Ossa Benítez 1 Introduction This Seminar Paper intends to describe and comment three of the great revenge drama plays of the early modern period in English literature: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Princ e of Denmark , Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Through visiting the direct sources of the plays, but also helped by some recent scholarship and criticism −from 1974 up to 2012, inclusive −, the plays have been read through the lens of Social Criticism and Satire. As going forward with the course of “Revenge Drama”, it was interesting to note how a very relevant figure as the malcontent, within the most of the plays, embodied the very thoughts, sentiments and expectations of a real difficult, intricate and exciting age as the period between 1570 and 1660. But the malcontent did not remained just as a depressive figure that comes only to bitterly point at what is wrong or misplaced; this figure also played the important roles of the critic and the satirist, shedding light upon the circumstances giving origin to the plot of the plays. Social matters have been very appealing when stepping in both philosophical and literary grounds. I guess English Renaissance playwrights could not avoid establishing connections between their most profound and transcendental thoughts and reasons, and the stories they wanted to tell. The social questioning works out as a means to enjoy the core of these dramatic pieces. The paper presents, this way, a reflection that tries to make an ensemble of both the figure of the critic and satirist, and the social issues that have been portrayed. The work starts with a view on the critique about social issues and distortions, continues with the satiric expression of the main characters as a privileged shape of the critic speech, and closes with the resource of the Masque, as a way to help this sharp and acute critique; that, nonetheless, preserves its