Revenge Tragedy Research Articles

Revenge Tragedy Revisited: Women and Law in Nina Raine’s Consent

‘Revenge’ has been a common theme in western drama, the primary examples of which are found in well-known Ancient Greek plays and Renaissance revenge tragedies, in which one major thematic quality of revenge is its affinity with the themes of ‘justice’ and ‘law’. Mirroring the inefficacy of legal mechanisms in such well-known plays, Nina Raine’s Consent (2017) portrays three women who have to struggle against a gendered-biased legal system with their own methods in their search for justice. This article argues the play can be read as a contemporary revenge tragedy with a feminist outlook, in which the female characters suffocated within a patriarchal legal construction try to attain justice on their own, portraying women’s permanent confinement within legal discourse both in real life and dramatic representations.

It is No Coincidence: HAMLET – An Actor Prepares (Three Hundred Years Before Stanislavsky?)

ABSTRACT The essay views William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet as a kind of London double-decker tourist bus. Visible on the open top level is the revenge tragedy. On the lower level, hidden in typical Elizabethan cryptic fashion, is an illustration of the internal journey an actor must take in order to be able to portray, “to be,” the character of Hamlet. This makes Hamlet two plays in one, both a revenge tragedy and an actor’s guidebook. When corroborated alongside the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the advice on acting outlined in Hamlet proves to be surprisingly sophisticated and contemporary. Is it a coincidence that the central question of the play is “To be or not to be” and the goal of Stanislavsky’s teachings is to achieve the “I am being” state while acting?

Hamlet, a genre-bending revenge tragedy? – Act 1 scene 2

This article concentrates on an early, but strategic scene in Shakespeare’s celebrated tragedy in which the audience is introduced to the court world of Elsinore and to the protagonist himself. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which Shakespeare’s innovative text tests early modern expectations of revenge tragedy as well as incorporating those associated with rhetoric and pedagogy in the period. The article ends demonstrating the international political emphasis of this scene as well as the unexpected continuities in self-representation between the leading male figures 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.

Pelopidarum secunda: a ‘site of memory’ in the history of Elizabethan revenge tragedy

AbstractPelopidarum secunda is an understudied anonymous English adaptation of Seneca's Agamemnon and Sophocles' Electra. The play is preserved only in manuscript and was probably performed at Winchester College around 1590. Through a combination of Marvin Carlson's notions of ‘ghosting’ and of the ‘site of memory’ with a neo‐historicist approach, the article offers a close analysis of this neglected school play from an intertextual, performative, and extratextual perspective. The analysis shows that the play is haunted by memories of its classical sources and of other performance contexts, including the church, and contains potential allusions to contemporary royal figures. In so doing, I argue that Pelopidarum secunda showcases the role of classical models in the history of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. By conjuring up memorable sources—Sophocles and Seneca—and events—past performances and executions—the unknown playwright(s) had the ambition to make Pelopidarum secunda equally memorable. Although this attempt has evidently failed given the obscurity into which the play has fallen so far, Pelopidarum secunda deserves a place in the archival memory of classical reception as well as further scholarly attention within early modern English drama studies.

Laws and Outlaws in Pastoral Comedy and Revenge Tragedy

The two genres of the title are not usually considered a pair. I argue that they share an important concern, namely, the clash between law and outlawry, city life and country life, abstraction and embodiment. The protagonists of both (often forced by the illegal actions of others) live outside the law and have to make their own laws. They often “take matters into their own hands.” Examples: paintings by Titian, Manet, Guercino, Marvell’s “The Garden,” Tasso’s Aminta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and late plays, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the Coen brothers’ “True Grit,” and Jennifer Haley’s The Nether.

Sir Thomas More and the Tragedy of Citizenship

Abstract: This essay explores the historical and generic basis for a tragic reading of The Book of Sir Thomas More . The early modern period’s dominant forms of tragedy (such as revenge tragedy and historical tragedy) typically focus on the dynastic-imperial struggles of aristocratic powers against the backdrop of centralization and state-building. Sir Thomas More inverts this representational hierarchy by leaving the monarch un-represented, relegating to the background the well-known factional conflicts that undergirded the Henrician Reformation. Instead, the play dramatizes the history of Tudor consolidation from the perspective of London’s citizenry, who are made to grapple with the meaning of their own freedom in an age of mass migration. The result, I suggest, is a charter myth not of the nation-state but of London and its civic institutions: a tragic meditation on the place of the city and its citizens in the world.

‘Poor mortal living ghost’– The ghost of Margaret past/present/future in Richard III

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, rises from the dead and haunts her rivals’ stage. Like a ghost, she appears as a supernatural vision from the past, and is called a ‘poor mortal living ghost’ by the Duchess of York who labels Margaret a ghostly vision. She certainly serves as an echo of dynastic loss; she stalks the Yorkist court, cannot undertake any action, and instead waits as a cursing shadow demanding vengeance for the murder of her family. In a production, she might resemble the ghosts that later visit Richard III and curse him. Margaret is not a ghost; and yet she is. The question is whether her appearance might be classified alongside similar visions. This paper examines the nature and function of Margaret’s apparitions as ghostlike scenes, not unlike those of a revenge tragedy and claims that she can be labelled a ghostly figure.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S 'HAMLET': A SAGA OF TRAGEDY

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, widely known as Hamletby Shakespeare, is popular for its tragic elements as well as its themesof revenge and internal conflict of the protagonist that has created astory worthy of applause. In this paper, a thorough analysis ofShakespeare’s Hamlet as a tragedy is presented.The motivation for the study was to analyse the different elementspresent in the play that establishes it as a unique tragedy through theamalgamation of diverse elements of the ancient and the modern. Thus,the true nature of it as a tragedy can be manifold which is consideredthe research problem in this paper.An empirical study design is adopted for the article, using Formalism asthe primary critical theory to analyse each part of the text and unearththe elements of tragedy- both in the ancient Greek and modernShakespearean sense.The results of the paper indicate that Hamlet is a unique synthesis of theancient notions of tragedy and a modern tragic hero with internalconflicts and self-doubt as well as a revenge tragedy by virtue of itsprimary theme. It is concluded that Hamlet is rooted in ancient Greekprinciples in terms of plot and dramatic devices yet the theme makes ita revenge tragedy and its modified character sketch establishes it as atragedy of thought.

The Osterman Weekend as Revenge Tragedy

The Osterman Weekend as Revenge Tragedy

Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, Catastrophe, History by Andrew Griffin

Reviewed by: Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, Catastrophe, History by Andrew Griffin Scott Venters Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, Catastrophe, History. By Andrew Griffin. University of Toronto Press, 2019. Cloth: $65.00, e-book: $65.00. 208 pages. Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama persistently opens the confines of reigning interpretations of early modern historical writing and establishes a place for the drama of the period as a serious mode of historical narrativity. The fundamental claim of Griffin's text is that in England prior to 1623, when occurred the first indelible signs of the institutionalization of history as a discipline, there existed a messy heterogeneity of conflicting historiographical methodologies. In this pluralistic environment, historically minded drama flirted and wrestled with providential, mythographic, humanistic, and antiquarian modes of historical discourse and engagingly articulated their epistemological antagonisms. To illustrate this transgeneric entanglement, Griffin explores sites at which biography, fatality, and history messily converge in what he terms an "untimely death"—a "narrative abruption or disruption," often reified at the locus of a protagonist's demise arriving "before it should have according to available forms of narrative explanation" (3). Griffin's examination of these dramaturgical fault lines exposes the broader historical narrative schematics employed by dramatists in conscious and unconscious ways to make sense of life and death. Griffin applies this conceptual formula to a select set of authors and texts to [End Page 103] produce intensely provocative, intertextual, and nuanced readings. His analyses are attended by comprehensive surveys of critical literature and dissections of each dramatist's peculiar, biographical relation to historiography. In chapter 1 he makes a strong case for Richard II as a problem tragedy because, according to Griffin, William Shakespeare self-consciously replicates the confused state of manifold historical sources available to him by ensconcing Richard's death in a plethora of discrete, contradictory probable causes. Against Annabel Patterson's dominant "proto-liberal" reading of Holinshed's Chronicles, Griffin iterates the text's "methodological overdetermination [within an] underpoliced field of historical inquiry" (41). Drawing upon that methodological porosity, Shakespeare fractures the line of Aristotelian tragic catastrophe bound to a single arc of logical action and characterological coherence. The intentional polyphonic texture of history in Richard II makes the untimeliness of Richard's death both a narratological and a historical problem. It also disturbs the prevailing maturation thesis of Shakespeare's oeuvre, or what Griffin calls the "teleological fantasy," that links the dramaturgical muddiness of the Henry VI plays with the author's vocational immaturity. Following a similar path of biographic reassessment, Griffin devotes sections of Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama to delineating the network spanning the theatrical and social activities of several playwrights. In chapter 2 he maintains that the generic confusion circulating around the false deaths of Moll and Touchwood Junior in Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which conflates the apparatus of city comedy with pastoral romance, is explicable only by first examining the playwright's involvement with various forms of civic histories. According to Griffin, most recent critics, influenced heavily by John Stow's chorographical commentary in A Survey of London, take a "synchronic" view of Middleton's representation of Cheapside, restricting the comedy to a mode of urban realism. When considered in light of Middleton's work as both a writer of mayoral pageants and London's chronologer, a diachronic pattern of Cheapside's "heterogeneous temporalities" emerges, invoking the district's sacral, cyclical, and commercial histories. It is Middleton the chronologist's understanding of Cheapside's semiotic richness and the variety of visages that London has worn that informs the commingling of Chaste Maid's satirical New Comedy and redemptive romance tonalities. Likewise, chapter 4 reads moments of Cyril Tourneur's involvement in the war against Spain within his Atheist's Tragedy and sets them against the contemporaneous pamphlet literature on the Siege of Ostend. Griffin argues that, unlike preoccupations with military strategy and technical innovation evinced in most writings on Ostend's fall, Tourneur imports an authentic scene of suffering into the domain of tragedy and fuses it with an empathic morality elegized in the play's ethics of vengeance. Using the well-worn structure of revenge tragedy, Tourneur, Griffin...

Collective Trauma as a Conceptual Framework in the Interpretation of Tragedy

This article looks to argue that the application of a socially informed trauma theory, as elaborated by Jeffrey C. Alexander et al, would yield invaluable insights into the vicissitudes of early modern society, which underwent a profound collective trauma. This collective trauma was performed on the early modern stage, where the especially gory genre of revenge tragedy served as a work-through channel for this fundamental crisis. Replacing the one-sided concept of mourning, the complex framework of collective trauma allows to account for the hegemonic power relations in the process of the creation of different, contesting trauma narratives. Another crucial aspect of the collective trauma-framework which the paper discusses is that while it acknowledges the loss inherent in fundamental social change, it also allows for the merits of Protestantism in the long run. However, it does not necessarily lead to the idea of disenchantment, as the concept of mourning does.

Batman as Modern Revenge Tragedy: The Shakespearean Dark Knight

Batman as Modern Revenge Tragedy: The Shakespearean Dark Knight Both Bob Kane’s Batman and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, lose parents, dress in black, put on antic dispositions, and go on personally motivated, violent missions for justice and revenge. The characters enter what seems to be an infinite mourning, where their innately flawed visions of obtaining justice are paired with unstoppable determinations. With my presentation, I intend on using video to demonstrate the historical trends of the revenge tragedy genre, and analyze their potential connection to the comic book medium, especially Batman. Using video, I can explore “adaptation” and all its nuances by implementing costume and visuals that mirror both the bard and the bat. Comics like The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and feature films like Batman V Superman, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and other Batman films act, in my view, as modern revenge tragedies; perhaps “Batman” becoming the entity that it is today has something to do with a legendary play, Hamlet, or at the very least, the legendary renaissance drama theatrics that might be hidden within it. Additionally, in light of Coen’s latest film, The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), and Reeves’s The Batman (2022) release around the corner, themes of darkness, “dark knights,” and revenge continue to rivet contemporary consumers of the theatric and the cinematic.

Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge by Emily L. King

Reviewed by: Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge by Emily L. King Adam Hansen Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge. By Emily L. King. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2019. xiii+170 pp. $53.95. ISBN 978–1–5017–3965–1. This is an enjoyably ambitious, sophisticated, and subtle rethinking of the ways in which revenge permeated and preoccupied early modern English culture. Emily L. King aims to show how we might think beyond the 'spectacular theatricality of onstage revenge acts', to perceive 'vengeanceʼs uncanny permutations', in texts and contexts 'beyond the high-pressure cooker' of the early modern theatre (p. 3), in 'conduct manuals, scientific writing, elegiac poetry, religious sermons, imaginative letters, and parliamentary acts' (p. 12). King perceives these permutations as part of the ever-ambiguous 'civilizing' process, with 'revengeʼs integration into the social fabric' becoming 'civil vengeance': 'retribution in the guise of civility' (p. 4). As King elaborates: 'civil vengeance makes legible interactions of covert aggression and animosity, especially ones that substitute for death' (p. 9). It is, as she memorably puts it '[r]evenge with a smile' (p. 53). King is surely right to note that treating early modern revenge as the preserve of the stage is a flawed and self-fulfilling [End Page 276] prophecy: we keep finding it there because we keep looking for it there, which means 'the basis on which we organize the genre [of early modern revenge tragedy] becomes conflated with how we understand revenge as a concept' (p. 7). By instead scrutinizing a 'wide and sometimes obscure archive' (p. 12), King explicates 'the quiet retribution inhabiting early modern English culture' (p. 146). This prompts some counterintuitive analyses: rather than prohibiting vengeance outright as a way to respond to the Reformationʼs impact on volition, many religious texts of the period permit it by showing how 'intersubjective violence is recoded as godly retribution' (p. 50). Ranging from the earliest incarnations of revenge on the English stage to the vengeful moments of the Commonwealth and Restoration allows King to show how Margaret Cavendish, for one, can 'disrupt the revenge machine' by challenging 'linear time' in a liminal, imaginative space (p. 134). Elsewhere, King suggests vagrants were subject to 'preemptive retaliation' (p. 80), that is, set up as a threat only in order to be exhibited and repressed as 'scapegoats' (p. 109). While this evaluation might be seen to reproduce long-standing tropes of transgression containment, and be insufficiently attentive to the nuances and ambiguities of writing about Englandʼs 'peripatetic population' (p. 109), via a reading of Thomas Nasheʼs The Unfortunate Traveller King does offer a novel way to conceive such figures and their representation in relation to national identity. An even longer view of tragedy and revenge might have complicated Kingʼs argument that 'revenge has traditionally been understood as a discrete event' (p. 3)—classical tragedy continually makes audiences question the causality of the events that make revenge inevitable. That is, you have to ask: where does tragedy, and thus revenge, begin (or end)? In turn, one might query whether there was something particularly early modern and English about how 'spectacular vengeance' occupies the 'realm of the extralegal' while 'civil vengeance' 'wraps itself in courtesy and flourishes under law' (p. 10): isnʼt that exactly what happens in the course of Aeschylusʼs Oresteia, with all the attendant exclusion and repression King notes in the texts and contexts she does discuss? Equally, any discussion of tragedy and violence might be enhanced by mentioning Francis Barkerʼs The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993)—not cited by King—which makes the comparable and challenging case that what happens on stage obscures the reality of social violence rather than drawing attention to it. From the opening discussion of Hamlet, which manages to illuminate that most studied of texts in new ways, King repeatedly offers amazing close readings of texts familiar and unfamiliar, culminating in a detailed account of Cavendishʼs use of the subjunctive. This attention to textual detail is underpinned by a theoretically astute approach, which is eclectic but coherent and encompasses at different points...

Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare’s Revenge Tragedies, by Lake, Peter

Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare’s Revenge Tragedies, by Lake, Peter

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDouglas Clark is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Université de Neuchâtel. His first book project, Performing the Will in English Renaissance Drama, determines the extent to which playwrights were preoccupied with exploring the destructive potential of the will (as both a faculty of the soul and a legal document). He is the author of forthcoming articles on John Donne’s testamentary verse for Studies in Philology, and transgressive acts of willing in Renaissance drama for Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England.Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan Jr. Research Professor of English and of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. She is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, Shakespeare After All, and Shakespeare in Modern Culture, and of books on cultural topics ranging from dogs and real estate to cross-dressing, bisexuality, the use and abuse of literature, and the place of the arts in academic life. Her most recent book is Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2020).Toria Johnson is a lecturer in early modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham (UK), and the author of Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare (D. S. Brewer, 2021). Her recent publications attend to the intersection of law and emotion in early modern Europe, cultures of fear in Macbeth and Othello, and the impact of the Reformation on English understandings of compassion.Kent Lehnhof is a professor of English at Chapman University. He has published some two dozen articles on early modern literature and culture in such journals as Shakespeare Quarterly, Modern Philology, SEL, ELH, and ELR. He is also coeditor (along with Moshe Gold and Sandor Goodhart) of the essay collection Of Levinas and Shakespeare: “To See Another Thus” (Purdue University Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book-length study of vocality and ethics in Shakespeare’s late plays.Martin Moraw is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo. He is currently completing his first book, Drama of Forms: Genre and Politics in the Time of Shakespeare, which argues that revenge tragedy, the history play, comedy, and romance give dramatic shape to the contradictions that animate the English political conjuncture of the early seventeenth century. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 50, Number 1Spring 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720378 © 2022 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“Who Feeds Revenge Hath Found an Endless Muse”: Nashe, Satire, and the Poetics of Vengeance

This article tells a new story about how satire and revenge tragedy cross-pollinated in the late Elizabethan period. Though widely acknowledged as a genius of prose satire, Thomas Nashe is not a figure we much associate with revenge tragedy. I argue, however, that Nashe was in fact one of that genre’s most provocative contributors and theorists, a role he came to in the pamphlets of the Nashe-Harvey quarrel and The Unfortunate Traveller. These works leverage a structural analogy between literary flyting and revenge feuds noted by Edward Coke, one that enables Nashe to translate revenge from stage to page. Between 1592 and 1596, Nashe and those in his orbit borrow tropes, forms, and rhetoric from contemporaneous revenge tragedy to model the enmities and alliances their collective milieu and to fashion for satire an explicit poetics—an equation of revenge with writing that Nashe celebrates as a potentially “endless Muse.” Read in this context, Nashe’s most inscrutable and anomalous work becomes newly legible. In the final section I argue that The Unfortunate Traveller is a deconstructed revenge tragedy, racked by newfound doubt as to the sustainability of its author’s project.

‘Lukretia geschonden zach geen wraak, ik al’: Juliane als Lucretia en Medea in Geeraardt Brandts De Veinzende Torquatus (1645)

Scholarship of early modern revenge tragedies has in recent years increasingly focussed on the interplay of revenge and sexual violence. This article explores this interplay in one such revenge tragedy, Geeraardt Brandt’s early modern Dutch The Feigning Torquatus (De Veinzende Torquatus, 1645), through a study of the mythological subtext. The character Juliane, who is raped on stage and later avenges herself on her rapist, is connected textually and subtextually to the mythological topoi of Lucretia and the vengeful woman. I argue that these topoi elevate Juliane’s revenge from private revenge to public justice, and finally to divine retribution. This case study contributes to the growing scholarship into gendered revenge in the early modern period.

The Case for Peele’s Authorship of Titus Andronicus 4.1: Cross-Examining Attribution Methods in a Disputed Scene

Abstract William Weber (2014) argues that Shakespeare authored Titus Andronicus 4.1 as evidenced by verbal collocation data and auxiliary investigations into the vocabulary, rhetoric, and classical content of the scene. Anna Pruitt (2017) corroborates this view using n-gram testing, and critical opinion has shifted against the older orthodoxy assigning the scene to George Peele. Yet despite efforts to select a limited set of Shakespearean works for their experiments, the datasets compiled by Weber and Pruitt from the LION database are invalidated by the imbalanced canon sizes of the two authorship candidates. This oversight compromises their quantitative arguments, as does their neglecting The Troublesome Reign of King John. This article demonstrates that when equitable canons are implemented 4.1’s vocabulary is strongly indicative of Peele’s hand, in clear opposition to the current consensus view. Additionally, the scene contains classical allusiveness that is distinct from that of Shakespeare with regard to sources, effect, and scope, further reinforcing the case for Peele’s authorship. The article then revisits the un-Shakespearean metrical properties of 4.1 and testimonial evidence in support of an earlier Titus play, arguing that Peele’s ownership of the scene can greatly inform our model of Shakespeare’s timeline and alleged innovations in the revenge tragedy genre during his earliest career phase. Recent critiques of automated searching in attribution studies show why integrated methods that unite quantitative and qualitative techniques remain indispensable, and the 2014 and 2017 studies’ erroneous conclusions provide a cautionary tale for future research in the field.

Peter Lake. Hamlet's Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp 224. $45.00 (cloth).

Peter Lake. Hamlet's Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp 224. $45.00 (cloth).