Janet Clare
The Revenger’s Tragedy (c. 1606) entered the dramatic tradition of revenge nearly twenty years after The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Thomas Kyd’s pioneering and enormously popular vernacular revenge play.1 After instigating a vogue for stage revenge, The Spanish Tragedy was revised in the early seventeenth century, continuing to move audiences by now familiar with more recent plays of revenge: Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600), Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1601) and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. In their unique fictional worlds and very different dramatic styles and idioms these plays illustrate the remarkable versatility of revenge tragedy. The rhetorical laments of Hieronimo, for example, contrast with the existential angst of Hamlet and with Vindice’s manic obsession with revenge. As Andrew Gurr has reminded us, the popularity of playgoing in Elizabethan and Jacobean London meant that playgoers demanded ‘a constant supply of novelty’.2 In its dramaturgy The Revenger’s Tragedy rises to this challenge. Nevertheless, revenge plays have a genre identity, and the very title of The Revenger’s Tragedy would have prompted a Jacobean audience to relate it to other revenge plays and respond not only to what was arrestingly new in its dramaturgy, but to what was familiar in the theatrical experience. Early modern playgoers would have watched the play through the lens of other revenge plays, and expectations would have been generated by experience of those plays and responses determined by the play’s striking divergences and generic subversions.
In this essay, I want to explore The Revenger’s Tragedy as an innovative play of revenge, in the context of the ‘stage traffic’ of early modern revenge drama, with the aim of recapturing something of its early reception on the Jacobean stage. Stage traffic is a term that I have used elsewhere to capture the way narratives, scenarios, motifs, stage effects circulated amongst early modern playwrights, playing companies and communities of playgoers, subject to change and adaptation. Over time, playwrights adapted and converted to new use familiar conventions not only to fit with prevailing ideology, but also on the basis of performance venue and the tastes and expectations of audiences.3 As I will argue, the traffic of revenge plays, as with other plays of the period, affects not so much narrative – although revenge plays do share narrative motifs – but dramaturgy. Dramaturgy relates to theatre practice, moving from the internal structures of a play text through to staging and the calculated manipulation of audience response.4 A dramaturgical analysis of a text takes into account its formal elements, including plot, narrative structure, character, time-frame and stage-action. It also includes the specific use made of theatrical conventions, such as asides and soliloquies, and of non-textual effects: visual, such as disguise, dumb shows, stage properties; and sound effects, such as, for example, music and thunder. As a tool of analysis dramaturgy moves from the creation and the construction of a play to its wider social function, implicating spectators’ response to the performance. Twenty-first century spectators, as a rule, do not deconstruct a performance into its component parts. Meaning is generated through the confluence of such dramatic components. An audience experiences a production aesthetic, determined by a director, which aims to bind its parts together. But for an early modern audience well-acquainted with revenge tragedies, part of the pleasure in watching The Revenger’s Tragedy would have been bound up with deconstructing a new play in the genre. That the play deliberately invites such a response through its self-conscious allusions, in-jokes and playful treatment of familiar conventions is fundamental to my argument.
To say that revenge constitutes the scaffolding of The Revenger’s Tragedy might sound tautological. Surely all revenge tragedies are constructed by schemes for retribution. But this is not quite the case. In certain plays, which we might justifiably describe as revenge tragedies – Webster’s The White Devil and Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, for example – other narratives and motifs are interlaced with revenge plotting. There are many byways to the dramatic structure of Hamlet which have little to do with revenge, and for a substantial part of its critical reception Hamlet has not been discussed in terms of revenge tragedy. In contrast, revenge proliferates – often comically – in The Revenger’s Tragedy, inflecting almost every action and conveying the play’s self-conscious take on the revenge sub-genre. Revenge is often spurious, in keeping with what I see as the play’s vein of excess, and used as a pretext for intrigue, to the extent that virtually every male character is plotting revenge. Characters contrive revenge against one another in order to right some real or half-imagined wrong, with the lines of vengeful intent criss-crossing one another or converging. Spurio, the Bastard, expresses early on the wish that ‘all the court were turned into a corse’ (1.2.36) and with warped logic convinces himself that his revenge is just: ‘there’s the vengeance that my birth was wrapped in’ (167). The Duchess, burning with resentment towards her husband, longs to ‘kill him in his forehead’ (107), avenging herself by making him a cuckold. Spurio plans to destroy Lussurioso by damning him in his pleasure. Urged on by Vindice that it will be glorious ‘to kill ’em doubled’ (2.3.4, echoing Hamlet’s desire to kill Claudius in ‘the pleasure of his incestuous bed’ [3.3.90])5, Lussurioso bursts into the Duke’s bedchamber thinking to surprise his stepmother and Spurio together. The revenge plots of Vindice and Antonio’s faction are thrown into relief by those of the ducal family, inviting an audience to make comparison with the diverse motives and modes of revenge. Among the extended ducal family, revenge is treated with levity and quick egotism. Vindice’s revenge is presented with dark and mordant relish, whereas for the courtiers avenging the death of Antonio’s wife revenge is a ritual, grave in tone.
The dramaturgy of the play coheres around the role of Vindice who – rather like a dramaturge – directs the audience towards the play’s artefact and exposes its mechanisms and techniques. He opens the play with his soliloquy, addressed not only to the audience, but to a skull, a memento mori of his murdered love, Gloriana. There is no stage direction in the 1607–8 text to indicate that Vindice is holding a skull. This posture – which must surely have evoked Hamlet’s address to Yorick’s skull, all the more so if Richard Burbage played both Hamlet and Vindice6 – can only be deduced from the text, that is, in Vindice’s morbid address to the ‘sallow picture’ of his ‘poisoned love’ (1.1.14). Hippolito’s entry confirms the scenario with his mocking ‘Still sighing o’er death’s vizard?’ (49),7 putting the play as a tragedy into its place. There may be a double joke here at the expense of both character and actor. Vindice is Hamlet in excess: possibly, the actor is replicating an earlier role as revenge-driven hero. A cause for vengeance has been established, but, in case a long-dead love may not have sufficient weight, another – again, gesturing towards Hamlet – is slipped in later in the scene when Vindice tells his mother he intends to travel:
VINDICE
For 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.
MOTHER
Indeed, he was a worthy gentleman,
Had his estate been fellow to his mind.
VINDICE
The Duke did much deject him.
MOTHER Much.
VINDICE Too much.
And through disgrace oft smothered in his spirit
When it would mount. Surely I think he died
Of discontent, the nobleman’s consumption.
(1.1.119–27)
The allusion to his father’s death is brief and hardly picked up again. It is as if Middleton did not want to miss a trick and is paying lip service to the scenario, familiar from Hamlet and Hoffman, of the son avenging the father. Further, the death of the father motif somewhat teasingly induces an audience familiar with Hamlet to consider the respective roles of the mother, Gratiana and Gertrude. Gratiana’s comment on her husband with its qualification of his worthiness in temporal terms raises questions about her constancy, preparing the ground for her later susceptibility to money and power when her daughter is propositioned.
Nine years brooding on retribution for the murder of Gloriana, and to no effect, well exemplifies Francis Bacon’s maxim that dwelling on revenge keeps ‘the wounds green’.8 Revenge is seldom, if ever, achieved speedily in revenge tragedies. Hamlet delays and prevaricates until the last scene of the play, despite his intention to ‘sweep’ to his revenge ‘with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love’ (1.5.29–30). The process is generally protracted, entailing disguise, subterfuge and deception. Revengers have to take time in plotting and scheming or deliberating on retribution for the dramaturgically practical reason that without delay between the call for and the execution of revenge there would be no play. In dramatic terms, the delay engages the audience with the sufferings, dilemma and sense of injustice felt by the revenger over a protracted period. Nine years is, however, an inordinate amount of time to wait to exact revenge. Such obsessiveness is consistent with a play distinguished – to some blackly comic effect – by the way it takes revenge conventions, in themselves structured towards excess, to the point of greater excess.
It is dramatically significant that this passage of time is not represented in the play. An audience is not engaged with the sufferings and dilemma of the revenger, as it is with Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy and with Hamlet. Instead, the audience is repositioned as accomplices, not witnesses, and this is central to the dramaturgy. Vindice shares all his stratagems and techniques with the audience, letting them in on the secret and showing how less ingenious plotters like the Duchess’s sons cannot hope to pull off their plots. Throughout the play, he alerts his audience not only to layers within the deceptions in the play, but to the methods of artifice. When he finds himself in the absurdly comic position of being hired, as Vindice, to kill his alter ego, Piato, he hits on the ingenious plan of dressing the murdered Duke in Piato’s costume, confiding in us as well as Hippolito: ‘What say you then to this device? / If we dressed up the body of the Duke –’ (4.2.205–6). As revenger, Vindice’s coup de théatre is his wittily appropriate and grotesque employment of Gloriana in his/her revenge, and again we become party to the design:
Look you, brother,
I have not fashioned this only for show
And useless property. No, it shall bear a part
E’en in it own revenge.
(3.5.99–102)
Evidently Vindice sees no incongruity in using Gloriana’s skull as a stage prop and casts it as another actor in the deadly show he is devising.
The malcontented Vindice is socially marginalized, but – as is apparent from the dramaturgy of the opening scene – he is theatrically privileged. Beginning a play with a soliloquy is a bold move. Shakespeare had done it in Richard III, giving Richard a theatrical advantage and establishing immediately a degree of complicity on the part of the audience with Richard’s ambitions. Moral judgement is placed on hold. Chettle opens his tragedy of Hoffman with Hoffman’s soliloquy in the presence of the tortured cadaver of his father, incorporating on stage his motivation for revenge. Addressing his father’s flayed corpse, stolen from the gallows, Hoffman vows to repay the public hanging with private revenge: ‘I will not leave thee, untill like thy selfe, / I’ve made thy enemies, then hand in hand / We’ll walke to paradise’.9 As Hoffman proclaims ‘myne’s a cause that’s right’ (l.12), thunder and lightning are heard and seen, a sure indication to Hoffman that he is to delay no further in seeking vengeance. A similarly arresting and macabre effect is created in The Revenger’s Tragedy’s opening scene as Vindice confronts himself and the audience with the most popular emblem of death, the skull, although, as I have suggested, the authenticity of the moment is playfully undercut by Hippolito’s reaction with its theatrical implications of an absurdly extended delay.
The theatrical effectiveness of Vindice’s soliloquy is enhanced by the split staging of the scene. As Vindice addresses skull and audience, the ducal family processes across the stage by torchlight, in a dumb show. In spatial terms, Robert Weimann’s classic definitions of theatrical space, locus and platea, evident from medieval drama, seem particularly apt for the crafting of the scene.10 For Weimann, the locus is a rudimentary representation of a fixed, symbolic location, which in The Revenger’s Tragedy can be identified as the court, while the platea is an unlocalized or neutral space. Vindice occupies the platea, a theatrical dimension of the real world, and from this privileged position moral weight is given to his blistering condemnation of the Duke and his family, and his determination to revenge. Occupying the space of the platea, Vindice has access to the audience, denied to the court in the first scene, and this interactivity of actor and audience seeks to engage the audience’s sympathy from the beginning of the play.11
Vindice’s platea status is maintained through other aspects of dramaturgy, specifically in his use of the aside and his assumption of disguise and role-playing. The play exploits these familiar theatrical conventions to an inordinate degree – both metatheatrically, to allude to the nature of performance itself, and also metaphorically, as a means of drawing attention to the endemic duplicity of the court. Disguise is crucial to plot and dramaturgy, enabling Vindice to infiltrate the court and the dramatist to trade in the dramatic irony essential to the play’s take on revenge. The audience is in the superior position of penetrating all disguises and share Vindice’s delight when members of the ducal family are completely taken in by his deceptions. Vindice, dedicated to avenging the murder of a woman who had resisted corruption, is obliged in his assumed role to go through the motions of corrupting his sister, and the would-be corrupter, Lussurioso, unwittingly engages her brother to act as his agent. Irony is not limited to situation. It informs the dialogue most prominently – and emerging seamlessly from the given situation – when Lussurioso confronts Vindice/Piato, faithful for nine years to a memory, with his passing lusts:
Give me my bed by stealth, there’s true delight;
What breeds a loathing in’t but night by night?
(1.3.107–8)
In due course the Duke, too, thinks he has found in Piato the right man to set up a sexual assignation in an ‘unsunned lodge’ (3.5.18) and hires him to be his pander, an encounter turned with full dramatic irony into an assignation with death.
Asides also privilege the audience: even the arch-deceivers, Vindice and Hippolito, do not know what others have said in their absence or disclosed to the audience in their soliloquies. Asides are present throughout the play’s dialogue. Ambitioso and Supervacuo, for example, superficially in alliance are, in reality, as their asides reveal, deadly rivals. They plot against Lussurioso:
SUPERVACUO Then let’s set by the judges
And fall to the officers. ’Tis but mistaking
The Duke our father’s meaning, and where he named
‘Ere many days’, ’tis but forgetting that
And have him die i’th’ morning.
AMBITIOSO Excellent,
Then am I heir – duke in a minute!
SUPERVACUO [aside] Nay,
An he were once puffed out, here is a pin
Should quickly prick your bladder.
(3.1.8–14)
The transparency effected by the aside is technically a foil to duplicity, and the audience responds to the various shades of irony that depend on its knowing more than any of the characters on stage. It is, though, Vindice who most employs the device, and to different effect than the other characters; his asides underline his unique position within the play and playhouse as he draws the audience’s attention to the irony of a situation or to his clever management of a scenario. While his use of the aside defines his duplicity in dealing with the ducal family, it also discloses how he stands outside their duplicity and corruption. This is evident in his exchanges with Lussurioso and in the mock temptation of Castiza when his lengthy attempts to corrupt her are interspersed with asides rejoicing in her chastity. The asides of the ducal family reveal how deep they are in corruption, those of Vindice that he is still a moral being.
The playwright gives little social or psychological complexity to Vindice since everything the character does is subordinated to the function of his role as avenger. Vindice’s relationship to members of his family is partly an exception. These relationships give him a fuller individual identity, though they also coincide with his revenge agenda: Hippolito is his reflection, like Horatio to his Hamlet; Castiza operates as another Gloriana, the innocent quarry of the Duke’s lecherous son; and Vindice’s mother falls prey to the corrupting potential and manipulative ways of rank and wealth. His soliloquies maintain the distinction between overt and covert, player and role, and his asides have the same function, often with grim humour. The audience is privy to these shifts between role and identity, invited to enjoy its complicity with the plotters and relish the many occasions of dramatic irony ingeniously devised. An outstanding instance is found in the dialogue that ensues when Vindice presents himself in his own person to Lussurioso as someone up to the job of killing his alter ego, Piato. The dramatic irony is palpable, further, in a playful moment of stagecraft: Lussurioso forgets the name of his hired assassin, allowing Vindice to respond with double entendre and dead pan irony:
LUSSURIOSO
Thy name? I have forgot it.
VINDICE Vindice, my lord.
LUSSURIOSO
’Tis a good name that.
VINDICE Ay, a revenger.
LUSSURIOSO
It does betoken courage. Thou shouldst be valiant
And kill thine enemies.
VINDICE That’s my hope, my lord.
(4.2.172–5)
Vindice is fully aware of the irony of his name and shares that with the audience, drawing attention to the convention of ‘meaningful’ names in the tradition of both the old morality drama and contemporary satirical and citizen comedy of which, of course, Middleton was a practitioner. The morality tradition is invoked, but its didactic purpose is subverted for satirical effect and dramatic irony.12
Whether Vindice retains the moral high-ground he occupies in the early scenes of the play and mirrored in their staging is open to question. To revenge the death of Gloriana he is forced to resort to subterfuge: a political necessity. Even in Titus Andronicus, where the avengers are powerful, trickery is the theatrical mode. In Vindice’s case, it is prescribed by his subordinate status. Middleton turns this political necessity into an elaborate dramatic aesthetic of disguise and masquerade. The artistry by which Vindice contrives the Duke’s death – the dressing up of Gloriana, the scene-setting of the ‘unsunned lodge’ and the presence of an audience/voyeurs in himself and Hippolito? coheres with the play as theatrical artefact. The plot seems driven by a motive that has lost some of its potency, as revenge becomes detached from its cause. Vindice directs Hippolito to step back as the Duke enters and all recollections of the skull as the remains of a loved one have been erased: ‘Brother, fall you back a little / With the bony lady’ (3.5.120–1). A little earlier in the scene in a mock dialogue with the ‘bony lady’, Gloriana is treated as a ventriloquist’s dummy. In what Hippolito describes as the ‘quaint malice’ of Vindice’s revenge against the Duke, there is gross sadism as Vindice exults in watching the Duke tormented by poison, nails his tongue down with his dagger and forces the Duke to watch the sexual assignation of the Duchess and his bastard son. Here, Middleton employs the mirroring motif of revenge dramaturgy in which punishment matches or exceeds the original crime. Hamlet in his dying moment forces Claudius to drink the poisoned wine which has killed his mother, at the same time emulating Claudius’s use of poison in killing Old Hamlet. Hoffman crowns his victims with a searing hot crown, imitating the public execution of his father. Although there is nothing Senecan in the rhetoric or idiom of The Revenger’s Tragedy, Vindice does take his cue from Seneca’s portrayal of excess, exemplified in Atreus: ‘You cannot say you have avenged a crime / Unless you better it’ (Thyestes, 2.195–6).13 The spectacular grimness and grotesque appropriateness of Vindice’s stratagem in arranging the Duke’s murder meets this requirement to the letter.
Integral to the dramaturgy is the orchestration of two revenge plots. Vindice’s stratagems are thrown into relief by a second, less substantiated revenge plot, occasioned by another act of sexual violence, a plot controlled by a court faction of uncertain leadership. When the unnamed wife of a lord simply known as Antonio is raped and takes her own life, Piero and a group of anonymous nobles swear revenge on the perpetrator, Junior Brother, the Duke’s stepson. The gathering is skillfully stage-managed by Antonio, providing a hint of how he will later behave towards Vindice in clearing the path towards his accession. The stage direction informs us that he ‘discovers’ the body of his wife to Piero, certain lords, and to Hippolito. Having no position at court, Vindice is not present. Antonio presumably draws back the curtain of a discovery space, revealing the body, and then in his lines particularizes the tableau of his wife lying with a prayer book under her cheek and holding in her hand an unspecified book with a tucked-up leaf and a hand pointing to words glossing her suicide. His construction of the scene is evocative of paintings of the death of Lucrece, popular in the Renaissance:
I marked not this before –
A prayer-book the pillow to her cheek;
This was her rich confection; and another
Placed in her right hand, with a leaf tucked up
Pointing to these words:
Melius virtute mori, quam per dedecus vivere.
(1.4.12–17)
The words ‘better to die virtuous than live with dishonour’ arouse streams of praise from Antonio and Hippolito contemplating the dead body, and the nobles vow to take revenge. But the focus of their vow is temporarily lost when the two elder brothers unwittingly bring about the death of Junior Brother through their incompetent scheming. The rape now becomes symbolic of endemic court corruption and feeds into the occasion for rebellion.
The scenario of death as the honourable – and only – solution for the woman stigmatized by rape would have been familiar to the early modern audience from Titus’s killing of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. A more overt template, as already suggested, is the rape of Lucrece, a story retold in verse by Shakespeare (The Rape of Lucrece, 1594) and by Middleton (The Ghost of Lucrece, c. 1600), before being dramatized by Thomas Heywood in The Rape of Lucrece.14 Heywood’s play was published in 1608, a year after The Revenger’s Tragedy, but possibly performed earlier. Like Lucrece, Antonio’s wife has been raped by the youngest son of a ruler, with the difference that in The Revenger’s Tragedy, Junior Brother is a stepson and not, like Sextus Tarquinius, a direct descendant of a king. Still, the structural parallel is there. More to the point is the idea – more latent in The Revenger’s Tragedy – of political appropriation of domestic violence to fire a plot against a corrupt regime. Lucrece’s rape is the ostensible cause for the nobility to rise against the Tarquins and the leader of the rebellion, Lucius Junius Brutus, becomes a hero in Rome’s liberation from monarchical tyranny. Lucrece has agency and a voice. She declares that she prides ‘her life lesse than her honour’d fame’ (l. 2490),15 while, at the same time, inciting Junius Brutus, her husband and her father to rise and depose Tarquin. In contrast, the function of Antonio’s wife is passive; she has no direct agency in promoting rebellion, though her suicide is perceived as an exemplary protest. It is possibly the underlying presence of the classical template that prompts her to be celebrated, not castigated, in an ostensibly Christian court, for taking her own life (Ophelia in Hamlet is denied full burial rites for the ‘sin’ of suicide).
In both Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece and The Revenger’s Tragedy the female body is a stimulus to insurrection or is used to this end. Brutus orders the removal of Lucrece’s ‘chaste body’ to the marketplace:
beare that chaste body
Into the market place: that horrid object,
Shall kindle them with a most just revenge.
(ll. 2512–14)
Revenge is to be taken not just against Sextus Tarquinius, but against the whole Tarquin family – ‘The hearts of all the Tarquins shall weepe blood’ (l. 2535). Brutus exploits the rebellion to gain power, but it is Collatine, husband to Lucrece, who succeeds Brutus as consul, acknowledging himself as one of Jove’s agents in revenging rape and punishing pride. The body of Antonio’s wife is not given such public prominence, yet its display to members of the court serves as the catalyst for the second revenge plot. For most of the drama the latter has no part in the action, resurfacing only in the penultimate scene. The sub-plot then merges with the main plot when the stage direction announces the entry of Vindice and his brother Hippolito ‘with Piero and other Lords’. Vindice addresses the lords, enjoining them ‘to blast this villainous dukedom’ (5.2.6) and he orchestrates the final act of vengeance against the ducal family during the celebrations for the accession of the new ruler. The play’s closure ironically contrasts the fates of the avenging parties. Vindice, exultant that his purpose has been achieved, is led off with his brother to execution. Antonio is the beneficiary of the rebellion and – having kept his hands clean – is proclaimed duke.
The distinct plots of The Revenger’s Tragedy are mirrored by distinctive groupings. Absent or present women – Gloriana, Antonio’s wife and Castiza – who are actual or potential prey to the Duke or members of his family stand apart as the antipode of the grouping of the ducal family with its ruthless sexual appetites. These women conduct their lives with exemplary chastity, representing a challenge to the lust and power of their persecutors. Antonio’s wife and Gloriana, innocent victims of the powerful, exert considerable symbolic power as the moral justification for revenge. It falls to Castiza, however, to articulate a spirited defence of sexual integrity and express contempt and defiance towards the ducal clan. Enacted on stage, Castiza’s indignant rejection of Lussurioso’s sexual propositioning gives a voice to violated femininity. The tempting of Castiza is essential to the play’s dramaturgy. By this means, the virtues of the silent, Gloriana and Antonio’s wife, are given a vigorous, living counterpart, free of posthumous – male – ennobling. Through their inner integrity this group of women generate an energy of protest and resistance that is transmitted to the avengers – notably all men – and both inspires and justifies their actions.
The manipulation of the two plots against the ducal family is quite deliberate. It is Vindice’s private revenge that dominates the action, whereas the oppositional court faction appears in one scene in Act 1 and re-emerge suddenly at the climax of the play. I would argue that the deployment and synchronization of these two rebellions are more than simply matters of the play’s design or structure, relating to the broader matter of the play’s social function – that is, the extent to which the work expresses and might be said to influence the culture of which it is part. Through the control of these two plots, the play’s subversiveness – uprising, regicide and regime change – is ostensibly neutered. Although the Duke’s tyranny is presented rather obliquely, or metaphorically, in sexual rather than political terms, he is undoubtedly a tyrant. He is given a soliloquy, after he has pardoned Lussurioso, ironically, for what the audience knows is a non-crime, in which he admits to abuses of power: ‘Many a beauty have I turned to poison / In the denial, covetous of all’ (2.3.127–8), at the same time conveying that any motion of guilt is weak and gives way to sexual appetite. The soliloquy is reminiscent of Claudius’s soliloquy in Hamlet in which he too confesses to murder, whilst admitting that he cannot relinquish what he has gained by his crime. In the Duke’s soliloquy, however, there is no question – as there is in Hamlet and other tragedies of state – that the murderer is not the legitimate ruler. Although the emphasis in The Revenger’s Tragedy is on sexual transgression and abuse – to the extent of murdering the unwilling – shifting the focus away from a politically motivated rebellion, the Duke’s removal, as well as that of his heir, are acts of regicide. The action of The Revenger’s Tragedy moves decisively, and dangerously, against the dominant ideological position of passive obedience and non-resistance even under tyranny.
We have only to look at Ben Jonson’s categorical and circumspect rejection of tyrannicide which accompanied the published text of Sejanus, in 1605, a year before The Revenger’s Tragedy, to see how close Middleton was sailing to the wind in presenting regicide on-stage. In ‘The Argument’ to Sejanus – a play presenting monstrous images of absolute power, in this instance under the Roman Emperor Tiberius, and for which Jonson had been questioned by the Privy Council – Jonson extracted a political moral:
This do we advance as a mark of terror to all traitors and treasons, to show how just the heavens are in pouring and thundering down a weighty vengeance on their unnatural intents, even to the worst princes; much more to those for guard of whose piety and virtue are in continual watch, and God himself miraculously working.16
Jonson makes it clear that God will thunder down ‘a weighty vengeance’ not on corrupt princes, but on those who seek to oppose them. In the later 1616 Folio text of Sejanus, Jonson omitted this explication of his artistic purpose, indicative of the fact that in 1605 – the year of the Gunpowder Plot – there was some obligation to impose an orthodox reading on his drama of imperial tyranny and aristocratic plottings against the regime.17 Middleton makes a playfully provocative allusion to the Gunpowder Plot in Hippolito’s gleeful anticipation of the fallout from Lussurioso’s expected discovery of the Duchess in bed with Spurio: ‘There’s gunpowder i’the court’ (2.3.168). But, far more politically provocative is the way the play engages with usurpation and regicide. The Duke may qualify as amongst ‘the worst Princes’, yet, in Jonson’s terms, that would still not justify Vindice’s quietly and ingeniously conducted tyrannicide. Nor would Lussurioso’s carnal pursuit of Vindice’s sister justify murdering him. Vindice’s intense feelings of loss and injustice and the verve with which he plays the part of the avenger bring the audience on his side, but theatre is not state. The dramaturgy has to resolve the tension between the logic of theatre – an audience wants Vindice to exact revenge – and the law of the state which demands the death of a regicide. At this juncture the dramaturgy may be seen transgressing the bounds of performance and engaging with the political culture of which it is part. In condemning Vindice to death the play is meticulously orthodox. At the same time, the play preserves its artistic integrity. Vindice’s final confession is that of the dramaturge who cannot bear to let the credit slip for a wonderful performance and a cleverly staged and ‘witty’ production:
VINDICE We may be bold
To speak it now. ’Twas somewhat witty-carried,
Though we say it. ’Twas we two murdered him.
ANTONIO You two?
VINDICE
None else, i’faith, my lord. Nay, ’twas well managed.
(5.3.96–9)
His confession perpetuates the inevitable denouement in which the revenger is shown that vengeance is his only on penalty of death, but any possible sense of tragedy is lost through the peripeteia of the final scene and Vindice’s exultant dance towards death: ‘’Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes’ (109). The reversal of Vindice’s fortunes from jubilant executioner to condemned criminal takes place in some thirty breathless lines. Far from being dismayed, Vindice seals his life’s work with wit and aplomb. Yet, a whole dynasty has been wiped out, and a new ruler who appears to have no legal right to the dukedom is installed. Antonio’s ascent to power has been facilitated in part by Vindice, whose role as avenger extends to that of proxy avenger, settling scores for the violation of Antonio’s wife. A rebellion takes place, backed by five hundred nobles, which is in essence a coup, but through Antonio’s non-participation and his scapegoating of Vindice, regicide and rebellion are naturalized as legitimate accession.
The stage managing of the Duke’s death is characteristic of the self-conscious theatricality of The Revenger’s Tragedy, not only in its relation to other revenge plays, but in its constant allusion to tropes of performance. When Vindice at last gains entry into the Duke’s inner circle, enabling him to plot his revenge, he is exultant, perplexing his brother as to the cause of his jubilation:
HIPPOLITO
Why, what’s the matter, brother?
VINDICE O, ’tis able
To make a man spring up and knock his forehead
Against yon silver ceiling.
(3.5.2–4)
The idea of literally jumping for joy at the prospect of imminent revenge is typical of the play’s colloquial idiom. At the same time the lines contain a metatheatrical allusion as Vindice points or looks up to the silver ceiling of the Globe’s ornate canopy, actor and audience colluding in the intrinsically theatrical device of breaking the theatrical illusion. Other aspects of stagecraft are heightened as the play frequently and explicitly shatters the illusion of the play. When Lussurioso hires him to kill his alter ego, Vindice, rather like a stage prompter, calls out for thunder to register the outrageousness of the act. Vindice appeals to the heavens:
O, thou almighty patience! ’Tis my wonder
That such a fellow, impudent and wicked,
Should not be cloven as he stood,
Or with a secret wind burst open.
Is there no thunder left, or is’t kept up
In stock for heavier vengeance? There it goes.
(4.2.193–8)
The invective of protest at the seeming impunity of wickedness evolves into an allusion to playhouse practice, in which thunder is ‘kept in stock’ (in reserve); then, after ‘thunder’, the line turns colloquial, with more than a touch of bathos. ‘There it goes’ readily suggests the thunder machine.18 As Vindice, Hippolito and two unnamed nobles stab Lussurioso and three courtiers, the stage direction indicates that thunder is heard again. Vindice responds with irreverent jubilation, again drawing attention to theatrical artifice:
Mark, thunder!
Dost know thy cue, thou big-voiced crier?
Dukes’ groans are thunder’s watchwords.
(5.3.42–4)
The idea that the groans of a dying ruler serve as a signal or a stage cue for thunder continues the self-conscious use of theatrical mechanisms. The Duke’s groans are part of the presentational dynamics of the play as Vindice draws attention to the fact that verbal cues are essential for the sound effects of performance. At another dramatic moment, the predicted stage effects do not respond to cue. In a flagrant lie, Lussurioso tells Vindice how he reacted against Piato for dishonouring Castiza; Vindice, in an aside, questions the lack of any sign of divine disapproval at such enormity: ‘Has not heaven an ear? / Is all the lightning wasted?’ (4.2.158–9). Unlike the thunder which is kept ‘in stock’, the lightning has been wasted, presumably on lesser wrongs.
Thunder variously functions on the early modern stage and in early modern culture. Jonson’s cautionary note to Sejanus had alluded to God’s vengeance ‘thundering down’. In King Lear when the old king is on the heath, a storm rumbles in the distance and then breaks out, a metaphor of cosmic chaos equal – in Lear’s mind – to the representation of the unnatural character of filial ingratitude. In Hoffman, the protagonist links the thunder he hears as an angry response to his apparent failure to revenge his father. Thunder can be taken both literally and symbolically, as an index to universal and abstract truth. The Revenger’s Tragedy plays on these tropes, leaving their meaning ambivalent, perhaps strategically so. In arguing for the play’s political and religious subversiveness, Jonathan Dollimore has contended that there is derision in Vindice’s summoning of providence, a parody of the providential viewpoint. For Dollimore, God’s wrath is simply ‘an undisguised excuse for ostentatious effect’.19 Certainly in performance such cues can come across effectively as a comic allusion to a melodramatic convention with actor and audience in on the joke.20 But, in a culture where life was understood as intimately linked to eternal verities, signs of those eternal verities were discovered in the everyday. Lussurioso’s superstitious viewing of the comet at his accession banquet as a bad omen is quite understandable. Stage thunder could not have been so outmoded in 1606–7, only two years after the fury, power and awesome grandeur of the storm in King Lear. I would argue that, as with the dramaturgy of the rebellion and regicide, there is a strategic ambiguity of presentation and hence representation of these aural effects. Vindice’s words do subvert the illusion of theatre, although not entirely. His couplet ‘No power is angry when the lustful die. / When thunder claps heaven likes the tragedy’ (5.3.47–8) leaves much open to interpretation. The sardonic ‘big-voiced crier’ has been replaced by the more reverential ‘heaven’, leaving a providential interpretation just about possible, though it is undermined by treating thunder and heaven as members of an audience: one claps and the other in a low key merely ‘likes’ the tragedy. Much depends on performance. Stage effects could be indicative of divine, moral judgement in a grotesquely sinful world or simply a contrived thunder clap, a motif of an agnostic play which above all else has privileged theatre and the mechanisms of performance.
Earlier critics tended to look for a moral pattern in The Revenger’s Tragedy, with particular emphasis on character and characterization, and such readings continue to be influential in shaping arguments about the play. R.A. Foakes, for example, has argued that Vindice loses his privileged position as morally justified avenger and aligns himself with the other villains in the play.21 To say that Vindice is aligned with the villains of the play pays scant regard to its structure. The Duke and his family murder or plan murder or have murderous wishes out of pique, or ruthless ambition, or gratuitous resentment or because a servant is suspected of trickery and knows too much. In every case the occasion for murder or murderous intent is slight. All this forms a stark contrast with Vindice, emphasizing the ethos and instrumentation of revenge where the punishment fits the crime.
This essay has sought to shift the emphasis away from an essentially moral perspective on character and action to discover through a focus on dramaturgy the relationship between presentation and representation. As a highly wrought artistic form, critically and theatrically self-conscious, it could be argued that The Revenger’s Tragedy is not socially contingent, alien to the world of its spectators. In its extravagant plotting and aesthetic of excess, the play can hardly be regarded as mimetic. Yet, the theatrical milieu of The Revenger’s Tragedy is far from alien. By the time the play had entered the dramatic tradition in the early Jacobean period, spectators were thoroughly familiar with its scenarios, its roles, plot devices and techniques: the spectacle of a corrupt ruler, head of an equally corrupt family, abusing innocence; and of the often ingenious plotting of the socially marginalized and malcontented avenger. The play depends upon such knowledge, an intimacy with the stage traffic of the revenge play, for its force, which is more often satirical or parodic than it is tragic. Indeed, tragic events – the deaths of Gloriana and Antonio’s wife – are dramatic marginalia, removed to a timeframe prior to the action of the play. To describe The Revenger’s Tragedy as a satirical tragedy would not be far off the mark. Through the novel role of Vindice seemingly created both as a way of representing a generic type and as a way of exposing the mechanisms of the revenge genre, the audience are given a privileged position. Theatricality is inclusive: the audience are in on the deceptions and can predict how things are likely to end for each character. Yet such intimacy exposes an audience to the abusive power structures of the play: the grotesquely ruthless self-indulgence of the regime with its destruction of life and love. A concern with stage aesthetics, a fascination with component parts of revenge and a sustained generic ambivalence between farce and tragedy chafes against the damning indictments of the play. The tragedy of a revenger whose life has been narrowed and warped is placed in the context of monstrous excess, comic asides and outlandish deceptions to create a particularly equivocal theatrical experience: tragedy tilted towards parody.
1The dates of composition and performance of early modern plays are difficult to fix. I have adopted the limits as recorded in Alfred Harbage, The Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. Samuel Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964).
2Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 115.
3See Janet Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–28.
4See Mary Luckhurst, Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
5William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006).
6The 1607 title page states that the play has been ‘sundry times Acted, by the Kings Majesties Servants’. Burbage was the celebrated tragedian of the King’s Men and played the part of Hamlet, thus it is probable that he would have taken the lead in The Revenger’s Tragedy. Middleton wrote a short elegy on Burbage.
7Jackson’s edition of the play substitutes the 1607 ‘death’s vizard’ with ‘death’s visor’, which Jackson annotates as ‘mask, or face suggestive of a mask’. Jackson’s modernization rather reduces the resonance of the 1607 text. ‘Vizard’ carries the meaning of ‘a phantasm or spectre’ not shared by ‘visor’. See OED 4.
8Francis Bacon, ‘On Revenge’, in The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 73. The essay is reproduced in Four Revenge Tragedies, New Mermaids (London: Methuen Drama, 2014).
9Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, Malone Society Reprints, ed. Harold Jenkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 1.1.23–5.
10Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 73–85.
11James Condon discusses Vindice’s control of theatrical space as a means of combatting his marginalization in political space; see James J. Condon, ‘Setting the Stage for Revenge: Space, Performance, and Power in Early Modern Tragedy’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 25 (2012): 62–82.
12For a discussion of the play in relation to the medieval morality tradition, see Leo Salingar, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Tradition’, reprinted in Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans: Essays by Leo Salingar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 206–22. See also Chapter 1 above.
13Seneca, Thyestes in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. and ed. E.F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).
14See also Chapter 5 above.
15Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece, ed. Allan Holaday (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950).
16‘The Argument’, Sejanus His Fall, ed. Tom Cain in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, eds David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), vol. 2, 230.
17For this reading to make sense, Sejanus must have been printed after 5 November 1605. See Sejanus, ed. Cain, 201.
18‘There it goes’ also means to come up with an idea. The peal of thunder does double duty as both the sound effect arriving on Vindice’s cue and as the signifier of his moment of inspiration.
19Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd ed. (Hempel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 140.
20When Anthony Sher challenged the heavens, ‘Is there no thunder left?’ in the 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production, he accompanied his call with throttled laughter.
21R.A. Foakes, ‘The Art of Cruelty: Hamlet and Vindice’, Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973): 21–32. See also Foakes’s Introduction to The Revenger’s Tragedy, Revels Student Editions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 21–2.