Linda Woodbridge
The essays in this collection register many instances of discordia concors in The Revenger’s Tragedy. Or maybe just discordia. Katherine Gillen is troubled by Vindice’s hybrid nature: ‘A combination of English Puritan and conniving Italian, Vindice revels in the theatricality, sexual depravity, and violence he claims to abhor’ (p. 127). The play’s trenchant sexual satire clashes with what appears to be its prurient salacity: as Eric Vivier notes, ‘The satirist who denounces sin reveals his own fascination with that sin, reveals his own extensive (and therefore problematic) knowledge of that sin, and ultimately associates himself with it’ and ‘by drawing attention to concealed sin, the satirist may do as much to instruct his audience in that sin as he does to dissuade them from it’ (pp. 40–1). The play idealizes Gloriana, her name evoking the grand old days of the virgin queen; and characters venerate the (nameless) wife of Antonio (‘that religious lady’, ‘that general-honest lady’ (1.1.111, 1.2.46), whose ‘name has spread such a fair wing / Over all Italy that, if our tongues / Were sparing toward [her rape], judgement itself / Would be condemned and suffer in men’s thoughts’ (1.2.56–9). But such esteem clashes disjunctively with the play’s pervasive misogyny: ‘Women are apt, you know, to take false money’; ‘Were’t not for gold and women there would be no damnation’ (1.1.104, 2.1.250). Kevin Quarmby’s essay is strong on the contradictions with regard to women, and Katherine Graham provides a lively account of the female characters in two productions slavering over delectable jewels – stage business which certainly has warrant in the text. Vindice’s strident moralizing, connected by Heather Hirschfeld and Eric Vivier with Middleton’s own Calvinist background, collides resoundingly with the play’s irreverent, often scurrilous comedy. Lucy Munro also sees Calvinism, in the play’s gesturing towards the belief that blasphemous swearing pointed to a reprobate condition; but she notes that ‘swearing also enables Middleton to articulate the ambivalent response to extra-judicial vengeance that was becoming characteristic of revenge tragedy’ (p. 137). There are generic disjunctions too, between the conventions of revenge tragedy and those of city comedy or of the morality play: Vivier notes that ‘the humour of the play – its verbal jokes, its comic misunderstandings, its bawdy double entendres – as well as its interest in wit and tricks make the play seem as much like a city comedy as a revenge tragedy’ (p. 40), while Erin Kelly calls the play ‘a revenge tragedy that is also a morality play. By blending these two types of drama, Middleton calls attention to the generic conventions of both even as he holds his audience in suspense about which will predominate’ (p. 28).
Are these internal contradictions, these fault-lines, these fractures, intentional or accidental? If accidental, how could an accomplished dramatist such as Middleton not have recognized them and fixed them? If intentional, what dramatic and artistic purpose do they serve?
In some cases, I’d plump for non-intentionality: it’s easy to imagine a satirist, bent on hammering sexual power abuse, or denouncing pervasive lasciviousness that saps society’s manly resolve, finding his Christian vehemence unexpectedly tipping over into lip-licking salacity. Maybe he wouldn’t even notice it had happened. Maybe, were it pointed out to him, he wouldn’t agree it was there. Or the misogyny issue: I can believe that Middleton, steeped in the various misogynies and male-supremacist notions so typical of his era, would hardly have noticed Vindice’s casual misogynist proverbs (‘Wives are but made to go to bed and feed’ [1.1.132]), or his unexamined male presumption in imposing standards of chastity on every female he encounters. It might seem contradictory to us that a Vindice who makes misogynistic remarks is clearly cast as a hero with whom we are meant to empathize (partly because he is avenging a wronged woman), but whether this much bothered Middleton is open to question. Did he create this contradiction to provoke future generations to ponder deep questions of gender? To undercut the whole genre of revenge tragedy? To prod us into reconsidering the definition of tragic hero? That the busy, prolific Middleton never gave it a thought seems to me fairly plausible. We academics often have a compulsion to attribute a highly-sophisticated intentionality to writers we revere. As Alfred Harbage once put it in an essay on Shakespeare entitled ‘The Myth of Perfection’, we assume that ‘because the plays are excellent, they are excellent in every way – in a word that they are perfect’.1 We don’t need to deny that The Revenger’s Tragedy is a stunning play to concede that some of its internal contradictions were possibly unintentional.
Similar internal contradictions have bedeviled readings of Shakespeare’s Henry V for generations. Some of that play’s dialogue, choruses and action point to Henry as a great national hero and the play as a jingoistic celebration of international war, while other aspects of the play suggest that Henry is a scheming Machiavellian and the whole invasion of France a diversion, distracting the populace from the illegitimacy of Henry’s Lancastrian dynasty. Norman Rabkin famously compared Henry V to ‘Gestaltist’ drawings like those of M.C. Escher, in which the eye may read a pattern as either rabbits or ducks; the play’s ‘ultimate power is precisely the fact that it points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us’.2 Joel Altman, in The Tudor Play of Mind, argues that the rhetorical, dialectical education given students in sixteenth-century England provided them with constant practice in debating both sides of any issue, predisposing them to regard any action from more than one point of view.3 Are the internal contradictions of The Revenger’s Tragedy an artefact of such ‘both sides’ thinking? If so, it doesn’t resolve the ‘intentionality’ question: Middleton could be deliberately using disjunction to provoke complex, multi-faceted thinking in his audience, or Janus-faced thinking could simply have been so ingrained in him as a child of his culture that he wrote disjunctively without even noticing.
Some of the dissonances are probably intentional. Like Emerson, Middleton contains multitudes. At this remove, we’ll never be able to gauge accurately exactly what Middleton intended to do. (Even with our contemporaries, it’s impossible to do that with any precision.) As Jonathan Culler once encapsulated the problem, ‘Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless’.4 Just as one can increase the number of sides in a regular polygon infinitely without ever creating a circle, one can add immensely to our knowledge of Middleton and his era without ever being sure what he intended; however, we can come closer and closer to that circle of certainty. Let me suggest a few ways we might approach the dissonances of The Revenger’s Tragedy.
In the interest of brevity, I will focus on the kind of discordia that seems to me most troublesome in the play – the disconnect between serious moralizing and irreverent eruptions of the comic. On the one hand, as Vivier notes, the play abounds in ‘very serious references to heaven, hell and the wages of sin’, in common with ‘nearly all satirists of the 1590s and early 1600s’ (pp. 44, 52), several of whom were serious enough about denouncing sin that they took holy orders. On the other hand, as Vivier also notes, the play abounds in ‘dark humour and irreverence’ (p. 44).
Here are a few examples that leap out for me. Lussurioso first hires Vindice (disguised) to pander to his own sister, then to murder his (disguised) self. He jestingly refers to the skull of his supposedly dearest love as ‘the bony lady’ (3.5.121). Unlovely members of the Duke’s reconstituted family rejoice in the monikers Lussurioso, Spurio, Ambitioso, Supervacuo and Junior. Hearing Lussurioso utter monstrous lies, Vindice employs the ‘deaf heaven’ trope common in revenge tragedy since time immemorial: ‘Has not heaven an ear? / Is all the lightning wasted? [.…] 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?’ (4.2.158–9, 193–8). At this moment, a thunder-clap is heard, and Vindice delightedly crows, ‘There it goes!’ – the effect onstage is almost always comic. In Act 3 the poisoned Duke is forced to watch his wife copulating with his bastard, and in the play’s final scene two separate troupes of four masked murderers dance in; we watch a choreographed mass stabbing, too ritualized and too excessive not to seem funny. Snarling insults and horrific events evoke bathetic responses: Duchess: ‘He called his father villain, and me strumpet, / A word that I abhor to file my lips with’ (2.3.24–5). Ambitioso: ‘That was not so well done, brother’ (26). Spurio, told of his father’s death, cries in anguish, ‘Old Dad dead?’ (5.1.116). When the Duke’s corpse is discovered in vassal’s attire, lips eaten away by poison and tongue mutilated, a nobleman mildly reports, ‘Your father’s accidentally departed’ (5.1.141). Nobles vie to out-flatter each other by wishing the new Duke longer and longer life: threescore years, then fourscore, then fivescore (5.3.30–4); we can’t help laughing when the new Duke actually gets about thirty more seconds of life. The play’s dark joking goes beyond merely existing side-by-side with lethal events: the joking is often about the lethal events (‘Old Dad dead?’, ‘accidentally departed’, and so forth). How do we account for the play’s dizzying shifts in tone, its inappropriateness of tone to subject matter?
We could approach this issue through various different theoretical frames. We could view it through a lens of literary history and the history of genres. Erin Kelly, in this volume, usefully parses the play’s morality play features, including allegorical names, sententious moralizing, the sudden downfall of ‘those who think themselves at the height of their powers’, the resemblance of Vindice to vice figures in morality plays: he is ‘highly theatrical, entertaining and morally ambiguous; he speaks directly to the audience, encourages bad behaviour by others, stage manages mischief and gleefully gloats over the suffering of others’ (p. 29). Irreverent humour was a standard feature of morality plays. During his deepest anguish, when Everyman is facing death alone and one after another of his friends declines to accompany him into that undiscovered country, one friend begs off on grounds of a sore toe – no doubt the actor went hobbling off with a histrionic flourish of podiatric pain, to the appreciative chuckles of the play’s late-medieval audience. Medieval audiences clearly had a high threshold of discomfort when it came to eruptions of humour at what seem to be dead-serious moments: the same Herod who decreed the massacre of all male infants in the land occasioned roars of derisive laughter when, foiled in his attempt to eradicate the baby Jesus, he jumped down from the pageant wagon and ranted up and down the streets of Wakefield or York. In another medieval mystery play, Jehovah was employing Noah to spare the human race and all other living animals from a watery extinction – a pretty serious matter; but when Mrs Noah baulked on the gang-plank, preferring a tipple with her gossips to sailing away in a water-borne zoo, and when she gave her husband a box on the ear, it really tickled the medieval funny bone. Devils in mystery plays were typically comic, perhaps on the theory that laughing at an evil enemy deprives him of dignity, and hence of some of his power. Continuities between medieval and Tudor drama have long been recognized – the great mystery cycles continued in a vigorous tradition until they were outlawed during Elizabeth’s reign, and the Vice figure from morality plays has long been identified as contributing to the DNA of such Renaissance dramatic characters as Iago and Richard III. Tensions between serious moral issues and irreverent laughter in The Revenger’s Tragedy come into better focus when viewed through this lens.
Another generic lens is that of satire, discussed in this volume by Eric Vivier. The era’s satiric tradition was robust, so provocative that in 1599 the nation’s bishops decreed a mass burning of existing satires (including some of Middleton’s), and an ecclesiastical ban on further verse satire. This genre had its own internal tensions: a long tradition of Juvenalian and Horatian satire, familiar from school curricula, was rendered more inflammatory by injections of the very sort of Christian moral ire that prompted bishops to ban satires. Renaissance satire has an acid tone, perfectly suiting the morbid rage of Vindice: to him, death is a ‘terror to fat folks, / To have their costly three-piled flesh worn off’ (1.1.45–6). He works himself up to a moralistic (voyeuristic?) passion when imagining sexual misdeeds:
Now ’tis full sea abed over the world,
There’s juggling of all sides. Some that were maids
E’en at sunset are now perhaps i’th’ toll-book.
This woman in immodest thin apparel
Lets in her friend by water. Here a dame,
Cunning, nails leather hinges to a door
To avoid proclamation. Now cuckolds are
A-coining, apace, apace, apace, apace,
And careful sisters spin that thread i’th’ night
That does maintain them and their bawds i’th’ day.
(2.2.133–42)
Ian McAdam writes of the ‘bitterness of the humour and the nightmarish quality of the action,’ which point to authorial seriousness about the ‘cultural pathology’ of ‘the world Middleton depicts’ (p. 85). But again, the play’s comic tone tends to undercut any Christian-tinged moral indignation: consider the sprightly self-congratulation of Vindice and Hippolito: ‘I do applaud thy constant vengeance, / The quaintness of thy malice’ (3.5.108–9); ‘Oh good deceit, he quits him with like terms!’ (5.1.103); ‘Brother, how happy is our vengeance […] Why, it hits / Past the apprehension of indifferent wits’ (5.1.134–6); ‘We may be bold / To speak it now. ’Twas somewhat witty-carried, / Though we say it. ’Twas we two murdered him’ (5.3.96–8). The posture of the Renaissance satirist is of a lasher of society’s vices; Vindice sometimes adopts such a stance, but at other times preens himself as a witty jokester. Here another genre raises its head – as Vivier notes, the aroma of city comedy also wafts through the play. Like satire, city comedy is a genre of ‘nowadays’ – life in the city, nowadays, is corrupt, immoral, cynical, materialistic, and utterly worldly. Where satire proper is able to maintain a fairly even tone of moral indignation, rage, and furious ranting about this, city comedy’s denunciations of London wickedness are often indistinguishable from celebrations of London sophistication. Juvenalian or Horatian satire and Christian moralization are old, old traditions; but rapid urbanization of the sort that gave rise to city comedy was new. Vindice’s satiric rage against society’s vices might easily draw upon the incandescent fury of puritanism, congenial in some ways with Middleton’s Calvinist heritage, but inimical to stage plays and hence satirizable in itself, as we see, for example, in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, a quintessential city comedy, which satirizes both city vices and puritans as the opponents of city vices. McAdam suggests that the ‘disconcerting simultaneity of the comic and tragic expression’ in The Revenger’s Tragedy ‘may be linked to the coincidence of [Middleton’s] astonishing gifts as a satirist with his apparent commitment to a religious ideology’ (p. 86). To understand the baffling mix of tones in The Revenger’s Tragedy requires a supple mastery of some very complex tonal shifts in Jacobean culture.
Another lens: is the whole play a literary parody? In this volume, Hirschfeld, Clare and McAdam view the play as what Hirschfeld calls a ‘sustained parody of Hamlet’ (p. 63), while for Munro, an intertextual relationship with Hamlet appears in both Hamlet’s and Vindice’s swearing on their swords and using the oath ‘’sblood’ (p. 136). Certainly, a play that opens with its morose (but often blackly comic) protagonist brooding over a skull can reasonably be suspected of parodying Hamlet, which was first onstage half a decade before The Revenger’s Tragedy. But does the play parody Hamlet directly, or does it parody a whole genre, perhaps revenge tragedy, perhaps the morality play? For Clare, who sees in it a parody of revenge tragedy, ‘part of the pleasure in watching The Revenger’s Tragedy would have been bound up with deconstructing a new play in the genre’, enjoying ‘its self-conscious allusions, in-jokes and playful treatment of familiar conventions’ (p. 161). If so, what is the purpose of such parodies? Do genres exhausted by over-familiarity tend naturally to tip over into parody? (This happened with the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, where the blazon’s rosy cheeks and grey eyes ultimately deteriorated into parodic grey cheeks and red eyes, and mistresses’ eyes became nothing like the sun.) John Mason’s Mulleases the Turk, another revenge tragedy, first staged just after The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607–8), also abounds in preposterous and seemingly parodic incident. Competitive plotting by rival avengers animates this chess-like play with its moves and counter-moves. Two phony vengeance-craving ghosts keep scaring other characters (and each other) into headlong flight. A fleeing ‘spruce’ lecher, happily named Bordello, encounters a group of chatting bawds and inquires politely, ‘Ladies, did you not see a spirit pass this way?’ They reply, ‘Thou see’st we are feeding the flesh, man! What, dost thou talk of the spirit?’ (1.2.126, 3.2.28–30).5 When Borgias, startled by a bogus ghost, falls from a great height, the disguised Ferrara tosses the supposed corpse over his shoulder, and the feigning Borgias whips Ferrara’s dagger from his belt and slays him. Posing as a ghost, Borgias strangles the other ghost impersonator with her own hair. But when he wafts into a hostage-taking still feigning ghosthood, Mulleases kills him to prove that ghosts do not exist.
Were such genre parodies just for fun? Nothing wrong with fun. Is The Revenger’s Tragedy fun? Or did parodies exist as a more serious way of reforming stage writing, purging it of the hackneyed, the over-used, the boring? Did parody offer a dramatist a tool for demonstrating his own superior sophistication? If a whole play is parody, does that undermine any serious satire or moral commentary the play contains? Wouldn’t pervasive parody send up the very moral stance of a protagonist? And would that mean that Middleton didn’t really care about sexual depravity or materialistic addiction to gold or power abuse or corruption in the judicial system? Or would it mean merely that, whether he cared about all this or not, at the moment of composing The Revenger’s Tragedy he was really more interested in sending up Shakespeare or demonstrating that revenge tragedy had reached the end of its useful theatrical life?
Most of these lenses through which we might view The Revenger’s Tragedy depend on some knowledge of the play’s historical, literary and theatrical contexts. In trying to make sense of this difficult play, it helps quite a bit to know at least something about Gloriana the virgin queen, about the conventions of Renaissance literary misogyny, about revenge tragedy, about Calvinism and puritanism, about satire and morality play and city comedy, about Middleton’s biography and writing habits, about contemporary dramatists against whom he competed, about the Jacobean sense of humour and what kinds of things struck Jacobeans as funny, about the medieval Vice figure and the ways he mutated into Renaissance dramatic figures, about literary parody, about the life-cycle of literary genres. It helps to know about the other plays onstage at nearly the same time, as Karen Marsalek sheds light on the exchange-of-heads gag in The Revenger’s Tragedy by reminding us that Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, with its grotesque head exchange, was staged just one year earlier by the same theatre company. In approaching a play full of oaths and full of dismemberments, it is useful to know, as Lucy Munro insightfully teases out for us, that Jacobeans connected blasphemous oaths with the dismemberment of Christ. The present volume contributes very helpfully by filling in a number of such contexts for us. What troubles me is wondering how many audience members at a modern production of the play are likely to read this volume before they attend. How many people, finally, are educationally equipped to profit from this volume? The problem, to be blunt, is that we don’t teach this period in our schools any more. For all but a few Renaissance scholars, knowledge of English Renaissance literature has been reduced to whatever they know about Shakespeare. And however much we resent Shakespeare’s sole possession of the Renaissance curriculum or worry that bardolatry perpetuates the often-intolerant mindsets that attended its birth, we should be grateful that the cult of Shakespeare gives us at least a small foot in the door of secondary and post-secondary education.
Luckily, The Revenger’s Tragedy has that clear intertextual relationship with Hamlet, and everybody knows Hamlet. (Or used to know Hamlet.) The theatre does a little better than the school system – as Kevin Quarmby shows, modern productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy have been able to count on audiences catching allusions to Hamlet, Richard III and The Spanish Tragedy. But even so, how many modern audiences will have seen Mulleases the Turk? How many modern theatregoers or readers have any notion of the sweep of the revenge play tradition? How many will know that the revenge play genre includes not only Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, but that it extends back to the ancient Greeks and that in the English Renaissance alone, it includes at least fifty other extant plays? No wonder two of the productions Quarmby discusses were accused of suffering from a surfeit of modernizing – how else can directors feel sure of connecting with a modern audience? Even with the best of programme notes, to try to understand The Revenger’s Tragedy or other non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays is to confront the consequences of Shakespeare’s having become a stand-alone writer for most modern readers and audiences.
Our only hope of understanding or appreciating Middleton’s wildly dissonant play is to steep ourselves in the contexts that produced it, and to do that we must not only attend to the well-researched essays in a volume like this one, but help to create a wider intellectual community in which to debate, discuss and enjoy plays like Middleton’s. We must not only struggle to retain ‘contemporaries’ courses alongside Shakespeare courses in our colleges and universities, but also become advocates for the restoration of more Renaissance literature at the lower levels of our school systems. Students who have had good experiences with Renaissance writers in high school are more likely to pursue them in college; and what about those who never have a chance to attend college? Shouldn’t they too be able to wander the corridors of long-ago literature, have some experience of The Past, before they leave high school? Now is the ideal time for us to press for inclusion of more Renaissance writers in classrooms. Only a few years ago, there was little hope of introducing a play by Middleton, Marlowe, Kyd or Jonson in a high school class, along with Shakespeare plays, if only because most school systems could not afford to provide the text books. Now students can download Renaissance plays online. It’s true that many of these lack vocabulary glosses and other notes essential for a high school student to be able to follow the text; but who better to remedy that situation than ourselves? Why not bend our philanthropic urges in an editorial direction, by helping to provide good texts, free, to high school students, so that they can enjoy these plays so long rendered inaccessible by neglect?
Hamlet merely meditates on the skull he holds in his hand, but Vindice puts the nine-year-old skull of Gloriana to work, clothes her, makes her live again. We scholars hold in our hands the 400-year-old skull of The Revenger’s Tragedy. If we harbour a wistful longing that Middleton and other lively Renaissance dramatists could live again in our culture, let us write about them, but also advocate for them. Renaissance literature has tumbled a long way down in our educational system, but let us not resign ourselves to the Slough of Despond. Let us fight!
1Alfred Harbage, ‘The Myth of Perfection’, in Conceptions of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 31.
2Norman Rabkin, ‘Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V’, Shakespeare Quarterly 28.3 (1977): 279.
3Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
4Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 123.
5John Mason, Mulleases the Turk, ed. Fernand Lagarde (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1979).