Gretchen E. Minton
In the spring of 2015, a group of scholars at the Shakespeare Association of America annual meeting in Vancouver gathered late on a Saturday afternoon to discuss a range of papers they had written about The Revenger’s Tragedy.1 This play, published anonymously in 1607, did not attract much critical or performative attention until the twentieth century. For the past several decades, however, it has been acknowledged as an important part of the canon of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama, enjoying popularity among students, teachers, actors and scholars alike. The Revenger’s Tragedy fascinates largely because it is so outlandish. It features a dizzyingly complex plot and stage action that is relentlessly grotesque and violent – so much so that this excess results in over-the-top humour. Such physical energy is matched by The Revenger’s Tragedy’s language, which drips with sexual innuendo, misogyny and searing imagery.
Critical attitude towards The Revenger’s Tragedy has been marked by heated debates in two areas: the identity of its author and the seriousness of its moral pretensions. The first of these questions has been largely agreed upon, thus the essays in this collection all reflect a widespread scholarly consensus that Thomas Middleton is The Revenger’s Tragedy’s author.2 Current scholarship benefits from situating this drama within Middleton’s canon; these essays thus take account of his prose works (e.g. The Black Book, Microcynicon), his poetry (e.g. The Ghost of Lucrece) and his other plays (e.g. Chaste Maid in Cheapside, The Changeling). The authorship attribution significantly impacts a historical reading of the play, especially because of Middleton’s Calvinist sentiments. As these essays attest, however, a deeper understanding of the author’s religious convictions and the play’s theological underpinnings does not always result in agreement about its generic orientation or the seriousness of its moralizing.
The three sections into which this collection is subdivided highlight religion, topicality and performance. Part One features four essays that centre upon the valences of religion and genre. Erin Kelly traces The Revenger’s Tragedy’s debt to the medieval morality tradition, Eric Vivier to satire, and Heather Hirschfeld and Ian McAdam to revenge tragedy. Yet even though they choose different genres as their primary focal points, these writers all acknowledge that part of what has been so difficult in understanding The Revenger’s Tragedy is the way in which it interweaves genres. For instance, in Chapter 1 Kelly sees the play as an attempt to reimagine the revenge tragedy genre through the lens of an older generic tradition – the morality play – which can account for its complex and morally ambiguous orientation. Her detailed historical look at morality plays demonstrates that they were not simplistic dramas that had little in common with a supposedly sophisticated commercial theatre; on the contrary, the morality plays often resisted explicitly Christian messages as they explored practical problems resulting from sin.
As Kelly elucidates, Vindice can be understood as a Vice character, and as such he would be expected to live on at the end of the play. Contrastingly, however, the conventions of revenge tragedy demand that the protagonist die after he has completed his revenge. Middleton interweaves these two genres in his complex ending, ultimately satisfying ‘neither those expecting Vindice to make his end atop a pile of bloody bodies nor those who think he might walk away from his many murders scot-free’ (p. 31). By equating Vindice with the vice characters of morality plays, Middleton is able to highlight the moral and social problems inherent in revenge tragedy.
Kelly’s paper offers a corrective to previous scholars who dismissed the possibility that The Revenger’s Tragedy is a morality play because it has satirical or parodic elements. Taking this trajectory further, in Chapter 2 Eric Vivier locates the play firmly within the satiric tradition, arguing that such an understanding of its genre can account not only for certain paradoxes within the play, but for divided critical attitudes toward the play. Specifically, the frequent oscillation between seriousness and scurrility has caused doubts about The Revenger’s Tragedy’s ability to uphold a moral position, but, as Vivier shows, such techniques are fundamental to satire itself. He sees The Revenger’s Tragedy as one of the many satiric experiments influenced by writers such as Thomas Nashe and John Marston that are evident throughout Middleton’s canon: from Microcynicon to The Black Book, from A Chaste Maid in Cheapside to A Game at Chess. On the one hand, early modern satirists such as Middleton wrote with a specific moral purpose, painting vivid pictures of vices so that their audiences could come to a full appreciation of their dangers, but on the other, satirist figures had a frequent tendency not only to be playful, but to become fascinated by the sins they decried.
As Vivier argues, a full understanding of the Elizabethan satirical tradition requires that these writers’ religious convictions be taken seriously. Building upon scholarship about Middleton’s theology, Vivier connects some of The Revenger’s Tragedy’s paradoxes to its Calvinist worldview. What Vivier adds to previous discussions is a particular focus upon the efficacy of satirical ethics. In his reading, the rhetorical complicity of the satirist is both self-damning and playful, both troubled and confident. Yet in the midst of these competing energies Middleton’s artistry rests upon the belief that ‘the well-intentioned but necessarily depraved satirist could be confident that he too served as an instrument of the Lord’s providential wrath’ (p. 54).
The essays by Heather Hirschfeld and Ian McAdam also engage with the implications of Middleton’s Calvinism. In Chapter 3, Hirschfeld analyses both the theological and the literary dimensions of The Revenger’s Tragedy’s persistent references to hell. Also attuned to Middleton’s generic experimentation, she reads The Revenger’s Tragedy’s engagement with the idea of hell as a parody of a revenge tragedy that came before it – Hamlet. Whereas Hamlet continually questions hell and meditates upon its ambiguity, Vindice gleefully asserts it as a physical place where the damned receive their just punishment.
Like Vivier and Kelly, Hirschfeld is interested in the debt that Middleton has to the satiric morality tradition. She situates The Revenger’s Tragedy in relation to Menippean satires such as Nashe’s Pierce Penniless and Middleton’s own The Black Book, specifically their accounts of journeys to the netherworld. In such works the realm of the dead is used as a metaphor to address social, political and religious problems. Drawing upon this genre enables Middleton to exploit ‘hell’s immense conceptual purchase as both doctrinal reality and literary device, as both material yet otherworldly place and figurative yet existential state’ (p. 62). Such ‘playing with the infernal’ ultimately destabilizes hell’s referential fixity rather than reinforcing it. This argument supports an ultimately more secular reading of The Revenger’s Tragedy than that put forward by Kelly and Vivier; while acknowledging the post-Reformation context of the play’s interest in allegory and linguistic uncertainty, Hirschfeld’s reading posits that Middleton may ultimately interrogate Protestant notions without supporting them.
In this section’s final essay (Chapter 4) McAdam explores the impact of Calvinist thought on The Revenger’s Tragedy; specifically, he suggests that this theology might account for the absence of interiority in the play’s characters, its pathologizing of sex and its deracination of masculinity. Once again Middleton’s other writings provide crucial context; in an overtly theological work such as Two Gates of Salvation, for instance, Middleton meditates upon the impossibility of distinguishing good from evil and links human identity with corruption and guilt. This context can help to explain how The Revenger’s Tragedy’s characters are in some sense constructed by depravity itself.
The emphasis upon interiority or lack thereof allows McAdam, like Hirschfeld, to contrast The Revenger’s Tragedy with Hamlet, similarly reading Middleton’s play as a response to Shakespeare’s. Vindice is a revenger who, unlike Hamlet, has no father figure to imitate, and this lack of masculine identification drives The Revenger’s Tragedy’s persistent misogyny. McAdam relates this strain in Middleton to the trauma arising from predestinarian theology, specifically as it impacts traditional hierarchies of gender and class; he thus contends that ‘the Protestant denial of the efficacy of works in the process of salvation placed a particular strain on constructions of masculinity’ (p. 89).
All four of the essays in Part One add to our understanding of The Revenger’s Tragedy’s religious context, as they interrogate the ways in which theology and ethics relate to Middleton’s drama. For these authors, understanding the religious dimension is inextricably linked to the play’s literary context, especially to its genre. Thus all of these papers, even when they take different stances on the relative religious or secular orientation of The Revenger’s Tragedy, attempt to account for the curious mixture of humour and morality that has been the cause of so much scholarly debate.
The essays in Part Two – History and Topicality – share many of the same concerns as those in Part One, such as an interest in The Revenger’s Tragedy’s genre and a conviction that a thorough measure of the Jacobean context is essential for understanding the play. When Vindice gleefully announces, ‘When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good’ (3.5.200),3 he is pointing to the fascination that revenge tragedies have for spilled blood. In Katherine Gillen’s analysis (Chapter 5) such sanguine preoccupations in The Revenger’s Tragedy can be read in relation to a historical shift whereby blood evolved from its original association with high social rank to a notion of race dependent upon ethnicity. According to Gillen, The Revenger’s Tragedy marshals the genre’s bloody thematics to interrogate class-based understandings of race, thereby exploring the implications of emerging racial ideologies that link English people to one another and to other Europeans.
Early modern tensions about racial mixing were often imagined in terms of a violation of the chaste and white female body, which is repeatedly staged in The Revenger’s Tragedy as a series of assaults on implicitly English chaste women by racialized Italian men. Yet Gillen points out that the play complicates these divisions both by associating chaste whiteness with death and by showing the troubling volatility of blood itself. Gillen reads The Revenger’s Tragedy next to Middleton’s narrative poem The Ghost of Lucrece, for both works highlight the paradoxical nature of blood as both purifying and contaminating; by extension, the works also question both racial purity and chaste whiteness.
One of the implications of Gillen’s argument is that such an interrogation of pan-European whiteness could provide an implicit critique of James I’s expansionist foreign policy. Further Jacobean questions are examined by Lucy Munro in Chapter 6 as she considers the significance of swearing and oaths in the play, especially as they relate to the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses that prohibited profanity on the public stage. Munro’s assertion is that paying closer attention to the function of such language in Middleton’s play has a bearing upon its theological, emotional and theatrical functions.
Oaths such as ‘’sblood’, ‘’swounds’ and ‘’slid’ are indicative of binding promises, but they also held a troubling resonance for the early modern listener because they suggested a violence done to Christ’s body. This ‘mincing’ of words in the mouth or teeth of the one uttering oaths provides a religious as well as emotional context for the frequent swearing in The Revenger’s Tragedy. Munro shows how oaths echo the play’s violence, especially the dismemberment of the characters (most notably the Duke’s gruesome murder in 3.5). Munro also takes account of the Calvinist implications of swearing, for numerous early modern tracts argued that swearing is one sign of a reprobate soul. The strong language in this play is not reserved for the evil characters, however, for Vindice himself is frequently guilty of such oaths – not only in his use of profane language, but also in his act of swearing upon Lussurioso’s sword. This elucidation of Vindice’s tendency to reproduce the vices he decries echoes the arguments of Vivier and Kelly in Part One.
Vindice’s swearing destabilizes his moral position and points to the dangers associated with uttering such words on the stage. Because acting is inherently mimetic, it is difficult to separate from the words used; when such words suggest damnation, the line between promissory and assertory functions is likewise blurred. In Munro’s provocative reading, swearing not only reflects religious and ethical tensions but also provides a powerful theatrical opportunity that is not determined by these factors.
The other two essays in Part Two take up similar issues about the overt theatricality of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Like Munro, Janet Clare seeks to shift emphasis away from moral perspectives; specifically, in Chapter 7 Clare considers how Jacobean theatrical conventions speak to the relationship between presentation and representation. She reads the entire play from a dramaturgical angle, considering the operations of stage traffic – circulating scenarios, motifs and stage effects. She argues that The Revenger’s Tragedy is a response to other revenge tragedies that came before it, such as Hamlet and Hoffman, not just in its thematics but in its use of theatrical effects ranging from split staging to asides and disguises, from stage cues and thunder to the control of theatrical space.
Not limiting her analysis to The Revenger’s Tragedy’s relationship to other revenge tragedies, however, Clare also reads the play next to Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece and Jonson’s Sejanus to show how Middleton interrogates both the motif of the sexually violated female and the dangerous political implications of active resistance to tyranny. Through exposing the mechanisms of revenge tragedy and alluding to the tropes of its performativities, Middleton enhances the ‘strategic ambiguity’ (p. 178) of representation. Clare resists a moralizing reading of the play that sees Vindice’s corruption as equal to the royal family’s, but she is also not prepared to adopt a reading that views the play as a straight parody. Taking a middle ground, she characterizes The Revenger’s Tragedy as an ‘equivocal theatrical experience’ that may be ‘tragedy tilted towards parody’ (p. 180).
In Chapter 8, Karen Marsalek also pays keen attention to the theatricality of The Revenger’s Tragedy, demonstrating how props can provide a way of understanding the dramaturgical links between King’s Men plays. Critics have often noted that Gloriana’s skull is a self-conscious allusion to Yorick’s skull in Hamlet, but Marsalek’s innovative approach considers this relationship alongside Measure for Measure – a King’s Men play by Shakespeare that Middleton later revised. Crucial to this argument is the linking of ‘bed-tricks’ with ‘head-tricks’ of Measure for Measure and The Revenger’s Tragedy. Marsalek shows that by appropriating the skull in Hamlet and the bed- and head-tricks of Measure for Measure, The Revenger’s Tragedy comments on ‘the King’s Men’s practice of theatrical recycling and their “ownership” of these corporeal props’ (p. 185).
Measure for Measure and The Revenger’s Tragedy both emphasize the degree to which head-props can be altered to represent various characters; like Ragozine the convict’s head, Gloriana’s skull becomes self-conscious property, turned into an object without rights. Whereas Yorick’s skull is personalized and made into a distinct character who is associated with his body parts, Gloriana’s skull is consistently objectified and made insistently literal. Middleton’s play thus forces the audience to think outside of the drama and to consider the provenance of specific props; such a move foregrounds an explicitly economic reading of dramaturgical exigencies.
In their examinations of early modern performance conditions, the essays by Munro, Clare and Marsalek lay an important foundation for exploring The Revenger’s Tragedy’s realization in contemporary stage and film. Both essays in Part Three take up these issues, examining performances for their readings of gender, objects and violence. Because she is also interested in the material presence of objects on the stage, Katherine Graham’s concerns (Chapter 9) overlap with Marsalek’s. Graham explores the staging of objects in two contemporary performances: the 2002 Alex Cox film and Melly Still’s 2008 National Theatre production. Graham analyses these productions’ use of objects, specifically objects in motion, as ‘material loci through, and around, which questions about gender are foregrounded’ (p. 208).
To elucidate this relationship between objects and gender, Graham focuses upon two topics: the money/jewellery used to corrupt Gratiana in 2.1 and the material presence of the skull in relationship to the person of Gloriana. In both productions, extra-textual material, including language, sound-effects and props, heightened the relationship between Gratiana’s greed and the threat to Castiza’s chastity. Even more striking than the importance of material objects associated with wealth, however, is the cultural and symbolic baggage related to the onstage skull. Graham’s analysis of the skull as physical object in The Revenger’s Tragedy traces the links between this stage prop and the imagined person of a woman named Gloriana. Graham argues that ‘in Still’s production the skull moves towards becoming Gloriana, whereas in Cox’s film the skull moves away from being associated with her’ (p. 215). Both productions use the skull’s movement as a means of addressing the sexual violence faced by women in the play, but whereas Still suggests the possibility of a ‘recovery’ from sexual violence, Cox offers no such respite.
Like Graham, Kevin Quarmby (Chapter 10) is interested in how contemporary performances of The Revenger’s Tragedy present the female characters, especially because of the play’s notorious misogyny. In addition to Still’s National Theatre production, Quarmby considers a production that same year at the Manchester Royal Exchange as well as a 2015 staging in London by the Lazarus Theatre Company. Quarmby demonstrates that both 2008 productions emphasized the shock tactics of violence and a ‘forced modernity’ in the setting while adopting a moralizing tone with respect to contemporary economic and social crises; in contrast, a more stylized violence allowed the Lazarus production a fresh approach to the play, its language and the female characters.
Quarmby examines the tendency that both 2008 productions had towards an over-the-top violent ‘overkill’ as a means of alluding to current political and economic events. This overt topicality ultimately had the side-effect of downplaying any feminist potential in these productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy. On the other hand, the Lazarus fringe production returned to an approach that had been pioneered by Trevor Nunn’s seminal 1966 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of the play, adopting a stylized and removed presentation of the violence. All these productions attempted to comment in some way about how this violence impacts the female characters. The 2008 revivals focused on links between the younger women (Castiza, Gloriana and Antonio’s wife), sometimes even doubling the characters, which only reinforced the attention to ‘patriarchal norms and salacious commodification of the prostituted body’ (p. 247). The Lazarus production instead doubled the parts of the Duchess and Gratiana and presented a nuanced view of these older women, thus underscoring the feminist potential of this production.
This volume concludes with an Afterword by Linda Woodbridge which reflects upon the many instances of discordia concors in The Revenger’s Tragedy that are illuminated by these ten essays. Woodbridge interrogates the problem of intentionality with respect to these fault-lines and considers various lenses through which we can view such critical issues. The Afterword concludes by asking a series of provocative questions about how contemporary students and audiences can understand a play such as this without a historical knowledge of the period that produced it. Woodbridge thus raises pressing concerns about incorporating non-Shakespearean dramatists into various curricula to ensure the continued vitality of the play and its context in our own world.
The three sections of this collection allow us to consider clusters of papers that share approaches to religion and genre, topicality and history, and performance. Nonetheless, several other recurring issues throughout these pieces cut across the section divisions but also indicate current trends in critical attention to The Revenger’s Tragedy.
It is often noted that one of the distinguishing features of The Revenger’s Tragedy as a revenge tragedy is that it has no ghost. Yet Vindice’s entrance into the play carrying a skull is one of many moments of engagement with Hamlet that demonstrate a preoccupation with Shakespeare’s ghostly predecessor. Similarly, the essays in this collection are haunted by Hamlet’s relationship to The Revenger’s Tragedy. Hirschfeld, McAdam, Clare and Marsalek read The Revenger’s Tragedy as a parody of Shakespeare’s play that turns upside down everything from its conception of character to its employment of theatrical effect. The essays by Graham and Quarmby likewise illustrate how directors of modern productions are also haunted by the ghost of Hamlet and can face criticism whether they rely too much upon the parallels or eschew them.
From a critical perspective, the ghost that haunts responses to The Revenger’s Tragedy is invariably that of Jonathan Dollimore, whose ‘Black Camp’ essay from Radical Tragedy still holds tremendous sway in our understanding of the play.4 Kelly and Vivier resist Dollimore’s reading of The Revenger’s Tragedy as secular parody, and while Hirschfeld, McAdam and Clare are more sympathetic to Dollimore’s viewpoint, they stop short of fully endorsing it. Thus, while none of the essays offer an explicitly ‘Dollimorian’ reading, they have a tendency to position themselves in relation to his influential argument. The ‘turn to religion’ in recent early modern scholarship is reflected by more serious attention to the theological implications of Middleton’s plays, as the essays in Part One attest. At the same time, it is not always easy to account for The Revenger’s Tragedy’s bizarre humour. It can be viewed as part of the generic context, as Kelly and Vivier show, but Dollimore’s ‘black camp’ designation articulated something about its sardonic energy that is still difficult to dismiss. This is why Woodbridge returns to this problem in her Afterword, noting that the most troublesome discordia concors in the play is ‘the disconnect between serious moralizing and irreverent eruptions of the comic’ (p. 258).
Dollimore was of course one of the strongest voices of cultural materialism, but in the thirty years since Radical Tragedy was published the growth of materialist criticism has been exponential. Much scholarship on The Revenger’s Tragedy has thus emphasized the physicality of the bodies in Middleton’s drama, highlighting topics such as necrophilia and dismemberment. The essays presented here take account of and participate in these discussions but their interest is more often in how bodies and other objects function as theatrical property or dramaturgical expedient. This is a key focus of Clare and Marsalek, but it also serves as the organizing principle for Graham’s analysis of modern performances of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Several authors in this collection take a different path, exploring instead the relationship between the material and the metaphorical. Hirschfeld’s argument that The Revenger’s Tragedy tests the limits of early modern metaphoricity can thus be provocatively applied to Gillen’s reading of blood’s significance in the play, as well as to Munro’s look at ‘mincing’ oaths.
As Woodbridge notes in her Afterword, these essays all operate on the assumption that historical context is primary in our understanding of meaning. Whether that entails a grounding in early modern Calvinism, Jacobean politics, or theatrical practices, the authors here assert that meaning is, first and foremost, derived from historicity. The depth of knowledge that these essays provide substantially adds to our understanding of the play and the cultural work it did in the seventeenth century. The final two essays necessarily bring these historical issues into conversation with our own time period. By examining how misogyny and violence are handled in contemporary productions Graham and Quarmby demonstrate the ethical imperatives of what it means to stage Middleton’s play. Such issues are not always comfortable for us, any more than emerging categories of race, a theology about damnation, or restrictions on strong language were for the Jacobean audience.
The Revenger’s Tragedy’s enormous linguistic and physical energies have fascinated (and sometimes appalled) audiences and critics for the past century, and they are likely to continue doing so. The degree to which Middleton understood his cosmic appeal is remarkable; as Vindice himself exclaims, ‘When thunder claps heaven likes the tragedy’ (5.3.47). Vindice gives the audience licence to keep viewing the horror, but these scholars show us new ways to consider what it means.
1‘Reappraising The Revenger’s Tragedy’, dir. Gretchen E. Minton, Forty-third Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Vancouver, April 2015.
2Middleton’s authorship was first proposed by E.H.C. Oliphant (‘The Authorship of The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Studies in Philology 23 [1926]: 157–68), though it was not accepted for some decades. Statistical analyses for Middleton’s authorship were first offered by G.R. Price (‘Authorship and Bibliography of The Revenger’s Tragedy’, The Library, 5th Series [1960]: 262–77) and P.B. Murray (‘The Authorship of Revenger’s Tragedy’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of American 56 [1962]: 195–218). Subsequently, three landmark studies provided comprehensive evidence that has never been seriously refuted: David Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays: Internal Evidence for the Major Problems of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); MacDonald P. Jackson, Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg, 1979); and R.V. Holdsworth, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy as a Middleton Play’, in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’, ‘Women Beware Women’, ‘The Changeling’: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1990), 79–105.
The play is presented as unequivocally the work of Middleton in the Oxford Collected Works; see the discussion of the text by MacDonald P. Jackson in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 548–61.
3Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. MacDonald P. Jackson, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). All references to the play throughout this volume are to this edition unless otherwise noted.
4Jonathan Dollimore, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy (c. 1606): Providence, Parody, and Black Camp’, in Radical Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 139–50.