Revenge Tragedy
Explores relationship between tragedy and justice – revenge
becomes a vehicle for moral debate and at the centre of this is the conflict
between duty and conscience.
The play’s persistent questioning and Hamlet’s position as a
philosopher is a signal that the play invites debate.
Revenge – A divide
in attitudes.
Old Testament – eye for an eye, but repeatedly we are told
that ‘vengeance is mine, I shall repay saith the Lord.’ Revenge is at odds with
Christian teaching.
1584 Bond of Association – swear before God that they would
take revenge on those that tried to challenge Elizabeth .
Francis Bacon.
Analysis
Development of
Revenge Plays
Senecan Revenge
Senecan
tragedy is a body of ten
1st century AD dramas of which eight were written by the Roman Seneca.
Rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century, they became the
models for the revival of tragedy on the Renaissance
stage. The Elizabethan dramatists found Seneca's themes of bloodthirsty revenge
more congenial to English taste than they did his form. Senecan influence is
also evident in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's
Hamlet:
both share a revenge theme, a corpse-strewn climax, and ghosts among the cast,
which can all be traced back to the Senecan model.
Differences –
deaths occurred off-stage with gruesome deaths reported to audience usually by
a messenger. In Renaissance, these deaths are shown on-stage and audience
witness violent events.
This succeeds in
implicating the audience with the action – complicit.
Also an analogy
between the theatre and the ‘Theatre of Execution.’ – The two are suspiciously
similar.
Revenge plots
border on farce – it will eventually exhaust itself as there is no one left to
kill and the stage is left littered with murdered corpses.
Revenge plots popular – great fashion for staging revenge
tragedies.
Kyd’s – ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ 1590
Character ‘Revenge’ actually appears and the action is
solicited by Revenge’s mood – he both structures and frames the play.
‘Titus Andronicus’ – 1590
Blood-fest.
Hamlet – 1601
Much more psychologically developed and rounded character.
The audience shares in Hamlet’s torments and questions what it is to be human
knowing that the only certainty is death, and what of that death.
‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’ – 1607
More violent –
grotesque, almost comic.
Here we get a
different type of protagonist and the division between hero and villain is
blurred. Note the difference between Vindice and Hamlet.
The Revenger
Need to avenge a terrible deed that occurred in the past –
there is a constant act of remembrance. Vindice with Gloriana’s skull and
Hamlet is implored to ‘remember’ his father by his ghost.
Revengers are usually patient.
They keep their wounds green. – often consumed by
bitterness.
Isolated from their surroundings.
Sensitive and intelligent.
The law / state has let them down – the villain is protected
by the law.
Feign madness – dissemble to gain proof of crime or to get
close to their enemy.
Hamlet struggles in
this role
He is stuck in a play
started by others.
whereas
Vindice relishes this
role
Vindice is a supremely
inventive revenger who revels in and is proud of his inventiveness. He speaks
like Iago and acts like Edmund.
Women are often
treated badly in these plays.
‘Frailty thy name is woman.’
Elizabethan and Jacobean
Revenge Tragedy
One of the great influences on the early modern revenge play genre was the
translation of the works of the Roman playwright Seneca into English in the
last half of the sixteenth century. Seneca’s tragedies concerned the heroic
figures of classical legend, and borrowed from such playwrights as Aeschylus,
Euripedes and Sophocles. The tragedies were filled with horrifying events such
as cannibalism, incest, rape, and violent death. Revenge is also a theme in
many of Seneca’s plays: in Hippolytus, Theseus takes revenge on his
son for the supposed rape of Phaedra, while in Agamemnon, the ghost of
Thyestes urges Aegisthus towards revenge. Revenge and violence are associated
with ghosts in several other Senecan plays. [1]
Another strong influence came from Italian literature, reinforced by a stereotype that was held in contemporary England of Italians as vengeful, cunning and bloodthirsty. [2] Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) wrote The Prince, a treatise on power, in the early years of the sixteenth century. The perceived amorality of the work led ‘Machiavel’ to be synonymous with villainy in the contemporary imagination. Innocent Gentillet wrote that in Machiavelli’s country, ‘vengeances, and enmities are perpetuall and irreconcilable’, and revenge gave ‘delectation, pleasure and contentment’; revengers will torment a victim, and may even ‘force him with hope of his life to give himselfe to the diuell; and so they seeke in slaying the bodie to damne the soule, if they could’. [3] This detail recalls Hamlet’s refusal to murder Claudius during prayer, lest the King’s soul go to heaven, [4] and to his emphasis on Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s deaths being carried out immediately, with no ‘shriving time’. [5] Other Italian works, like The historie of Guicciardin containing the warres of Italie, translated by Geoffrey Fenton (1579), and novels such as those translated by Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques (1559-70) and into English by William Painter in his Palace of Pleasure (1567-8) contained gruesome tales of revenge and violence. [6]
Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587-9) is one of the earliest plays built around blood-revenge to be performed on the English stage. [7] It not only contains a ghost, but also a personified spirit of Revenge, giving the play a framework that involves supernatural forces and the workings of fate. [8] This is set against the protagonists’ struggles to achieve justice through their own actions. Hieronimo’s desire for vengeance ‘is in a very real sense a passion for justice’. [9] The existence of evil and undeserved misfortune in the world drives him to exclaim ‘O world! no world, but mass of public wrongs,/ Confus’d and fill’d with murder and misdeeds’. [10] Here we find echoes of ‘something is rotten in the state of
Revenge plays in the style of Kyd include Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, perhaps the most grotesque and least likeable of Shakespeare’s plays, and Hamlet. Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599) includes elements found in Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy: the ghost, the play-within-a-play, delayed revenge, rape or threats to female honour, and a bloody denouement, as well as the pretended foolishness of Antonio, which matches Hamlet’s feigned madness. The Revenger’s Tragedy (attributed to Tourneur, c. 1606-7), is another play in this genre. [11] A central element is the skull of a woman who has been poisoned. Carried about by the revenger, the skull prompts meditations on the transience of life and the inevitability of death and corruption, which recall both medieval morality drama and the philosophical musings of Hamlet. The revenger, Vindice, goes about disguised, which ‘enables him to act as a detached, satirical and didactic commentator in the folly and evil of the other characters’, [12] again recalling Hamlet’s similar ironic commentary under the disguise of madness.
In these plays, the revenger is a kind of hero, avenging cruel and undeserved death, yet is a killer in his turn. The extent to which contemporary audiences would have sympathised with the avenger is debated by literary critics. [13] In some plays, the revenger is not heroic at all, but utterly villainous: in The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand comes to believe he has turned into a wolf, symbolising his savagery. Yet revenge could be a way to settle a ‘legitimate grievance’. [14] Francis Bacon wrote that ‘revenge triumphs over death’, [15] a sentiment expressed by Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy when he proclaims ‘When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good’, [16] suggesting that the justice of revenge outweighs the horror of tragedy. However, Bacon also wrote that ‘in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince’s part to pardon’. [17] In revenge plays, the option of forgiveness is not taken, and even if justice is done and the revenger dies to expiate his deeds, revenge plays close with a sense of futility, waste and loss.
Karen Kay
1. Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan
Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1959). Return to text
2. Bowers, pp. 48-52. Return to text3. Bowers, p. 52, citing Innocent Gentillet, Discours sur les moyens de bien governer [...] contre Nicolas Machiavel (1576), translated as A Discourse Upon the Meanes of Well Governing [...] by Simon Patericke (1577), Part III, max. 6. Return to text
4. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The
5. Hamlet, 5.2.46-7, p. 436. Return to text
6. Bowers, pp. 53-61. Return to text
7. A Hamlet play written before Shakespeare’s version, possibly by Kyd, now lost, would have been another early example of the genre. Return to text
8. Cf. Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallet, The Revenger’s Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 8. Return to text
9. Hallet and Hallet, p. 145. Return to text
10. Hallet and Hallet, p. 147, citing Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 3.3.3-4. Return to text
11. On plays in the style of Kyd, cf. Bowers, pp. 101-53. Return to text
12. Tourneur, Cyril, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. by Brian Gibbons, New Mermaids (London: Benn, 1967; Black, 1988), p. xv. Return to text
13. Cf. Bowers, pp. 3-40.Return to text
14. Cf. Hallett and Hallett, p. 6. Return to text
15.From ‘Of Death,’ Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, ed. by Charles W. Eliot, The Harvard Classics (New York: Collier, 1901-14), III, Part 1, online at http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/2.html Return to text
16. The Revenger’s Tragedy, 3.5.198, p. 64. Return to text
17. From ‘Of Revenge,’ Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, ed. by Charles W. Eliot, The Harvard Classics (New York: Collier, 1901-14), III, Part 1, online at http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/2.html Return to text
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