Revenge Drama Research Articles

Vaguening Revenge: Beckett, Marston, and All That Fall

At the beginning of Samuel Beckett’s radio play, All That Fall, Mrs Rooney famously forgets her lines: she cannot quite remember the precise phrase that she strains to recall from John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy. However, what has been overlooked is Beckett’s own forgetfulness as to the origins of this intertextual reference. Repeatedly, he attributes this line (and others from his wider stock of notes) to one of Ford’s close contemporaries: John Marston. This article recovers Beckett’s many mistaken allusions to Marston, and begins to think through the ways in which his curious recurrence in Beckett’s thinking at the time of All That Fall’s composition might betray a particular interest in the revenge genre (in which Marston is so influential). It posits that, in writing All That Fall, Beckett works to ‘vaguen’ many of the formal tropes that recur over the course of revenge drama’s long literary history. It then goes on to explore the possibility that this play for voices might engage specifically with this generic tradition in order to stage a critique of religion.

The Spanish Seneca and the Black Legend in English Revenge Drama: Spaniards, Moors, and Stoics Onstage

The Spanish Seneca and the Black Legend in English Revenge Drama: Spaniards, Moors, and Stoics Onstage

Revenge as a Mirror of Corruption in Shakespearean Drama

Speaking in general terms, a revenge play is a genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in which the protagonist is seen to seek revenge since, sometimes imaginatively, sometimes in reality, he has been exposed to injustice and/or injury and wronged. The approach to the notion of revenge was dualistic in early modern culture. Revenge was something accepted and approved in the feudal world. However, in the early modern period, it was solely God who had the responsibility of taking revenge. Plays which ended with the accomplishment of the avenger are indicative of the fact that feudal codes were more powerful than the Christian ones. However, the Christian notion of revenge in which God might be the only avenger was actually praised since it was believed that the sovereign represented God. Thus, early modern revenge plays, especially revenge tragedies, reflected this twofold consideration on the subject. Undoubtedly, Shakespeare was among those dramatists of the Renaissance period who illustrated his time’s ambivalent treatment of the notion of revenge. This study proposes a reading of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Hamlet focussing on the notion of revenge to demonstrate that Shakespeare embedded revenge in his plays to mirror or even emphasize social/political corruption and inequity. Thus, the paper contends that Shakespeare’s depiction of revenge becomes a solid metaphor to dramatize justice and the judicial system in the selected plays.

Morisco Justice in Calderón’s Amar después de la muerte

For Thomas Case and Erik Coenen, Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s notion of justice has theological origins in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s natural law and national self-determination. Issues of Morisco justice become a means of dramatic development. In Amar después de la muerte, Calderón dramatizes the Morisco revolt in Granada (1567–1571). Moorish descendants sought refuge and a return to Islam, after Philip II’s edicts banned their cultural heritage. Calderón’s play moves through four different attempts to deal with the Morisco community. The first is the enslavement of survivors of the rebellion. The second attempt is intermarriage, evidenced when Malec’s daughter Clara, betrothed to El Tuzaní de Alpujarras, accepts marriage as a means of revenge against Juan de Mendoza, whom she plans to kill for disrespecting her father. With the third issue, the revolt, the play becomes a revenge drama as El Tuzaní seeks out the murderer of his wife. The fourth issue is true conversion to Catholicism. Redemptive justice and true faith are perhaps what attracted Calderón to this historical event. His play stands as a tribute to a disenfranchised population.

Donald A Beecher and Grant Williams (eds). Henry Chettle, ‘Kind-Heart’s Dream’ and ‘Piers Plainness’: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book Trade

Henry Chettle is probably best known to scholars of early modern literature as the author of a Hamlet-esque revenge drama, The Tragedy of Hoffman; as a co-author of a few other extant plays including Patient Grissel and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon; and as a bit-part-player in the history of Shakespeare’s early career, thanks to his authorship of Kind-Heart’s Dream. In the prefatory epistle to this 1593 pamphlet, Chettle responds to the charge that he is the real author of the Groatsworth of Wit attributed to the late Robert Greene, in which Greene had warned fellow dramatists about a certain ‘upstart Crow’; Chettle denies being anything more than Greene’s editor and transcriber and apologizes to the (unnamed) injured party, having since ‘seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes’ (88). It is fair to say that critical discussion of this text has struggled to escape the shadow of Chettle’s illustrious contemporary. Donald A. Beecher and Grant Williams’ edition brings Kind-Heart’s Dream together with Chettle’s 1595 pamphlet, Piers Plainness’s Seven-Years Prenticeship. Although the editors inevitably make reference to the Groatsworth and its aftermath, their focus is very much on Chettle’s two pamphlets in their own right and particularly on their status as products of—and reflections upon—early modern print culture.

‘For Fear to Be Infect’: Reading the Female Body in Early Modern Revenge Drama

The article examines representations of female revenge within early modern drama. While much scholarship frames revenge as a primarily masculine form of expression, the article argues that revenge is not solely a male-specific endeavour. Rather, there is an interconnectedness between female revengers’ modes of vengeance and their identities as women. This is present across multiple comedic and tragic works, with the bodies of female characters becoming the instruments of their revenge. Accordingly, these characters’ quests for vengeance signify not a departure from, but an embracing of female agency and nature. However, while this may suggest that revenge helps empower and showcase female characters, the language used to define their actions is often filled with imagery of disease and suffering. Thus characterised as agents of infection, female revengers are often more vilified than they are empowered. And, as female bodies are integral to the expression of female revenge, so too are feminine identities deemed transgressive. The article develops this argument over three sections: a discussion of early modern discourses on bodies, gender and infection; an analysis of how female bodies are implicated in dramatic depictions of female revenge; and a discussion of how such representations conflate female bodies with infection, subversion and violence.

Theatricalising the Theology of Patient Revenge in English Renaissance Drama

Parmi les tropes les plus communs de la tragédie anglaise de la Renaissance, on trouve l’idée de l’impossibilité pour le héros souffrant d’appliquer à sa situation la notion chrétienne de patience. La « patience » en tant que vertu chrétienne résiste à la représentation dans le contexte du théâtre commercial et profane. En dépit de cette difficulté, on rencontre de nombreux exemples dans le théâtre élisabéthain et jacobéen qui tendent à donner une forme dramatique aux diverses conceptualisations théologiques de la patience chrétienne et aux expériences dévotionnelles qui en découlent. À l’aide de Hamlet et King Lear de Shakespeare, on verra que la difficulté qui consiste à appliquer la vertu de la patience à la passivité dramatique sert dans ces pièces à mettre en mouvement des moments dramatiques éthiques qui compliquent des procédés comme le délai, la durée, l’évitement et la mise en abyme. Un détour par The Spanish Tragedy de Thomas Kyd permet de clarifier ce point dans le contexte de l’émergence de la tragédie de vengeance et de son éthique de la patience dans la vengeance, sur la scène élisabéthaine commerciale.

Dangerous Conversations in The Duchess of Malfi

The proposition of this essay is that conversation exists as a theme in its own right in The Duchess of Malfi. It is clear that Webster borrowed from The Civil Conversation (1586), as Steffano Guazzo’s book was known in English translation. As in Guazzo, honest conversation, in Webster's play, has a civil rather than courtly character, and as such the conversation theme corresponds with an antithesis that has been noted by John L. Selzer between merit and degree. But the conversation of Webster’s meritorious characters is entangled with dishonesty in ways that Guazzo would not have countenanced. The result is a moral ambiguity which is difficult to square with virtue ethics, and which calls for a reading in terms of the totalitarian contexts of the revenge play and the Tacitean history play then gaining ascendancy in Jacobean England. Ironically the Duchess is restored to her honesty by conversing with her murderer at the climax of the play.

The Undemanding Dead: Fantasy and Trauma in The Spanish Tragedy and Post-Reformation Revenge Drama

The Undemanding Dead:Fantasy and Trauma in The Spanish Tragedy and Post-Reformation Revenge Drama Emily Shortslef He shrieks; I heard, and yet methinks I hearHis dismal outcry echo in the air. —Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy1 By now it is a critical commonplace that early modern English revenge tragedy is profoundly marked by the schisms of the Reformation, its melancholy revengers the representatives in extremis of a social body compelled to remember its dead but deprived of legitimized ways in which to do so.2 As social and religious historians have shown, the Protestant rejection of Purgatory and the abolition of the intercessory system that had provided prayers and masses for the deceased fundamentally altered the relationship between the living and the dead by denying the possibility of communion across death's barrier. At the same time, however, as Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall note, "a recognition of the reciprocal bonds between present and past generations was too deep-rooted in popular consciousness to be easily eradicated," Protestant doctrine notwithstanding.3 Literary critics have long seen revenge tragedy as a genre uniquely responsive to the sense of cultural loss attendant on the newly-opened rift between the community of the living and the dead, as well as to the pressures and anxieties generated in its wake.4 Since Stephen Greenblatt's influential Hamlet in Purgatory, critics have increasingly explored the ways in which these plays also assume and perpetuate the survival, in some form, of traditional, pre-Reformation beliefs about the dead. Although few might go so far as Thomas Rist's assertion that revenge tragedies are "a surviving expression of Catholic culture in the officially, but not yet completely, Reformed England," a consensus has emerged that the genre attests to continuities across the fault lines of the Reformation and calls into question the Protestant position on the dead, thereby exposing the weak spots of Protestant ideology and undermining its hegemonic aspirations more generally.5 [End Page 467] Foremost among the ways in which revenge tragedy challenges Reformed beliefs is the ghost's demand for revenge, or what Hamlet calls its "dread command."6 No trope more vividly suggests the enduring investment of the dead in the actions of the living, or the ongoing obligation of the living to the dead, than the spectral complaint for vengeance.7 Nor could there be a more apt signifier of the return of all the Reformation repressed than Hamlet's complaining ghost, the very figure invoked both in Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny and in Jacques Derrida's reflections on spectrality.8 It is not surprising, then, that the ghost who returns to demand vengeance in early modern revenge plays has been almost reflexively interpreted as an agent of disruption, a sign of trouble. For critics who see revenge tragedy as a genre that gives the lie to the success of Protestant ideology, the stock figure of the complaining ghost not only suggests the lingering presence of the dead in the post-Reformation cultural imagination, but also limns a time out of joint, a historical present haunted by its unfinished and traumatic past.9 Thus Paul A. Kottman writes of Hamlet that "the appearance of the ghost signals some eruption between past and future, the insistent return of what should be over and done."10 This essay, too, reads revenge tragedy as a cultural form shaped by the trauma of the Reformation, approaching its narratives of loss as indexical representations of the wound suffered by the social body.11 But it argues that the genre's mediation of that trauma, particularly as focalized through the twinned figures of the complaining ghost and the spectral complaint, looks strikingly different when approached through Hamlet's theatrical predecessor, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy—a play that, as I will show, treats both the ghost and the complaint for vengeance as the stuff of fantasy, rather than signs of an otherwise unspeakable truth. First performed in the mid-to-late 1580s and considered to be the earliest extant English revenge tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy was also among the first plays to adapt the Senecan trope of the complaining ghost for the...

The Orphan of Zhao: Chinese Revenge Drama and European Adaptations

Abstract This article is a comparative study of the thirteen-century Chinese revenge drama The Orphan of Zhao and its European adaptations from the eighteenth century to the present. Generally considered one of China's great tragedies and the first Chinese dramatic work introduced to Europe, this play makes a good case study as intercultural theater. Unlike the earlier studies which emphasized Chinese influence on European drama, this study examines how European adapters tried to remake the Chinese play to conform to Western criteria of drama, such as the three unities. It also discusses how the dramatic actions in William Hatchett's and Arthur Murphy's adaptations reflected the conditions of England rather than China, and how Voltaire appropriated the Chinese play to articulate his ideas of European Enlightenment. In contrast to the Eurocentric eighteenth-century adaptations, the 2012 production by the Royal Shakespeare Company represents a changing European attitude toward Chinese drama and a new direction in intercultural theater. This study provides a history of cultural exchanges between East and West through a systematic analysis of transnational transmissions of an important Chinese play.

“Address to Public Council”: The Additions to Marston’sThe Malcontent, the King’s Men’s Repertory, and Early Modern Theatrical Economics

“Address to Public Council”: The Additions to Marston’s<i>The Malcontent</i>, the King’s Men’s Repertory, and Early Modern Theatrical Economics

Representing Orestes’ Revenge

This essay considers Orestes' revenge in early modern literature, especially English drama. In their surviving plays, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides furnished varying representations of Orestes' revenge, and these representations proliferated and changed in subsequent mediations in many languages. The traditions bore strange fruits in John Pickering's Horestes (1567), the first revenge play in English; Thomas Heywood's The Second Part of the Iron Age (wr. 1612–15, pub. 1632); Thomas Goffe's The Tragedy of Orestes (wr., 1613–18, pub. 1633); and Christopher Wase's translation of Sophocles’ Electra (1649), a direct return to a Greek source. Drawing upon traditions that portray a culpable Orestes furens, Heywood and Goffe feature a mad avenger in a gory stage action. Drawing upon other traditions and framing the moral imperatives differently, Pickering and Wase write political plays specifically attuned to their historical moments to depict a heroic Orestes immediately or ultimately justified, Orestes vindicatus.

The Revenger’s Tragedy as Trauerspiel

This paper makes a case for the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s concept of baroque allegory to The Revenger’s Tragedy . I argue that the effigy, which appears in a number of guises in The Revenger’s Tragedy , warrants inclusion among the constellation of key allegorical objects that distinguish the genre of Trauerspiel and its English counterparts, chiefly revenge drama. By tracing the effigeal semiotics of The Revenger’s Tragedy , this paper demonstrates that the key images (corpse, skull, puppet, and ruin) from Benjamin’s corporeal lexicon of baroque allegory are also relevant to early Stuart revenge tragedy. The Benjaminian view of baroque mourning as a loyalty to the world of things and as a deep investment in ruins and evacuated objects helps to explain Vindice’s otherwise baffling acts of irreverence and betrayal to the remains of his beloved.

Killing Time in Titus Andronicus: Timing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Defense

As you can see, this discipline relies in great part on the ability to subtly deceive your opponent.-Salvator Fabris, Lo Schermo, overo Scienza d'ArmeNow is a time to storm. Why thou still?-Shakespeare, Titus AndronicusStorming and stillness, movement and suspension, action and empty word: Marcus Andronicus, the politician and rhetorician, understands these activities as opposites in Titus Andronicus.1 He urges his brother toward immediate and public mourning and revenge. In contrast, Titus, a military leader and expert at hand-to-hand combat, understands that stillness is an integral part storming. Modern literary scholarship has a stronger inheritance from the pedagogy rhetoric than from the pedagogy combat, and so it has become something a critical commonplace to see waiting as the opposite acting in Shakespearean revenge dramas like Hamlet and Titus Andronicus. In fact, suspension in these plays can function to prompt mistakes in timing on the part the revenger. A consideration how timing is informed by the art and science defense, or fencing, will shed light on the tactics inaction. Further, the ways in which early modern fencing masters taught timing provokes us to reconsider the role time in the genre revenge drama as a whole.In Shakespeare's oeuvre, the timing combat and its relationship to the timing rhetoric is explored most deeply in Titus Andronicus. While Hamlet prominently features a fixed fencing match and Romeo and Juliet turns from comedy to tragedy through a duel, Titus Andronicus explicitly associates rhetoric with swordplay, articulating the two on a structural as well as a thematic level. Further, while it is certainly possible to find other plays in which duels feature more prominently, the representation a duel does not teach us as much about how timing was understood and practiced as does the pedagogy that the duel is founded upon. Rather than scouring scanty stage directions to reconstruct the temporal logic combat, look to the underlying theory described in fencing texts-a theory that is then explored and enacted in the tragedy.Titus Andronicus is famous for its rich interweaving the thematic strands writing and wounding, and this pattern participates in the conventional debate between sword and pen. The rhythms timing taught in fencing illuminate the complex pacing the plot. Rhetoric and armed combat a long history competition.2 This rivalry is due, in part, to their claims to the same domain knowledge: the recognition and seizure the opportune moment, or kairos.3 Writing and fencing masters alike weigh in on the comparison. The Spanish writing master Juan Luis Vives urges his students to replace weapons with writing implements. In Vives's Latin dialogue, the master asks the students, have you come here armed? and then clarifies that he speaks not of the arms blood-shedding, but writing-weapons, which are necessary for our purpose (70).4 Pens trump arms in the humanist educational program writing masters, but fencing masters tell a different story.On the Continent, the Italian fencing master Angelo Viggiani sees the competition between arms and letters as important enough to treat first (and at great length) in his three-volume Lo Schermo (1575). Disarming many common lines reasoning used to denigrate his occupation, Viggiani argues that the science defense is devoted to the most important kinds knowledge, movement and time, which are fundamental to all natural things. War, more than any other or faculty, requires skill in movement and time.5 Viggiani capaciously classifies manipulations time and motion, along with any other sort deceit, under the purview arms: I do not call war only that which one does with weapon in hand, but also that which is waged with cunning [ingegno] (13r). Viggiani's use ingegno in this context is grounded in a larger cultural movement. …

The Ethics of Equivalent Exchange in The Merchant of Venice

Karl Marx severely criticizes the monetary exchange system by quoting Timon’s attack on money from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Does Shakespeare agree or disagree with Marx’s opinion? Does Shakespeare support or criticize a market system in which the exchange of monetary or other signs is the principal means of life? This article attempts to find an answer to this question in The Merchant of Venice, a Shakespearean comedy which deals with the issues of money and exchange in full scale. To give the answer in advance, this article suggests that Shakespeare in this play not only acknowledges the monetary exchange system but also finds a life ethics in it, namely, that an ethical way of life in the emerging capitalistic society like Venice, Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice suggests, can be found in its neutral exchange system. To develop this argument, this article looks at the play as an economic revenge play, traces the cycle of Shylock’s, Portia’s, and Antonio’s revenges circulated in the various economic forms, and reveals that in these circulations of retaliation lies an ethics of equivalent exchange. This article, focusing on both the conflation of the human realm with the economic one and the confusion between revenge and mercy, derives Shakespeare’s hypothesis that an equal or symmetrical exchange process operating at the basis of human life can be a revenge or an ethics, depending on ‘who, where, when, why, how’ use it. Sometimes, the economics of equivalent exchange can lead to constructing the restrictive laws or legal systems, making the inhuman contracts, and seeking vengeance. If it is wisely used at the right time for the right person or circumstance, however, it can be embodied in impartial verdicts, equitable contracts, or the exchange of love and thus can effectively function as an ethics to enhance or enrich our life. To prove this hypothesis, this article analyzes the revenge narratives represented in The Merchant of Venice, which circulate from Antonio, via Bassanio, to Shylock, and recirculate from Shylock, via Portia, to Antonio, centering on the two thematic axises-the monetary exchange and revenge psychology.

Calvinism as tragedy in the English revenge play

What did it mean to live in a culture where imputation from below was systematically thwarted by a Calvinist political ideology that withheld justice (in the sense of a normal expectation) from a comprehensively fallen humankind? The question is addressed here through the popular phenomenon of the English revenge play. The genre is seen as paradoxical in its very nature: on the one hand indulging revenge, anger, imputation and resistance; yet on the other, demonizing them in a bid for politico-theological compliance. Uncertainty about its polarity – in addition to changes in audience taste and constituency – is taken to be the force driving the revenge play from one iteration to the next. While the form approaches a justicial “myth of accusation” (in The Spanish Tragedy) and even endorses a best-case of revenge in Hamlet, it largely reverts to compliance in plays of the Jacobean revival by Marston, Webster and Tourneur, in which a genuine (as distinct from carnivalized) imputation emerges ironically if at all. Throughout these switches of generic direction, the invocation of theological motifs plays a key role in the plays, either signalling compliance or justifying deviance from the norm in theological terms. Analysis of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays is rounded off by The London Merchant (1731), which is read as a retrospective critique of the form from the vantage of the following century in which the hold of Calvinism had been broken by the new emotional language and virtue ethics of Shaftesbury.

Chris McMahon. Family and the State in Early Modern Revenge Drama: Economies of Vengeance. Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2012. 250 pp. $125. ISBN: 978–0–415–80775–3.

Chris McMahon. Family and the State in Early Modern Revenge Drama: Economies of Vengeance. Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2012. 250 pp. $125. ISBN: 978–0–415–80775–3. - Volume 66 Issue 2

Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre: From “Hamlet” to “Madame Butterfly.” Edited by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. x+290. $90 cloth.

Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre: From “Hamlet” to “Madame Butterfly.” Edited by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. x+290. $90 cloth. - Volume 52 Issue 2

Chris McMahon, Family and the State in Early Modern Revenge Drama: Economies of Vengeance

(2011). Chris McMahon, Family and the State in Early Modern Revenge Drama: Economies of Vengeance. Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association: Vol. 2011, No. 116, pp. 123-124.

Patronage and Perverse Bestowal inThe Spanish TragedyandAntonio's Revenge

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.)