Titus Andronicus has long been recognised as indebted to Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, but in thinking about the ways in which revenge tragedies make use of classical thought to shape their worlds, we would be misguided to expect Shakespeare to merely import the Aristotelian faculty psychology, unique to Kyd's own peculiar concerns, which animates that earlier work. To be sure, as Tzachi Zamir has eloquently argued, Shakespeare's earliest revenge tragedy does share with Kyd's play an abiding interest in arboreal imagery, one that powerfully serves to guide the play's mix of tragic pleasure and ethical instruction. But while the linkages between Titus Andronicus and The Spanish Tragedy are many and varied, the amorphous Roman world of Shakespeare's play is decidedly not the world of Kyd's Spanish court, and the ontological frameworks constructed by each author remain markedly geared toward the particular dramaturgical needs dictated by the central conflicts staged within each play. Indeed, although Titus Andronicus concerns the travails of competing families, each jockeying for position and power within their reconfigured polities, Shakespeare remains less concerned than Kyd with how households may grow, prosper and preserve themselves, as even a cursory glance at Titus’ pride in his sons’ tomb would well attest. In terms of the underlying philosophical frameworks that work to shape reception of revenge on the early modern stage, the affinities between these two early revenge plays lie, then, not in a shared interest in a particular doctrine but rather in a shared dramaturgical strategy of marshalling familiar ideas – current in contemporary culture but with roots in classical thought – in order to anchor each play's revenge narrative into common assumptions about how the playworld as depicted operates on its most fundamental levels. If in Kyd's tragedy, this process takes shape in such a way as to align retribution with the most ubiquitous and essential of natural impulses, Shakespeare's tragedy, as we will see, figures revenge as a kind of return to a more balanced condition within a larger natural order. Distinct in his thematic, theatrical interests and thus in the specific philosophical ideas with which he will imbue his play, Shakespeare nonetheless shares with Kyd an allied method of invoking and, when needed, refashioning his era's philosophical assumptions in order to create a fully-realised, immersive world that, in its very construction, will help condition reception of the revenge enacted on stage.