The Revenger’s Tragedy opens with a soliloquy from Vindice as he watches the Duke of an unnamed Italian principality and his family walk together in a royal procession. In his soliloquy, Vindice condemns the royal family for their immoral behavior and sets the stage for the play by introducing its primary antagonists.
Duke: royal lecher; go, grey-haired adultery,
And thou his son, as impious steeped as he:
And thou his bastard true-begot in evil:
And thou his duchess that will do with devil.
Four excellent characters – O that marrowless age
Would stuff the hollow bones with damned desires,
And ’stead of heat kindle infernal fire
Within the spendthrift veins of a dry duke.
A parched and juiceless luxur. O God! One
That has scarce blood enough to live upon,
And he to riot it like a son and heir?
First, he lists the various members of the Duke’s family, excoriating each in turn. The Duke, he claims, is a “royal lecher” who carries out numerous extramarital affairs despite his advanced age. His oldest son and presumptive heir, Lussurioso, is similarly dismissed as being “as impious” as his father, as is Spurio, the Duke’s “bastard” son born out of wedlock and therefore, to Vindice, “true-begot” or conceived “in evil.” Following the Duke and his son are the Duchess and her four sons from a previous marriage. To the cynical Vindice, this family is a fitting cast for the “marrowless” or insubstantial age in which he lives, one which has been metaphorically hollowed out by “damned desires” and is heated by “internal fire,” language that suggests venereal disease. Above all other sins, Vindice identifies lust as the definitive vice of his historical moment and suggests that it's closely associated with the Duke’s family.
