1 Vindice and the Vice of Revenge: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Play Tradition

1 Vindice and the Vice of Revenge:

The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Play Tradition

Erin E. Kelly

There is a long critical tradition recognizing that The Revenger’s Tragedy shares features with medieval morality plays such as Mankind and The Castle of Perseverance. Identifications of Middleton’s play as like, if not necessarily an example of, morality drama date to L.G. Salingar’s 1938 essay ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Tradition’.1 Others relied upon this categorization to argue that the play offers a clear moral message about the inherently sinful nature of human society.² These readings might now seem questionable since most critics who identified morality drama influences in The Revenger’s Tragedy attributed the play to Cyril Tourneur, striving to square its ethical positioning with the more explicitly Christian rejection of revenge found in Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy. Even so, The Revenger’s Tragedy indubitably resembles medieval morality plays by putting onstage allegorically named characters who seem simultaneously to be individuals capable of specific actions and embodiments of abstract concepts.

Jonathan Dollimore notably threw out the possibility that The Revenger’s Tragedy could be a ‘“late morality” where “the moral scheme is everything”’ by pointing out all the ways in which it is parodic, subversive and outrageous, ultimately a ‘radical tragedy’ whose extreme violence and pervasive metatheatricality amount to ‘black camp’.3 Others have followed his lead, noting how The Revenger’s Tragedy differs from early morality plays.⁴ These arguments often imply that the morality is a ‘simpler and cruder ancestor’ of more realistic public theatre plays with psychologically developed characters. Morality plays might then be, at best, of historical importance, but even late examples have been described as lacking ‘dramatic cohesion’ and as showing a ‘tendency to rambling diffuseness’ that makes them bad plays.⁵

The debate about whether or not to label The Revenger’s Tragedy a morality play hinges on how one defines that genre. Participants in this discussion who have disagreed about how to categorize Middleton’s play too often share mistaken assumptions that morality drama is simple, pious and conservative. In fact, the morality play tradition comprises much more than a few medieval attempts to disseminate Christian teachings through performance. The following survey and analysis of the complex, constant evolution of morality drama across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries demonstrates not only that The Revenger’s Tragedy is a morality play, but also reveals how Middleton commented upon revenge tragedy conventions by reimagining them through the lens of an even older theatrical tradition.

Morality play foundations

One challenge for anyone attempting to attach the label ‘morality’ to Middleton’s play is a lack of agreement about how to define the term. As Robert Potter notes, ‘The moralities are a tradition and not a rigid type’.6 What’s more, the term does not seem to have been commonly used for plays until well after the end of the Middle Ages, the period normally associated with such drama.⁷ If The Revenger’s Tragedy is a morality play, it will seem a shockingly late example to anyone who learned in school that morality plays died out when rejection of Catholic beliefs during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI made older plays seem heretical. Even some theatre historians assume no one wrote a morality play after the 1560s, when Elizabethan statutes prohibited plays from engaging with religious controversy. Early morality plays do not typically forward polemical arguments, but many encourage devotional practices that would have seemed problematic to religious reformers.

Definitions of the morality usually look to the corpus of plays everyone seems to agree merit that label: The Castle of Perseverance, Everyman, Mankind, Wisdom, and the fragment Pride of Life. Pamela King admits that these texts are not like one another, are not necessarily medieval and may not even all be plays.8 Given that so few early plays survive from what must have been a thriving fourteenth- and fifteenth-century performance culture, we might add that they could be unrepresentative examples.⁹ But they are a reasonable place to start. As King puts it,

What these plays have in common most obviously is that they offer their audiences moral instruction through dramatic action that is broadly allegorical. Hence they are set in no time, or outside historical time, though their lack of historical specificity is generally exploited by strategically collapsing the eternal with the contemporary.¹⁰

Additionally, these morality plays share a theatrical style Potter describes as involving ‘acts of presentation rather than acts of illusion’; for example, the characters Mercy and Satan in Mankind have more lines in which they explain themselves directly to the audience than in which they talk to other characters. Morality plays usually begin with such declamatory moments in a prologue or opening speech that ‘Freely [acknowledges] the audience’s presence [and] … makes clear the argument of the play or sets the scene’.¹¹

The allegorical names of characters seem the most obvious characteristic Middleton adopted from the morality play tradition. The anonymous play Wisdom (1460–70) begins with both Wisdom and Soul offering speeches in which they name themselves.12 The corruption of Soul involves vices perverting Mind, Understanding and Will. The character names in The Revenger’s Tragedy are less Anglicized but equally suggestive of abstract qualities. As Florio’s Italian dictionary for English speakers A worlde of words explains, Lussurioso means ‘lusty, lecherous’, Ambitioso ‘ambitious’, and Spurio ‘a bastard, one base born’ – and these characters manifest through their actions the qualities signalled by their names. Conversely, Castiza, whose name means chastity, and Gratiana, whose name is associated with grace, play out their parts as one would expect – Castiza is steadfast in protecting her virginity while Gratiana offers a problematic kind of social grace when she yields to Lussurioso’s suit before receiving true grace in the form of her own repentance and her sons’ forgiveness. Vindice’s true name fittingly indicates that he is ‘a reuenger of wrongs, a redresser of things, and abuses, a defender, one that restoreth and setteth a libertie or out of danger, a punisher of things done amisse’, while his alias Piato signals humiliation and hypocrisy since the word means both ‘a plea, a suite in law, a controuersie, a processe, a pleading’ and ‘flat, squat, cowred downe, hidden, close to the ground, euen, leuell, iust, razed with the ground’.13

These names would be more apparent to a reader of the play with a dramatis personae list on hand than to someone in the audience for a performance. In a production, we learn that the dead woman whose skull has been turned into a murder weapon was named Gloriana only when the Duke is in his final throes (3.5.150), thus implying that this figure represents a powerful achievement of ‘glory’ by poisoning the man who poisoned her. Moments later, the play’s main character reveals his name by shouting to the Duke, ‘’Tis I, ’tis Vindice, ’tis I’ (5.3.167). Name, character and action intertwine as the figure on stage most clearly identifies himself as Vindice when he is in the midst of carrying out revenge. (Only retrospectively for an audience member, or retroactively for a reader flipping pages, does it become apparent that when Vindice in his opening monologue speaks of ‘Vengeance’ (1.1.39) and notes we must ‘give Revenge her due’ (1.1.43) he might be talking about himself.)

The play text deploys character names and descriptions in such a way that it is sometimes difficult to determine which is which. The first line, ‘Duke, royal lecher, go, grey-haired adultery’ (1.1.1), describes the character, but it also suggests his name might be Adultery, and his misdeeds both before and during the play merit that designation.¹⁴ Hippolito and Vindice talk about the Duchess, who has helped Hippolito find a place at court, so shortly after they share quips about ‘that bald madam, Opportunity’ (1.1.55) that it seems fitting to think of her as such, especially when she takes the opportunity to revenge herself against the Duke by seducing Spurio. As does any morality play full of allegorically named characters, The Revenger’s Tragedy blurs the agency underpinning action. Just as Avaritia in The Castle of Perseverance must greedily seek power over human souls and tempt mankind to covetousness, Vindice can be nothing other than a revenger, do nothing other than seek revenge.

The play’s names slip so easily from being labels for stage figures to character descriptions to abstract qualities in part because of the play’s abstracted setting. The Revenger’s Tragedy takes place in Italy, so the play seems more rooted in the world than Castle of Perseverance (1382–1425), which stages its action around a castle set in the middle of scaffolds representing Flesh, World, Belial and Avarice. But Middleton’s Italy is more symbolic and less specific than Hamlet’s Elsinore or even Hieronimo’s Spain. A judge’s comment that the virtue of Lord Antonio’s wife attracted admiration ‘Over all Italy’ (1.2.57) doesn’t make explicit that the Duke governs a city-state in Italy, much less which one. Time seems similarly indistinct – as the Duke dies, Vindice gloats, ‘nine years’ vengeance crowd into a minute’ (3.5.122), but this phrasing does not necessarily mean Gloriana has been dead for exactly nine years. Nor does it clarify questions about how long Vindice’s father has been deceased, how many weeks (or months?) Lussurioso has spent trying to seduce Castiza, or how much time passes between the suicide of Lord Antonio’s wife and his ascension to the dukedom. The out-of-time and out-of-place quality of the play as much as the allegorical character names compel an audience to look for symbolic resonances and abstract ideas, if not necessarily clear morals, rather than a realistic representation of individualized people and specific events. Everyman (c. 1519) achieves similar effects by expanding the moment between an individual’s encounter with death and his actual demise into a thousand-line exploration of how the soul might be saved, while Castle of Perseverance condenses human life and afterlife into about four thousand lines. As Middleton’s play bends time and blurs place, it suggests the sins of the Duke and his family represent eternally problematic types of human corruption rather than the specific foibles of one court. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus begs to be encountered as a morality play.15

Vindice’s opening speech through its presentational style is very much in the tradition of morality play prologues, signalling to the audience that they are about to watch a play, suggesting what type of play it is and demanding an interpretive stance. As the immoral characters of the court make their way across the stage, Vindice calls them ‘Four exc’llent characters’ (1.1.5). His exposition of prior events that motivate his revenge, particularly the death of his fiancée, is framed as a condemnation of the vices of the present day. And the entire speech ends with a memento mori message:

For banquets, ease, and laughter

Can make great men, as greatness goes by clay,

But wise men little are more great than they.

(1.1.47–9)

This message plays out as those who think themselves at the height of their powers experience sudden downfalls – the Duke about to seduce a country maiden, Junior about to be pardoned for committing rape, Lussurioso at his coronation, and even Vindice assuming his acts of revenge will be celebrated all come to be ‘As bare as this’ (1.1.47) skull that appeared in the play’s first moments. The Revenger’s Tragedy might not offer a moral in the form of a lesson about Christian doctrine, but it seems a descendant of plays like Everyman or Castle of Perseverance when it reminds its audience that all human beings will die and exposes success in the earthly realm as vanity.

This invocation of the morality tradition is no accident; morality plays impacted Middleton’s works throughout his career.¹⁶ The Black Book (printed 1604) introduces itself as ‘A Moral’ and begins with a stage direction that would not be out of keeping in medieval drama, ‘Lucifer, ascending as a Prologue to his own play’.17 Similarly, one of Middleton’s earliest works, The Ghost of Lucrece (c. 1597–1601), includes both a ‘Prologue’ and an ‘Epilogue’ surrounding a long monologue in which the title figure ponders whether her soul can ever be redeemed from hell, despite her lack of chastity and continuing desire for revenge against her rapist.18 The final play of Middleton’s career, A Game at Chess (1624), is a battle between good and evil represented through encounters between virtuous, white, English Protestant chess pieces and duplicitous, black, continental Catholic pieces. Their conflicts occur at the level of the social and political rather than within one individual’s conscience; nonetheless, the rescue of the White Queen’s Pawn from physical and spiritual debasement by lusty Catholics offers the play’s audience an everywoman story.

Morality plays across the sixteenth century – and beyond

But how can we explain Middleton’s late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century fascination with the conventions of morality plays? Would his engagement with the morality play tradition have seemed academic (a form of proto-medievalism) or nostalgic (hearkening back to outdated theatrical tropes)? To understand Middleton’s work, especially The Revenger’s Tragedy, we need to examine drama across the entire early modern period. Although morality plays originated in the Middle Ages, the majority of English drama featuring allegorical characters in unspecified locations and relying upon a presentational style to offer an audience a moral message dates to the sixteenth century. By the first decades of Elizabeth’s reign, many morality plays were not obviously Christian or even moral; to call The Revenger’s Tragedy a morality play, therefore, puts it in like company.

King estimates ‘seventy or so surviving interludes written between the period of the medieval saints’ plays, scriptural plays, and morality plays and the construction of the first Elizabethan theatres’ have much in common with medieval morality plays.19 Plays ranging from John Skelton’s Magnificence, usually dated between 1520 and 1522, to Nathaniel Woodes’s Conflict of Conscience, likely composed shortly before 1581, rely on allegorical characters and feature conflicts between virtue and vice characters to represent the struggle for an individual’s soul. Some later plays make only minor changes to the conventions found in medieval drama. For example, John Bale adapted the morality play to disseminate Protestant doctrine in plays like Three Laws (1538) by staging vices in the guise of hypocritical Catholic clerics. Some of these morality plays were performed at court, but a significant number appeared in school and university settings for educational as well as entertainment purposes, and quite a few have been associated with public performances by travelling companies.

As one would expect of any long-lived theatrical tradition, morality plays did not remain static across decades. Earlier morality plays often focus around a central humanus genus character who stands in for all people. (That said, even the plays with titles linked with this trope seem less universal when analysed carefully – Everyman is a particular type of man, a merchant, and Mankind is a farmer.) More individualized central characters receive attention in later plays. For example, a subset of allegorical drama, including Youth (1513–14), Wit and Science (1539), Lusty Juventus (1547–53) and The Disobedient Child (1559–70), considers the spiritual and moral wellbeing of school-aged young men. A number of these plays move away from offering the explicitly Christian messages – instead, large-scale, court-associated plays like the Marian Respublica (1553) and the Scottish Satire of the Three Estates (first performed 1540 and revised 1552 and 1554) present lessons about good governance while small-cast plays for public presentation like The Trial of Treasure (1567) and The Tide Tarrieth No Man (1576) focus on how to manage worldly wealth.

Later morality plays often turn their attention to practical problems resulting from sin, representing social problems as allegorical vices in satirical – and highly entertaining – ways. The militantly Protestant New Custom (1550–73) makes Ignorance an old and foolish Catholic priest. In The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (1559–68), Ignorance is a fun-loving friend who has a bad influence on Moros, while Discipline is a morally upright but unexciting schoolmaster. The Play of Wit and Science (1539) has Idleness dress the fallen Wit in the ridiculous clothing of her son Ignorance. While there were presumably recognizable conventions associated with the staging of some allegorical figures, the fact that a quality like ignorance could be manifested in so many different ways suggests later morality plays’ interest in selectively skewering particular forms of corruption. The Revenger’s Tragedy might be seen as an extension of this tradition as it shows Vindice engaging with and punishing characters who outrageously act out their lust and ambition.

Some later morality plays have something else in common with The Revenger’s Tragedy: final scenes in which a central character does not achieve a happy ending (in the form of earthly happiness or spiritual salvation). Enough is as Good as a Feast (1559–70) concludes with Worldly Man struck down by God’s Plague before being carried off to hell by Satan. The Disobedient Child (1559–70) states in its prologue that the audience will learn the dangers of parents being too lenient with their children, but the play also shows the young man refusing to follow his father’s wise guidance; the question of whether father or the son is more at fault seems no easier to answer after the Devil appears onstage to claim responsibility for the son’s petulance, so the moral one should derive from this morality is unclear. Like Will to Like is dominated by the vice Newfangle, who receives orders from Lucifer to help corrupt mankind by helping people find companions who share their sinful inclinations. Thus, drunkards and criminals wind up being paired off, and they all come to a bad end.

Teleological narratives that describe the rise of Renaissance drama as a secularizing adaptation of medieval religious drama have been around as long as scholars have undertaken serious study of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries; a story of religious morality plays evolving into more socially concerned drama that eventually turns into more realistic public theatre tragedies and comedies fits well with this narrative.20 As it attempts to explain key structural features of early modern plays, David Bevington’s seminal Mankind to Marlowe implies that Renaissance drama became more sophisticated as it progressively evolved out of and moved away from morality plays.21 Discussions of morality play conventions often rest on this hypothesis, assuming that playwrights stopped staging allegorical figures that represented virtues or vices, that only transitional plays presented a Vice figure, and that plays performed at the time of Middleton peopled the stage with a very different type of individualized, psychologically developed characters.²²

References to morality plays in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century plays appear to reinforce these suppositions. When Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592; first printed 1597) describes himself as being ‘Like the formal Vice, Iniquity’ (3.1.81),23 he can be seen as both accurately evaluating his own character and linking himself to a medieval past associated with plays of Richard’s times rather than with those being performed at the Globe. Sir Thomas More (c. 1590–1600) establishes the historicity of the events it stages by having its title character stage for his household guests an old-fashioned morality play identified as The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom (Scene 9).24 Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass (c. 1616) opens with the minor demon, Pug, asking Satan for a ‘brave’ Vice like Iniquity before being chided for thinking he will be helped by such an old-fashioned type of character; in the seventeenth century, the devil explains, vices are ‘stranger and newer: and changed every hour’ (1.1.102)25 to the point where human depravity outstrips anything found in hell. But this is very thin evidence on which to base our understanding of theatre history; rather than identifying morality plays per se as outmoded, all of these references could just as well imply that the morality play elements of these later works self-consciously differ from, but are also in conversation with, earlier drama.²⁶

As Alan Dessen once proposed, ‘one could argue that the period between 1558 and 1590 represents the golden age of the morality play’;27 however, a survey of plays performed from the 1590s to the closing of the theatres in 1642 reveals that while the morality play was no longer a dominant form, highly allegorical drama was hardly moribund. Robert Wilson’s plays about the fall and redemption of Lady Conscience, Lady Love and Lady Lucre, The Three Ladies of London and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, were both printed and probably performed in the 1590s. The Contention Between Liberality and Prodigality was printed in 1602 after being performed at court in the previous year; its many scenes of different types of characters appealing to Fortune for her son Money sent a clear message to the queen about the importance of rewarding virtuous service. Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon responded to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot by pitting its title character against a perfectly virtuous and virginal fairy queen, Titania; just in case anyone failed to understand the allegory, the printed text of this play (1607) features a dramatis personae list and marginal glosses that clearly identify what key characters represent.

These and too many other plays to mention continued the morality play tradition on commercial stages. But allegorical, moralizing drama was even more common in Jacobean and Caroline court settings in the form of the court masque. Furthermore, universities regularly staged allegorical drama, and such plays must have seemed appropriate for a sophisticated, educated audience as well as of interest to London readers, based on the evidence of Thomas Tomkins’s Lingua (which was reprinted numerous times after it first appeared in 1607), Barten Holiday’s Technogamia, or The Marriage of the Arts, and the anonymous Pathomachia, or The Battle of Affections (the latter two being printed in 1630 but probably performed at Oxford around 1618). Perhaps allegorical public theatre plays of the seventeenth century do not look back to an older tradition so much as they attempt to replicate elite, contemporary refinements of a long-established type of performance. Then again, it is possible that playwrights for commercial theatres were simply offering their audiences plays reliant upon familiar conventions; after all, Londoners could witness lavish allegorical performances once a year in the form of Lord Mayor’s shows, not to mention the occasional coronation procession or other state event. Taking this wide range of performances into account, we can assume that when Middleton presented The Revenger’s Tragedy, audiences would have recognized its morality play conventions as such.

Revenge as vice

Our question should therefore be not whether The Revenger’s Tragedy is a morality play, but what effects might be generated by a revenge tragedy that is also a morality play. By blending these two types of drama, Middleton calls attention to the generic conventions of both even as he holds his audience in suspense about which will predominate.28 Middleton’s Vindice is certainly a revenger, and by 1606 audiences would know from their long experience with plays like Thomas Kyd’s wildly popular Spanish Tragedy (first performed 1587 and first printed in 1592) and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1592) and Hamlet (c. 1600–1) that the conclusion of a revenge tragedy usually featured the revenger’s death, often at his own hand.

But Vindice is also a vice figure, a character type closely related to the allegorical vices in early morality plays. By the late sixteenth century, vice figures seem to have been the main attraction of morality plays, usually speaking the most lines. Like other vice figures, Vindice is highly theatrical, entertaining and morally ambiguous; he speaks directly to the audience, encourages bad behaviour by others, stage manages mischief and gleefully gloats over the suffering of others. Peter Happé’s catalogue of vice figures gives more than thirty examples dating to between 1547 and 1579, the period he considers the height of this character’s popularity, as well as more than fifty later iterations in plays up to 1621.29

Just one example can clarify what audiences would expect from the vice. Thomas Preston’s Cambises (c. 1560–70) has its vice Ambidexter enter the play announcing that since King Cambises has gone into battle, temporarily leaving his realm in the hands of Sisamnes, he will ‘give […] a leap to Sisamnes the judge / I dare avouch you shall his destruction see’ (2.30–1).30 Shortly thereafter, Ambidexter meets with the king’s deputy to declare him ‘unwise’ (3.19) if he does not take his official position as an opportunity to take bribes. After the king discovers Sisamnes’s corruption and has the judge flayed, Ambidexter playfully queries the audience, ‘How like you Sisamnes for using of me?’ (6.4). The vice leads others to act immorally and then takes pleasure in their downfall. Rather than being outrageously innovative, Vindice carries on the tradition of the vice figure whenever he tempts audiences to laugh uncomfortably with his jesting over a corpse.

As the play bearing his name continues, Cambises becomes a bloody tyrant who shoots a child through the heart with an arrow; has his brother murdered; and forces his cousin into an incestuous marriage. Ambidexter responds to events like the execution of the queen by momentarily feigning sorrow before resuming his typical irreverence: ‘Ah, ah, ah, ah! I cannot choose but weep for the Queen. / Nothing but mourning now at the court there is seen. / Oh, oh, my heart, my heart! Oh, my bum will break’ (10.189–91). Then, at the end of the play, Ambidexter simply takes his leave of the audience. The king has died in front of him after an accident getting onto his horse, inspiring Ambidexter to comment:

Alas, good King! Alas, he is gone!

The devil take me if for him I make any moan.

I did prognosticate of his end, by the Mass.

Like as I did say, so is it come to pass.

I will be gone. If I should be found here,

That I should kill him it would appear.

For fear with his death they do me charge,

Farewell, my masters, I will go take barge.

(10.233–40)

Even though he has stirred up and cheered on sin over the course of the play, Ambidexter walks offstage without punishment. In this way, he is a typical vice figure – these characters might be chided or exiled, but morality plays conventionally leave their vice figures alive.

As a revenger, Vindice would be expected to die, most likely by suicide, at the end of The Revenger’s Tragedy, but as a vice figure, he would surely live on, perhaps after promising to carry out more revenge in the future. The final scene of The Revenger’s Tragedy combines both conventions. Vindice will die, one presumes, after Antonio commands, ‘Lay hands upon these villains’ and orders his guard to ‘Bear ’em to speedy execution’ (5.3.99, 101). And yet as he leaves the stage, Vindice once again displays the swaggering wit of a vice figure even as he figures himself as the victim of his own scheming:

Now I remember too, here was Piato

Brought forth a knavish sentence once:

‘No doubt’, said he, ‘but time

Will make the murderer bring forth himself’.

’Tis well he died; he was a witch.

(5.3.114–18)

With this complex ending, Middleton satisfies neither those expecting Vindice to make his end atop a pile of bloody bodies nor those who think he might walk away from his many murders scot-free. Vindice is a murderer who, in a seeming expression of the world’s slant towards virtue, exposes his own crimes and is sentenced to an appropriate punishment. Yet Revenge is an abstract human impulse that cannot be completely eradicated, so it makes sense that Vindice, the embodiment of this vice, appears for the last time in the play making lively and dangerous jokes rather than as a static and safely dead body.

Indeed, by sending this revenger offstage for officially sanctioned state execution, The Revenger’s Tragedy reimagines and interrogates revenge. It is no longer a form of wild justice as in so many revenge tragedies. Revenge is instead reduced to the status of a crime that can be punished by destroying the individuals who carry it out. Even so, the immorality of revenge, particularly revenge that amounts to what Antonio labels ‘treason’ (5.3.128) because it seeks the life of a corrupt ruler, seems impossible either to exile from or accommodate within a well-ordered state. Rather than eliminating the vice by condemning Vindice, Antonio finds himself carrying out a kind of revenge against the man who murdered his predecessor – a seemingly necessary action that makes The Revenger’s Tragedy’s ending very different from that of, say, Hamlet. Is Antonio’s revenge the same as or different from that of Vindice? The play offers no clear answer to this question. Instead, Middleton’s conclusion forces a confrontation with revenge upon a ruler who wishes to be virtuous and then refuses to make clear to the play’s audience exactly what would be the right thing for him to do.

The Revenger’s Tragedy was not the first morality to wrestle with questions of when and whether revenge could be justified. John Pickering’s A New Enterlude of Vice Conteyninge, the Historye of Horestes with the cruell reuengment of his Fathers death, vpon his one naturall Mother first appeared in print in 1567, and we assume it was written and performed relatively close to this date.31 The play is most commonly discussed under the short title Horestes, but its title page gives first billing to the ‘Vice’, who introduces himself with false names including Patience and Courage but whose true identity is Revenge.³² Through key characters’ interactions with Vice and their ability to receive his advice critically rather than unthinkingly, the play offers a complex message about revenge. In his first appearance onstage, Horestes explains that his mother Clytemnestra and her new husband Egistus murdered his father Agamemnon, thus giving him good cause to act, and Revenge urges him to punish them both (A4v). The Vice even passes himself off under the pseudonym ‘Courage’ as a messenger sent from the gods to tell Horestes that revenge must be carried out in this case (B1r). And yet Horestes still seeks additional advice and approval before acting, kneeling before his surrogate father Idumeus for approval and then waiting for Idumeus to get a formal statement from Councell (seemingly an allegory of a monarch’s advisory council) that revenging his father’s death would be a moral and legal act (B1v–B2). After being defeated in battle, Clytemnestra and Egistus do not die at Horestes’s hand but rather face judicial execution as a result of his orders – Egistus by hanging and Clytemnestra by beheading (D2r–D2v).

Such a cautious approach to revenge, the play suggests, is the only way that a cycle of perpetual violence can be prevented. When Horestes is later approached by Clytemnestra’s brother Nestor, this well-established prudence dissuades the uncle from his initial impulse to seek revenge and instead leads him to offer Horestes the hand of his daughter Hermione in marriage. Because Horestes avoids bloodthirsty revenge – instead seeking retribution only so far as the laws of the gods, man and morality allow – the play ends not with a bloodbath but instead with the vice Revenge forced to beg for subsistence from the audience’s hot-headed women before he is displaced onstage by Duty and Truth’s celebratory speeches. The ultimate message of Horestes seems to be that within the confines of an orderly, lawful, moral society the impulse to revenge when one has been wronged can be contained and safely redirected even as justice is served.³³

Subsequent to Pickering’s play, revenge tragedies raised the stakes for revengers, putting individual characters in situations where no such justice seemed, or likely would be, available. How can Hieronimo find justice when those guilty of murdering his son are the royal heirs of Spain and Portugal? How can Hamlet get advice and approval from the king’s council if the murderer he wishes to punish is the king? Even though these characters die after they have killed the enemies who motivated their revenge, death seems for them either an end to earthly suffering or perhaps a tragic outcome for an individual more sinned against than sinning. Coming at the other end of the revenge tragedy tradition than Horestes, The Revenger’s Tragedy raises similar questions about the morality of revenge, but it comes to different conclusions. The vice in Horestes is Revenge, and he is unscathed at the end of the play (although he is rejected by the principal characters). Middleton’s play cannot tolerate the continued existence of Vindice, perhaps because so many other plays have made revenge seem justified or attractive.