Patronage and Perverse Bestowal inThe Spanish TragedyandAntonio's Revenge

Abstract

English dramas of the late sixteenth century tended to demonstrate an acute interest in the delicate interplay between monarchical prerogative and the agency of individual subjects. But revenge drama in particular brought this interplay under its most intense scrutiny, tested the boundaries of sovereign/subject interdependence, and transgressed those boundaries through acts of mutual violence. More specifically, revenge tragedy was able to call into question the very bonds of obligation defining sovereign/subject interaction in the royal court by creating a distorted mirror-image of the practices of donation, gift-bestowal, and patronage that comprised such bonds to begin with. In this way, within much Elizabethan drama revenge achieved a certain political relevance by functioning as a perverse inversion of the social economy that characterized the English court of the 1590s; in particular, the aggression inherent to patronage practices at this time found a bloody counterpart on stage. I elaborate this claim by exploring two specific revenge tragedies that roughly bracket the decade in question here, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1588–92) and John Marston's Antonio's Revenge (1601). (B. S.)