Our refined modern sensibilities recoil from blood revenge – a primitive, sub-literary motif. Revenge plays we regard as the primordial slime from which Shakespearean tragedy emerged. Evolving exquisitely, it transcended sensationalist forebears: “The revenge play before and outside Shakespeare can be a mechanical, shallow and violent form … Hamlet is incomparably more” (Everett 21). Nevertheless, both Hamlet and Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, are sensational revenge plays. The civil wars in his eight-play history cycle are a vendetta between two families. In comedy, Shylock thirsts for revenge and Malvolio storms out of Twelfth Night vowing to “be revenged on the whole pack of you!” All but two of Shakespeare's thirty-seven or thirty-eight plays mention revenge. England's public theater sucked in revenge with its mother's milk: Kyd's Spanish Tragedy was “one of the first extant plays to be written for adult players and performed on the public stage” (Erne 96). Renaissance drama gave us a vengeful annihilation of Spain's ruling family; a Jew taking revenge on the whole island of Malta; an avenger torturing a victim while making him watch his wife copulate with a lover; a king tied to his bed, who thinks his mistress is inventing new erotic sports, until she vengefully stabs him; an empress avenging her husband by poisoning his assassin's bay wreath.