Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge by Emily L. King

Abstract

Reviewed by: Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge by Emily L. King Adam Hansen Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge. By Emily L. King. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2019. xiii+170 pp. $53.95. ISBN 978–1–5017–3965–1. This is an enjoyably ambitious, sophisticated, and subtle rethinking of the ways in which revenge permeated and preoccupied early modern English culture. Emily L. King aims to show how we might think beyond the 'spectacular theatricality of onstage revenge acts', to perceive 'vengeanceʼs uncanny permutations', in texts and contexts 'beyond the high-pressure cooker' of the early modern theatre (p. 3), in 'conduct manuals, scientific writing, elegiac poetry, religious sermons, imaginative letters, and parliamentary acts' (p. 12). King perceives these permutations as part of the ever-ambiguous 'civilizing' process, with 'revengeʼs integration into the social fabric' becoming 'civil vengeance': 'retribution in the guise of civility' (p. 4). As King elaborates: 'civil vengeance makes legible interactions of covert aggression and animosity, especially ones that substitute for death' (p. 9). It is, as she memorably puts it '[r]evenge with a smile' (p. 53). King is surely right to note that treating early modern revenge as the preserve of the stage is a flawed and self-fulfilling [End Page 276] prophecy: we keep finding it there because we keep looking for it there, which means 'the basis on which we organize the genre [of early modern revenge tragedy] becomes conflated with how we understand revenge as a concept' (p. 7). By instead scrutinizing a 'wide and sometimes obscure archive' (p. 12), King explicates 'the quiet retribution inhabiting early modern English culture' (p. 146). This prompts some counterintuitive analyses: rather than prohibiting vengeance outright as a way to respond to the Reformationʼs impact on volition, many religious texts of the period permit it by showing how 'intersubjective violence is recoded as godly retribution' (p. 50). Ranging from the earliest incarnations of revenge on the English stage to the vengeful moments of the Commonwealth and Restoration allows King to show how Margaret Cavendish, for one, can 'disrupt the revenge machine' by challenging 'linear time' in a liminal, imaginative space (p. 134). Elsewhere, King suggests vagrants were subject to 'preemptive retaliation' (p. 80), that is, set up as a threat only in order to be exhibited and repressed as 'scapegoats' (p. 109). While this evaluation might be seen to reproduce long-standing tropes of transgression containment, and be insufficiently attentive to the nuances and ambiguities of writing about Englandʼs 'peripatetic population' (p. 109), via a reading of Thomas Nasheʼs The Unfortunate Traveller King does offer a novel way to conceive such figures and their representation in relation to national identity. An even longer view of tragedy and revenge might have complicated Kingʼs argument that 'revenge has traditionally been understood as a discrete event' (p. 3)—classical tragedy continually makes audiences question the causality of the events that make revenge inevitable. That is, you have to ask: where does tragedy, and thus revenge, begin (or end)? In turn, one might query whether there was something particularly early modern and English about how 'spectacular vengeance' occupies the 'realm of the extralegal' while 'civil vengeance' 'wraps itself in courtesy and flourishes under law' (p. 10): isnʼt that exactly what happens in the course of Aeschylusʼs Oresteia, with all the attendant exclusion and repression King notes in the texts and contexts she does discuss? Equally, any discussion of tragedy and violence might be enhanced by mentioning Francis Barkerʼs The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993)—not cited by King—which makes the comparable and challenging case that what happens on stage obscures the reality of social violence rather than drawing attention to it. From the opening discussion of Hamlet, which manages to illuminate that most studied of texts in new ways, King repeatedly offers amazing close readings of texts familiar and unfamiliar, culminating in a detailed account of Cavendishʼs use of the subjunctive. This attention to textual detail is underpinned by a theoretically astute approach, which is eclectic but coherent and encompasses at different points...