Adapting "The Revengers Tragedy"

Middleton is also the most brilliant exploiter of his period's elaborate and sophisticated repertoire of stage devices-disguise, processions, masque performances, emblematic props, symbolic stage locations, to name but the devices most crucial to this play-that can easily impede rather than enliven film adaptation.1 The first and defining issue confronting the makers of such a film concerns the use of the playwright's language. The opening credits overlay a depiction of an orbiting communications satellite that also is made to suggest pervasive surveillance, first through an extreme close-up of an eye, which is soon revealed to be that of the Duke, and then by a view of western Europe, which is missing some of its expected land mass and seen through somewhat abstract graphic markings signifying an optical reticule, an image that will recur with increasing abstraction within the film.4 The opening scenes inform us that this is a time of both extraordinary violence and bread-and-circus political repression.