Heh. Good question.

The historiography of Jacobean England as accepted by English literature scholarship views the era as a period of turmoil and anxiety (everything is a period of anxiety) over the death of beloved Queen Elizabeth and the institution of a Stuart monarchy. Order, morality, everything was thrown into chaos, and--as the story goes--this played out in theater, particularly in tragedy.

Jacobean tragedies, the literary critics' line has traditionally gone, violate the bounds of aesthetics, decency, and good taste. They're chaotic, excessive, grotesque, and just plain gross. Surely Shakespeare, the greatest post-medieval English writer, can't be part of this tradition, right?

Well, let's let Anja Muller-Wood characterize the traditional scholarly portrayal of Jacobean tragedy:

These are plays in which characters are mutilated and tortured with apparent gusto, in which intricate assassinations are planned and mercilessly executed (sometimes on stage) and in which protagonists, in fits of madness, dash out their own brains--or those of others.

Hm. Seen Titus Andronicus (ca. 1590) lately?

In fact, the whole genre of revenge plays, which gets its start firmly in Elizabeth's England (and was almost certainly inspired by Greco-Roman tradition), blurs the line between "Elizabethan" and "Jacobean" tragedy. It's part of the reasons critics like Muller-Wood have argued that the gore on turn of the 17th century stages relates to developments in English society and theatre beyond just the dynastic switch-up, like the uncertainty over funding for the arts during the transition from aristocratic patronage to self-supporting professional companies.