship, kingship, and political subjecthood. In chapters addressing blood revenge, rape, female passion, and personal ambition, I examine revenge in a number of Restoration tragic dramas written for the stage between 1660 and 1685. This project shows that characters' claims to redress wrongs committed against the civil notion of justice collapse into private, individual desires that are pathological and destructive of the state. This project on revenge has the potential to shape the way we think about revenge on stage by calling attention to revenge as a sign of self-interest at the end of the seventeenth century, an age in which a shift in thinking about monarchy and personhood was taking place. Just as Hobbes warns against the "excessive desire of Revenge," this dissertation shows how playwrights stage revenge as a warning about the potentially destructive consequences of revenge: revenge puts not only private bodies in danger but also the public well being of the state.