Female sexuality in Hamlet and The Revenger's Tragedy

Abstract

Revenge tragedy, a subdivision of Renaissance tragedy of blood, expresses a dominantly male perspective. In Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy, not only Hamlet but Vindice, as the chief moral spokesman in each play, tells us more about his own needs to set right a world out of joint and epitomizes the aesthetic revenger. The fundamental motive for the tragic action in both plays is revenge according to the masculine code of male domination, yet the revenge motif would be yielded to a psychological development and a detailed study of female sexuality. Shakespeare and Tourneur make explicit the preoccupation with the uncontrollability of female sexuality in their works, for female erotic mobility threatens the power base of patriarchy. The table of incest, adultery, suspicion, hate, and violence explores the boundaries of human corruption in which desire and vengeance have become complicatedly entangled. Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy effectively demonstrate that women cannot function properly outside of the patriarchal structure, and reinforce the patriarchal notion that women cannot survive without men to govern them. Though each woman is presented as a sexual subject in both plays, questions of chastity, references to chastity, adultery, cuckoldry, incest, and misogyny are submerged in the overpowering issue on her life itself. In both plays each woman is the emotional focus in the play’s cultural construction of the guilt, so that she seems determined to take guilt upon herself. The women who cause the male characters’ anguish or break the rules of female conduct are verbally assaulted by men, or destroyed by the masculine code of the punishment of women. Despite a moral difference between Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy the woman’s suffering or death is as much an outcome of the tragic hero’s strategy of the actual vengeance, for his frustration or frenzy in the action of revenge is reflected in an attack on female sexuality as a kind of a defense against his vulnerability, specifically against the femininity.