Five Revenge Tragedies: The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, Antonio's Revenge, The Tragedy of Hoffman, The Revenger's Tragedy (Penguin Classics)

by William Shakespeare

  If revenge tragedies do not reflect, in any simple way, early modern attitudes to justice, they do have affinities with legal procedures and methodologies, in their investigation of detection, proof and punishment. Introducing an Elizabethan translation of the Roman Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca, to whom Kyd and other revenge tragedians are heavily indebted and from whom Marston, in particular, often quotes, T. S. Eliot observes that ‘The Spanish Tragedy, like the series of Hamlet plays, including Shakespeare’s, has an affinity to our own contemporary detective drama’.7 Lorna Hutson has explored the ways in which ethical questions of violence and retribution are played out procedurally, as revenge plays gather and test evidence and probability.8 Here we might consider the delay of the revenger less as a psychological barrier and more as an investigative necessity: Hieronimo needs Bel-imperia’s witness statement, delivered in a bloody letter, to be sure of the identity of his son’s murderers and vows ‘by circumstances [to] try, / What I can gather to confirm this writ’ (3.2). Hamlet uses the play as ‘the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’ (scene 7). As Hoffman’s plot unravels in The Tragedy of Hoffman, the play’s detectives multiply: Hoffman eschews strangulation, worrying that ‘Circles of purple blood’ (4.2) will proclaim foul play to even the most cursory autopsy; an alibi for the relevant hour proves Rodorick the hermit could not have lured Lodowick and Lucibella to their doom; Martha notes that her son’s costume, worn by Lucibella, ‘is not sea-wet: if my son were drowned / Then why thus dry is his apparel found?’ (5.1). Processes of revenge and mourning are here folded in with the forensic assessment of death’s causes – and consequences.

  The outcome of these investigations is to attach direct culpability for deaths to specific human agents: Horatio was killed by Lorenzo and Balthazar; Feliche by Piero, Julio by Antonio; the duke by Vindice; the old king by his successor. But these direct lines of culpability stand in here, as in the modern detective story, for existential questions of causation that are more difficult to articulate. Like bandits, revengers are ‘symptoms of crisis and tension in their society’.9 The anxieties which they embody, however, have been seen by recent critics as less concerned with matters of temporal justice and law – the ethics of revenge in contemporary society – and instead related to the post-Reformation religious context and to contested attitudes to the dead. Crucial among the ritual and doctrinal differences between the unreformed and reformed religions – between Catholicism and Protestantism – were their understandings of death and of relations between the living and the dead. Requiem masses and prayers for the dead had given Catholic liturgy rituals of connection and agency in which the dead were not beyond the help of the living, and those mourning had an active role towards those who had died. The existence of Purgatory within Catholic practice as a third, intermediate post-mortem destination that was not heaven or hell, allowed for the tropes of ghostly return, as in Hamlet (1603):

  I am thy father’s spirit, doomed for a time

  To walk the night, and all the day

  Confined in flaming fire,

  Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

  Are purged and burnt away. (5)

  By contrast, reformed religion’s reimagining of the afterlife demanded, as Peter Marshall has explored, ‘a far-reaching reconfiguration of the cultural and emotional nexus that bound the living to the dead … well beyond the boundaries of academic theology’.10 The stage was one of the dominant spaces of this cultural work.

  Revenge tragedies present their dead as insistently demanding of the living that they remember through retributive violence. Some of these ghosts return from the dead, like Hamlet’s father, Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy or Andrugio in Antonio’s Revenge; others are present in grim bony relics ventriloquized by the living, as in the addresses by Vindice to the skull of his betrothed at the start of The Revenger’s Tragedy or Hoffman to the ‘anatomy’ or skeleton of his father. In all these cases the dead have a mnemonic function, and this role is taken up by other props too: Hieronimo offers his double Bazulto, weeping over his own murdered son, a handkerchief to wipe his eyes, but as the stage direction makes clear, ‘He draweth out a bloody napkin’, a ‘token’ from Horatio ‘That of thy death revenged I should be’ (3.13). Ultimately this play reveals Horatio’s body as its ultimate mnemonic device: the 1997 RSC production had the court recoil in disgust at the smell of Horatio’s unburied body. Keeping him unburied is a prompt to revenge, but it may also be an attempt to keep him in the world of the living: the early modern period did not always consider a person dead until buried, as suggested by contemporary arrests of corpses for debt on their way to the graveyard.11 As Bacon observes, the ‘man that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green, that otherwise would heal and do well’.12 Revenge stands in for, and defers, funeral rituals, and in their repeated inscription of disrupted, incomplete or postponed burials, these plays allude to the contested understandings of the appropriate treatment of the departed, just as contemporaries argued over the legitimacy of prayers for the dead, the tolling of bells and the erection of graveyard crosses. As Thomas Anderson puts it, by ‘registering a generation’s inability to move beyond the loss of the community of the dead, the revenge stage offers its vision of early modern communities – peopled with body parts, skeletons, bastards, corpses, and disembodied voices – that try to compensate for, even as they repeat, the traumatic loss of the place of the dead’.13

  By this analysis, it is not so much the criminalized human agents of death within the plays that are significant, but the unknowable mystery of death itself. The Elizabethan liturgy for the burial of the dead included 1 Corinthians 15:26: ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’ (King James Version). Lorenzo in The Spanish Tragedy or Piero in Antonio’s Revenge thus become merely the personification of an impersonal fatal force that can, within the fiction of the genre, be humanized and thus defeated. Revengers attempt, in Robert Watson’s words, to ‘convert the villain into a scapegoat for mortality itself’ in an ‘absurd version of homeopathic medicine – death curing death’.14 Many of the images of revenge tragedies recall the visual iconography of the danse macabre, in which Death, a grimly jovial skeleton, twines implacably among the living as they feast or embrace: the bony sentinels of The Tragedy of Hoffman, for example, or the skulls of Gloriana and Yorick, or the festivities usurped by mortality in Antonio’s Revenge and The Spanish Tragedy. Just as sixteenth-century medics explored the body’s hidden mysteries in the new science of anatomy, and just as contemporary divines explored the ars moriendi, or art of dying well, so too the stage, in its unflinching depiction of mortality, approached existential questions of life, death and the inexplicable passage between.

  The understanding of these issues in the drama is visceral. First Otho, then Ferdinand and finally Hoffman in The Tragedy of Hoffman narrate the physiological processes of their dying. Hamlet’s preoccupation with the fate of the soul after death does not preclude an abiding interest in the vermiculating or decaying body: the murdered courtier Corambis is ‘At supper, not where he is eating, but / Where he is eaten: a certain company of politic worms are even now at him’ (11). But revenge, too, and its companion emotion grief are seen as physiological. Antonio, impatient with his courtiers’ attempts at stoicial comfort, demands:

  Are thy moist entrails crumpled up with grief

  Of parching mischiefs? Tell me, does thy heart

  With punching anguish spur thy galled ribs? (1.5)

  Hieronimo experiences his grief as a sympathetic injury: ‘They murdered me that made these fatal marks’ (4.4), and, indeed, the life of the revenger is itself usually sacrificed to his quest. If revengers make themselves resemble their victims, they usually also become their own final victims. Vindice recognizes, having given away their plots to a horrified Antonio at the end of The Revenger’s Tragedy, that ‘’Tis time to die, when we ourselves our foes’ (5.3), and the logic of the genre makes it clear that he should not survive his
crimes. Only Antonio of Antonio’s Revenge outlives his vengeance, vowing a ‘virgin bed’ as he continues to mourn for his lost love (5.6).

  In ending the play, Antonio also acknowledges its theatricality, closing the ‘last act’ of his own revenge and bidding any future playwright who would attempt to write about Mellida to present ‘some black tragedy’: ‘may his style be decked / With freshest blooms of purest elegance’. The self-reflexive turn at the end of the play is clear in its references to Marston’s own highly unusual vocabulary. Revenge tragedies exhibit a high degree of self-consciousness, both about their own theatrical status and about previous plays in the genre. Hoffman gleefully describes the murder of Otho as ‘but the prologue to the ensuing play’; when the stoical Pandulpho asks rhetorically, ‘Would’st have me cry, run raving up and down. / For my son’s loss?’ (1.5), the recollection is of Hieronimo mourning Horatio; Vindice uses the prop of the skull to quote Hamlet’s most iconic moment in the graveyard; Antonio, like Hamlet and Hieronimo, enters reading a book. When the young actor playing Balurdo in Antonio’s Revenge enters with his beard half off, he recalls Balthazar preparing for the playlet in ‘Soliman and Perseda’ at the end of The Spanish Tragedy. What has changed, however, is that in Kyd’s play the character Balthazar is playing an actor at this point, putting on a beard to play the Turkish emperor Soliman. In Antonio’s Revenge there is no such intermediary: Balurdo’s imperfect costume is to play – to be – Balurdo himself, and thus we cannot suppress the knowledge that this is a play. Writing of the studio system in the classic Hollywood period – perhaps our nearest analogy to the commercial world of the early modern theatre – Thomas Schatz discusses a ‘genre’s progression from transparency to opacity – from straightforward storytelling to self-conscious formalism’ as a way in which it can ‘evaluate its very status as a popular form’.15 Revenge tragedy, that is to say, becomes more opaque, more self-conscious, more knowing, and to an extent that is indeed what happens to this type of play in the fifteen or so years between The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy. When Vindice calls for thunder to accompany his deeds, he knows he is operating within a fictional genre and has no identity outside it (Vindice = revenge). As Susan Sontag’s celebrated ‘Notes on Camp’ recognizes, he understands ‘Being-as-Playing-a-Role’: one of the key elements of a camp aesthetic is ‘love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration’,16 and it is a love fully embraced by Vindice and the play.

  But early modern revenge tragedy was, from its outset, marked by an affinity between retribution and theatre. Kerrigan notes that the sequence action + revenge is one of the simplest units of drama, and Hieronimo, as author of ‘Soliman and Perseda’, is only the most literal version of the thoroughgoing equivalence between revenger and playwright. As ‘surrogate artist’, the revenger excels in designing and executing his own play-within-a-play, from Hamlet’s ‘The Mousetrap’ to the usurped accession rites of Lussurioso at the end of The Revenger’s Tragedy.17 And just as revenge plays create their own internal tension through the chain of action and retaliation, so the series of plays within the genre are interconnected as dramatic acts of (sometimes violent) statement and response. Antonio’s Revenge darkens the comic ending of Antonio and Mellida just as the anonymous prequel to The Spanish Tragedy, The First Part of Jeronimo, sought to excavate a happier past for Andrea and Bel-imperia. Hamlet (1603) discusses different acting styles and acknowledges, in a topical reference, that audiences ‘are turned to private plays, / And to the humour of children’ (7) – the Children at St Paul’s performing the similar and contemporaneous Antonio’s Revenge. Quarrels between different theatre companies over the performing rights to the popular The Spanish Tragedy, and the tit-for-tat writing sequence of additional passages to this old stager in response to Hamlet, Antonio’s Revenge and The Tragedy of Hoffman (see Chronology) implicate the revenge tragedy genre in the rivalries of the commercial theatre and turn its stock vengeance plot into a metaphor for dramatic competition.The so-called Wars of the Theatres, a sequence of connected, antagonistic plays by different writers for different companies, turn revenge plot into dramatic rivalry, or vice versa. In Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601) Marston is represented by the character Crispinus, who, in a dramatically apt form of restitution for his linguistic crimes familiar from the revenge tragedy genre, is forced to vomit up some of his newly coined words. If Hieronimo used theatre as a vehicle for his revenge in the Spanish court, so later writers use revenge as a vehicle for theatre. The self-consciousness always associated with revenge tragedy becomes an end in itself, an intense, knowing meditation on the power of theatre to create fictions of being, agency and control.

  NOTES

  1. John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996), p. 28.

  2. Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (1985), p. 72.

  3. Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587–1642 (1940), p. 11.

  4. Eric Hobsbawn, Bandits, new edn (2001).

  5. Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy, p. 6.

  6. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (1962), p. 130.

  7. T. S. Eliot, Introduction, in Seneca his Tenne Tragedies (1927), p. xxv.

  8. Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007), especially chapter 6.

  9. Hobsbawm, Bandits, p. 29.

  10. Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (2002), p. 188.

  11. Robert N. Watson, The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (1994), p. 4.

  12. Bacon, Essays, p. 73.

  13. Thomas Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (2006), p. 127.

  14. Watson, Rest is Silence, p. 56.

  15. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (1981), p. 38.

  16. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (2009), pp. 280, 275.

  17. Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy, pp. 4, 17.

  Further Reading

  John Kerrigan’s Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996) ranges with lucid erudition from Greek tragedy to Sherlock Holmes, via Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy. More specifically on early modern drama is Michael Neill’s Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (1997), which develops the compelling thesis that ‘tragedy … was among the principal instruments by which the culture of early modern England reinvented death’ (p. 3). Thomas Rist’s Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England (2008) focuses the association, making revenge tragedy in particular a ritual of mourning and remembrance. For a collection of critical essays, including important work on gender and sexuality, see Stevie Simkin (ed.), New Casebooks: Revenge Tragedy (2001). Janet Clare’s Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance (2006) includes a number of plays not in this volume, and is recommended as a guide to further exploration.

  The Spanish Tragedy

  Dillon, Janette, ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Staging Languages in Renaissance Drama’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 34 (1995), 14–40.

  Erne, Lukas, Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (2001).

  Griffin, Eric, ‘Nationalism, the Black Legend, and the Revised Spanish Tragedy’, English Literary Renaissance 39:2 (2009), 336–70.

  Hartley, Andrew James, ‘Social Consciousness: Spaces for Characters in The Spanish Tragedy’, Cahiers Elisabéthains 58 (2000), 1–14.

  Semenza, Gregory M., ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Metatheatre’, in Emma Smith and Garrett J. Sullivan (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy (2010).

  Watson, Robert N., The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (1994), chapter 2.

  Antonio’s Revenge

  Ayres, Philip J., ‘Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge: The Morality of the Revenging Hero’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 12:2 (1972), 359–74.

  Baines, Barbara J., ‘A
ntonio’s Revenge: Marston’s Play on Revenge Plays’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 23:2 (1983), 277–94.

  Burnett, Mark Thornton, ‘“I Will Not Swell like a Tragedian”: Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge in Performance’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 90 (1989), 311–20.

  Loewenstein, Joseph, ‘Marston’s Gorge and the Question of Formalism’, in Mark David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (2002), pp. 89–114.

  Spinrad, Phoebe S., ‘The Sacralization of Revenge in Antonio’s Revenge’, Comparative Drama 39:2 (2005), 169–85.

  Hamlet (1603)

  Clayton, Thomas (ed.), The ‘Hamlet’ First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities (1992).

  Irace, Kathleen O., The First Quarto of Hamlet (1998).

  Sams, Eric, ‘Taboo or Not Taboo? The Text, Dating and Authorship of Hamlet, 1589–1623’, Hamlet Studies 10 (1988), 12–46.

  Thompson, Ann, and Neil Taylor, William Shakespeare: Hamlet, 2 vols. (1995).

  The Tragedy of Hoffman

  Brucher, Richard, ‘Piracy and Parody in Chettle’s Hoffman’, Ben Jonson Journal 6 (1999), 209–22.

  Jowett, John (ed.), Henry Chettle: The Tragedy of Hoffman (1983).

  Pesta, Duke, ‘Articulating Skeletons: Hamlet, Hoffman, and the Anatomical Graveyard’, Cahiers Elisabéthains 69 (2006), 21–39.

  The Revenger’s Tragedy

  Coddon, Karin S., ‘ “For Show or Useless Property”: Necrophilia and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, English Literary History 61 (1994), 71–88 (reprinted in Simkin, New Casebooks: Revenge Tragedy.)