The Tongue and Its Office in The Revenger's Tragedy

Abstract

Lussurioso’s valedictory in The Revenger’s Tragedy—”My tongue is out of office”—isolates a dominant image that Cyril Tourneur adapted from the Kydian revenge play, particularly Titus Andronieus where the mutilation of Lavinia represents the gothic assault on the definitively human ability to speak and the cancellation of the eloquent bond that creates a just society. Whereas Shakespeare finally affirms this classical idealization of rhetoric, Tourneur accentuates the opposing tradition of rhetoric as the ability to flatter, seduce, and speak unjustly. He employs the biblical concept of the fiery tongue as a quasi-independent organ with psychic and ethical potency. In Tourneur’s world of “nimble and desperate tongues,” the linguistic glory of man becomes a phallic and self-destructive act that justifies Vindice’s moral degeneration and tragic end. With other images that ironically evoke lost ideals of Renaissance humanism, imagery of the tongue helps to illuminate the grotesque Jacobean darkness of the play.