The Halletts' study concentrates on THE SPANISH TRAGEDY, ANTONIO'S REVENGE, HAMLET, and THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY, four plays that strive to render the experience of a man dominated by the passion of revenge. These plays have been linked generically through their structural dependence upon certain "revenge-tragedy conventions"--the ghost, the madness, the delay, the play-within-the-play, a series of multiple murders, and the death of the avenger--but the motifs themselves are often ridiculed. The authors suggest that these motifs, taken together, form a symbolic configuration designed to dramatize the psychological progress of the passion through stages of increasing intensity and dislocation. Using insights gained from Renaissance (not Freudian) psychological theories, they offer, for the first time, a serious analysis of the meaning behind each motif. But, they insist, the plays are more than clinical case histories. The symbolic configuration operates on yet another level--the tragic--where the revenger's dilemma is paradigmatic of the Renaissance man's. Thus, the experience of the prince of Denmark, that in the moment of his greatest need his culture failed to supply him with adequate guidance for action,recounts a dilemma confronting the best minds of the time.