Revenge Tragedy Revisited: Women and Law in Nina Raine’s Consent

‘Revenge’ has been a common theme in western drama, the primary examples of which are found in well-known Ancient Greek plays and Renaissance revenge tragedies, in which one major thematic quality of revenge is its affinity with the themes of ‘justice’ and ‘law’. Mirroring the inefficacy of legal mechanisms in such well-known plays, Nina Raine’s Consent (2017) portrays three women who have to struggle against a gendered-biased legal system with their own methods in their search for justice. This article argues the play can be read as a contemporary revenge tragedy with a feminist outlook, in which the female characters suffocated within a patriarchal legal construction try to attain justice on their own, portraying women’s permanent confinement within legal discourse both in real life and dramatic representations.