6 ‘’Cause I love swearing’: Strong Language, Revenge and the Body in The Revenger’s Tragedy

6 ‘’Cause I love swearing’:

Strong Language, Revenge and the Body in The Revenger’s Tragedy

Lucy Munro

In the third scene of The Revenger’s Tragedy, the disguised Vindice agrees to procure his own sister, Castiza, for the Duke’s son and heir, Lussurioso. Lussurioso tells Vindice, ‘Come, I’ll furnish thee. But first / Swear to be true in all’ and the dialogue briefly pivots on the question of whether Vindice will swear this oath that he apparently cannot keep:

VINDICE True.

LUSSURIOSO Nay, but swear.

VINDICE

Swear? I hope your honour little doubts my faith.

LUSSURIOSO

Yet for my humour’s sake, ’cause I love swearing.

VINDICE

’Cause you love swearing, ’slud, I will.

LUSSURIOSO Why, enough.

(1.3.161–5)

Punning on the two senses of the word ‘swear’ – to make a promise, and to utter a profanity – Lussurioso appears to downplay the seriousness of the undertaking he requires of Vindice. Vindice’s reply, in turn, acknowledges the pun and in some sense enacts it, conflating the act of making a binding promise with the blasphemous oath ‘’slud’, a contraction of ‘by God’s blood’ – that is, the blood shed by Christ on the cross.¹ To swear ‘by God’s blood’ was to seal a promise with the most powerful of guarantees, yet Vindice’s oath of loyalty to Lussurioso is a promise to whore his own sister. Vindice is well aware of this tension, making a new oath shortly after Lussurioso exits: ‘Swear me to foul my sister! / Sword, I durst make a promise of him to thee: / Thou shalt disheir him; it shall be thine honour’ (172–4). To pursue his promise to his dead fiancée Gloriana to murder the Duke, Vindice swears an oath that requires him to attack the very structures of his own family. He then caps this oath with a new promise of violent retribution, initiating in the process the secondary revenge action against Lussurioso that propels the later scenes of the play.

Incorporating as it does a visual, linguistic and theatrical echo of Shakespeare’s Hamlet – like Vindice, Hamlet swears on his sword and uses the oath ‘’sblood’ – this moment suggests not only the crucial role that swearing plays in The Revenger’s Tragedy, but also its place at the heart of early modern revenge tragedy more broadly. Its centrality to the genre’s narrative and ethical structures is underlined when characters use profane oaths such as ‘’slud’. In a genre that abounds in excessive and transgressive language, swearing is not only a point of ethical and religious tension, but also a theatrical opportunity, an opportunity that The Revenger’s Tragedy exploits. This essay therefore seeks to fill a lacuna in the recent scholarship on swearing in early modern culture at large and The Revenger’s Tragedy in particular.2 It draws on the important work of Frances A. Shirley on swearing in Shakespeare’s plays to argue that we should take seriously not only the promissory function of oaths in The Revenger’s Tragedy, but also the theological and emotional force of profane swearing itself.3

The violent revenge action of The Revenger’s Tragedy is embedded within a linguistic framework that itself links the fragmentation of the body with questions of salvation and damnation. Swearing thus has the power to connect tragedy’s language with its ethical and theatrical strategies, a function that Middleton exploits in crucial scenes such as those surrounding the execution of Junior and the murder of the Duke. The bodily associations of the strongest oaths mean that swearing carries with it an implicit commentary on violence, attacks on the integrity of the human body and dismemberment, themselves prominent features of revenge tragedy as it was developing in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. On another level, moreover, swearing reinforces the play’s Calvinist structures.⁴ Characters such as Lussurioso, Spurio, Supervacuo, Ambitioso and Junior use the strongest oaths in the play and are also some of its most morally compromised figures. Jacobean audiences may have been justified in seeing these characters’ swearing as an indication that they were reprobates, individuals who according to Calvinist theology were damned to spend eternity in hell before they were even born, in contrast with the elect who were predestined to heaven. However, given that Vindice and Hippolito both use these oaths, swearing also enables Middleton to articulate the ambivalent response to extra-judicial vengeance that was becoming characteristic of revenge tragedy. Written at the very moment at which contemporary tensions about profane swearing were coming to a head, The Revenger’s Tragedy makes a strong case for swearing’s aesthetic, dramatic, theological and ethical utility on the playhouse stage.

Swearing in early modern culture

The moment at which Lussurioso declares that he loves swearing and Vindice agrees to swear with the words ‘’slud I will’ encapsulates some of the problems that attended swearing in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. As the Calvinist divine William Perkins summarized it, an oath ‘is either assertorie or promissorie. Assertorie, by which a man auoucheth that a thing was done or not done; Promisserie, by which a man promiseth to doe a thing or not to doe it’.5 At its most basic, an oath might be nothing more complex than the statement ‘I will’, but it attracted various forms of reinforcement and validation. Blasphemous oaths such as ‘’slud’ had their origin in medieval systems of swearing, in which the assertion or promise might be reinforced by a reference to the body of the crucified Christ, the Virgin Mary or the Mass itself.⁶ The drunken Miller in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for example, swears ‘By armes, and by blood and bones’ that he can tell a better tale than the Knight’s, while the narrator in The Book of the Duchess swears ‘by the masse’.7 The Reformation had long-lasting effects on the ways in which English men and women swore. By the late sixteenth century, oaths such as ‘Marry’ (a contraction of ‘by the Virgin Mary’), ‘Mass’ and ‘by the Mass’ had become associated with older generations and Catholicism; as Gillian Woods notes, ‘by the Mass’ had ‘an obvious Catholic heritage’ and for many Protestant thinkers ‘swearing by the idolatrous mass [was] idolatry doubled’.8 The associations between these oaths and Catholic doctrine thus meant that they could simultaneously be dismissed as outmoded and prohibited as idolatry. In contrast, oaths focusing on the body of Christ retained their currency and old force, even when they began to appear in contracted or ‘minced’ forms in the later sixteenth century. In fact, monosyllabic oaths such as ‘’slud’ or ‘’sblood’, ‘’sfoot’ (‘by God’s foot’), ‘’swounds’ (‘by God’s wounds’), ‘’slid’ (‘by God’s eyelid’) and ‘’sheart’ or ‘heart’ (‘by God’s heart’) seem to have proliferated, perhaps because they were both satisfying to say and easily adapted to serve as spontaneous expressions of surprise or anger, becoming detached in the process from their original function but retaining some of their transgressive power.

In theory, to swear an oath was to make a terrible, binding promise. In practice, oaths were often used carelessly or unconsciously – all too often, as far as many commentators were concerned.⁹ Stories about swearers who took their oaths too lightly appear regularly in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts: William Perkins’s A Direction for the Government of the Tongue According to God’s Word (1593), for example, presents the story of ‘a serving man in Lincolnshire’,

who had still in his mouth an use to sweare, Gods pretious blood, and that for very trifles: being often warned by his friendes to leave the taking of the Lords blood in vaine, did notwithstanding still persist in his wickednesse, untill at the last it pleased God to acite him first with sicknesse, and then with death: during which time of the Lordes visitation, no perswasion could moue him to repent his foresaid blaspheming, but hearing the bell to towle, did most hardly in the verie anguish of his death, start up in his bed, and sware by Gods blood this bell towled for me. Whereupon immediatly the blood abundantly from all the joynts of his body, as it were in streames, did issue out most fearfully from mouth, nose, wrestes, knees, heeles, and toes, with all other joyntes, not one left free, and so dyed.10

The power of the anecdote derives from the equation that it makes between the sin and its divine punishment, between words and their physical counterparts: the serving-man swears ‘by Gods blood’ and is ‘immediately’ drained of his own blood. This story was not original to Perkins’s book: it appears, as he acknowledges, in a 1581 book by Philip Stubbes, and it reappeared regularly for over a century as part of a set of cautionary tales about swearing and cursing.11 It features a man of comparatively low status, but swearing was associated as much, if not more, with men of high status, or aspiring to high status, and occasionally with women too.12 It also serves a didactic function that is reinforced by Perkins’s comment, ‘These and such like judgements must be as warnings from heauen to admonish us, and to make us afraid of the abuse of the Tongue: especially when it tendeth to the dishonour of God’.¹³ As I will explore in further detail below in relation to The Revenger’s Tragedy itself, one of the reasons to fear and avoid oaths was the connection that Calvinist divines such as Perkins and Arthur Dent made between swearing and damnation.¹⁴

The unfortunate serving-man uses a strong oath, ‘by God’s blood’, but many commentators held that there was no such thing as a mild oath. Perkins, for example, attacks the belief that ‘a man may lawfully sweare when hee speakes nothing but the truth: & sweares by nothing but that which is good, as by his faith or troth’ or ‘a man may sweare by the Masse, because it is nothing now: and byr Ladie, because she is gone out of the country’.¹⁵ Similarly, Dent argues that even euphemistic oaths such as ‘by Cock, or Pie, or Mouse-foote’ are prohibited because ‘to sweare by creatures, is to forsake God’.¹⁶ Nonetheless, some of the strongest opprobrium was reserved for oaths that invoked God directly, and especially those that were sworn on the fragmented body of the crucified Christ. John Downame is typical in his comment that ‘Some sweare by the creatures, some by the Saints, Masse and Rhoode, some by the dreadfull name of God; but most of all blaspheme our Sauiour Christ himselfe, pulling his soule from his bodie, and tearing peecemeale his precious members one from another, diuersifying their oathes according to the diuers parts of his sacred bodie’.17 The image of the blasphemous swearer tearing at the body of Christ exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. Mincing or contracting the oath did not necessarily improve matters: another preacher, Walter Powell, attacks those who mince their oaths ‘as if God could not espy them, when as men may; as, by Dickins, Maskins, s’lid, burlady, s’foot, by my fay, by St Tan, yea Mary, by yea and by nay’.18 Moreover, the monosyllabic oath appears to have gained a force of its own, as I explore in further detail below.

Swearing was a part of oral culture that is not generally recorded in printed texts; plays are an exception because they so often seek to represent colloquial speech and the extremes of linguistic expression. Furthermore, swearing and the playhouses were closely associated in the popular imagination. Philip Stubbes, who may have brought the story of the Lincolnshire serving-man to broader public attention, also attacked the theatre, listing swearing among the (many) bad habits that one could learn there: ‘if you will learn to playe the vice, to swear, teare, and blasp[h]eme, both Heauen and Earth’, he tells his readers, ‘if you will learne to comtemne GOD and al his lawes, to care neither for heauen nor hel, and to commit al kinde of sinne and mischéef you néed to goe to no other schoole, for all these good Examples, may you sée painted before your eyes in enterludes and playes’.19 Stubbes associates swearing with the personified Vices that stalked the stage of the 1560s and 1570s and were its main proponents of swearing; their use of residually Catholic oaths such as ‘Marry’ and ‘by the Mass’ underlined their status as a threat to Protestant doctrine. In the following decades, even as plays began to move away from the purely allegorical structures of the Tudor morality play, oaths stuck in the mouths of the descendants of the Vice: Richard of Gloucester in Richard III; Aaron in Titus Andronicus; Iago in Othello. However, theatrical swearing also bled out from the Vices and the prodigal young men that they ensnared, moving into the dialogue of a greater range of characters.

By the early seventeenth century, swearing in the playhouse had become a matter of pressing concern. As Brian Cummings suggests, one of the problems with theatrical swearing was that it was mimetic: in performing the role of a character who uttered profane oaths, actors were required to swear, and playgoers had to listen to their profanities.20 The authorities decided to take action, and on 27 May 1606 Parliament approved An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players:

For the preuenting and auoyding of the great abuse of the holy Name of God in Stage-playes, Interludes, Maygames, Shewes, and such like, Bee it enacted by our Soueraigne Lord the Kings Maiestie, and by the Lords Spirituall and Temporall, and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by the Authoritie of the same, That if at any time or times, after the end of this present Session of Parliament, any person or persons, doe or shall in any Stage-play, Interlude, Shewe, Maygame, or Pageant, iestingly or prophanely speake or vse the holy Name of God, or of Christ Jesus, or of the holy Ghost, or of the Trinitie, which are not to bee spoken but with feare and reuerence, [such person or persons] Shall forfeit for euery such offence by him or them committed tenne Pounds; The one moytie thereof to the Kings Maiestie, his Heires and Successors, The other moytie thereof to him or them that will sue for the same in any Courte of Record at Westminster, wherein no Essoign, Protection or Wager of Law shall be allowed.21

As Gary Taylor has explored in detail, the Act had a marked effect on the ways in which plays were written and performed, even if successive Masters of the Revels had different ideas about what constituted swearing.22 Legislation against swearing in society at large did not follow until 1624, so the stage was a particularly early test-case in a larger attempt to purify England’s spoken language.²³

Swearing in The Revenger’s Tragedy

Emerging from the same cultural moment as the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, The Revenger’s Tragedy is alert to the transgressive potential of swearing and its capacity to speak to broader aesthetic, narrative and ethical structures.²⁴ Its distribution of oaths largely mirrors that of early modern drama in general. The most prolific swearers are the young men: Vindice, Hippolito, Spurio, Lussurioso, Supervacuo, Ambitioso and Junior, all of whom use strong, bodily oaths such as ‘heart’, ‘’slud’ or ‘’sblood’, and ‘’sfoot’. Vindice and Lussurioso also use ‘Mass’ and ‘by the Mass’, and Lussurioso says ‘By this light’ when he agrees with Gratiana’s statement, reported by Vindice, ‘Women with women can work best alone’ (2.2.62). The Fourth Noble says ‘’Sblood’ and ‘Heart’ when he is accused of murder in the final scene, suggesting that he should be cast as a young man. Spurio, Vindice and Gratiana all use ‘Marry’; Vindice apparently copies his mother’s oath in Act 2, Scene 1, when he comes to her in disguise (2.1.67–8), but he also uses it in later scenes (e.g. 2.2.72, 4.2.85, 5.1.74). The milder oaths, ‘faith’ and ‘troth’, are used by Gratiana, Castiza and the Duchess as well as the young men; the Duchess also swears ‘by yonder waxen fire’ (3.5.210). The older men swear rarely, if at all: Antonio uses ‘faith’ when he tells Piero that the judgement against Junior ‘cools and is deferred’ (1.4.51), but the Duke does not swear. A handful of characters – Vindice, Gratiana and Lussurioso – say ‘O God’ or ‘O Heavens’, exclamations that were also to be banned under the 1606 Act.

Some of the oaths in The Revenger’s Tragedy have the promissory function that swearing traditionally carried. As we have seen, Vindice’s declaration to Lussurioso, ‘’slud, I will’, is part of a set of promises that Vindice makes and breaks in the pursuit of his revenge. In a similar fashion, profane oaths are intertwined with the play’s broader structures of revenge. For instance, just before the murder of the Duke, Hippolito asks Vindice, ‘Prithee, tell me, / Why may not I partake with you? You vowed once / To give me share to every tragic thought’, and Vindice replies, ‘By th’ mass, I think I did too. / Then I’ll divide it to thee’ (3.5.5–9). Here, the oath recalls and underlines the promise of revenge that Vindice made to Gloriana, and his subsequent vow to share his plans with Hippolito.

However, the early seventeenth-century oath might in some contexts lose both of the promissory and assertory functions described by Perkins, becoming in the process difficult to distinguish from expressions such as ‘push’ and ‘puh’ that appear frequently in Middleton’s plays, exclamations of distain, anger, impatience or disgust that often had the same syntactic and expressive function as a monosyllabic, minced oath. Some oaths in The Revenger’s Tragedy are used merely for emphasis or to express emotion. Vindice, Hippolito, Lussurioso and Spurio routinely utter oaths such as ‘Mass’, ‘heart’ and ‘’sfoot’ when they are surprised by the arrival of other characters or become aware of their presence. Oaths are also used to express other forms of shock or surprise. In Act 2, Scene 3, the Duke momentarily frustrates Supervacuo and Ambitioso’s plot against their stepbrother by declaring that he will have Lussurioso released from prison:

DUKE

I know ’twas but some peevish moon in him.

Go, let him be released.

SUPERVACUO [aside] ’Sfoot, how now, brother?

AMBITIOSO

Your grace doth please to speak beside your spleen.

I would it were so happy.

DUKE Why, go release him.

SUPERVACUO

O, my good lord, I know the fault’s too weighty

And full of general loathing, too inhuman,

Rather by all men’s voices worthy death.

(2.3.90–6)

Supervacuo’s oath is an empty expression of rage rather than a promise – implicit or explicit – to commit to a course of action or an assertion of the truth of a situation; it is a momentary articulation of his true emotional state, which Ambitioso apparently ignores when he cuts across him by speaking directly to the Duke. Supervacuo apparently then gathers himself together and joins Ambitioso’s offensive.

While Supervacuo’s use of ‘’sfoot’ signals anger and shock, Junior uses a similarly strong oath merely for emphasis. The moment at which he receives Supervacuo and Ambitioso’s letter features some self-aware play on the nature of oaths:

Nothing but paper comforts?

I looked for my delivery before this,

Had they been worth their oaths. Prithee, be from us.

[Exit Keeper]

Now, what say you, forsooth? Speak out, I pray.

[He reads the] letter

‘Brother be of good cheer.’ – ’Slud, it begins like a whore, with good cheer.

(3.4.4–9)

We have seen enough of Ambitioso and Supervacuo to sense that their oaths – in the sense of promises – are given lightly, and that their speech is larded with profanity. Junior is therefore right to question both whether they will keep their promises and whether they will live up to their highly-charged language. His own use of oaths in this speech charts his response to the letter, as he moves from the very mild oath ‘forsooth’, often associated with women and children in the early modern period, to the much stronger oath, ‘’slud’, which underlines his derision for its anodyne opening. Simultaneously, Junior’s casual use of violent language – and, in particular, his use of ‘’slud’ – recalls the act of sexual violence for which he is imprisoned, and which he attempted to excuse by claiming that he was prompted ‘by flesh and blood’ and that the rape of Antonio’s wife was only ‘sport’ (1.2.47, 65). Middleton insistently links profanity with bodily and sexual violence, assisted by the multiple meanings and associations of words such as ‘’sblood’, ‘’slid’ and ‘’sheart’; he inscribes revenge tragedy’s abjection of the body onto the linguistic structures of his play.

Supervacuo and Ambitioso are especially prone to use language as a form of emotional release – we might also look to their response to Junior’s death and Lussurioso’s ‘resurrection’ in Act 3, Scene 6, where their exclamations fall into a call-and-response pattern across the verse line:

AMBITIOSO

O death and vengeance!

SUPERVACUO Hell and torments!

[…]

AMBITIOSO O furies!

SUPERVACUO Plagues!

AMBITIOSO Confusions!

SUPERVACUO Darkness!

AMBITIOSO Devils!

(65, 75)

The brothers’ blasphemous oaths thus form part of their general tendency to use language in emotional and uncontrolled ways, in contrast with the more calculated uses of language that Lussurioso, Hippolito and, especially, Vindice employ. It is noticeable, for instance, that while Vindice swears throughout the play, he occasionally modulates his oaths to fit his deceptions. In Act 4, Scene 2, when he plays out the role of the rustic malcontent for Lussurioso’s benefit, he uses ‘i’faith la’ (79). Both ‘i’faith’ and ‘la’ were often associated with unsophisticated speech, and the oath is of a piece with his greeting ‘God you god den’, of which Lussurioso comments, ‘How strangely such a coarse, homely salute / Shows in the palace […] Should we name God / In a salutation ’twould ne’er be stood on – heaven!’ (44–6, 47–8). Both greeting and oath are part of a linguistic impersonation, a mark of Vindice’s ability to deceive and manipulate the characters around him.

Salvation and damnation

Despite the emotional force that swearing could invoke, there is something habitual and unconscious about the ways in which oaths are used in The Revenger’s Tragedy, and characters’ offhand profanities may underline their place within Calvinist frameworks of belief. In Arthur Dent’s hugely popular dialogue The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, which boasted on its title-page that it provided the means ‘Wherein euery man may clearely see, whether he shall be saued or damned’, oaths are a sign that the speaker was a reprobate. Philagathus, ‘an honest man’, suggests to the divine, Theologus, that they ‘proceed to speake of the fift signe of condemnation, which is swearing’, and Theologus replies, ‘It may wel indeed be called a signe of condemnation: for I thinke it more then a signe. It is indeed an euident demonsration of a reprobate: for I neuer wist any man truly fearing God in his hart, that was a vsual and a common swearer’.25 In an influential essay on ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’, John Stachneiwski notes that ‘Interest in the logic of an inner, unknown self was mobilised by the Calvinist determination to read polarised endings, in heaven or hell, back through entire lives which might not always exhibit extreme differences’.²⁶ In this context, swearing might be a marker of the reprobate status of a speaker whose life was otherwise without reproach, and the stronger the oath, the more violent was God’s response likely to be. Although Theologus condemns all forms of swearing other than the oaths sworn before magistrates and other forms of authority, he reserves a special condemnation for oaths involving the body of Christ, a subject that Antilegon, ‘a notable Atheist, and cauiller against all goodnesse’ (B1v), raises with him:

ANTIL.

What say you then, to them, that sweare wounds and bloud, and such like, in a brauery, thinking that it setteth out their speech very well?

THEOL.

Hell gapeth for them. And they shall know one day what it is to blaspheme God.

ANTIL.

What may wee thinke of such as sweare by Gods life, Gods soule, Gods body, Gods heart?

THEOL.

That their case is most wofull and dangerous: and I quake at the naming of them. They are most horrible, monstrous and outragious blasphemies, enough to make the stones in the streete to cracke, and the cloudes to fall vpon our heads. And we may thinke that all the diuels in hell are in a readinesse to carie such blasphemous villains headlong into that lake which burneth with fire and brimstone for euer.

(L8r)

These oaths are not merely the sign of an individual’s future damnation; they also potentially have the capacity to bring immediate judgement upon the speaker, just as the serving-man in Perkins and Stubbes’s anecdote is drained of his blood at the moment at which he says ‘by God’s blood’.

The underlying back note of blasphemous oaths such as ‘Mass’, ‘’slud’, ‘’sfoot’ and ‘heart’ in The Revenger’s Tragedy thus provides a constant reminder of the extent to which characters may already be damned, regardless of their specific actions. It is noticeable that one of the characters who does not swear, the Duke, is already aware of the fate to which his sins have consigned him, commenting ‘Age hot is like a monster to be seen; / My hairs are white and yet my sins are green’ (2.3.129–30). The Duke’s failure to swear is both generationally and morally appropriate – unlike the play’s younger men, he labours under no misconceptions about the state of his soul. Although his essay focuses on The Changeling, Stachneiwski also offers some suggestive comments on The Revenger’s Tragedy, drawing attention to Vindice’s resonant statement, ‘I think man’s happiest when he forgets himself’ (4.4.85) and to the connections between the play’s language of ‘flesh’ and ‘blood’ and its Calvinism.27 ‘Predestination to damnation’, he writes, ‘unfolds through the constraint “the flesh” places on men to sin’.²⁸ Junior’s justification of his rape of Antonio’s wife as the prompting of his ‘flesh and blood’ (1.2.47) has particular resonance within this theological framework, while Lussurioso’s declaration that ‘It is our blood to err, though hell gaped loud’ (1.3.74) has a similar force. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus sustains a linguistic structure in which oaths sworn on the fragmented body of the crucified Christ intermingle with a broader discourse of flesh and blood, itself emanating from Calvinist theology. Moreover, the fragmentation of Christ’s body in an oath finds a yet more blasphemous echo in the theatrical representation of violence in the play’s action, in which characters’ own bodies are liable to fragmentation and destruction, aided by technologies of stage blood and prosthetic body parts.

The violence of swearing was a regular feature of anti-swearing tracts in both the late medieval and early modern periods. In Stephen Hawes’s The Conversion of Swearers (1509), Christ begs the swearer to ‘Tere me nowe no more / My woundes are sore’, and – as Sandy Bardsley describes – the image of swearers dismembering Christ also appears in fifteenth-century wall paintings.29 One of Middleton’s contemporaries, Abraham Gibson, expounds on this theme in a 1613 sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, reproving the use of

impious and fearefull Oaths, which (me thinketh) I am afraid to mention, blasphemous, horrible, terrible, by the parts or adiuncts of Christ, as by his life, death, passion, flesh, heart, wounds, blood, bones, armes, sides, guts, nailes, foote, with many hundred more, which a gracious heart cannot but melt to heare, tremble to speake, quake to thinke, and yet (good Lord) how common are they in the mouthes of the prophane sonnes of Beliall, whereby they peirce the sides, wound the heart, teare the soule, and rend in pieces the body of our blessed Sauiour; worse then Iudas, who betraied him to be crucified for mony: these crucifie him themselues meerely vpon vanitie: worse then the Souldiers, that diuided his garments; these diuide his person, his natures, his members: worse then the Iewes, who cryed to Pilate, Crucifie him: these instead of Crosse & Nailes, do between their owne teeth grinde him, and teare him.30

Gibson uses the expansive structures of the early seventeenth-century sentence to intensify the emotional power of his description of Christ’s pain, invoking bodily responses (melting, trembling, quaking) that culminate in the grotesque image of the swearer tearing at Christ with his own teeth. Thus, profane swearers not only put their own souls at risk, but also re-enacted the crucifixion itself, tearing Christ’s body repeatedly through their careless or vicious language, which becomes almost a form of cannibalism.

Execution and murder

The impact of such thinking in The Revenger’s Tragedy is registered especially strongly in the central scenes of the play that deal with the execution of Junior and the murder of the Duke. Apparently betrayed by Supervacuo and Ambitioso, Junior begs the Officers, ‘Since I must / Through brothers’ perjury die, O let me venom / Their souls with curses’ (3.4.74–6). Two scenes later, an Officer brings his ‘bleeding head’ to Supervacuo and Ambitioso, who initially believe it to be that of Lussurioso. The Officer then describes his death:

SUPERVACUO

How died he, pray?

OFFICER O, full of rage and spleen.

SUPERVACUO

He died most valiantly, then. We’re glad

To hear it.

OFFICER

We could not woo him once to pray.

AMBITIOSO

He showed himself a gentleman in that,

Give him his due.

OFFICER But in the stead of prayer

He drew forth oaths.

SUPERVACUO Then did he pray, dear heart,

Although you understood him not.

OFFICER My lords,

E’en with his last, with pardon be it spoke,

He cursed you both.

SUPERVACUO

He cursed us? ’Las, good soul.

(3.6.42–50)

Junior makes the archetypal ‘bad’ death – he refuses to acknowledge his sins, or to beg for God’s forgiveness, and he dies unreconciled with his fate or those responsible for his death. The comments of Supervacuo and Ambitioso – who, we should recall, think that they are talking about their despised stepbrother – underline the connections made in early modern culture between atheism, excessive language and social status. If Lussurioso/Junior has refused to pray and instead utters oaths and curses, he acts like the stereotypical irreligious gentleman or gallant of popular culture. The blasphemous quality of Junior’s oaths is underlined in Supervacuo’s assertion that oaths were his way of praying – he calls on God in the ‘wrong’ way, rather than through prayer and repentance. The presence of Junior’s dismembered head in the shape of a theatrical prop underlines the violence that he did to his soul in refusing to make a good death, and the capacity of his oaths to tear at Christ’s own body. It creates a potent dialogue between speech, prop and reported action that is set up by Supervacuo and Ambitioso’s uses of ‘Heart’ (3.6.9) and ‘’Sfoot’ (10) as they squabble at the beginning of the scene.

The two scenes dealing with Junior’s death bookend the central act of violence in the play, Vindice and Hippolito’s murder of the Duke, in Act 3, Scene 5. Andrew Sofer brilliantly draws our attention to the fact that Gloriana’s skull bears with it not only the violence of her death, but also the posthumous act through which it was severed from her body. He argues that ‘Gloriana transforms her lover, who has desecrated her wish to remain pure and intact by disinterring and mutilating her corpse, into the instrument of her own infernal revenge on the men who treat her like dirt’.31 While Junior is reduced to a prop, the prop skull of Gloriana gains an uncanny kind of agency, oscillating ‘between subject and object, person and prop’.³² Early modern commentators would have rejected any kind of connection being drawn between the crucified Christ and Vindice’s murdered lover, not least because revenge is explicitly condemned in Christian doctrine. However, the ripping of Christ’s body that is enacted in the blasphemous oaths uttered by Supervacuo, Ambitioso, Hippolito and Vindice in the scenes surrounding Gloriana’s revenge provides an unsettling fusion of the physical and metaphysical signs of salvation and damnation.

Moreover, although the Duke does not himself use profane oaths, his murder fragments his body into its constituent parts. The Duke complains that his teeth are ‘eaten out’ by the poison that is transferred to his lips as he kisses Gloriana’s skull, and he exclaims ‘O, my tongue!’ (3.5.159, 162). Vindice then tells him ‘You have eyes still’ and directs him ‘Look, monster, what a lady hast thou made me / My once betrothed wife’ (164–6). When Spurio and the Duchess enter, attention is again drawn to the constituent parts of the Duke’s body, as Vindice tells Hippolito,

Nail down his tongue, and mine shall keep possession

About his heart. If he but gasp, he dies.

[…]

Brother, if he but wink, not brooking the foul object,

Let our two other hands tear up his lids

And make his eyes like comets shine through blood.

When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good.

(196–7, 199–202)

They do not cut out his tongue at this moment; instead, as Brian Gibbons comments, ‘the brothers station themselves on either side of the Duke, their daggers pointing at his treacherous tongue and false heart’.33 The stage image’s ‘ironic and emblematic aptness’ – as Gibbons terms it – is underscored by its relationship with the play’s broader discourses of bodily fragmentation and their association with Calvinist structures of salvation and damnation. Together with the phrase ‘Nail down his tongue’, Vindice’s repeated references to blood and ‘tear[ing] up his lids’ create a network of references to bodily violence that recall the very terms of profane swearing itself.

‘When the bad bleeds’, Vindice declares, ‘then is the tragedy good’. Roger Holdsworth has argued that Middleton shows comparatively little interest in revenge ‘as an issue of complex debate’, noting of The Revenger’s Tragedy, ‘as far as any “theme” of the legitimacy of retaliation is concerned, it is soon clear that Vindice’s career will simply illustrate the truism voiced by Votarius in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy: “Revenge / Does no man good but to his greater harm”’.34 Yet the ways in which The Revenger’s Tragedy links violent action and violent language suggest that Middleton is nonetheless alert to the moral complexity of revenge. If men such as Vindice and Hippolito utter profane oaths before they have even begun to embark on their revenge, it is not the capacity of revenge to corrupt and endanger the immortal soul that is at stake, but the character of those who are attracted to vengeance and their impact on the world around them. Perhaps, the play suggests, revengers – like blasphemers – reveal themselves as reprobate through their actions and their very words.

The Revenger’s Tragedy was written at a moment of transition in the theatrical use of oaths, just before censorship curtailed their expression on the English stage. Its modes of expression were therefore on the verge of becoming archaic – or at least the authorities might have hoped that they were about to become so. In the twenty-first century, however, the problem with ‘’slud’ is not its transgressive power but its loss of that very power, as religious oaths have slipped out of the language at large, fossilized in comparatively anodyne terms such as ‘crikey’, ‘blimey’ or ‘gosh’. It seems fitting, therefore, that one of the very few stage or screen adaptations to engage productively with the play’s swearing is Alex Cox’s temporally ambiguous Revengers Tragedy (2002). Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script not only keeps some of the play’s original oaths, but also inserts some of their contemporary equivalents. Notably, at the moment that Vindici produces Gloriana’s skull in the film’s version of Act 3, Scene 5, Castiza – who in this adaptation takes an active part in the revenge – takes Hippolito’s line, ‘Is this the form that living shone so bright?’ (3.5.67) while Hippolito, here called Carlo, comments ‘Ah, fucking hell, mate’. Such a movement into present-day English enables the film to connect past and present on an aural level, just as the hyper-contemporary clothing and the setting in a dystopian Liverpool of an alternative present or near future do on a visual level. In addition, the use of the phrase ‘fucking hell’ enables a twenty-first century viewer to have a direct emotional response to the oath – be it one of recognition, humour or disgust – while also registering the connection between early modern oaths and the questions of salvation and damnation explored above. Cox and Boyce thus retain the playfully serious use of emotionally and theologically charged language in The Revenger’s Tragedy in their contemporary reworking of Jacobean revenge tragedy. Moreover, the use of twenty-first- century profanity reminds us, perhaps more powerfully than all of the textual evidence marshalled above, of the force of oaths such as ‘’slud’ in early modern England. Swearing in The Revenger’s Tragedy may be careless at times, but its effects are anything but artless.