The Revenger’s Tragedy is a strange revenge tragedy. Nearly all of its modern readers have noted ways that it either fails to adhere to or actively disrupts conventions of the genre that had been well-established by 1606. Its revenger-hero, Vindice, is surprisingly untroubled by the ethics of revenge and embraces his role with an unsettling exuberance; the unnamed Italian court in which he moves is filled with openly corrupt characters who act like – and indeed are named as though they are – allegorical representations of the seven deadly sins; and the central act of revenge, accomplished in outrageously violent fashion, occurs in the third act. The desire for vengeance is ubiquitous, aimless and ridiculous: nearly every character in the play issues a call for vengeance, and the Second Lord’s suggestion that ‘Our wrongs are such, / We cannot justly be revenged too much’ (5.2.8–9) is patently absurd. Indeed, the humour of the play – its verbal jokes, its comic misunderstandings, its bawdy double entendres – as well as its interest in wit and tricks make the play seem as much like a city comedy as a revenge tragedy.
So too does The Revenger’s Tragedy seem preoccupied by satire. Vindice keeps turning away from – or even forgetting – his ‘tragic business’ (3.5.99), both to test the chastity of his mother and sister, and to remark, in extended satirical fashion, upon the general corruption of the world both onstage and off. At times, in fact, it seems like there’s more satire in the play than revenge. Other revengers had been satirists – as Alvin Kernan points out, the revenger and the satirist share similar melancholic dispositions, occupy similarly impossible positions in a morally sick world, and employ similar weapons1 – but Vindice seems more like a satirist who also happens to be a revenger. I would like to suggest, in fact, that revenge tragedy provided Middleton with a vehicle for his demonstrable interest in satirical experimentation. In one sense, The Revenger’s Tragedy is an allegorical fantasy of an Elizabethan satyr-satirist: Vindice literalizes the metaphorical weapons of the satirist and purges the unnamed Italian court by destroying the embodiments of its Lust, Ambition and Pride. But the play itself is also satirical in its attack upon the lechery of contemporary London. Moreover, the play is self-reflexive about satire. The Revenger’s Tragedy explores several paradoxes about the ethics and efficacy of early modern satire, paradoxes of which most early modern satirists – perhaps none more than Middleton – were keenly aware: first, the satirist who denounces sin reveals his own fascination with that sin, reveals his own extensive (and therefore problematic) knowledge of that sin, and ultimately associates himself with it; and second, by drawing attention to concealed sin, the satirist may do as much to instruct his audience in that sin as he does to dissuade them from it. Middleton’s response to the ethical and rhetorical complicity of the satirist, I hope to show, is at once self-damning and playful, at once troubled by the possibility of spiritual corruption and confident in its performance of providentialist conversion.
Recent discussions of satire have tended to stress its humour and its willingness to speak truth to power, as though satire is a kind of comedy with a subversive political purpose.2 But early modern satire looked very different from twenty-first century satire: its practitioners imitated classical models, drew upon medieval morality plays, and incorporated rhetorical and religious aspects of early modern sermons.3 Whether writing in verse, in prose, or for the stage, early modern satirists set out to defend Christian morals, the church, the social hierarchy and English customs against the threat posed by vice, unruly women, papists, puritans, upstarts, usurers and foreign fashions – targets that were threatening precisely because they were popular and because they could otherwise appear innocuous. Early modern satirists felt compelled to render vice in such a way that its viciousness could be seen for what it really was; they needed to make vice seem ugly, to ‘shewe it to the world’ in such a way ‘that all men may shunne it’.4 This was a rhetorical project, and satirists used the rhetorical tools of epideictic speech to accomplish it: they inflated their targets to grotesque, monstrous, disgusting, or disturbing proportions; they deflated their targets to absurd, laughable, or ridiculous proportions; and they associated their targets with objects or acts that their audiences found shameful.5
Thomas Middleton experimented with various satirical forms throughout his career, from poetry (Microcynicon: Six Snarling Satyres, 1599) to prose (The Black Book, 1604), from city comedy (A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 1613) to tragedy (The Changeling, 1622) to history (A Game at Chess, 1624). He self-consciously imitated a wide range of satirical predecessors, trying on different styles even as he developed new combinations of his own. Microcynicon imitated John Marston’s The Scourge of Villainy (1598); Plato’s Cap (1604), a satirical mock-almanac, borrowed liberally from Simon Smellknave’s Fearful and Lamentable Effects of Two Dangerous Comets (1591); Father Hubburd’s Tales (1604) deliberately echoed Edmund Spenser’s satirical beast fable, Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberd’s Tale (1591?); and The Black Book capitalized on Robert Greene’s promise to deliver a book of that title in The Black Booke’s Messenger (1592) even as it served as an explicit sequel to Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592). The range, extent and duration of his satirical experimentation ranks Middleton among the most innovative and important satirists of the early modern period.
Most readers of The Revenger’s Tragedy have noticed its protagonist’s interest in and affinity for satire.6 The play opens with Vindice’s Juvenalian assault on the Duke and his court as they progress across the stage, and his most famous speech is notable not for his reflections upon revenge but for his satirical attack upon the hollow vanity of women’s fashion. Holding the naked skull of his dead beloved – who, he has already told us, was largely innocent of such vanity – he asks,
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?
[…]
Does every proud and self-affecting dame
Camphor her face for this? And grieve her maker
In sinful baths of milk, when many an infant starves
For her superfluous outside – all for this?
(3.5.72–5, 84–7)
Nearly every moment in the play offers a new opportunity for Vindice’s satirical castigation. Even Hippolito’s description of Vindice as a melancholy figure who ‘Keeps at home, full of want and discontent’ (4.1.47) fits that of the typical melancholy Elizabethan scholar-satirist figure, like Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse, whose education and social expectations are at odds with his unemployment.
But in fact, the play’s interest in and experimentation with satire is considerably more thorough than most critics have recognized. Vindice is neither simply nor straightforwardly a satirist and neither simply nor straightforwardly adopts a satirical disguise. There are moments, such as those quoted above, when he rails openly on vice in the manner of a satyr-satirist, but there are other moments when his comments reflect ironically upon vice, such as when, dressed as Piato, he insists to Lussurioso that he has known ‘strange lust’: ‘Any kin now next to the rim o’th’ sister / Is man’s meat in these days’ (1.3.57, 64–5). His remarks to his sister are similarly layered, serving on one hand as literal temptation, but on the other hand as ironic castigation of changing economic conditions: ‘It was the greatest blessing ever happened to women / When farmers’ sons agreed and met again / To wash their hands and come up gentlemen’ (2.1.212–14). This is notable both for its rapidly shifting form of attack and because it unsettles Kernan’s reading of Vindice as a satirist within the play. Vindice’s attention continually turns from the vice unfolding around him onstage to the vice unfolding around him offstage, from an unnamed Italian court to contemporary England. ‘If every trick were told that’s dealt by night’, he remarks cheekily to Hippolito, glancing at the audience, ‘There are few here that would not blush outright’ (2.2.145–6). The targets of his satire are consistently English, not Italian, and when he holds up Gloriana’s skull he looks through it to address the English women in the audience: ‘Here might a scornful and ambitious woman / Look through and through herself. See, ladies, with false forms / You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms’ (3.5.95–7).
Middleton’s experimentation is even more evident in the strikingly original manner that the satirical voice wanders from character to character throughout the play. It may not be surprising that Vindice’s brother, Hippolito, occasionally offers a satirical remark, such as his suggestion that ‘’Tis common to be common through the world, / And there’s more private common shadowing vices / Than those who are known both by their names and prices’ (3.5.39–41). But the vicious characters themselves frequently provide satirical reflections as well, either in remarks that serve as justification for their own behaviour or in frank acknowledgement of their own viciousness. Lussurioso admits that he is ‘past [his] depth in lust’ (1.3.90) and recognizes, when Vindice does not, that the name ‘bawd’ ‘Is so in league with th’age nowadays / It does eclipse three quarters of a mother’ (1.5.56–8). Spurio apparently shares Middleton’s own view of puritan hypocrisy (2.3.57–9), and he sounds remarkably like Nashe when he imagines his own adulterous conception (1.2.176–84). The Duke, for his part, holds himself up for us as an example of the monstrosity of lust in an old man: ‘Age hot is like a monster to be seen; / My hairs are white and yet my sins are green’ (2.3.129–30). Even the idiotic Supervacuo and Ambitioso occasionally sound like satirists: ‘Most women have small waist the world throughout’, Ambitioso says, repulsed by his mother’s lustful relationship with Spurio, ‘But their desires are thousand miles about’ (4.3.15–16). The wandering satirical voice diffuses satirical authority throughout the play, unsettles any one character’s (e.g., Vindice’s) claim to sole satirical or moral authority and relocates that satirical and moral authority offstage – to Middleton himself.
For despite The Revenger’s Tragedy’s dark humour and irreverence, its overt project is moral. This is clearly evident in the way its scurrility is frequently punctuated by very serious references to heaven, hell and the wages of sin. Spurio knows, for example, that ‘one incestuous kiss picks open hell’ (1.2.173), and when the Duchess coaxes him by suggesting that ‘there’s no pleasure sweet but it is sinful’, he laments that the ‘Best side to us is the worst side to heaven’ (3.5.205–7). The Duke knows that he has ‘great sins’ that will take ‘days, / Nay months […] with penitential heaves / To lift ’em out and not to die unclear’ (2.3.9–13). Lussurioso, likewise, knows that ‘It is our blood to err, though hell gaped loud’ (1.3.74) and recognizes that he has sent Piato not only to tempt Castiza to sleep with him, but also to tempt her soul: ‘Hast thou beguiled her of salvation / And rubbed hell o’er with honey?’ (2.2.20–1). And although Vindice attacks the court in humorous terms, he also serves as a Christian moralist, our constant reminder that what is at stake is not our body but our soul. Dressed as Piato and recounting his knowledge of hidden ‘fulsome lust’ (1.3.58), he punctures the comfort sinful men take in daytime social anonymity by offering reassurance that is in fact rather distressing: ‘When they are up and dressed and their mask on, / Who can perceive this, save that eternal eye / That sees through flesh and all?’ (1.3.66–8). Vindice reminds us that the woman who paints her face ‘grieve[s] her maker’ (3.5.85), that some rich men would ‘rather be damned indeed than damned in colours’ (4.2.103–4) and that ‘there would be no damnation’ were it not for ‘gold and women’ (2.1.250). These and other remarks serve as constant reminders of the play’s underlying moral project.
The play makes passing reference to a number of Middleton’s favourite targets – usurers, spendthrift heirs, upstart gentlemen, lawyers and so on – but by far and away its principal concern is lust. Some critics have detected a latent nostalgia for Elizabeth and a bitter reflection upon the lasciviousness and sumptuousness of the Jacobean court, ‘a classic expression of the so-called Jacobean disillusionment’.7 This is certainly possible, but lechery had been a central preoccupation of the Elizabethan satyr-satirists as well as in Middleton’s earlier satires; it seems more likely that The Revenger’s Tragedy continues this rather typical attack upon the lust that turns all men away from the ‘only God on high’ (4.4.14). Neither men nor women are free from lust in the play, but women are singled out because of the constant sexual temptation they pose to men: the dead Gloriana was so beautiful ‘That the uprightest man – if such there be / That sin but seven times a day – broke custom / And made up eight with looking after her’ (1.1.23–5); Junior Brother found himself ‘moved unto’ Lady Antonio by her beauty and by his ‘flesh and blood’ (1.2.47–8), despite the fact that she was ‘As cold in lust’ when she was alive ‘as she is now in death’ (1.4.35).8
The play works to expose lust wherever it manifests itself and to render it disgusting, grotesque and hateful. Lussurioso’s all-consuming lust is no less repulsive than the Duchess’s incestuous desire for her own son-in-law, which is itself no less awful than Junior Brother’s rape of Lady Antonio (and his continued desire for her after her suicide). As the figure of ‘grey-haired adultery’ (1.1.1), the Duke’s youthful lust is both ridiculous and repugnant, and it is only fitting that his death should come through an act of necrophilia. Indeed, the real threat facing the court is not (or is not only) the injustice of a tyrannical ruler but ‘fulsome lust’ (1.3.65), whose elimination is more difficult and takes longer to accomplish than Vindice’s revenge upon the Duke. The fact that the Duke is only one of many embodiments of Lust at court – and that as a satirical scourge Vindice’s real task is to eliminate Lust in all its forms – helps to explain why the play is not over with Vindice’s act of revenge in Act 3. The play ends only after all the embodiments of lust have been killed and when the threat to Gratiana and Castiza has been cleared. Only then can Vindice declare confidently that he and Hippolito ‘have enough, i’faith: / We’re well, our mother turned, our sister true; / We die after a nest of dukes. Adieu’ (5.3.123–5). The Revenger’s Tragedy, in other words, is principally concerned with its satirical attack upon – and the allegorical elimination of – lust.
Although early modern satirists largely claimed to be engaged in a deliberately moral enterprise, some contemporaries argued that satire did more harm than good. Francis Bacon, for example, objected to Martin Marprelate’s ‘immodest and deformed manner of writing […] whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage’.9 Gabriel Harvey likewise objected to the anti-Martinists who answered Martin in his own satirical vein: ‘If the world should applaude to such roisterdoisterly Vanity, […] what good could grow out of it, but to make euery man madbrayned, and desperate; but a generall contempt of all good order, in Saying, or Dooing; but an Vniuersall Topsy-turvy?’10 Duke Senior scolds Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It for asking permission to speak as a satirist, claiming that ‘chiding sin’ is itself a ‘Most mischievous foul sin’ (2.7.64).11 The world is already ‘sore with sinne’, John Weever declared in his fascinating Whipping of the Satyre (1601), yet instead of ‘balme’ the satirist ‘powres out blame thereon: / With filthie rancour still he vomits out / The poysoned malice of his spitefull thought’.12
Weever’s Whipping, in particular, explicitly acknowledges two important paradoxical aspects of early modern satire. First, the satirist who denounces sin reveals his own fascination with – and problematic knowledge of – that sin, often taking obvious pleasure in compiling long lists of very specific examples to denounce them. ‘[T]ouching examples of Venerie’, Weever tells the Epigrammatist (probably Everard Guilpin), ‘I thinke, you had gotten a whole Sampler-full from Venus her selfe, so that you might well haue place and applause aboue all others for that faculty’. The very act of exposing and attacking sin in fact associates the satirist with that sin: ‘know, thou filthy sweepe-chimney of sin’, Weever tells the Satyrist (probably Marston), ‘The soyle thereof defiles the soule within’. The satirist can never completely hold himself apart from the sin he castigates, can never keep his hands completely clean from the pitch he touches. By ‘defaming others’, Weever claims, the satirist is himself ‘defam’d’; by ‘blaming others’, the satirist ‘merits others blame’.13
Middleton had explored the complicity of the satirist in the sin he castigates in several earlier works. Whereas Ben Jonson carefully distinguished between his morally upright satirists and the envious roles they played in each of his three comical satires (1599–1601) – for which he was excoriated in Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix (1601) – Middleton playfully drew explicit attention to the inevitable complicity of the satirist. In the fifth satire of Microcynicon, for example, the speaker realizes that in exposing ‘Sinful Pyander’ as an ingle and a fraud he is also exposing himself as a frequenter of brothels and a dupe; in the sixth satire, the railing satirist and the fool gradually become indistinguishable from one another.14 In The Black Book, Middleton takes this sense of satirical complicity a step further: the satirist who roams around the seedy underbelly of London exposing its viciousness to our view is Lucifer himself, who, as R.V. Holdsworth notes, is ‘inseparable from the evil he studies’.15 So, too, does Lucifer fulfil the request for patronage Pierce Penilesse had made in Nashe’s original Supplication, bequeathing his ‘tithe of all vaulting-houses’ to the penurious author; as a result, the Devil becomes the patron of satirical prose and the satirist becomes the heir of the Devil. In the epilogue, finally, Middleton wryly acknowledges the contamination that comes with ventriloquizing the Devil and writing on his behalf with a darkly equivocal remark: ‘Do I deserve my dark and pitchy title? Stick I close enough to a villain’s ribs?’16 The satirist’s performance of villainy ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the villainy he exposes.
Vindice’s similar complicity in the sin of the court in The Revenger’s Tragedy is widely recognized.17 Once he emerges from his nine-year retirement from court to become ‘a man o’th’time’ (1.1.94), he is unable to hold himself apart from the corruption he condemns. This is apparent not only in his unhesitating willingness to commit murder and treason, but also in the way Middleton undercuts the significance of the revenger/satirist’s disguise. Vindice first disguises himself as Piato by dressing in his own clothes (he already owns ‘a habit that will fit it quaintly’ [1.1.102]), then, when Piato falls out of favour with Lussurioso, Vindice returns to the court ‘disguised’ as himself and commits the same crimes all over again. Vindice’s sinful complicity is also apparent in the verbal and visual echoes between Vindice/Hippolito and Ambitioso/Supervacuo – both of whom plot to kill Lussurioso, both of whom draw their weapons on their mothers, both of whom have a tendency to congratulate themselves for their own wit – which become more and more obvious until the two sets of brothers are visually and morally indistinguishable in the deadly masque of the final act. ‘Now comes in / That which must glad us all’, Vindice tells his co-conspirators, ‘we to take pattern / Of all those suits, the colour, trimming, fashion, / E’en to an undistinguished hair almost’ (5.2.14–17).18 As Vindice famously recognizes at the end of the play, he has become his own enemy: ‘’Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes’ (5.3.109).
Vindice’s sinful complicity is perhaps more evident, however, in his fascination with lust. Despite his absence from court, he has a problematically extensive knowledge of ‘Dutch lust, fulsome lust’, and he rather obviously takes pleasure imagining fathers sliding ‘from the mother’ to ‘cling [to] the daughter-in-law’, uncles being ‘adulterous with their nieces’, and brothers sleeping with their brothers’ wives (1.3.58, 61). His erotic excitement builds in the repetition of ‘apace’ as he imagines the ‘juggling of all sides’ that occurs when most of the world has gone to bed: ‘Some that were maids / E’en at sunset are now perhaps i’th’ toll-book. / […] Now cuckolds are / A-coining, apace, apace, apace, apace’ (2.2.34–5, 39–40). His desire for revenge bleeds very quickly into sexualized lust, and we can hear something orgasmic as he imagines murdering the Duke: ‘O, sweet, delectable, rare, happy, ravishing! […] I’m lost again; you cannot find me yet; / I’m in a throng of happy apprehensions’ (3.5.1, 29–30). His conversion of his mother at his rapier’s point is overtly if unintentionally sexualized, as is his remark that the slap from his sister ‘is the sweetest box that e’er my nose came nigh’ (2.1.41).19 His determination not to kill Lussurioso by stabbing him in the back is nakedly homoerotic: ‘Sword, thou wast never a backbiter yet. / I’ll pierce him to his face. He shall die looking upon me. / Thy veins are swelled with lust. This shall unfill ’em’ (2.2.90–2). This catalogue could go on and on; as Leslie Sanders points out, ‘[t]here are very few lines in The Revenger’s Tragedy that do not permit of sexual interpretation’.20 The point is that Vindice’s complicity with the sin of the court has as much to do with his fascination with and participation in sexualized lust as it does with the murder for which he is eventually punished.
The second paradoxical aspect of satire John Weever highlights in his Whipping of the Satyre is that the satirist corrupts the very audience he seeks to purify. Weever repeatedly scoffs at the idea that ‘foule words can beget faire manners’ or that ‘bitter euill slanderous speach, / Were fittest method vertuous deeds to teach’. Instead of purifying ‘the sincke of all mens sinne’, the speech of the satirist ‘putrifies within’. By ‘handling Lecherie’ and ‘Lauishing out such vilde lasciuious speach’, in fact, the satirist acts as though he ‘would inuite one vnto Venerie, / Disclosing things that neuer Bawd could teach’.21 By drawing attention to hidden sin – sin that he hopes to eradicate by revealing it – the satirist provides a kind of instruction manual. For Weever, in other words, satire is not just rhetorically ineffective, but is in fact morally destructive: by drawing attention to concealed sin, the satirist makes the world more sinful.
Middleton had explored this second paradox in his earlier satires as well. He consciously echoes Robert Greene’s coney-catching tracts in the fourth satire of Microcynicon, ‘Cheating Droone’, which tells the story of the ‘silly cony’ who enjoys a night of eating, drinking and musical entertainment at a new friend’s expense only to awake to discover that he has in fact paid for everything;22 like Greene’s tracts, the story could serve equally well as a guide for an aspiring cheat as it could a cautionary tale for the trusting innocent. Middleton toys with this paradox even more overtly in The Black Book, which is wryly dedicated to those who ‘can touch pitch and yet never defile themselves’, a proverbial impossibility. Those who ‘read the mischievous lives and pernicious practices of villains’ contained in the book, such a paradoxical dedication playfully suggests, are sure to be ‘worse at the end of the book’ rather than ‘confirmed the more in their honest estates and the uprightness of their virtues’. Their souls will be just as metaphorically defiled as their hands will be literally stained from the book’s solid black cover.23 As both the heir and the ventriloquist of the Devil, Middleton’s satirist tempts as much as he upholds, taints as much as he purifies. ‘Qui color albus erat, nunc est contrarius albo’,24 the epigram to Microcynicon darkly declares; the same could be said for all of Middleton’s satirical work.
The Revenger’s Tragedy toys with its effect upon its audience in the same way. Hippolito seems to allude to the audience’s complicity in the collective vengeance of the final act when he refers to the ‘five hundred gentlemen in the action / That apply themselves and not stand idle’ (5.2.21–2). More relevant, perhaps, is the way the play knowingly invites and then evacuates the audience’s pleasure in Vindice’s exposure of sexual licence. As Sanders notes, ‘The audience, in the position of co-plotters, become caught up in Vindice’s machinations in a manner frequent in Jonson’s plays. Vindice carries the audience with his wit, glee and energy until the audience, like the protagonist, wake to find they too have lost themselves.’25 Vindice offers both devilish temptation and moral castigation, and he plays these roles both for Castiza and Gratiana and for the audience. Even though he is almost willing to ‘stake [his] soul for these two creatures’ (1.1.105), Vindice initially corrupts Gratiana; the same may well be true for members of the audience, whose soteriological security cannot be so readily determined. After her re-conversion two acts later, Gratiana draws explicit attention to Vindice’s troublingly doubled role, connecting him thematically to Middleton’s earlier satirists: ‘I’ll give you this, that one I never knew / Plead better for and ’gainst the devil than you’ (4.4.89–90).
It’s tempting to follow Jonathan Dollimore and others in ascribing the playful ‘double subversion’ of moral authority I have been tracing in The Revenger’s Tragedy to a secularist parody of providentialism.26 Similar assertions have been made about nearly all satirists of the 1590s and early 1600s, whose moralist pronouncements can seem like mere excuses to indulge in violent and prurient raillery. But we should hesitate before doubting or dismissing the fervour of these satirists’ religious and moral convictions. The anonymous Martin Marprelate was a radical puritan willing to stake his life for the cause of presbyterian reform; Thomas Nashe was a committed Church of England conformist whose harrowing Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593) leaves little doubt about the intensity of his fear of God; both Edmund Spenser and Thomas Dekker were militant Protestants; and numerous prominent satirists of the 1590s – including Joseph Hall, John Donne and John Marston – went on to take holy orders. And although there are certainly scholars who have read and continue to read The Revenger’s Tragedy and other Middleton plays through secular lenses, there does seem to be a growing critical consensus that Middleton’s work demonstrates a fairly serious and sustained Calvinist commitment.27
Dollimore’s influential argument is based on his assertion that there was a fundamental conflict in the early modern period between two concepts of mimesis – between Philip Sidney’s idealist claim that a poet’s task was to represent the world better than it was and Francis Bacon’s empiricist insistence that a poet’s task was to represent the world as it actually existed. The Revenger’s Tragedy, he claims, repudiates Sidney’s providentialist mimesis by reducing retributive justice ‘to a parody of theatrical convention’ and offers instead its own discomforting version of empiricist mimesis, ‘a realism which sees the social aberration of court life as rooted in the prior fact of an aberrant nature, ungoverned by any kind of law – social, natural, or supernatural’.28 But thinking about The Revenger’s Tragedy in terms of satire disrupts this reading, for satire in fact served as a third form of mimesis in this period, a kind of anti-idealist mimesis: it offered the possibility of representing the world worse than it really was. Like idealist mimesis, satirical mimesis served moral and didactic purposes: if idealist mimesis created golden worlds in order to praise virtue, satirical mimesis created hellish landscapes in order to blame vice. As Neil Rhodes notes, early modern satire ‘vacillated wildly between the strident invective of the pulpit orator and the flippant, verbal tumbling tricks of the clown, the lord of misrule and similar representatives of the folk culture of late medieval England’.29 This mixture of the godly and the profane may strike us as strange, but it was characteristic of much popular writing of the period,30 and it helps to explain why The Revenger’s Tragedy swings between seriousness and scurrility – as well as why modern scholarship on the play has swung back and forth over the fundamental question of the play’s morality.
Scholars who have attempted to make sense of The Revenger’s Tragedy within a Calvinist framework have rightly revived interest in the play’s depiction of ‘mankind’s inescapable damnation without the divine miracle of grace’,31 re-asserted a providentialist view of delayed punishment as divine punishment and re-emphasized earnest interpretations of Antonio, Castiza and Gratiana. But most have also downplayed the humour and playfulness of the play. Holdsworth’s and Stachniewski’s accounts of Middleton’s Calvinism are particularly bleak: they cite Calvin’s stress on predestination, the universal depravity of man, the immutability of God’s decrees, and the impossibility of knowing for certain whether one is a member of the elect as evidence for a reading of Middleton’s plays in which characters can only ever discover that they have always already been saved or – what’s more likely – damned.32 As Herbert Jack Heller reminds us, however, Middleton was also very interested in the repentance and conversion precipitated by ‘God’s conviction of sin and the offer of salvation’.33
At the heart of this problem is a larger question about the possibility of satirical ethics and efficacy in a Calvinist world. Orthodox Calvinism would seem to deny both. Calvin held that men are not just sinful but thoroughly depraved, corrupted by the hereditary taint of Adam’s original transgression from the very moment of our birth, for which we are ‘deservedly condemned by God’; without grace, Calvin insisted repeatedly, man is utterly incapable of any kind of moral action, and even after regeneration, man still ‘has no ability in himself to do righteousness’.34 So too did Calvin claim that man could do nothing to effect his own or others’ conversion, election, or salvation: ‘When the will is enchained as the slave of sin, it cannot make a movement toward goodness, far less steadily pursue it. For such movement is the first step in that conversion to God, which in Scripture is entirely ascribed to divine grace’.35 Without the ability to perform good works, satirists could never hope to write moral satire; without the ability to affect election, satirists could hardly be morally persuasive or effect the moral reform they so often promised.
But what should be paralyzing instead seems to be liberating for Middleton. The impossibility of moral purity allows him to accept the unavoidable depravity of the satirist and the freedom to be playful with the sin he castigates. The impossibility of moral persuasion also frees Middleton from worrying about purifying his entire audience: those who remain reprobate will continue to ‘provoke the anger of God against them, and give evident signs of the judgment which God has already passed upon them’,36 but those who have been regenerated by faith will find themselves reminded to look to their sins and ‘serve God’ (3.5.56).
Middleton’s ability to align satirical ethics and efficacy with Calvinism is rooted in the very providentialism – the very idea that ‘all events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God’37 – that Dollimore’s influential account of the play denies. For if, as Calvin argued, ‘thieves and murderers, and other evil-doers, are instruments of divine providence, being employed by the Lord himself to execute the judgments which he has resolved to inflict’,38 then the well-intentioned but necessarily depraved satirist could be confident that he too served as an instrument of the Lord’s providential wrath. And if ‘the elect are brought by calling into the fold of Christ, not from the very womb, nor all at the same time, but according as God sees it meet to dispense his grace’,39 then the harsh rebuke of the providential satirist could also be as effective a catalyst for conversion as the harsh rebuke of the preacher.
One cannot help but think Middleton would have been pleased to know that so many readers have found his depiction of sexual and economic lust in The Revenger’s Tragedy distasteful, because that is largely the point. We are supposed to be put off by the grotesque depths of Lussurioso’s lust, by Junior Brother’s mocking indifference to his rape of Lady Antonio, by the Duchess’s pursuit of Spurio, by the Duke’s ‘grey-haired adultery’ (1.1.1). Our revulsion at these naked displays of lechery should have the same effect upon us as our revulsion at the nakedness of Gloriana’s skull: ‘Here’s an eye’, Vindice says, ‘Able to tempt a great man – to serve God’ (3.5.56). In fact, this speech in particular is peppered with explicit references to the rhetorical purpose of the skull as a memento mori that also speaks to the rhetorical basis of the play and early modern satire more broadly:
Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble,
A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo ’em
To suffer wet damnation to run through ’em.
[…]
It were fine, methinks,
To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts,
And unclean brothels. Sure, ’twould fright the sinner
And make him a good coward, put a reveller
Out of his antic amble,
And cloy an epicure with empty dishes.
(3.5.58–60, 90–5)
Like the skull, The Revenger’s Tragedy strips the alluring trappings of lustful behaviour to reveal its ugly – and deadly – interior. The play works to make vice seem monstrous, ugly, disgusting and ridiculous: it shows vice – and the consequences of vice – in order to make the audience shun it.
Vindice may reveal his own depraved fascination with the lust he decries, and he may do as much to instruct some members of his audience to pursue lust as to shun it, but he does serve as a catalyst of providentialist conversion for at least one character in the play. His mother, Gratiana, has acted reprehensibly – she has accepted money for her daughter’s virginity and she has been carried away by remembering ‘What ’twere to lose it’ (2.1.149) – but in response to Vindice’s harsh language and public exposure of her secret sin, she weeps tears of repentance and begs heaven to ‘Take this infectious spot out of [her] soul’ (4.4.53). Castiza’s independent test of her mother indicates that Gratiana’s conversion is real, and the concluding lines of the fourth act explicitly underscore the rhetorical nature of both the scene and, more broadly, the play: ‘Faith and thy birth hath saved me. / ’Mongst thousand daughters happiest of all others, / Be thou a glass for maids and I for mothers’ (4.4.155–7). Middleton probably had few hopes that The Revenger’s Tragedy would entirely reform his audience, but he certainly leaves open the possibility that the satirist can function as an instrument of divine providence – or even of grace.
1Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 219–20.
2See e.g. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson, eds, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
3J.B. Leishman, ed., The Three Parnassus Plays (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson Ltd, 1949), 45–9.
4Thomas Nashe, The Anatomy of Absurdity, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald McKerrow (1904; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 1.9.
5Magnification, minimization and association are the three tools Aristotle associates with epideictic speech (praise and blame). See Aristotle, Rhetoric, ed. Lane Cooper (New York: Pearson, 1960), 1.9.
6Kernan’s reading of the play (224ff) is in many respects my point of departure, but see also John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 255–87; Inga-Stina Ekeblad, ‘The Structure of The Revenger’s Tragedy’ (1960), in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (London: MacMillan, 1990), 58–65; J. Mark Heumann, ‘Death Culture and the World of The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Gradavia 1.1 (1976): 48–64; J.L. Simmons, ‘The Tongue and Its Office in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, PMLA 92:1 (January 1977): 56–68; Robert C. Jones, Engagement with Knavery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 126; Peter Mercer, Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 90–117; R.V. Holdsworth, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy as a Middleton Play’, in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (London: Macmillan, 1990), 79–105; Michael Neill, ‘Bastardy, Counterfeiting, and Misogyny in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, SEL 36.2 (1996): 397–416; MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Introduction to The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 543–7; and Heather Hirschfeld, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy: Original Sin and the Allures of Vengeance’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, eds Emma Smith and Garrett Sullivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 200–10.
7Neill, ‘Bastardy’, 412. See also Steven Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45. 2 (1994): 139–62; and Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. 68–79.
8For similar remarks about the way women cease to lure men to sin only after they are dead – and in general about the way the play ‘obsessively repeats both the virtuous enclosure of female chastity and the “false forms” of deceptive womanhood’ – see Peter Stallybrass, ‘Reading the Body: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption’, Renaissance Drama 18 (1987): 121–48.
9Francis Bacon, ‘An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England’ (1589), in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.
10Gabriel Harvey, ‘An Aduertisement for Papp-hatchett, and Martin Marprelate’ (1589), in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander Grosart (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 2.131.
11William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 2.7.65.
12W.I. (John Weever?), The Whipping of the Satyre, ed. Arnold Davenport (London, 1601), sig. D5r.
13Weever, Whipping, sigs. A3v, B8r, E7r, B8v.
14Thomas Middleton, Microcynicon (1598), ed. Wendy Wall, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1970–84; 5.47, 6.29–38.
15Holdsworth, ‘Middleton Play’, 83.
16Thomas Middleton, The Black Book, ed. G.B. Shand, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 204–18, 800–2, 824–6.
17See e.g. Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587–1642 (1940; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), 133–4; Holdsworth, ‘Middleton Play’, 83, 103; Thomas Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 154–60; Hirschfeld, ‘Original Sin’, 208. For dissenting views, see Jonas Barish, ‘The True and False Families of The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in English Renaissance Drama: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Doran and Mark Eccles, eds S. Henning, R. Kimbrough and L. Knowles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 142–54; and Karen Robertson, ‘Chastity and Justice in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, eds Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 215–36.
18See Scott McMillan, ‘Acting and Violence: The Revenger’s Tragedy and Its Departures from Hamlet’, SEL 24.2 (1984): 275–91, 288.
19Judith Deborah Haber rightly notes that this line is ‘astonishingly filthy’. Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 65.
20Leslie Sanders, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy: A Play on the Revenge Play’, Renaissance and Reformation 10 (1974): 25–36, 29.
21Weever, Whipping, sig. A3r, D5v, F5r, E6r.
22Middleton, Microcynicon, 4.25.
23Middleton, The Black Book, 3–11. For the cover, see G.B. Shand’s ‘Introduction to The Black Book’, 204.
24Middleton, Microcynicon, Epilogue 7. ‘[I]ts colour, that once was white, is now the very opposite’ (Wall, 1984).
25Sanders, ‘Revenge Play’, 28.
26See Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Two Concepts of Mimesis: Renaissance Literary Theory and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Themes in Drama: Drama and Mimesis, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 25–50; and ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy: Providence, Parody and Black Camp’, in Revenge Tragedy: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Stevie Simkin (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 107–20.
27See Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theater: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Holdsworth, ‘Middleton Play’; John Stachniewski, ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’ (1989), in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (London: Macmillan, 1990), 226–47; N.W. Bawcutt, ‘Was Thomas Middleton a Puritan Dramatist?’ Modern Language Review 94 (1999): 925–39; Herbert Jack Heller, Penitent Brothellers: Grace Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000); and Ian W. Archer, ‘Religious Identities’, in Thomas Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 135–43.
28Dollimore, ‘Two Concepts of Mimesis’, 35–6, 43, 38.
29Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 3–4.
30See Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 32–64; and Peter Lake, ‘Religion and Cheap Print’, in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1, ed. Joad Raymond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 217–41.
31Simmons, ‘Tongue and Its Office’, 58.
32See Stachniewski, ‘Calvinist Pshycology’, 244.
33Heller, Penitent Brothellers, 33.
34John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 2.1.6, 2.2.6.
35Ibid., 2.3.4.
36Ibid., 3.23.12.
37Ibid., 1.16.2.
38Ibid., 1.17.5.
39Ibid., 3.24.10.