Revenge Tragedy Research Articles

Titus Andronicus, hell and the elements

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the co-authored revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus (pub. 1594) as a subtly constructed space (as we read it on the page) that emphasizes its hellish torments and moral message through an oblique use of a graduated elemental scheme within it. The four elements are loosely clustered according to the act divisions of the play established in the First Folio. The play incorporates the elements according to a Virgilian–Aristotelian scheme, progressing naturally from earth to fire, and so demonstrates an intertwined dual framework of renaissance natural philosophy and religion reminiscent of classical and medieval purgatorial and hellish concepts. The elements thereby form a running and varying structural conceit that reinforces the “hellish” experience that an audience (or reader) might expect from a revenge tragedy, including George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar. When understood in this way, we see how the elemental scheme undergirding the play provides a structural moral and intellectual coherence relevant to all of us. The individual characters undergo horrendous torments and remarkable changes; they are, in a sense, writhing souls in communal suffering bound by the cosmic borders of the stage, which was commonly understood conceptually as a microcosm. The underlying elemental scheme reinforces the concept of the play as a virtual or parodic hell and/or purgatory: a play that begins amid earthly desires and burials ends with the destructive bonfires of the living hell that the characters thrust (and bake) themselves into.

Hamlet's Early International Lives: Geeraardt Brandt'sDe Veinzende Torquatusand the Performance of Political Realism

Written in Dutch and set in imperial Rome, Geeraardt Brandt's De Veinzende Torquatus (The Feigning Torquatus, 1645) bears unmistakable traces of an encounter with Hamlet. More than a literary-historical curio, Torquatus reveals much about Continental adaptations of, and audiences for, English dramatic works. This essay introduces Brandt and his intellectual milieu, demonstrating how and why he turned to Hamlet in an early investigation of revenge tragedy and political realism. From the dynamic plots to the histrionic style of performance, English drama offered Brandt a vision of political life not unlike the political realism of Tacitus and Machiavelli. While attending to the complexities and problems of establishing its provenance, the essay excavates the tragic vision of political life at work in Torquatus — a version of politics that struck Dutch audiences as prescient in its capacity to render visible the erratic and ultimately realistic behavior of sovereigns and subjects alike.

The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660

Introduction: the royalist republic Part I. Public Spheres and Discursive Communities: 1. The translation of politics: civil war polemic in the Dutch Republic 2. Unity and uniformity: the first civil war and the Anglo-Scoto-Dutch puritan community 3. Emerging royalism: anti-puritanism and Anglo-Scoto-Dutch history Part II. Maps of Meaning: 4. Eikon basilike translated: the cult of the martyr king in the Dutch Republic 5. 'When in my neighbourhood the cannons raged': war and regicide in estate poetry 6. The cry of the royal blood: revenge tragedy and the Stuart cause in the Dutch Republic 7. The English devil: stereotyping, demonology, and the First Anglo-Dutch War 8. Representing restoration: politics, providence, and theatricality in Vondel and Milton Conclusion Bibliography Index.

In Accents Yet Unknown: Reenacting Caesar’s Death in a Roman Prison

This essay focuses primarily on the Italian film Cesare deve morire (2012), an adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar acted by prisoners in Rebibbia District Prison, Rome. (1) If we use Linda Hutcheons definition of adaptation as derivation that is not a derivative--a work that is second without being secondary and Jean Marsdens description of appropriation as seizure for one's own uses, this production can be seen to fall into both of these (partly overlapping) categories. (2) At the same time, the shape-shifting Julius Caesar finds a poignantly revealing representation in its new form. This paper intends also to highlight the relevance of the presence onstage of Caesar's dead body, both in the English play and in the prison courtyard, in an attempt to demonstrate that the physical presence of the corpse is a determining element in both works. While examining the choices made by the Italian directors in order to tailor the language and the scenes to the setting of a contemporary prison, some more general considerations are made on the possible affinities between theatre and jail and on some of the implications of reading and acting Shakespeare during imprisonment. In 2012, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, both in their early eighties, winners of many prizes, and well known for their literary adaptations (Tolstoy, Pirandello, Dumas) produced the film Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die). (3) This film, which we could call a docudrama or docufilm, is based on a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by prisoners held in the Carcere di Rebibbia, a high-security prison in the eastern suburbs of Rome. (4) The film won the 62nd Berlin Film Festival, five David di Donatello awards, and was selected as the Italian entry for the best foreign language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards. The production records the yearly project carried out by the Italian theatre director Fabio Cavalli, which consists in involving prisoners--whose crimes range from drug trafficking and participation in organized crime to murder, and whose sentences vary from ten to fifteen years to life imprisonment--in acting activities organized as part of a rehabilitation program. The Taviani brothers had been to see one of these performances and suggested to Cavalli that he should attempt to put on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and that they might try to film the phases of its production, from casting and rehearsals to the actual performance on the prison stage. Cavalli agreed and the project took place. There are numerous factors specific to this Roman play contributing to making this adaptation particularly striking and memorable. The staging of the Forum scene particularly, with Caesar's dead body and speeches concerning the legitimacy of murder, acquires special resonance for inmates who know they will end their days in that same place. Widely recognized as a watershed in Shakespeare's dramatic writing, coming almost certainly in 1599 between the comedies and histories and just before the great tragedies and thus a kind of gateway to plays where the nature of power is seen in a larger perspective and with deeper symbolic significance, Julius Caesar has lent itself to multiple interpretations and classifications. Moral exemplum, chronicle, or revenge tragedy, derived mainly (but possibly not only) from North's translation of Plutarch's Lives--the lives in question being those of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony--it has often been seen as a play lacking a main character, the eponymous protagonist speaking only six percent of the total lines and dying before the middle of the play. The real theme, then, is not so much Julius Caesar but his death and the debate over the legitimacy of the killing of a sovereign when--and if--he is on his way to becoming a tyrant, a theme which has inevitably encouraged numerous rewritings for both stage and screen and which, as we shall see, brought out abundant parallels with the personal history of the Italian offenders who acted in Cesare deve morire, most of whom came from the south of Italy and were involved in criminal organizations with their own inner rules and hierarchies. …

The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare by Heather Hirschfeld

Reviewed by: The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare by Heather Hirschfeld Eric D. Vivier (bio) Keywords early modern English drama, turn to religion, penitence, atonement, Merchant of Venice, Othello, English Reformation Heather Hirschfeld. The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. xii + 256 pages. $55.00. Heather Hirschfeld’s excellent new book explores the cultural and dramatic resonances of a central but often overlooked aspect of the Reformation in England: the impossibility of expiatory atonement in Reformed theology. Whereas other literary scholars and historians have discussed “more spectacular points of religious conflict, such as purgatory, iconoclasm, or the Eucharist,” Hirschfeld makes a convincing case for the significance of the redefinition of “repentance, atonement, and satisfaction,” which gave rise to considerable psychological anxiety and structural vicissitudes across a range of cultural practices and institutions (29). Hirschfeld explores the theological implications of the impossibility of doing or making “enough” in penitential satisfaction for several such practices and institutions—ecclesiastical debate, revenge, finance, and marriage—which she pairs with refreshing and nuanced readings of some of the period’s most important plays: Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. She examines the ways these plays work through questions of “enough” in repentance, and in her “Post-Script” she suggests that the theater offered the possibility and the pleasure of satisfaction no longer available in Reformed theology. Hirschfeld situates her work squarely in the so-called turn to religion in early modern literary studies. Such work assumes that the early modern secular and theological realms were inseparably intertwined, and that religious practice and doctrine cannot be reduced to or subsumed under the heading of “politics,” “economics,” or “power.” Like Sarah Beckwith, Huston Diehl, Bryan Crockett, Elizabeth Mazzola, Michael O’Connell, John Stachniewski, and Adrian Streete, Hirschfeld’s primary interest is the way early modern English drama acted as both an arena and an archive for the public exploration of radical [End Page 145] doctrinal change: “doctrine is itself a language, an aesthetic, and a structuring of meaning,” she claims, “and it remained in our period in crucial, mutual dialogue with the lived practices we associate with dramatic performance and content” (14–15). She examines an impressive range of ecclesiastical texts, conduct manuals, and other non-dramatic texts—spanning multiple periods, languages, and geographical origins—in order to chart this dialogue, and in doing so she navigates potential literary, historical, and theological minefields with experienced precision. Hirschfeld acknowledges the work by historians and literary scholars who have insisted upon continuities between the medieval and early modern periods in general and between Catholic and Protestant theology in particular, but she demonstrates the way that Protestant reformers emphasized “the radical difference of their model of repentance and its connection to solfidianism”—the Protestant doctrine of sola fide, or justification through faith alone (33). Whereas Catholic penance allowed for human beings to be agents in their own repentance—to do enough in order to satisfy God for their sins and thus to be satisfied in return—Luther and Calvin put renewed stress on original sin and insisted that men and women could never do enough to atone for it. What was for Catholics an increasingly calculable and precise transaction between God and the sinner was for Protestants entirely one-sided: human beings could only be justified through the inexplicable mercy of Christ’s passion, God bestowed his grace when and on whom he pleased, and repentance was the effect of this grace (and therefore the mark of election) rather than its cause. Hirschfeld’s most important historical claim is that this idea of “satisfaction” became “the premier shibboleth” for “differentiating Protestant from Catholic repentance,” and that the Reformation therefore “marks the historical juncture at which satis was satis only for Christ, when humans recalibrated—and rejected—their potential for doing enough in matters of atonement” (34–36). Hirschfeld’s chapters on the Descensus Tradition and revenge tragedy are particularly notable for her deep ecclesiological, historical, and generic contextualization. Her second chapter traces the consequences of penitential recalibration for the Reformation debate about Christ’s descent into Hell. Whereas...

Pinter’s Poetry: A Diachronic Analysis

A playwright, poet, actor, director, political activist, and winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter has become a focus of global criticism. Although Pinter was regarded as of greatest playwrights of twentieth century (Pendarvis 189), his drama has been greatly discussed around world; his poetry, on other hand, has failed to gain enough attention. Up to now, most scholars (1) have discussed Pinter's poetry in passing when their foci are on his plays or life. They have observed with acumen some characteristics of Pinter's poetry. Like his best plays, Pinter's best can force mundane reality to assume deepest overtones (Baker and Tabachnick 18). However, little attention has been given to evolution of Pinter's poetry as a whole. In a period of 60 years or so, Pinter as a poet had written a great number of poems, among which least 90 are published (Balter, Harold Pinter 134). A diachronic study of these published pieces will manifest an overall tendency toward a gradual compression: Words, lines, verses all become briefer as time passes (www.haroldpinter.org), which is confirmed by Baker when he observes that Pinter's poems become shorter, increasingly so, with age (Harold Pinter 19). But brevity is not all. In terms of diction, syntax, image, and other poetic components, Pinter's earlier are more elaborate, ornate, irregular, obscure, complicated, while his later ones become clearer, more direct, more unadorned, regular, and easily intelligible. His early poetic style can be called baroque while late one plain. early phase covers from 1950s to 1960s; his middle phase encompasses 1980s; late phase refers to 1990s and beyond. Such dates are approximate and inevitable features of earlier poetic rhetoric sometimes reoccur in later poetry written later. This paper will investigate change Pinter's poetry undergoes by analyzing some representative pieces in different periods: and this examination will help us better understand development of Pinter's poetic career. However, it should be borne in mind that Pinter's poetry, in company with others, has a tendency to resist formulaic generalizations. changes in his poetry reflect developments in Pinter as a creative writer. His early poetic writing is much influenced by themes, language, and forms of Jacobean revenge tragedy, an interest encouraged by his English master at Hackney Downs Grammar School Joe Brearley, (2) and inflated language of contemporary poets such as W. S. Graham and Dylan Thomas. (3) His middle period sees him increasingly influenced by Samuel Beckett (4) and reflects Pinter's paring down of language, simplifying it and remembering personal relationships. In Pinter's later period, his poetry is affected by personal loss such as death of his father and close friends, personal illness, increasing awareness of his own mortality, and increasing political commitment. Pinter's poetry also depicts absurdity of human condition in post-Second World War world and reflects his effort to convey pointlessness of existence by exposing its bleakness and by fighting injustice. Pinter's lifelong friend Mick Goldstein recalled that, at an evening gathering after school, Pinter cited Cardinal Newman to me about creation being a vast aboriginal calamity. Billington, who quotes this remark, adds that the notion that they need surface of daily existence lie destination and emptiness permeates [Pinter's] work. (5) But this thematic preoccupation changes from sense of apocalyptic angst caused by aftermath of War to concrete expression of oppression. It partly explains permeation of death throughout Pinter's canon. early poetry is shrouded in an enigmatic and doomed atmosphere; in his later poetry, source of death takes on shape of human agency in so-called democracies, to use a word he repeats four times in his 1996 poem The Old Days. …

On Book Borrowing: Forming Part of a Literary History Seen Through the Perspective of a Book from Charles Lamb’s Library

shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb! and then you--will be vexed that I had bescribbled your Books. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, May 2, 1811 COLERIDGE WROTE THESE WORDS ON THE BACK FLYLEAF OF A COPY OF John Donne's Poems owned by Charles Lamb. (1) It would be the first book he returned to his friend with predictions of imminent death or marginalia destined to outlive both men. A few months later, in Lamb's folio of the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Coleridge prophesied: shall be long here, Charles! I gone, you will mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic. (2) In reality, Coleridge was nowhere near death, and while he may have known that, he certainly did know that he was spoiling Lamb's book. Spite of Appearances, he wrote on Lamb's 1669 edition of Donne, Copy is the better for the Mss. Notes. Annotator himself says so. (3) Lest there should be any doubt about the annotator, he signed the note (as he did others) S.T.C. Coleridge was a master of that scattered genre, marginalia, a term he himself coined. He was voluminous in his marginal commentary, so much so that Princeton University Press had to devote no less than six hefty volumes--one of them over twelve hundred pages--in his Collected Works to it. In Lamb's essay The Two Races of Men, Lamb spoke teasingly of the manuscript notes Coleridge left in his books as vying with the originals only in quality, but also not unfrequently in terms of quantity. (4) Indeed, Coleridge was above commenting on his own comments. N.B. Tho' I have scribbled in he wrote in Lamb's copy of Donne, is & was Mr Charles Lamb's Book, who is likewise the Possessor & (I believe) lawful Proprietor of all the Volumes of the 'Old Plays' excepting one. (5) He was referring to the third volume of Lamb's twelve-volume set of Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays, which he had lost. volume included a revenge tragedy, a history, and three Jacobean comedies (John Webster's White Devil, Jasper Fisher's Fuimos Troes, Robert Tailor's Hog Hath Lost his Pearl, John Cooke's Greene's Tu Quoque, and Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's Honest Whore), and for Lamb, it was perhaps the most valuable volume of them all. (6) Coleridge had borrowed it along with Lamb's copies of Samuel Daniel's Poems and Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Pray, if you can, Lamb pleaded, remember what you did with it, or where you took it out with you a walking perhaps; for, to use the old plea, it spoils a set. (7) But Coleridge could remember, and, on this occasion, having loaned his books to Coleridge, Lamb wound up with an unsightly gap in his bookshelves and two books made valuable only because Lamb owned them but, more importantly, because he and Coleridge wrote in them. These two races of men--lenders and borrowers, Lamb and Coleridge-were connected through what is called, in the book trade, the association copy, and also, more generally, through what we might call the principle of association. Lamb's library was a living nexus of association. nodes of that network included books as well as readers, annotators, owners, booksellers, and a multitude of bookish encounters and events. To follow patterns of association between books, or between people who have been involved in the life of a book, is to build so many paths to, and through, a lost world of letters. Embracing the associational principle as a literary critical technique--belletristic and book historical, biographical and bibliographical--this essay will explore literary history from the perspective of the book. story it contains will be transatlantic, spanning the gap from Lamb's bookshelves to Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan, and our primary means of conveyance will be that same octavo edition bearing the marks of Lamb, Coleridge, and various other hands since the seventeenth century: Poems, &c. …

Seneca and the Modernity of Hamlet

Abstract This essay reassesses Shakespeare’s engagement with Senecan tragedy, arguing both that Hamlet’s use of the Senecan dramatic tradition is more robust and sophisticated than has hitherto been accepted and also that it is best understood as part of a larger cultural conversation about agency and action in revenge tragedy. The essay therefore offers a revisionary account of the reception of Senecan tragedy in early modern England. In doing so, it also suggests that recovering Shakespeare’s engagement with Seneca may require rethinking Hamlet’s own reception history, since Shakespeare’s play is so often discussed as a key text of emergent modernity.

“Groaning Shadows that are Gone”: The Ghosts of Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus is a play concerned with bodily dismemberments and other “unspeakable” acts, which, under the framework of revenge tragedy, refuse to be forgotten. What is lost from the world of the play always, in effect, seems to return, haunting characters and playgoers alike in the form of apparitions not yet laid to rest, severed body parts that return to the space of the stage, and language itself that, however inarticulate or unspeakable the act, serves to remind us of what was present before: “O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none” (3.2.29–30). This paper examines the representation of ghosts in Shakespeare's early Roman play, exploring how perpetrators of violent acts and violated bodies are haunted by spectral returns, and to what end. Although not often commented on by critics, Titus's ghosts allow us to gain new insights on the play's textual and theatrical bodies, for, despite the centrality of Lavinia's body in the play's feminist criticism, it is in fact the male body, not Lavinia's, that is most haunted by “groaning shadows that are gone” (1.1.126).

Middleton's Traffic in Dead Women: Chaste Corpses as Property in The Revenger's Tragedy and The Lady's Tragedy

Previous articleNext article No AccessOriginal ArticlesMiddleton's Traffic in Dead Women: Chaste Corpses as Property in The Revenger's Tragedy and The Lady's TragedyChristine M. GottliebChristine M. Gottlieb Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 45, Number 2Spring 2015 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6757.12048 Views: 457Total views on this site © 2015 The Author(s). English Literary Renaissance © 2015 English Literary Renaissance Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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.

Decentring the law in Hamlet

Hamlet, at once the best-known of all revenge tragedies and a significant departure from its predecessors, occupies a unique and complicated place within the genre of revenge tragedy. This article seeks to approach the question of Hamlet’s exceptional status through the prism provided by law and literature. Instead of arguing that Hamlet is more complex than his fellow revengers when it comes to legal matters, I demonstrate that Hamlet shows comparably less concern for the law and its intricacies. Despite that fact that Hamlet is unprecedented for the attention it has garnered from legal critics, I seek to demonstrate how Shakespeare deliberately downplays questions of law and justice throughout his most famous revenge tragedy. In the process, I suggest that other revenge tragedies of the period have far more to say on the subject of early modern law, but have suffered unfairly through comparison with Shakespeare's melancholy prince.

Building the Necropolis: Killing Mother/Nature in The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus

The story of the mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western man. —Ted Hughes Like evolutionary chains, the trajectory of ideas about nature has puzzling loops and dead ends, and it does not pr...

Genres: Cinematic and Early Modern

This essay brings together two areas of study from cinema and theatre. The first is the theory of popular genres, their evolutionary cycle, and their role in the industrial development of Hollywood in the first half of the twentieth century, as explored by theorists and historians of cinema. The second is the early modern genre of revenge tragedy and its generic selfconsciousness and metatheatricality. Insights from the film industry can build our understanding of the so-called Wars of the Theatres at the very end of the sixteenth century as a distinctly commercial phenomenon haunted by one genre in particular: revenge tragedy. Following Roslyn Knutson, I see the phenomenon of theatre rivalry in the period from around 1598 to 1601 as mutually beneficial industrial partnership rather than bitter ideological and interpersonal competition. Using the industrial organisation of the studio system in Hollywood as an analogue for the developing business of theatre, I argue that revenge tragedy, particularly the influential The Spanish Tragedy , is an under-recognised generic engine of this serial commercial theatre experience developed by a mature entertainment industry operating as a kind of professional cartel. Just as revenge tragedy implicates its characters in a web of action and reaction, so the genre enacts and codifies early modern theatre's commercial bonds; revenge tragedy's muchcommented metatheatricality extends beyond performance to the developing London theatre industry.

“The law is a wise serpent”: Subtextual Subversion in The Revenger's Tragedy

“The law is a wise serpent”: Subtextual Subversion in The Revenger's Tragedy

The New Revenge Novel

The New Revenge Novel Kyle Wiggins In the opening chapter of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (2010), Marylou Ahearn, a seventy-seven-year-old retired schoolteacher, contemplates murdering a doctor who fed her radiation cocktails a half century earlier. The novel’s protagonist tracks her poisoner to Florida, only to discover that Alzheimer’s has stolen the doctor’s memory of seven hundred pregnant women on whom he experimented. Stalking her geriatric prey from afar, Marylou recalls the unconventional circumstances of her vengeance: Of course, the radiation she’d swallowed had made her sick. Weak. Anemic. Dizzy. Prone to headaches. Bleeding gums. And because she’d swallowed it, she’d killed Helen. After Helen’s death she’d had to focus her anger somewhere, and since the government of the United States as a thing to hate was too unwieldy, and all the idiots who got caught up in cold war paranoia—the morons who devised and funded and carried out the radiation experiments—were too numerous and anonymous to collectively despise, she focused her hatred on Wilson Spriggs. (5) Within this brief explanation of a lethal plot, author Elizabeth Stuckey-French captures some of the most important and innovative features of the new revenge novel. First, the target of Marylou’s vengeance is not her true enemy. The doctor-poisoner Wilson Spriggs is a proxy representative upon whom Marylou heaps her anger at the United States government. Although medical labs victimized citizens during the Cold War, including the narrator’s daughter, those programs are too structurally diffuse to detest in any practical way. Blame for Helen’s demise belongs equally to the nation’s policy makers, financiers, and scientists. In order to shape vengeful desire into something purposeful, Marylou channels her rage toward a single figure. She transforms Spriggs into the embodiment of mid-century US domestic politics, enlarging him into a symbol yet reducing the nation to a convenient personification. While Spriggs retains his individual [End Page 675] complicity in Marylou’s suffering, the avenger’s moral code also holds him accountable for every other governmental misdeed. Stuckey-French’s novel follows an abiding necessity in recent revenge fiction whereby the aggregate guilt for systemic crimes gets transferred to a synecdochal villain. Second, attributing a government’s scientific abuses to one doctor gets Marylou closer to her dream of harming an abstract foe. According to her internal monologue, Marylou faults “numerous and anonymous” entities for a “cold war paranoia” motivating the deadly experiments. But that sort of adversary is useless to the avenger out for blood. Not only does it resist identification by hiding in obscurity, it verges on immateriality. Vengeance, a proportional retaliation designed for private satisfaction, cannot sink its claws into intangible enemies. Payback needs physical recipients to collect what is owed, even when it chases a dispersed antagonist like the government. Stuckey-French understands this basic rule of the genre and, in turn, her character knows the limits of vengeful craving. Marylou’s debt can only be repaid by destroying another person in kind. Thus, tabbing Spriggs as her mortal foe is not a narrative selection of convenience, but a necessity. By walking readers through Marylou’s thought process, explaining how Spriggs came to be the vengeful object, Stuckey-French demonstrates a dilemma common to revenge literature. Because recent history spreads its malevolence across complex systems, old narrative modes of arch villainy have become obsolete. Nemesis, that ancient, singular opponent at the center of honor sagas and revenge tragedies, disaggregates under modernity by seeping into intricate networks or fading into a barely perceptible realm. How can novelists represent the distributed nature of modern antagonism yet still depict visceral retribution? What does a revenge narrative adjusted to the reality of contemporary geopolitics look like? I contend the answer lies in a patterned conceit defining twentieth- and twenty-first-century reinterpretations of the revenge genre, particularly those occurring in American literature. Over and over, contemporary novels create retributive scenarios (like the one described above) in which characters transform other characters into material signifiers as a means of rendering dominant, unassailable systems vulnerable.1 An impulse to punish the nation’s untouchable injustices haunts much of the...

Andreas Höfele Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s TheatreStage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Andreas Höfele. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+315.

<i>Andreas Höfele</i> Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre<i>Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre</i>. Andreas Höfele. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+315.

“Thy state is the more gracious”: courtly space and social mobility in Hamlet and early modern culture

This article examines the representation of courtly space and social mobility in Shakespeare's Hamlet and, more generally, in English Renaissance society. Here the court is viewed as a malleable social space, a platform for the performance of courtiers and monarchs as they assert political will. Because the meaning or definition of this courtly realm is often open-ended and available for seizure, this essay traces the play's staging of social mobility and status at court, as social identity is shown to be unrestricted precisely because of this open court setting. Furthermore, the play's generic status as a revenge tragedy is of particular importance, as the article argues that the depiction of the stage revenger was the most viable type of drama for the representation of social mobility at court for a number of key reasons.

Fabricated evidence: Exploring authenticity in a murder mystery’s appropriation of Early Modern drama

Abstract This article considers instances of scriptwriters (and the protagonist they create) playing with notions of authenticity and revenge tragedy through an episode of the popular murder mystery series Lewis (ITV1, 2011). Parallels between, diversions from and references to the characters, plot structure and setting of Early Modern drama are carefully traced through ‘Wild Justice’. The article argues that authenticity is both established and, to some extent, betrayed by the episode. Its scriptwriter, Stephen Churchett, uses and reinforces Early Modern drama’s cultural and literary value, without being constrained by it. Additionally, by exploring the way in which the programme incorporates the literary into the non-literary, the article extends existing arguments for a positive reconsideration of the sometime-maligned detective genre. Specifically, it adds to previous research arguing that the genre can be regarded as a key source, particularly among television broadcasts and popular fiction, evidencing the continuing cultural value of Early Modern drama.

The Oxford handbook of Thomas Middleton

Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). 670pp. ISBN 978 0 1995 5988 6.The editors of The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley, open their collection by surveying the relatively barren landscape of Middleton studies prior to the publication of The Collected Works in 2007: 'Looking backward from this vibrant moment, what will strike anyone about the history of Middleton criticism is its paucity, its discontinuity, its lost and riven heart' (p. 1). It would be difficult to argue with their claim that 'In a real sense, Middleton criticism started, or started over, in 2007' (p. 13); accordingly, the thirty-six essays in The Oxford Handbook reveal that the heart of Middleton criticism has not only been stabilized and resuscitated, it now pulses with an energy that will no doubt invigorate the study of early modern literature for some time to come.In many ways, The Oxford Handbook is a natural extension of Oxford's Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works and its companion volume, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, in that the extensive groundbreaking scholarship of the earlier volumes frees contributors from the obligation of providing broad introductory contexts for particular works or of tackling thorny questions related to attribution. Numerous contributors to The Oxford Handbook were also involved in the preparation of these earlier volumes, but they now enjoy a perspective on the Middleton canon that was previously unavailable to them. In the words of Taylor and Henley, 'all the critical introductions and essays in the 2007 Oxford Middleton were written before the 2007 Oxford Middleton was published. The individual contributors could not stand back and get a perspective on the massive collective structure that each was helping to build. Every reader of the Oxford Middleton can see Middleton better than any reader before November 2007' (p. 14). If the process of building the Middleton canon is complete (for the time being), then The Oxford Handbook represents a series of detailed journeys through hitherto unexplored passageways and stairwells that link Middleton's works to one another and link Middleton to the work of his contemporaries and to his historical moment. Indeed, significant portions of a number of the essays in The Oxford Handbook are devoted to vigorously surveying or mapping a certain issue or theme across Middleton's corpus; there are so many connections to be discovered - so many forgotten or ignored texts to consider - that one can sense the excitement that accompanies the blazing of new interpretive pathways. In 'Staging Muteness in Middleton,' for instance, Heidi Brayman Hackel identifies Middleton's fascination with 'the theatrical elements that most resist the faculties of a hearing audience: muteness, gesture, and dumb show' (p. 330) in tragedies, comedies, and civic entertainments across his entire career before she gestures at the broader implications of her findings: 'Early modern dumb shows were, finally, not solutions to dramatic problems but rather complex assertions of silence and meaning available in the body' (p. 344). Similarly, 'Middleton's Stylistics' by Jonathan Hope ranges across multiple works and genres to establish Middleton's linguistic preferences, stylistic markers, and his awareness 'of print as a technology, . . . of books as 'things,' . . . of the materiality of manuscript culture, and the handwritten word' (p. 250). Essays devoted to individual works are in the minority, but these too have a freshness about them, as Middleton's best-known works are approached from new angles (such as Regina Buccola's comparative examination of two 2008 productions of The Revenger's Tragedy in 'Giving Revenger's Its Due'), and some of Middleton's lesser-known works are treated to an attentiveness that has rarely, if ever, been shown them: Stephen Guy-Bray does much to salvage the reputation of Middleton's seemingly universally-disparaged The Wisdom of Solomon in 'Middleton's Language Machine,' and Julian Yates helps to navigate the genre-defying swerves of The Owl's Almanac in 'Middleton' s Shelf Life. …