Ian McAdam
This essay proposes to explore a theological rationale for the apparent absence of interiority in the characters of Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Admittedly there could be several reasons, related to genre, for this artistic feature, which is not necessarily a limitation. One obvious explanation is that the character types, bordering on allegorical representations of lechery, bastardy, ambition, chastity, and so on, arise from the playwright’s conscious intent to deploy the features of the morality play to parody the overt didacticism of a providential viewpoint, as in Jonathan Dollimore’s oft-cited reading. While it is difficult to deny the elements of parody and black comedy in the play, the bitterness of the humour and the nightmarish quality of the action nevertheless raise questions about cultural pathology in the world Middleton depicts – questions that are not limited to the excessively conservative, timidly strait-laced readers, dismissed by Dollimore, who are eager to ‘render respectable’ an ‘otherwise very disturbing play’.1 Gary Taylor enthusiastically endorses T.S. Eliot’s observation that Middleton is ‘both a great comic writer and a great tragic writer’, ranking him with Shakespeare and virtually no other English playwright.2 Yet what could be termed the disconcerting simultaneity of the comic and tragic expression remains a vexing critical issue: this striking feature of Middleton’s work may be linked to the coincidence of his astonishing gifts as a satirist with his apparent commitment to a religious ideology that may leave little or no room for human self-improvement, indeed even for human agency. Such theological commitment will be my focus in the following discussion, but specifically in light of the following consideration. The Revenger’s Tragedy may be less a parody of the morality tradition than a parodic response – albeit an ideologically and psychologically complex one – to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a text which, probably more famously than any other early modern play, constitutes a significant promulgation of human interiority.
My initial approach to this topic was in fact influenced by Shakespeare’s commonly noted overshadowing, through his psychological profundity, of another contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, whose theological associations parallel Middleton’s. With respect to this particular overshadowing, the critical consensus, even before Harold Bloom introduced the currently highly controversial phrase, was that Marlowe and other playwrights of the 1580s arrived, or flowered artistically, a little too early to take advantage of Shakespeare’s supposed ‘invention of the human’. Thus in the 1980s Simon Shepherd observed, while composing his study of Marlowe, a television programme ‘in which extracts from pre-Shakespearean plays are read [by RSC actors] in silly voices to show how unreal they are, and extracts from Shakespeare are read earnestly to show how “natural” and real is the achievement of his blank verse’.3 The irony of this observation nicely underlines the perniciousness of critical and historical prejudice, but does not quite dismiss the real distinction of Shakespearean psychological insight. I perhaps want to have my critical cake and eat it too when I challenge the seemingly absurd assertion that Shakespeare ‘invented’ the human but recognize something fundamentally revolutionary about the way he imagined human character. But since his artistry contrasts with the achievements of dramatists who both predate and postdate his example, I propose in this case a theological rationale to explain the distinction: Middleton, like Marlowe before him, was deeply influenced by, and/or arguably strongly reacting against, Calvinist doctrine, the dominant form of Protestantism in early modern England.
This argument does not suppose that Shakespeare, by contrast, was a committed Catholic whose work consistently reflects or subtly promotes such an ideological agenda – only that something in his Catholic upbringing4 produced a detachment or a distance from what I consider a specific cultural pathology of his age, in the sense that Freud described societies themselves as becoming ‘neurotic’.5 The generally Calvinist context of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is now widely accepted, although interpretations vary over the extent to which Marlowe directly interrogates the religious ideology underpinning his play. While emphasizing a Lutheran rather than Calvinist theology but nevertheless recognizing a similar pattern of potentially aggressive but radically unstable self-assertion, G.K. Hunter significantly anticipated the present ‘turn to religion’ in his reading of Tamburlaine when he located its roots in Reformation concerns: the ‘attitude of mind […] depicted [in Tamburlaine is] an atheistic version of the Lutheran soul in its search for justification through faith – atheistic because in this case the believer has simply excluded God from the equation and concentrated his faith on himself’.6 As a University Wit at Cambridge, Marlowe was exposed to a profoundly Calvinist environment, since his arrival there ‘coincided with the period when William Perkins became known by his preaching as the most popular and effective spokesman for the extreme Calvinists’.7
Middleton’s Calvinist credentials are perhaps even more emphatically established in early modern literary scholarship; as Gary Taylor’s well-known summary states, Middleton’s ‘literary practice and his representation of writers reflect a specifically Protestant poetics. He had strong and varied personal and professional connections with Puritans […] The vocabulary and psychology of his major tragedies is strongly Calvinist’.8 The impact of Protestantism upon early modern dramatists has been widely discussed in recent years. Such influences have been observed in Webster, for example, particularly in The Duchess of Malfi, with Dena Goldberg in the 1980s asserting that ‘the Duchess is a perfect Puritan heroine’, and Huston Diehl in the 1990s developing a reading based on the assumption that this tragedy ‘is deeply informed by English Calvinism’ since the ‘tragic predicament of characters like Bosola’ reflects notions of predestination.9 More recently Adrian Streete has offered a compelling analysis of the influence of Protestant theology on early modern drama, in particular the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton.10 Even Ben Jonson’s sporadic commitment to Protestantism, interrupted by his ten-year foray into the Catholic fold, may have influenced his dramatic portrayal of (for example) gender in ways that transcend the mere satire on Puritanism.11 Nevertheless, Middleton’s work suggests the deepest kind of commitment to, or obsession with, Calvinist doctrine. Such commitment problematizes human agency – and by extension, in a patriarchal culture, masculinity – in ways that resemble anxious masculine self-authorization in other playwrights of the period. Yet in Middleton the process by which uncertain subjectivity extends into forms of dehumanization is, I suggest, carried disturbingly further.
I wish then to investigate the peculiar trauma associated with a culture which has embraced the key doctrine of sola fide, justification by faith alone – but significantly a faith granted by God’s grace only to the elect, as a predestined condition – and more specifically the political trauma in effect inflicted by such a belief system on traditional hierarchies of gender and class. I contend that the Protestant denial of the efficacy of works in the process of salvation placed a particular strain on constructions of masculinity. Furthermore, the insistence on human depravity admittedly inherent in all forms of Christianity which assert the doctrine of Original Sin translated, to a nightmarish degree, into a demonization of sexuality within the theological constructs of Protestant cultures. Alexandra Shepard identifies ‘the impact of the Reformation (and the Protestant rejection of clerical celibacy) on the range of male identities’12 as one lacuna in the historiography of early modern masculinity. While no one would claim the absence of misogyny in Catholic societies and households, the radical subversion of human (and masculine) integrity inherent in a theology of grace led, I suggest, to a peculiar intensification of idealized female chastity, and of the male responsibility for and obsession with its maintenance within political and especially domestic contexts. More generally, such theology encouraged the convenient displacement of an insupportable sense of human (sexual) depravity onto the scapegoat of women. In England, theological concerns were intensified by tensions arising from related social transformations. Tanya Pollard interrupts her general description of Renaissance revenge tragedy to offer a familiar but helpful description of the social scene which reminds us of the increasingly high stakes, and increasing personal anxiety, in the process of social advancement and the assertion of political control for men of various classes: ‘The Elizabethan court’s growing monopoly on power weakened the status and fortunes of the aristocratic classes, as well as those who depended on them for employment and patronage. […] The emergence of a market economy, meanwhile, opened up prospects of social mobility for those in the middle class with education and entrepreneurial instincts’.13
Shakespeare himself engages with the psychological challenges of the Reformation in the ‘great’ tragedies at the height of his career, where Calvinist conceptions, or rather traumatic limitations, of male self-authorization are gradually worked through, imaginatively, as a prelude to his more comprehensive attempt to integrate masculine and feminine polarities in the final tragicomedies. This process clearly constitutes an enormous, and separate, topic.14 Let me nevertheless raise here a central issue which impacts a variety of early modern English writers: the ‘mystical’ dimension of self-fashioning in the context of Reformation theology can hardly be exaggerated. Redcrosse’s struggle with the dragon near the end of Book 1 of The Faerie Queene is emblematic: as Satan, the dragon must be defeated through heroic endeavour, but its fire simultaneously and paradoxically represents God’s burning wrath.15 Thus the salvation of the human self amounts to the destruction of the human self, and metaphysical good and evil are apparently impossible to tell apart from a human perspective. This paradox is essentially Pauline: ‘For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. […] Mortifie therefore your members which are on the earth, fornication, unclenness, the inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, & covetousnes which is idolatrie’ (Colossians 3.3–5, Geneva Bible). Unless we regard the entire work as simply a gesture of hypocrisy or ideological opportunism, Middleton’s personal investment in such theology may be ascertained from his pamphlet The Two Gates of Salvation (1609), which clearly demonstrates ‘the dramatist’s acquaintance with and interest in a typological vision’, and in which he clearly asserts, ‘To preserue the memory of this expected Redeemer [Christ], more liuely, sundry pictures of him (as it were) were drawne in the persons of others. Kings, Priests and Prophets, were appointed to be shadowes of him that was the true and only substance’.16 That is, according to this theology, Christ constitutes the only genuine identity; all the rest of human experience and human interaction which does not directly anticipate or reflect his Incarnation is the shadow-play of souls bound only – regardless of their temporary triumphs and failures, their personal losses and gains – for irrevocable damnation.
This argument sheds light on another contradiction or apparent paradox in Middleton’s art, the fact that a Calvinist emphasis on self-cancellation, a lack of human integrity, actually forms an impetus, at this historical moment, for a depth model of the self. John Stachniewski has argued that ‘the Reformation, especially Calvinism, seems […] to be the main cultural origin of what eventuated in Freudian depth-psychology’.17 For Stachniewski, this phenomenon arises primarily from the unconscious nature of the soul’s predestined state; thus, for example, The Changeling’s Beatrice-Joanna can optimistically assume a life of opportunity, of ‘election’, with initially only intimations of her darkly reprobate character. Admittedly social ambition, especially on the part of individuals with origins in the lower classes, did much to increase the appeal of Calvinism in early modern England – Nicholas Tyacke reminds us of ‘the incipient egalitarianism of Calvinism’,18 and so the theology’s attraction for playwrights like Marlowe and Middleton, in spite of what we now clearly identify as its psychological terrors, is understandable.19 But the frequently self-destructive nature of both playwrights’ protagonists might also suggest why the socially revolutionary potential of their art seems so often subsumed in a vision of the general corruption of humanity. Indeed, Dollimore’s observation that ‘the futility and destructiveness of social life seem to have their source in some deeper condition of existence; at the very heart of life itself there moves a principle of self-stultification’20 strikes me as simply an accurate description of the Calvinist ideology underpinning The Revenger’s Tragedy.
From this assertion it is a short ideological distance to Heather Hirschfeld’s persuasive suggestion that the action of The Revenger’s Tragedy may be considered as a significant but futile attempt to transcend Original Sin: ‘While they are obviously occasions for punishing the guilty, Vindice’s efforts at revenge, particularly his use of disguise, are also opportunities for him to fashion himself free of the moral and sexual stain preached by contemporary religious discourse and ascribed to all humans as the necessary bequest of one’s parents’. The irony, however, of Vindice’s disguise as Piato ‘is that [his] attempt at self-making only reinstalls the original, and originally sinful, Vindice’. The upshot of this ironic failure of ‘genuine’ self-fashioning is that Vindice ‘becomes the ultimate object of his destructive tendencies, fulfilling his own suggestion that he has been hired to kill himself’.21 When Hirschfeld refers to the ‘moral and sexual stain […] ascribed to all humans as the necessary bequest of one’s parents’, we are reminded not only of the parallel trauma regarding sexual and parental origins in Hamlet, but also of the very different version of ‘working through’ offered by the Shakespearean characterizations. Hirschfeld makes a nice distinction which I would like to develop: ‘the question that is most important to Vindice is not focused on who he is (the issue that haunts Hamlet), but who has made him who he is’.22 While Shakespeare depicts a character famously obsessed with fathoming his own interiority, Middleton offers a protagonist whose erratic career reflects a desperate attempt to fashion himself in the face of uncertain ontological origins and a suspicion of their irrevocable corruption.
Hirschfeld refers significantly to The Revenger’s Tragedy’s deliberate parody of Hamlet, in particular the protagonist’s tormented relationship to the afterlife (see above, Chapter 3). The appearance of a ghost from Purgatory in the apparently Protestant context of Shakespeare’s Denmark seems, in my own reading experience, not only less odd than it used to, but in some ways almost historically predictable or inevitable. According to Protestant propaganda, the fiction of Purgatory constitutes, ultimately, an enormous financial scam, with no scriptural authority whatsoever, on the part of the medieval church, but in Hamlet the oddness of the ghost’s provenance in fact constitutes an implicit challenge to the doctrine of Original Sin and the Atonement. In Greenblatt’s succinct formulation, Purgatory contains ‘souls destined for Heaven, but they cannot enter its sacred precincts with the burden of even relatively minor sins upon them. Why did God’s sacrifice of his own Son not suffice to clean the slate of each soul? Because that sacrifice did not erase individual moral responsibility’.23 In the patriarchal context of early modern England, Prince Hamlet’s tormented relationship to the afterlife therefore involves a progressive attempt to imagine an adequate, imitable masculine role through which responsible human agency can be grounded.
In contrast to Middleton, Shakespeare’s ultimate interest is in human integrity; if he favours hierarchy, he is ultimately drawn to hierarchies of merit, anathema to the Calvinist worldview. Gary Taylor argues that, while Shakespeare’s portrayal of the nobility ‘is not always flattering’, his ‘many royal protagonists are almost always the focus of intense psychological engagement and empathy. Their dramatic presence and power is unmistakable. In Shakespeare kings matter’.24 Anyone at all familiar with Shakespeare’s work will find this claim generally incontestable, although some qualification might be encouraged by the more recent attention to Shakespeare’s possibly republican leanings, as in Andrew Hadfield’s suggestion that ‘a more careful analysis of the political options open to Shakespeare, and his use of them in his plays and poetry, will reveal a highly politicized and radical thinker, interested in republicanism’. In spite of Hadfield’s somewhat ambiguous treatment of the development of republican thought, especially in the latter stages of the playwright’s career after ‘the republican moment had passed with the death of Elizabeth’, this critic’s general emphasis on ‘the republican ideal of a society that can promote virtue and eliminate vice’ again suggests Shakespeare’s ideological distance from Calvinist assumptions regarding (the impossibility of) human perfectibility.25 While I don’t propose a simplistic resolution to the sometimes intriguing contradictions raised by the complex question of Shakespeare’s political affinities, I suggest that it may be critically helpful to propose that the playwright’s work emphasizes not so much the importance of kings, as the importance of fathers who serve as sound authorities and role models. Definite traces of ‘nostalgia’ for the old religion, the old order, can on occasion be identified in Shakespeare. But while ‘Shakespeare makes the past real […] Middleton makes the present unreal’.26
Vindice, unlike Hamlet, does not deeply mourn (is not haunted by) his father, although Vindice admits, ‘since my worthy father’s funeral / My life’s unnatural to me, e’en compelled, / As if I lived now when I should be dead’ (1.1.119–21). The apparently suicidal sentiment here understandably motivates Brian Gibbons’s comment that ‘The analogy with Hamlet seems clear and deliberate,’ but the effect of the comparison underlines the radical devaluation of the fatherly role in Middleton.27 Since Vindice’s father has ‘died / Of discontent, the nobleman’s consumption’ (126–7), the class status of the family appears to be, vaguely, some type of lower-level aristocracy that is now languishing due to its failure to procure further favour from social superiors. The main legacy from his father which Vindice emphasizes is the inheritance of misogynistic attitudes, as he approves of his father’s distrust of his mother – ‘Wives are but made to go to bed and feed’ (132), he says in reference to his parents’ erotic and emotional rapport.
We might attribute the distinction between the father-son bonds in Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy to the different biographies of Middleton and Shakespeare. As Gary Taylor observes, ‘to a five-year-old boy the death of his father is almost always unexpected and unexplainable’; Middleton’s then rather elderly mother, ‘an affluent propertied widow’, made the mistake of marrying a man twenty years her junior and of highly questionable character. The subsequent legal battles in this ‘classic dysfunctional marriage’,28 and the presumed effect on the playwright’s later interpretations of conflict and competition in Jacobean London, are well known from the biographical summaries of Middleton’s life. Even better known is the story of the eldest son William Shakespeare’s presumably close identification with his father John, whose notable social climbing career apparently reached its apex in 1576, with his impressionable son in early adolescence; the reasons for John Shakespeare’s subsequent fall from social grace remain controversial, but are possibly related to his recusant status in the Warwickshire social context. The prosperous playwright’s eventual attainment of a coat of arms for the Shakespeare family in 1596 is often read, unsurprisingly, as a kind of vindication for the thwarted ambitions of his father, who had first sought the honour thirty years earlier. However naïve the clash between the cynical and the sentimental in these two admittedly speculative life histories, their differences may nevertheless represent something significant in the contrasting attitudes of the two playwrights toward paternal authority.
Yet theological distinctions can provide further suggestive reasons for varying attitudes toward idealized fatherhood. Adrian Streete, in his discussion of The Revenger’s Tragedy, considers the following intriguing passage from Calvin’s popular Sermons … on the Epistles of S. Paule to Timothie and Titus (1579):
The name father is so honorable, that it belongeth to none, but to God onely. Yea in respect of our bodies. And therefore, when we say, that they which have begotten vs, according to the flesh, are our fathers, it is an vnproper kind of speech: for no mortall creature deserueth this so high and excellent dignitie: yet so it is, that God of his singular goodnesse aduaunceth men, to this so high a steppe, that he will that they be called fathers: and he doth it to this end and purpose, that they should acknowledge them selues to be so much more bound vnto him.
According to Streete’s reading of this passage, ‘the role of Father is only grudgingly bequeathed to fallen humankind. Because it is only ever a fallen, fleshy and immanent copy of God’s patriarchy, the name of the Father represents, at best, a surrogate title, and at worst, traumatic abandonment’.29 The word ‘traumatic’ indicates a developing pathology, and there is definitely a perverse emphasis in Calvin’s own logic concerning the deity’s honouring men with the name of ‘father’ – that is, a role of authority but also more crucially of loving and dedicated responsibility – only so that they will become more (cripplingly) dependent on Him. Not only is the Calvinist God inimitable, but the earthly fathers he authorizes are so alienated from their own physicality that they encourage, or contribute to, a general deracination of masculinity.
As observed above, Vindice in the opening scene only fleetingly idealizes his father with the adjective ‘worthy’. His primary motive appears to be revenge for the murder of his betrothed, famously objectified in the skull he carries onstage, coupled with sexual nausea directed at the corruption of the court. His cultural critique is memorably underlined in his opening soliloquy, where he functions as a satirical chorus denouncing the members of the Duke’s family as they pass over the stage in torchlight. His special target is the vile nature of the murderer of his betrothed, the Duke as ‘royal lecher’ or allegorized ‘grey haired Adultery’:
Oh that marrowless age
Should stuff the hollow bones with damned desires
And, ’stead of heat, kindle infernal fires
Within the spendthrift veins of a dry duke,
A parched and juiceless luxur! Oh God, one
That has scarce blood enough to live upon,
And he to riot it like a son and heir?
(1.1.5–11)
Brian Gibbons’s annotation to this passage cites the ‘prodigal son’ as ‘a stock type in dramatic satire of city and court at this period’. Unlike the prodigal son of the parable, however, there is no redemptive possibility in this Duke, who as reigning patriarch is oddly described as the junior recipient, not the senior donor of wealth and sustenance, implying the inversion or collapse of social hierarchy, as well as a general infantilization of the characters in the play. Indeed, the image, which might be read as emblematic of the play’s entire action, recurs in fourth act. After Vindice has achieved his revenge upon the Duke, he pursues (now in propria persona) his vendetta upon the son Lussurioso, whom he teases with a 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). The tableau suggests that, in Middleton, the role of father and son does not involve respectful emulation and eventual loving succession through manly inheritance of responsibility, but a hellish form of parasitical consumption by both usuring father, preying upon the financially needy, and the greedy, expectant son, heartlessly and foolishly squandering his inheritance in anticipation. Such hellish composition seems the natural result of a theology which completely denies the desideratum of human integrity.
Even the whore in this tableau appears the inevitable demonized doppelganger of the wife prized and objectified only for her idealized chastity, as the projection of the husband’s own obsession with spiritual purity. What reader does not note the irony that Vindice ultimately forces the remains of his ‘beloved’ Gloriana into the very prostitution with the Duke that she sacrificed her life to avoid? In the opening scene, Vindice laments the ‘ragged imperfections’ of Gloriana’s skull, ironically recalling the ‘hollow bones’ of the Duke himself, and remembers when ‘life and beauty naturally filled out’ the ‘bright face’ (1.1.6–17); but such memory leads directly to the assertion that ‘she was able to ha’ made a usurer’s son / Melt all his patrimony in a kiss’ (26–7), so that even at her best and brightest Gloriana served simply as fuel to male lust and dissipation. In Act 3, Vindice’s famous, and appalling, apostrophe to the skull, now ‘dressed up in tires’ just before the murder of the Duke, seems neatly to displace the blame for sexual corruption onto womankind in general:
And now methinks I could e’en chide myself
For doting on her beauty
[.…]
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?
(3.5.69–87)
Careful readers or spectators will also note that, when the other female corpse appears on stage, the widower Antonio denounces the Duchess’s youngest son for a ‘long lust to eat / Into my wearing’, and for singling out among all the ladies ‘that dear form, who ever lived / As cold in lust as she is now in death’ (1.4.32–5) – not only conflating loving husband and rapist in a radical objectification of women, but underlining a sense of sterility in the society as a whole. Sickness follows sickness here, from an excessive idealization of form that denies, or rather perverts, the reality of human processes grounded in the physical world. That Hippolito wishes to ‘dip’ the ‘fair … monument’ of Antonio’s wife’s corpse ‘in the defacer’s blood’ (67–8) suggests a surprising conflation whereby little ethical difference remains between men who ‘honour’ women and men who defile them. A similar conflation is conveyed obliquely later when Junior, irritated by his incarceration for rape and impatient for his elder brothers to effect his relief, exclaims, ‘Is’t not strange that a man should lie in a whole month for a woman?’ (3.4.15–16), where the careful sequestering of a beloved wife after childbirth is equated with his own apparent ‘inconvenience’ due to lawless and violent desire. Yet disturbingly the behaviour and ethical values of the abhorrent ducal family differ little from the outraged subjects who oppose them.
We should not, perhaps, express surprise at the level of misogyny in this play, when we recall Steven Mullaney’s observation that ‘Revenge tragedy has long been recognized […] for the speed with which it becomes virtually synonymous with stage misogyny’. Yet even Mullaney, in comparing The Revenger’s Tragedy with Hamlet, must admit that Vindice ‘can easily make Hamlet sound like a proto-feminist’,30 and I would like to consider more closely this critic’s crucial analysis of the relation between the two texts. Mullaney is concerned with Hamlet as a play ‘keenly aware of its late Elizabethan status’, and Middleton’s early Jacobean response to it is clearly underlined by the fact that Vindice’s beloved Gloriana carries the sobriquet of ‘Elizabeth’s idealized royal persona’.31 The parallel between Elizabeth and Gertrude which Mullaney assumes suggests that ‘Mourning for a dead king, even revenge, is displaced or at least overlaid and complicated by misogyny toward a queen who is too vital, whose sexuality transgresses both her age and [in Gertrude’s specific case] her brief tenure as a widow’. Thus Hamlet’s melancholy is ‘produced as much by Gertrude’s sexual vitality as by his father’s death’. In response, Hamlet in the graveyard scene – another crucial moment that clearly catalyzed Middleton’s interest – contemplates Yorick’s skull, which ‘prompts not a reflection on human or even male mortality but a triumphant reading and declaration of female mortality: “Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come”.’ Yet how then can we agree that Hamlet presents but a mitigated version of Vindice’s misogyny? Mullaney partly provides a rationale when he observes that ‘Yorick’s tenure in the grave, twenty-three years, dates […] a specific moment in the past, Hamlet’s age when Yorick died, and it is hardly an insignificant number. Seven was not only the canonical age of reason. In the Renaissance, it was also the age of transition from childhood to youth […] the breeching age’. Therefore, like Leontes in the second scene of The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet also ‘recoils exactly twenty-three years to remember an early modern version of a pre-oedipal phase’.32
But if, according to Mullaney, ‘the confrontation with Yorick’s skull produces the one clear instance of successful mourning in the play’,33 then the graveyard scene constitutes, I suggest, a radical difference from Vindice’s perverse obsession with Gloriana’s skull, which has in fact led to an unexplained emotional paralysis of nine years (3.5.122). A distinction between the forms of paralysis in the two revenge plays needs to be drawn. I suggest that in Hamlet the memory of the father’s jester, while a temporary regression, also constitutes a distinct case of reculer pour mieux sauter, and therefore that Yorick serves as a kind of surrogate father for Hamlet at a crucial moment after his return from the aborted voyage to England. Hamlet’s subsequent declaration, ‘I loved Ophelia – forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum’ (5.1.258–60),34 does, in spite of his earlier brutalization of her, suggest at least an attempt to transcend a misogynistic objectification of his beloved. In Act 5, Hamlet is no longer haunted by the contradictorily purgatorial presence of his overly idealized father, as he has begun to achieve a more coherent interiority. His self-construction is grounded neither in the theoretical absence of responsibility postulated by a Calvinist theology of grace, nor – what is in effect the inevitable and fantastical opposite of the psychological binary – in the narcissistic and desperate assumption of ‘Christhood’, of absolute responsibility indirectly encouraged in Protestant doctrine by an unqualified identification with a Heavenly Father through an unmediated relationship with God. A dialectically medial psychological position has been achieved: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will’ (5.2.10–11).
My most controversial claim will therefore involve a challenge to, at least a qualification of, Mullaney’s assumption that ‘the more rigidly hierarchical the system of patriarchy, the more rabid and chronic are its expressions of misogyny’.35 In general, ‘rigid’ patterns of identification certainly produce anxiety and potentially violent reactions, but I suggest that the narcissistic erosion of clear patterns of masculine identification in this historical case accentuates the misogynistic cultural formulations. Mullaney’s identification of Gertrude with Elizabeth I is interesting and compelling, but also directly contradicts the historicized reading of Andrew Hadfield, who instead suggests a parallel between Gertrude and Mary, Queen of Scots: in the face of ‘Hamlet’s aggressive misogyny when he confronts his mother with her complicity in Claudius’s deeds (3.4) […] the audience cannot be sure whether Hamlet is most enraged about her complicity […] or her choice of sexual partners, an ambivalence mirrored in anti-Marian propaganda.’ Thus Hadfield implicitly supports the reading of Howard Erskine-Hill, who argues that the play ‘dramatized the position of King James VI […] the tragically incapacitated inheritor of the unnatural scene into which he had been born’.36 My point here is to suggest that artistic or cultural identification with various monarchs, either female or male, while significant, may not be so historically fundamental to the issues at hand as the inherent ‘effeminization’ or undermining of human agency due to a theology of grace, a process that Shakespeare in a sense attempts to work through artistically and psychologically, but which Middleton, in spite of his satirical brilliance, effectively reifies.
Such reification in Middleton, as we have seen, takes on an unusual intensity of parasitical consumption and predatory competition between infantilized men. This process is undoubtedly highlighted and assisted by the corrupt women of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Gratiana, for example, easily agrees to prostitute her daughter to Lussurioso, proving her own lack of human integrity and belying the sanctity of her morality name. When her husband fails to immediately dismiss the rape charge against her youngest son, the Duchess bitterly observes, ‘an old man’s twice a child’, and, surprised at her own ‘mildness’, imagines, ‘Some now would plot his death / With easy doctors, those loose living men, / And make his withered grace fall to his grave / And keep church better’ (1.2.93–100). For her, the only valid agency is thus rank perversion of justice, the only valid ‘church’ a depository for such failed agency. This corruption of humanist agency is virtually celebrated in Vindice’s final, self-parodic anagnorisis: ‘’Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes. / When murd’rers shut deeds close, this curse does seal ’em: / If none disclose ’em they themselves reveal ’em’ (5.3.108–11). Black comedy or tragic farce? It is the simultaneity of the comedy and tragedy that, as noted at the outset, emphasizes the moral problem in Middleton.
In fact, the inevitable pattern of parasitical consumption and predation varies little between his tragedies and his comedies. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, for example, offers the memorable image of the ‘wittol’ or willing cuckold Allwit, who happily celebrates his ‘founder’ Sir Walter Whorehound as one who has ‘maintained my house this ten years, / Not only keeps my wife, but a keeps me / And all my family. I am at his table; / He gets me all my children, and pays the nurse’ (1.2.16–19).37 But of course Whorehound is just another kind of parasite, who borrows heavily on the expectation of an inheritance that slips through his fingers in the end due to the surreptitiously adulterous conception of Lady Kix at the hands of her ‘physician’ Touchwood Senior, whose sexual virility does not guarantee his manliness but threatens to ruin him (it doesn’t help that he, like Whorehound, is chronically addicted to adulterous liaisons). The situation is undoubtedly hilarious, but the denouement perhaps less so. Whorehound’s pursuit of the generous dowry of Moll, daughter of the prosperous goldsmith Yellowhammer – ‘I shall receive two thousand pound in gold / And a sweet maidenhead worth forty’ (4.4.54–5) – brings him in competition with the protagonist Touchwood Junior, whose motives are only arguably, or parodically, more romantic. The resulting violent altercation leaves Whorehound seriously wounded, and the news of Lady Kix’s pregnancy encourages the Allwits to heartlessly abandon their ‘founder.’
Yet the downfall of Whorehound contributes to the play’s most interesting ideological effect. He abruptly becomes more psychologically realistic than the other characters and demonstrates an interiority that challenges the conventions of comedy:
Let me for ever hide my cursed face
From sight of those that darkens all my hopes,
And stands between me and the sight of heaven!
His subsequent moral struggle is strongly reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Claudius:
O, how my offences wrestle with my repentance!
It hath scarce breath;
Still my adulterous guilt hovers aloft,
And with her black wings beats down all my prayers
Ere they be halfway up.
(5.1.68–77)
It may be that the comic form of the play forces us to read this as a parody of repentance, but I have lingered over this textual moment because it seems to develop a technique evident even in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the composition of which predates Chaste Maid by about a half-dozen years.38 There the despicable Duke, debating whether to forgive his son for apparent, if mistaken, treason and attempted patricide, pauses to observe:
It well becomes that judge to nod at crimes
That does commit greater himself and lives.
I may forgive a disobedient error
That expect pardon for adultery,
And in my old days am a youth in lust.
Many a beauty have I turned to poison
In the denial, covetous of all.
(2.3.122–8)
While perhaps not demonstrating the same complexity as Whorehound’s repentance, this speech conveys the similar odd effect of attributing to the play’s antagonist or villain a greater sense of conscience, and a deeper interiority, than the protagonists or heroes with whom we are apparently invited to identify. Although an admission of crimes might be considered typical of the morality tradition, in that tradition such heartfelt language is more typically assigned to the protagonists; in Middleton the rhetoric of Whorehound and the Duke, both despised and distanced from audience sympathy, indicate an apparently incongruous depth of soul-searching (and therefore of soul) absent in the other characters – as if the only possible human depth is the depth of corruption.39
In fact the morally and artistically constrained resolutions of four of Middleton’s most well-known plays seem to evidence a similar problem: the coffin trick and mock resurrections at the end of Chaste Maid, which carry the parody of romantic conventions to an uncomfortable, potentially profane, extreme; the notorious concluding masque of Women Beware Women, sometimes read as artistically incompetent, inadvertently or perhaps rather intentionally comic (as a parody of tragedy); the complex masquing that almost farcically resolves the action of The Revenger’s Tragedy, where the tone of black comedy seems perhaps more consistent, both with the preceding action and the gleeful final self-erasure of the tragic protagonist; the pat moralizing by the unbearably self-righteous Alsemero at the conclusion of The Changeling, which leads to debates concerning possible differences of reception between early modern and postmodern audiences. All these issues may be related to what Anthony Dawson, in a highly compelling treatment of feminist political implications in Women Beware Women, identifies as a ‘double commitment’ to ‘two coherent and independent modes of thinking and dramatizing which come into overt conflict’.40 Middleton’s increasing artistic stature in a postmodern age arises in part from how his now archaic theological determinism fuels a vision of social determinism, which chimes with present cultural attitudes. It is in fact not really a new critical observation to suggest that ‘Middleton’s life and art both suggest one who responded to rather than created circumstances, who was pessimistic about his ability to shape events, and painfully conscious of the limitations placed on human freedom by social and economic conditions’.41 But the aporia between the two modes identified by Dawson – the traditional ‘Christian’ morality and the Marxist or materialist determinism – still represents, or at least resembles, a significant ideological impasse of our own. At the beginning of this discussion I hedged my critical bets by asserting that Middleton, like Marlowe, was arguably strongly reacting against Calvinist doctrine. Perhaps through a ‘presentist’ urge, this is what I wanted to discover, what I repeatedly perceive in Marlowe and Shakespeare: a sustained and persistent interrogation of a religious ideology that strangles or distorts constructive psychological and social development. I do not therefore wish to deprecate the current revival of interest in Middleton, who remains unrivalled as a satirist and creator of an astonishing form of black humour. But his inability or unwillingness to challenge an ideological commitment to Calvinism might clarify why earlier critics, before the present celebratory rediscovery of his cultural significance, distanced Middleton from the line of more humane English dramatists, from Marlowe to Shakespeare and then on to Jonson. That people can become (in the broadest sense) morally or spiritually alive without denying their productive humanity is an idea, even intimation, I find nowhere in Middleton’s art.
Middleton’s nightmarishly satirical morality types in The Revenger’s Tragedy, which explode the possibility of providential interpretation, ironically have their roots in the anti-humanist element of Reformation theology which denies integrity or viable agency to any subjectivity not grounded, through typological thinking, in a direct identification with, or in direct relation to, Christ. While we would be astonished to discover Marlowe or Shakespeare as author of a work like The Two Gates of Salvation, Middleton’s authorship comes as really no surprise at all. As Thomas Luxon reminds us, ‘Even in his Christology Calvin emphasizes the distinction between, rather than the combination of, the divine and the human. […] The divine may manifest itself in the human […] but the two remain as distinct as sign and thing signified. In this world there is no fulfillment, only signs and shadows’.42 There is a direct ideological relation between this lack of ‘fulfillment’ and the lack of interiority in Middleton’s characters, both female and male, in ways that could be further explored in scholarship on his plays and his other forms of writing. From the perspective of a humanist reader who finds both doctrinal orthodoxy and a purely materialist worldview problematic as a constructive guide to human experience, Middleton’s corpus constitutes an often highly amusing but nevertheless cautionary kind of tale, since the dark logic of Calvinism lies at the heart of the disturbing paradox that a playwright apparently devoted to or at least obsessed by a spiritual belief system focuses so emphatically and bleakly on humankind’s material conditions.
1Jonathan Dollimore, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy (c. 1606): Providence, Parody, and Black Camp’, in Radical Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 139–50, 139.
2Gary Taylor, ‘Live and Afterlives’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 58.
3Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), 72.
4Colin Burrow assumes, in the course of his review of Greenblatt’s Will in the World, that the document discovered in the roof space of John Shakespeare’s house in Henley Street in 1757 is ‘too good to be true’; nevertheless, I am in full agreement with Patrick Collinson’s response to this assumption: ‘Sammy Schoenbaum, who provided most of the facts, had his own reservations as to the value of the Borromeo text as evidence of John Shakespeare’s Catholicism. I am not so cautious’ (London Review of Books 27.3 [3 February 2005]).
5S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 110.
6G.K. Hunter, ‘The Beginnings of Elizabethan Drama: Revolution and Continuity’, Renaissance Drama, n.s., 17 (1986): 29–52, 39.
7G.M. Pinciss, ‘Marlowe’s Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus’, SEL 33 (1993): 249–64, 252.
8Gary Taylor, ‘Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton’, ELR 24 (1994): 283–314, 289.
9Dena Goldberg, Between Worlds: A Study of the Plays of John Webster (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1987), 107; Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 182, 207.
10Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
11As I argue in ‘The Puritan Dialectic of Law and Grace in Bartholomew Fair’, SEL 46 (2006): 415–33.
12Alexandra Shepard, ‘From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 281–95, 287.
13Tanya Pollard, ‘Tragedy and Revenge’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, eds Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 59–60.
14I have made some attempt to trace Shakespeare’s artistic response to this theological challenge in the central chapters of Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern Drama (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009).
15See the commentary to 1.11.26 in Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), 148.
16Paul Mulholland, ‘The Two Gates of Salvation: Typology, and Thomas Middleton’s Bibles’, English Language Notes 15 (1985): 27–36, 27, 28; quoting The Two Gates of Salvation, sigs. B2r–B2v.
17John Stachniewski, ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’, in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1990), 228.
18Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 246.
19G.K. Hunter’s exploration of self-justification in Tamburlaine, considered above, is consistent with this subversive aspect of the dramatic texts, in spite of the Lutheran rather than Calvinist emphasis of that argument. See Streete, Protestantism and Drama, 203–10, for a helpful introduction to the sometimes vexed distinctions between the relative political radicalness of Lutheranism and Calvinism in early modern Europe.
20Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 146.
21Heather Hirschfeld, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy: Original Sin and the allures of vengeance’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, 201, 203, 208.
22Ibid., 206.
23Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 66.
24Taylor, ‘Forms of Opposition’, 310.
25Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12–13, 205, 207.
26Taylor, ‘Forms of Opposition’, 311.
27Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: A&C Black, 1991).
28Taylor, ‘Lives and Afterlives’, 30–1.
29Streete, Protestantism and Drama, 213.
30Steven Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 139–62, 144, 159.
31Ibid., 149, 160.
32Ibid., 149, 153, 154, 155–6.
33Ibid., 156.
34William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006).
35Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny’, 157.
36Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 202, 198; quoting Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 107.
37A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, ed. Linda Woodbridge, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 907–58.
38Whorehound’s repentance, parodic or otherwise, is also anticipated by the sudden qualms of conscience expressed by the adulterous Penitent Brothel in A Mad World, My Masters, another moral ‘crisis’ which in this early play does – though in a deeply ironic fashion – have a limited effect on the social corruption at large.
39This feature in Middleton differs from the oft-noted depth of, and uneasy sympathy for, supporting roles in Shakespearean comedy and tragedy (for example, Shylock, Malvolio, Claudius, Edmund). In these instances, such characters are hardly unique in their complexity, and the dialectical interaction between characters at least offers the possibility of moral and psychological growth, even when tragically occluded.
40Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape’, SEL 27 (1987): 303–20, 315.
41David L. Frost, Introduction to The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), ix.
42Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4.