3 Playing with Hell: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Infernal

3 Playing with Hell:

The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Infernal

Heather Hirschfeld

Revenge tragedy enjoys a special relationship with the infernal. The genre’s abiding fascination with sin, crime, justice and punishment fuels its persistent traffic with the underworld, that literary and theological landscape for matching with obsessive precision earthly deeds and eternal consequences.¹ Recent scholarship on early modern revenge plays has given fresh attention to this relationship, clarifying the ways in which contemporary religious, epistemological and cartographic change contributed to the genre’s dramatizing of cosmic geographies and the spaces of the afterlife.²

This essay builds on such studies by exploring the ways in which The Revenger’s Tragedy’s invocations of hell reinforce some of its central representational fascinations, preoccupations that make it a play, in T.S. Eliot’s apt phrasing, ‘in which a horror of life, singular in [its] own or any age, finds exactly the right words and the right rhythms’.3 First, I study the play’s references to hell as a means of parodying Hamlet, particularly the protagonist’s understanding of the afterlife in the pursuit of revenge. Then I discuss how the play’s gestures to the infernal draw on satiric morality traditions reincarnated in Elizabethan and Jacobean prose accounts of the netherworld. Taken together, such ‘playing with’ the infernal, I suggest, exploits hell’s immense conceptual purchase as both doctrinal reality and literary device, as both material yet otherworldly place and figurative yet existential state. Middleton’s play thus outstrips conventional critical concerns with whether or not ‘the allusions to sin and hell in the play have [any] bearing on the way the characters behave’.4 Instead, The Revenger’s Tragedy’s use of hell tests the limits of early modern notions of metaphoricity, materiality and intertextuality.

‘A hell besides this’: infernal parody

Reflecting on the depredations of the two European world wars, George Steiner writes compellingly that the first half of the twentieth century witnessed the ‘transference of hell from below the earth to its surface’ in the shape of the Nazi concentration camps and their ‘regulated gradations of horror’. He calls this transference the ‘mutation of hell into metaphor’, and he attributes it to a moral gap – ‘the absence of the familiar damned’ – opened up by the secularizing imperatives of modernity.5

Steiner’s evocative account depends upon a persuasive but suspiciously overgeneralized chronicle of hell, one that traces a steady trajectory from premodern conviction in hell as a literal, localized place to an Enlightenment and then modern understanding of it as a figurative image of torment and retribution.⁶ Rachel Falconer has called attention to the shocking inversion of penal logic assumed by the account, according to which a modern, metaphoric hell oversees the suffering of innocents rather than the punishment of the sinful.7 But I am more concerned here with how Steiner’s formulation glides over the complex linguistic and ontological status of hell in early modernity. For the period of The Revenger’s Tragedy, that is, hell was already operating metaphorically as well as literally, and its figurative function was enabled by, not antithetical to, its reference to a doctrinally secure (although not unquestioned) locale of eternal punishment.⁸ Hell’s signifying value – its value as a means for ‘humans [to] discuss other things, such as human identity, culture, justice, forgiveness, suffering, political affiliation, and death’ – derived from its status as a rhetorical device as well as a real region, and from the conceptual porosity between these two states.⁹ In a further ironic twist, hell’s figurative role – its power to name, in the absence of other convincing terms, a universe of violation and appropriate penalty – depended precisely on the way it denotes the unnameable, the incommensurate, the endless.

These multiple valences are embedded in original, even radical, ways in The Revenger’s Tragedy. In the play’s opening lines, for instance, when the protagonist Vindice notes that age ‘kindle[s] infernal fires / Within the spendthrift veins of a dry Duke’ (1.1.7–8), the physical furniture of hell becomes both the material of the human interior and an expression of its sinful passions. By the play’s closing sequence of masques, when Lussurioso promises that his hated siblings will ‘dance next in hell’ (5.3.41), the symbol of corrupt, ephemeral court ceremony – dancing, masquing, playing – becomes capable of conveyance to the realm of eternal punishment. Later I discuss the linguistic logic of this kind of imagery. But first I look at how such references contribute to one of The Revenger’s Tragedy’s signature concerns, its sustained parody of Hamlet, particularly the latter play’s portrayal of the relation between life and afterlife.

Because of its centrality to Reformation doctrinal conflict, recent critics have focused almost exclusively on the fraught place in Hamlet of Purgatory, the ‘middle space of the realm of the dead’ codified in Catholic doctrine in the twelfth century and embodied in Hamlet in the figure of the Ghost.¹⁰ In his seminal account, Stephen Greenblatt tracks the vehement Protestant rejection of Purgatory as poetry or fable, suggesting that this rejection made a ‘crucial body of imaginative materials […] available for theatrical appropriation’; Shakespeare, he explains, used them in Hamlet to ‘intensif[y] a sense of the weirdness of the theater’.11 Kristen Poole has linked the play’s references to Mount Hecla as a way of imagining a real, mappable locale for Purgatory and thus of ‘comprehending the supernatural in a newly cartographic world’.12 And most recently, Zakariah Long has suggested that Purgatorial torment is crucial to the way Hamlet both thinks and remembers: ‘when Hamlet peers out at the world through the fumes of his melancholy, he projects Purgatory onto it. [And] if this is so, it is only because he first introjected it – that is, because Purgatory had already been seized from the world “out there” and turned into a model for his inner world, the theater of his mind’.13

But Purgatory is not the only supernatural landscape central to Hamlet and Hamlet, nor was it the only supernatural landscape subject to Reformation controversy.¹⁴ Hell, the ‘divinely sanctioned place of eternal torment for the wicked’, is frequently on the tip of the protagonist’s tongue.¹⁵ Indeed, while the Ghost implies that he inhabits a purgatorial arena, ‘doomed for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away’ (1.5.10–13), Hamlet continues to speak of the infernal: the Prince who has just returned to Denmark from Wittenberg, seat of the European Reformation, is explicitly attached to hell even if his father’s ghost never names it.¹⁶ He boasts to Horatio, Bernardo and Marcellus that if he sees a ghost ‘assume my noble father’s person, / I’ll speak to it, though hell itself should gape / And bid me hold my peace’ (1.2.265–7); when he sights that ghost in the following scene he considers whether it brings ‘airs from heaven or blasts from hell’ (1.4.45); and after his wrenching conversation with it he exclaims, ‘O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? / And shall I couple hell?’ (1.5.99–100). If the first reference smacks of bravado, the latter two echo the play’s more characteristic dissolution of personal and conceptual boundaries. Hamlet is not puzzled about the existence of hell, but he is uncertain of the Ghost’s provenance as well as the status of his own soul should he pursue the Ghost’s injunction to revenge. And if he ‘couples’ hell, he worries, he not only designates it as the Ghost’s ‘resting’ place, but his own as well. By Act 2, when Hamlet declares himself ‘prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell’ (2.2.519), the opposing realms of a dual afterlife, like so many of the play’s seemingly binary categories, have collapsed into one another.

Hamlet separates the two after the inset play in 3.2. As he plots his next move he refers only to hell: ‘’Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world’ (3.2.378–80). His language is similar when he declares his intentions for the praying Claudius:

Up sword, and know thou a more horrid hent.

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,

Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed,

At game, a-swearing, or about some act

That has no relish of salvation in’t –

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

And that his soul may be as damned and black

As hell, whereto it goes.

(3.3.93–100; emphasis added)

Roland Mushat Frye describes with a sense of regret Hamlet’s pleasure in ‘the prospect of entrapping his victim’, in taking on the ‘role as judgmental gatekeeper of hell’.17 But even in this scene the infernal registers with Hamlet in a ‘questionable shape’. If in Act 1 he was not certain whether hell would open up before him, here, in Act 3, Hamlet is still unsure whether he can successfully orchestrate Claudius’s descent there. Like so much else in the play, that ‘trip’ is postponed until an unidentified future, a ‘when’ qualified by multiple ‘or’s and ‘may’s. A scene later, Hamlet is not even convinced (unlike Vindice at his play’s start) that hell ‘canst mutine in a matron’s bones’ (3.4.93).

It is this hesitation, this deferral, which The Revenger’s Tragedy mocks in its own unsparing, uncompromising references to hell. The bastard character Spurio delights that ‘one incestuous kiss’ with his stepmother ‘picks open hell’ (1.2.173); Lussurioso admits that ‘[i]t is our blood to err, though hell gaped loud’ (1.3.74). Most striking is Vindice’s extraordinary arrangement of the Duke’s murder in Act 3, during which he both performs and guarantees the kind of damnation for the Duke that Hamlet imagines but cannot confirm for Claudius (until, perhaps, his play’s final moments). In what many scholars consider the play’s centrepiece, Vindice poisons the Duke using the skull of his beloved Gloriana and then forces him to watch as Spurio and the Duchess meet in an amorous, adulterous, incestuous embrace. ‘Is there a hell besides this, villains?’ (3.5.184), the Duke asks Vindice and his co-conspirator Hippolito, acknowledging that the duo have brought to earth, as a kind of prologue, a punishment that both depends upon and reinforces its full performance in a region of the afterlife. The fifth act provides the final punch-line in this parodic treatment of Hamlet’s prayer-scene speech, as Vindice, having been hired by Lussurioso to kill his alter ego Piato, presents him with the disguised, slumped body of the dead Duke. Believing it to be a drunk Piato, Lussurioso relishes the opportunity to murder him and ‘let him reel to hell’ (5.1.51). In this he repeats Hamlet’s intent for Claudius even as he narrates, unwittingly, what the audience has already seen happen to the Duke.

Such references are consistent with The Revenger’s Tragedy’s other parodic strategies – the protagonist’s nine years-deferred revenge, for instance, or his manic melancholy and delighted assumption of multiple disguises – that cut to the core of Hamlet’s deep metaphysical strain and its protagonist’s efforts to ‘come to terms with […] an outside world warped through no act of his – a world miasmal with mystery, disease, degeneration, death, betrayal, and false seeming.’¹⁸ Vindice has accepted this miasmal world – he does not need to come to terms with it – and his invocations of the infernal apply the same certitude to the prospect of hell. What is for Hamlet a disturbing ambiguity or threat is for Vindice a palpable conviction and source of perverse glee. David Nicol has noted that for Middleton’s characters ‘the notion that they are damned is almost invigorating’; we might say the same for their notion of the place of the damned.19 Vindice assents with delight to the tangibility and inevitability of hell, to how close both he and his antagonists are to it.

This outlook, in turn, reflects what scholars consider the playwright’s own ‘life-long Calvinism’, not only Calvinism’s denial of Purgatory, but also its doctrines of inherent human depravity and the implacability of predestination to damnation.20 Vindice has absorbed these doctrines, but in his case the absorption has triggered not the obsessive rigours of introspection encouraged by some forms of practical Calvinism (and given dramatic shape in other revengers’ painful, morbid self-examinations) but rather a kind of feverish activity born of the assumption that he and others around him are already damned.²¹ Such behaviour, as Ian McAdam suggests in Chapter 4, represents a particular response to the psychic pressures of Protestant devotion, one that implicitly accepts, even as it explicitly perverts, the salvific intent of its doctrinal foundations. This sensibility has affinities with that of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, whose enthusiastic contract with the devil takes aim at, even as it derives from, a soteriology that makes belief in one’s damnation a sign of that damnation.22 In his parody, however, Middleton takes aim not at this theological principle but at its opposite: at the embodiment in Hamlet of a species of questioning that has not consigned its thinker to a postmortem fate and location. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s ironic energies target the brooding or meditative revenger, mocking scepticism about hell – scepticism about one’s relation to it, if not scepticism about its existence – in the pursuit of vengeance. Vindice promotes instead a theatre of revenge that takes a real hell as its protagonist’s origin and telos. His drama has no room either for either an ‘undiscovered country’ or for a Ghost returning from it. This is simultaneously a theological and generic contest, one over both the meaning of predestination as well as the mentality of the revenger and the shape of his plot.

The Menippean tradition

Hell’s role as an arena for such intertextual as well as doctrinal engagement has a robust heritage, most recognizable in the early modern period in the trope of the epic descent, the katabases linking Homer to Virgil to Dante to Spenser to Milton. But hell was central to another genre, the Menippean dialogue, which consisted of satiric travel narratives to the netherworld. In one salient section of Lucian’s Menippus, for example, its speaker, who has visited the netherworld, counsels against accumulating riches. He reports on a law resolved in Hades that ‘when [the rich] die their bodies be punished like those of the other malefactors, but their souls be sent back up into life and enter into donkeys until they shall have passed two hundred and fifty thousand years in the said condition, transmigrating from donkey to donkey, bearing burdens, and being driven by the poor; and that thereafter it be permitted them to die’.23 This tradition, present most immediately to Middleton in a series of pamphlets around Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), also determines the references to hell in The Revenger’s Tragedy.24

These references, like the ones discussed above, preserve a sense of the reality and materiality of the infernal; they also insist on their own artificiality, their design as a literary inheritance where sojourners track shadows of their past or symbols of others’ futures. But, as opposed to Vindice’s earlier personalizing of images (the ‘infernal fires’ kindling in the Duke’s veins, for instance), they register as emblematic, anecdotal, sententious. They take shape in exclamations like Castiza’s, when she appears on stage for the first time at the start of Act 2 and asks: ‘Why had not virtue a revenue? Well, / I know the cause: ’twould have impoverished hell’ (2.1.7–8). Her tone and intent (to deplore earthly riches in the language of commerce) inform Vindice’s comments later in the scene, when his mother, Gratiana, agrees to prostitute Castiza in order to make money. Vindice expands Castiza’s critique, first mapping the otherworld into a fantastic metadramatic programme that calls attention to his own artifice and then suggesting a special relation between hell and women:²⁵

Why does not heaven turn black, or with a frown

Undo the world? Why does not earth start up

And strike the sins that tread upon’t? O,

Were’t not for gold and women, there would be no
damnation,

Hell would look like a Lord’s great kitchen without fire in’t;

But ’twas decreed before the world began

That they should be the hooks to catch at man.

(2.1.247–53)

And later, when auditioning before Lussurioso for the role of malcontent murderer, Vindice paints a verbal picture of a ‘usuring father to be boiling in hell and his son and heir with a whore dancing over him’ (4.2.86–7).

Vindice’s portrait of the usurer is the play’s most direct link to contemporary prose narratives of infernal trafficking. The image is, of course, conventional to late medieval and early modern sermonic literature and other written, oral and pictorial presentations of the Seven Deadly Sins; it also recalls the structures of morality-play allegory with which The Revenger’s Tragedy has long been allied (see Chapter 1).²⁶ But the portrait, along with other moral devices, was being reoriented in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean satiric prose that traced a deliberately comic, Menippean path to and from the infernal. The centre of the reorientation, the treatise that ‘translated the Seven Sins into a London comedie humaine’, was Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, in which the titular persona, an impoverished writer, pens a mock appeal to the Devil for money.27 The Devil, Pierce explains early in the pamphlet, was ‘so famous a politician in purchasing, that hell, which at the beginning was but an obscure village, is now become a huge city, whereunto all countries are tributary’.²⁸ Nashe thus grounds his chronicle of the moral failings of London on the literal and symbolic landscape of hell, as his supplication becomes a series of portraits of sins so novel and effervescent as to cancel out ‘any moralistic point’.²⁹ Pierce Penniless closes by returning to the geography and the punitive calculus of hell, as Pierce asks the Devil’s messenger, the so-called Knight of the Post, to tell him

the state of your infernal regiment; and what that hell is, where your lord holds his throne; whether a world like this, which spirits like outlaws do inhabit, […] or whether it be a place of horror, stench, and darkness, […] where, permutata vicissitudine, one ghost torments another by turns, and he that all his lifetime was a great fornicator, hath all the diseases of lust continually hanging upon him, and is constrained, the more to augment his misery, to have congress every hour with hags and old witches; […] as the usurer to swallow molten gold, the glutton to eat nothing but toads, and the murderer to be still stabbed with daggers, but never die.³⁰

Vindice’s own reference to the usurer boiling in hell draws on Pierce’s treatment of the infernal and its inhabitants, which, as Lorna Hutson celebrates in her work on Nashe, ‘is less like homage to the homiletic tradition than like a grotesque dismemberment of the political reclassifying of deadly sins in the interest of economic individuality’.31 Vindice’s version has a similar but distinct drive, condemning the usurer to an infernal punishment that is as much a topical comment on profligacy as it is on miserliness. And if Pierce’s emblems of hellish retribution, as Hutson has explained, ‘masquerad[e] as the conventional probing of moral abuses’ while claiming ‘moral and economic authority from a diabolic buffoon’,32 Vindice’s graphic image of the usurer puts the portrayal of divine punishment for worldly evil in the mouth of a triumphantly amoral revenger.

Middleton had already been experimenting with Nashe’s pamphlet and its Lucianic overtones before The Revenger’s Tragedy. Indeed, Vindice’s references to hell in the play can be seen as an extension, writ small but fierce, of his work in his 1604 The Black Book, an ‘exuberant sequel’ to Nashe’s fiction that imagines Lucifer’s journey from hell to London to visit the impoverished Pierce.33 Such a ‘resurrection’ of Pierce, as Molly Hand aptly calls it, is also a resurrection of the underworld as the literary realm on which to launch a ‘radical critique of [contemporary] socio-economic conditions’.34 And these conditions include those of the writer, dramatist and actor. Thus, The Black Book shares with its generic fellows a metadramatic sensibility that ‘draws on metaphors of stage practice and on stylistic stage effects’³⁵ which in turn rely on hell as both image of and deferred but eternal penalty for economic inequality. Like Greene’s Newes Out of Heaven and Hell (1593) and Henry Chettle’s Kind Hart’s Dream (1593) as well as Pierce,36 The Black Book thrives on associations with the drama and its practices and practitioners to shape its narrative: Lucifer ‘ascends as Prologue to his own play’ and then ‘turns actor’; he observes Pierce through ‘the sullen blaze of a melancholy lamp that burnt very tragically upon the narrow desk of a half bedstead’, where he sees ‘spiders that stalk as if they had been conning of Tamburlaine’.37 The Black Book, then, not only promulgated a moralizing message meant to lay bare the city’s ‘infectious bulks of craft, coz’nage and panderism’ (l. 25); it also reinvigorated for the opening years of James’s reign a 1590s genre that used hell as a backdrop to authorize the writer and player’s place in social critique.38 So even though it is set on the streets of London, The Black Book uses an infernal backdrop to stage comparison after comparison between spectral personae and their punishments, including a parodically homiletic nod to a usurer who would not spend money on coal: ‘Is it possible […] a usurer should burn so little here, and so much in hell?’ (ll. 283–5).

When Middleton has Vindice call up the image of the usurer boiling in hell, then, he alludes to his own The Black Book and to its genre of netherworld locodescription; he connects revenge drama with satiric pamphlet at the point at which they use the realm of the damned dead to address social, political and religious inequities and violations. Both these genres depend, of course, on hell’s resonance in Western European culture as both a ‘region of punitive justice’ and a ‘sense of collectively recognized evil’.³⁹ But the shapes they take on stage and page, I want to emphasize, also depend upon hell’s status as a linguistic and conceptual phenomenon. The capacity of hell to signify literally and figuratively, as a spiritual reality and as a code for mundane punitive suffering, was extended in the period generally and in particular for Middleton, whose The Revenger’s Tragedy seizes in special ways on its representational resources.

Figuring hell

Scholars trace to the Church Fathers what we might call hell’s ‘double referentiality’, its role in naming both damnation after death and guilt during life. As early as the first centuries after Christ, hell designated postmortem physical pain and earthly psychological suffering; as Alan Bernstein writes, it ‘invade[d] a living person’ through his or her conscience.40 According to this logic, hell is literal and figurative, real and metaphoric: hell, the receptacle of the damned, serves as the vehicle or source for hell the tenor or target, the state of a guilty, pained conscience alienated from God.⁴¹ This literal and figurative formula was preserved well into the seventeenth century, even as the elaborate urbanized infrastructure of the high medieval hell gave way to a sense of hell as an undifferentiated, unstructured landscape.⁴² But Reformation doctrinal debate, Peter Marshall has suggested, put fresh pressure on hell’s function as fact and figure. In an interpretive strategy he calls ‘comparative infernalism’, Marshall observes that Catholics and Protestants shared traditional ideas of ‘special torments tailored to the particular sins of the damned’ as well as a lurid iconography meant to dissuade believers from sin. ‘In many ways’, he writes, ‘it is surprising how little the rival theologies of grace seem to have impacted upon reformed and counter-reforming discourses about hell’.43 Nevertheless, Marshall insists, there were ‘divergences along broadly confessional lines’, divergences concerned specifically with the placement and the grammar of hell.⁴⁴ Protestants, he explains, were wary about identifying the exact location of hell while Catholics placed it confidently at the centre of the earth; Catholics believed in the materiality of hell-fire while many Protestants considered it an allegory or metaphor, ‘a figure for the literally indescribable torments awaiting the damned in hell’.⁴⁵ Certainly both groups participated in a longstanding tradition ‘in which the psychology of evil is explored in such a way that the wicked soul is seen as subject to self-imposed suffering, which has analogies with the sufferings of hell’.⁴⁶ But for Protestants ‘there was […] a greater openness to the possibility of allegory and metaphor in making sense of the reality of hell’.⁴⁷

The possibility of metaphor in making sense of the reality of hell: this is the linguistic process that The Revenger’s Tragedy stretches and probes. For the work of figurative language in this procedure is multifaceted, shaped not only by competing theologies, but also by the nature of linguistic comparison, the way, as different theorists have explained, it stages a ‘commerce between thoughts, a transaction between contexts’.⁴⁸ Indeed, insofar as metaphor does not simply make sense of an objective reality but rather, according to contemporary sociolinguists, has ‘the power to create […] reality’,⁴⁹ Middleton’s use of the language of hell offers a new vision of revenge in the mundane and postmortem worlds.

Such a sense of the power of metaphor was current, if expressed in different terms, in early modern England. For George Puttenham, it allowed a word to become ‘more significative’: metaphor, his manual explains, is the ‘figure of transport’ in which ‘there is a kind of wresting of a single word from his own right signification to another not so natural, but yet of some affinity or conveniency with it’.50 As various scholars have shown, rhetorical handbooks such as Puttenham’s treated metaphor not merely as a literary ornament, but as a creative force, producing fresh meaning and achieving various aesthetic and psychological effects.⁵¹ Metaphor, like other literary figures, functioned as a form of knowledge production;⁵² it ‘permeated Renaissance literature and culture as [a] dynamic and evolving nucle[us] of thought and expression’.⁵³ And, as Patricia Parker has written, it generated plot itself, stories both creative and violent in which ‘metaphor as the foreigner or “alien” usurp[s] the place properly occupied by the original term’.54

Middleton’s figurative use of hell works in these and other ways in The Revenger’s Tragedy. It seizes on hell as the ultimate ‘dead metaphor’, as an established way of naming sin and punishment in the mundane and eternal worlds, and forms it into fresh images, gives it new signifying life. Such ‘galvanizing’ of a trope, as Daniel Jacobson has suggested, is characteristic of the play: ‘one of the main resources of language exploited by the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy is the tendency of common words to acquire in their historical evolution encrustations of meaning which begin as figurative extensions and eventually harden into further levels of literalness’.55 In his wordplay on hell, then, Middleton reactivates the orthodox ‘transport’ between hell as state and hell as place in ways that call attention to the unstable nature of the relation and realign it. Looking closely at Spurio’s comment that an adulterous kiss ‘picks open hell’, for instance, Jacobson observes that the reference ‘telescopes’ illicit sex and ‘the idea of the damnation that is consequent upon it’.⁵⁶ This formula is certainly a conventional, Augustinian way of talking about sin as its own punishment, but Spurio’s language is more active, suggesting that adultery, in ‘picking’ hell open, comes into physical contact with it as a place. The same principle is at work when Lussurioso wonders whether Vindice has tried to seduce his own sister on Lussurioso’s behalf, asking the protagonist if he has ‘rubb’d hell o’er with honey?’ (2.2.21). Here the language stresses the literal as well as figurative proximity of worldly and otherworldly realms, collapsing their geographic and referential distance. Hell is a spiritual idea only insofar as it is a physical place that Vindice can sugarcoat; it is a material reality only insofar as it needs mundane tropes to describe its pains. The image insists that, when it comes to hell, the literal is figurative and vice versa: the afterlife is both vehicle and tenor.

Such rhetorical play shows Middleton investigating the full range of hell’s linguistic functions, insisting, in fact, on its attendant metonymic force, as a comparison based on contiguity which is ‘always literal as well as figurative’.⁵⁷ As we have seen, hell had long been understood as a metaphor for describing a guilty conscience. But the metonymic strain of hell was baked into its theological underpinnings as well. For insofar as sin was seen to lead to (or, in more predestinarian terms, indicate) damnation, and insofar as a guilty conscience was seen to rehearse postmortem suffering, activities on earth were metonymically connected – as cause and effect, as foreshadowing and realization – to hell. Middleton’s language emphasizes this connection, dramatizing the exchange of the figurative and the literal in the theology of hell. The play thus shares the compulsion, which scholars have observed in both Catholic and Protestant sermonic rhetoric, to ‘collect the various “traditional” ideas about the torments of Hell and weave them into [an] alarming pattern’.⁵⁸ As John Casey writes in his survey of ideas about the afterlife, early modern preachers on hell ‘wanted to give people an imaginative sense how the other world was as real as this one’; at the same time, they also wanted to ‘persuade people to see their sins in all their loathsomeness’.59 Certainly the play, like the sermons, conveys viscerally both other and present worlds. But Middleton’s portrayal of hell’s nearness, as we have seen, has a different effect than do the doctrinal accounts. By weaving the images into the voices and characterizations of its personae, the play exposes the slipperiness of the language of hell, destabilizing the infernal’s referential fixity rather than reinforcing it. This dynamic is consistent with what some scholars see as the play’s fundamental secularism: its vision, Jacobson writes, is of a ‘hellish world’ which is nevertheless ‘clearly the world as it is – corrupt, licentious, treacherous, violent’.60 But such a formulation underestimates the linguistic strength of the play, its ability to bring a figure to life so that we see that the ‘world as it is’ is hell.⁶¹

The play’s understanding of the figural reality of hell differs from Steiner’s model of the infernal world of the twentieth century. In that model, hell comes to earth to metaphorize – to signify or stand in for – the horrors of the trenches and concentration camps precisely because it no longer exists as a reality in European culture. In Middleton’s depiction, by contrast, hell comes to earth because it does exist, and the relation between it and the corruptions of the seventeenth-century court is metonymic rather than metaphoric. In its most extreme moments – for instance, when Vindice admits that his ‘life’s unnatural to me […] / As if I lived now when I should be dead’ (1.1.120–1) – the relation is one of identity: hell and earth are the same thing, same place, same idea.

It is important to recognize that this view also differs from other revenge tragedies. The Revenger’s Tragedy, in other words, is more radical in its depiction of the infernal than its most influential predecessors. Those plays – The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, Antonio’s Revenge – maintain explicit commerce with the underworld, of course: Kyd’s play begins and ends in the Hades of Virgil and features the spirit of Don Andrea as its Chorus; Shakespeare’s and Marston’s plays provide a Ghost who speaks directly to the protagonist. But these conduits between the mundane world and the afterlife actually serve to reinforce the distinction between the two realms, preserving, among other things, the possibility of a redeemed earth. Thus Hamlet’s arresting double vision, his recognition of alternatives:

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily with me that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

(2.2.261–9)

Vindice offers no such assessment. No ghost appears to him to trace a path from the afterlife to Italy. Nor do the earth and the air seem or appear as something else to him; they are infernal. Ultimately, this colours the play’s very concept of revenge. Earlier revenge dramas, despite their notorious excesses of symbolic violence, attempted to restore balance to a world they presented as out of joint; they held out the hope that their revengers, whether as scourge or minister (or both), could set things right. But the notion of restoration or equilibrium, insofar as it depends on a redeemable earth, is entirely alien to Vindice. The fantastic viciousness of his revenge plots, then, aim to reproduce themselves, to multiply, like infernal punishments, endlessly. And they end only when earth and hell, revenger and villain, are revealed as the same thing: ‘’Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes’ (5.3.109).

Notes

1 For a powerful discussion of this precision in terms of early modern record keeping, see Linda Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15–16, 84–105.

2 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Zakariah Long, ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet: Infernal Memory in English Renaissance Revenge Tragedy’, ELR 44 (2014): 153–92; Kristen Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

3 T.S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), 124.

4 R.A. Foakes, ‘Introduction’, Thomas Middleton/Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. R.A. Foakes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 23.

5 George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 53, 55, italics mine. Consider also Alan Bernstein, who observes that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries hell ‘has been dismissed as an artifact of the imagination’ only to ‘reappear as a result of the human imagination, the work of human hands, the manmade horrors of the Nazi death camps, the Gulag, and the atomic bomb’ (‘Thinking About Hell’, Wilson Quarterly 78 [1986]: 89).

6 For the early modern rejection of hell, see D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). For a revision of the secularizing sensibility, see Philip Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

7 ‘Modern hells are places of injustice where the innocent suffer. […] If in pre-modern times damnation was at least a sign of divine justice in operation, in modern times the reverse is most likely to be true. Now hell is the state one enters when facing a death that is meted out arbitrarily, senselessly’, R. Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Descent Narratives since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 18, 24.

8 See Peter Marshall on the ‘beginnings of a fundamental reconceptualisation’ of hell during the Reformation, what he calls ‘a tectonic shift in accepted and permissible modes of representation’ (‘“The map of God’s Word”: Geographies of the Afterlife in Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 130).

9 Isabel Moreira and Margaret Toscano, ‘Introduction: Holding Ajar the Gates of Hell’, in Hell and Its Afterlife, eds Isabel Moreira and Margaret Toscano (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2010), 1.

10 Quotation from Greenblatt, Hamlet, 3. For the long history of ideas of purgatorial suffering and their institutionalization in the place of Purgatory in twelfth century Christianity, see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For a powerful discussion of the genre of revenge tragedy in relation to the loss of Purgatory, consider Michael Neill’s formulation: ‘It was revenge tragedy that spoke to the anxieties produced by this painful transformation in relations with the dead’ (Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], 245).

11Greenblatt, Hamlet, 249, 253.

12Poole, Supernatural, 105.

13 Long, ‘Infernal Memory’, 189.

14 Poole does attend to Hamlet and hell in the Introduction to Supernatural Environments, though hell is not significant in her longer account of the play (see 1–17). For controversies about the existence of hell, see Peter Marshall, ‘The Reformation of Hell? Protestant and Catholic Infernalisms in England, c. 1560–1640’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61.2 (2010): 279–98.

15 Alan Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 3.

16 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006).

17 Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 195, 196.

18James Calderwood, To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 20.

19David Nicol, Middleton & Rowley: Forms of Collaboration in the Jacobean Playhouse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 48.

20 Gary Taylor, ‘Lives and Afterlives’, in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 451.

21 See, for instance, R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

22 See John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 292–331. Later critics have clarified Stachniewski’s assertions that self-doubt in Calvinism always implies the doubter’s damnation, but his reading of Doctor Faustus remains persuasive.

23 Lucian, Menippus, or the Descent into Hades, trans. A.M. Harmon, Loeb Classical Library 162, 105–7.

24 For Nashe’s Lucianic heritage, see Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 172.

25 For Vindice’s orchestration of metadramatic moments to undermine the idea of providential design, see Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For the misogyny of the play that would allow a statement that holds women responsible for men going to hell, see 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, esp. 158–62.

26 ‘The characters in the Moralities are personified abstractions and moral or social types, representing the main forces for or against the salvation of the individual and social stability; they have no dramatic functions outside the doctrinal scheme. The actions on the stage are symbolic, not realistic, and the incidents are related to each other logically, as parts of an allegory or as illustrations of the argument. The Revenger’s Tragedy is constructed on closely similar lines’, Leo Salingar, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Tradition’, Scrutiny 6 (1938): 402–24, reprinted in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: The Revenger’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, The Changeling: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (London: Macmillan, 1990).

27 Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 101.

28 Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J.B. Steane (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 56.

29 Nicholl, Cup, 101.

30Nashe, Pierce, 118–9.

31 Hutson, Thomas Nashe, 180.

32Ibid., 174.

33 G.B. Shand, ‘Introduction’, The Black Book in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 204.

34 Molly Hand, ‘“Now is hell landed here upon the earth”: Renaissance Poverty and Witchcraft in Thomas Middleton’s The Black Book’, Renaissance and Reformation 31.1 (2008): 84, 80.

35 Karen Kettnich, ‘Nashe’s Extemporal Vein and His Tarltonizing Wit’, in The Age of Nashe, eds Stephen Guy-Bray, Joan Pong-Linton and Steven Mentz (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 100.

36 Pierce Penniless features an extended defence of the theatre as a remedy for the vice of sloth as well as a great teacher of moral wisdom, instructing the audience in the ‘ill success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissension, and how just God is evermore in punishing of murder’ (Nashe, Pierce, 114); it concludes with a round-up of respected contemporaries, including ‘famous Ned [Edward] Alleyn’, Richard Tarlton, Knell and Bentley. Greene’s Newes Out of Heaven and Hell (London, 1593) features Greene discussing his own books with various ghosts; and Henry Chettle’s Kind Hart’s Dream (London, 1593[?]) refers to visitations from Tarlton and Greene as well as from Pierce himself and his Knight of the Post.

37 Thomas 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; ll. 38, 62, 407–8, 417–18.

38 Both Thomas Dekker’s Knight’s Conjuring (London, 1607) and the anonymous The Returne of the Knight of the Poste from Hell, with the Diuels Aunswere to the Supplication of Pierce Penilesse (London, 1606) quickly followed Middleton’s piece.

39 Falconer, Hell, 18, 17.

40 Alan Bernstein, ‘Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: 1100–1500’, in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Christianity in Western Europe, 1100–1500, eds Miri Rubin and Walter Simmons, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 201.

41Although this logic may be seen to inform the distinction by Christian theologians between poena damni (the penalty of loss of God presence) and poena sensus (physical pain), both of these experiences apply to the afterlife and are meant to be seen as aspects of suffering in a real, regional hell.

42 ‘The Dantean hell was ordered, even hierarchical. The hell of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, as well as most Protestant versions of hell, gave up that order in the interests of the psychological drama of damnation, with millions of the damned crushed promiscuously together, with a revolting stench’; John Casey, After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 193.

43 Marshall, ‘Infernalisms’, 282, 286.

44Ibid., 289.

45Ibid., 290.

46Casey, After Lives, 139.

47 Marshall, ‘Infernalisms’, 295.

48 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 80.

49 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 145.

50 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, eds Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 264, 262.

51 The scholarship here is vast. For a helpful summary, see Maria Franziska Fahey, Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), xiv–xvii, 1–21.

52 Jenny Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 19.

53 Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber, ‘Introduction’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, eds Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11.