Role of Lust and Virtue in Cyril Tourneurs Play The Revengers Tragedy - Essay Example

? Role of lust and virtue in Cyril Tourneur’s play The Revenger’s Tragedy Introduction In the famous play “The Merchant of Venice” Shylock had once questioned the society, “if you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?”1 Revenge is an integral part of human nature, and incorporates various aspects like violence, death, insanity, moral degeneration and ultimately the attainment of justice from an avenger’s perspective. The act of revenge has been a natural human impulse, suppressed by society, often carrying with it presumptions of lust and virtue. Cyril Tourneur’s play The Revenger’s Tragedy (some experts contend that Thomas Middleton is the real author)2, is a Jacobean drama that deals with revenge. However, instead of merely telling the story of a revenge seeker, it explores various attributes of revenge and the different facets of human judgement. As the author points out the dangers associated with revenge, a question arises: does a good cause (revenge) really justify the methods used to achieve it, and if it does, to what extent? The author however does not answer this question, but leaves it to the audience or reader to decide. Tourneur in this play describes all kinds of crimes, lust, sin, and corruption, and very few characters in the play remain immune from committing sin. An analysis of the drama shows that sexuality, which includes love and lust, combined with virtue emerge as important themes in the play The Revenger's Tragedy. The opening lines of the play “Duke, royal lecher: go, grey hired adultery…”3 rapidly builds up an atmosphere of lust and corruption, which is present throughout the drama and forms to be the core theme reflecting the Jacobean era. The play continuously reflects economic and political immorality as comparable to or the outcome of lust, which in turn become becomes an allegory for the social depravities. Within the basic theme of sexuality, however, other secondary themes can be distinguished. One, such theme revolves around the knavish Duke, concerns aged lust, where the author displays a special disregard for the feeling of lust seen in aged men, and a constant repeat of this motif implies the dramatist's desire to create a strong feeling of revulsion, hence deepening the emotional quotient of the play. With vivid portrayal of lust and depravation the author creates a world that is “inherently evil…denuded of spiritual significance.”4 Along with lust, as in other Renaissance revenge tragedies, the play also displays an apparent obsession with the virtue of its female protagonists. The lead male protagonist, Vindice, starts observing the world around him in pairs, where the societal role of every female reflects morality clubbed with a sinful antithesis. On one hand, society comprise of women that are faithful to their husbands, while at the same time there are those that provide piety and expect pleasure and power in return, which turns Vindice sceptical towards all women. Using this sceptical perspective Tourneur implicates that virtuous and ideal figures are disappearing from the society. Here the binary between lust and virtue is a representation that the author makes about Jacobean monarchy and the British society during seventeenth century (just after Queen Elizabeth I’s death). Here the role of lust and virtue is to symbolise the tensions faced by those in power and the institution of the monarchy and the general corruption and moral degeneration prevalent in society during those times.5 In this paper, the researcher aims to study the role of lust and virtue in the play The Revenger's Tragedy and explore the various ways in which they have been portrayed within the drama Discussion The Revenge Tragedies The genre of literature, which captures acts of revenge, was popular during the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, and is referred to as revenge tragedy. The three most famous revenge tragedies are William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Revenge tragedy, evolved in its own pattern is of a paradoxical literature genre as “Its practitioners take on of the most primitive, brutal human impulses as their essential subject matter and turn this into complex, often deeply thought-provoking aesthetic experiences.”6 The form of literature where the core theme comprises of revenge is seen as early as the Roman civilisation, and remains popular even to this day. The significance of this form of literature and its various analyses is how it represents the society within which it had been conceived. The very name of the genre itself captures the idea that when one sets out on a journey for revenge, he must dig himself two graves, since the ‘tragedy’ is found in the ultimate failure and death of the avenger. The concept of revenge with literature has been observed as “well adapted to literary and dramatic treatment because of its impulse towards structure, ethical ambiguity and emotional turbulence.”7 Some of the common traits of revenge tragedies include a secret murder of a virtuous person by an evil one, the visit of the spirit of the murdered person to somebody within his family (usually his son), intrigue and intense plotting where the avenger and the murderer plot against each other, madness of the avenger (feigned or real), general violence and a catastrophe that destroys almost everybody including the person seeking revenge. In the English revenge tragedies, the avenger follows or attempts at following stoicism, therefore in this context, the basic theme in all English revenge tragedies involved around the ethos of pain. The British playwrights used revenge tragedies to explore various themes like corruption, lust, love, virtue amidst sin, absolute power of the monarchy, factional issues that were prevalent during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean socio-political scenario, as much as they were present during the Roman political era, and remain even relevant today. The Revenger’s Tragedy and the role of lust and virtue in it The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) is an English Jacobean play, which contains extreme violence and typifies the use of satire and cynicism, a popular tone found in most Elizabethan and Jacobean era dramas.8 T. S. Eliot had severely criticised the bizarre portrayal of violence and the vivid depictions of sexual in the play claiming it to be a deep hatred towards all that is living with the mind of an adolescent.9 Jenkins had also criticised the play, claiming that the author seemed to be “instinctively aware only of sin everywhere rife in the world.”10 The play is an outcome of the relationship between literature and society and is best described as an “example of the lurid, increasingly sceptical and anti-essentialist world-view evoked in Jacobean revenge drama.”11 Jacobean playwrights took over from the Elizabethans in reworking the generic hallmarks of the revenge tradition. The generic function of a “sickly combination of sex and death, with sex crimes (rape, incest, necrophilia and adultery)”12 came to accompany the idea of the physical action of revenge, which can be seen to be ultimately driven by the heavy infatuation with lust and virtue. Lust in this instance refers to a feeling of sexual desire or drive, whereas virtue stands for moral excellence. When isolating these two opposing concepts by locating common grounds, in this case being revenge, their roles can be evidently identified. It can be seen that it is the combination of the juxtaposition of the concepts of lust and virtue, which inherently constructs and provides a deeper meaning to Cyril Tourneur’s play The Revenger’s Tragedy, hence serving the contextual function within the play, where the characters are derived from surrounding society and the ruling monarchy. Since Lussurioso did not really care about this father’s death, he simply wanted to hold someone responsible for the act and execute that person. This also reveals the persistent fear of death felt by the ruling monarchs and their desire to mete out justice based on this fear. Similarly, Antonio, instead of judging the situation on terms of morality, on hearing the confession from the brothers simply claimed, “You that would murder him would murder me,”13 and ordered for their execution. These scenes within the play reflected the English monarchy during sixteenth-seventeenth century Britain. Even though Lussurioso resemble Henry VIII to some extent, since the latter was known to have given orders for executions under even minor provocations (which shows his persistent fear of being killed), where sometimes the victims were not even proven guilty.14 However, there is a definite parallel between The Duke and Henry VIII in their lust and endless pursuit of women, even at an old age. There is almost nothing mentioned about the Duke's capability as a ruler, nor is there any mention of his or his son’s interest in governmental activities. Almost all their activities revolve around women and merrymaking, showing a decadent society. The Duke remains busy in committing adultery (like Henry VIII), with at least two marriages (since Lussurioso is not the current Duchess’s son). He murdered Gratiana who refused to succumb to his lust and there are hints that more such murders have taken place before. This is very similar to Henry VIII's, behaviour who had married six times, and had several of his wives executed on mere whims.15 As regards the fear that we observe in Antonio and Lussurioso it reminds the reader of the incident where after being crowned, Mary I imprisoned Elizabeth I (her half-sister), and when Elizabeth I came to the throne she ordered the execution of her cousin, Mary Stuart, who led many uprisings against her.16 However, it is in the characters of Ambitioso & Supervacuo that are best related to Mary & Elizabeth, thereby showing that the contextual function of lust and sin was derived from the British society and monarchy of the Renaissance period. Lust and virtue drive the plot of the play as they are interwoven into the protagonist’s quest for achieving revenge whilst simultaneously develop and expose the hallmarks associated with revenge tragedy Tourneur has utilized in the play. The concepts also uphold conceptual and thematic values, which enables them to explore ideas that arise throughout the play mainly centred on virginity, chastity, male honour, cuckoldry and seduction. The binary between lust and virtue is also a representation of the critique the author is trying to forge about the Jacobean monarchy and its society at the time. Tourneur uses both lust and virtue as symbols of the tensions faced by those in power and the institution of the monarchy in order to illustrate ideas about corruption, gender, sex and revenge in particular. When deconstructing Tourneur’s play through analysing the thematic concepts of lust and virtue, their role can be identified as establishing the conventions of the revenge tragedy, which in turn shapes the plot of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Tourneur creates a discordant society as the setting of his play, this convention is a mark of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy, however it is evidently utilized by Tourneur in is Jacobean play The Revenger’s Tragedy. “Here the society has an underlying problem that is not obvious to its people yet it is often obvious to the hero. The highest symbol of order, usually the King or Duke, is seen to be violating the order so discordance is seen to be this ruler’s fault.”17 In The Revenger’s Tragedy, the Duke, a ruler in Italy, is portrayed as sexually depraved and consumed by lust, which causes him to violate laws and satisfy his own sexual desires. The discordance is illustrated through the Duke’s lustful demeanour being fed by virtue, as he murders Vindice’s virtuous beloved Gloriana, due to her refusal to his sexual advances. Even though Vindice, after the murder of his beloved, views the dukedom as completely corrupted, many of the other characters seem to accept this vice as an acceptable state of affairs. The play also contains two other separate plot lines as well as this, each of which are all essentially linked though lust, virtue and revenge. The play’s plot is manufactured out of a quest for vengeance after a real crime of offence. In each case, the real crime has been produced out of an act of lust in order to impede or stain one’s virtue, such as the rape of Lord Antonio’s wife, the Duchess seducing the Duke’s son Supervacuo, and the Duke murdering Vindice’s beloved who rejected his lustful advances. However, as the plot develops in the play, so does lust, which becomes contradictory in nature. This contradiction occurs when the character fuelled with vengeance evidently becomes blinded, where he uses lust as a way to attain revenge, while it was this very lust which killed his beloved and drove him to take vengeance. This idea of lust being used as weapon of revenge enables Tourneur to explore the convention of “madness” within his play through the protagonist. Vindice is utterly consumed by his passion for vengeance in that he ironically becomes lustful for the attainment of revenge and the supposed satisfaction, which comes along with it. Vindice’s insanity or “madness” can be seen when he forgoes his own sense of virtue and that of Gloriana’s, by adopting bizarre methods to lure the Duke to his death. Vindice exploits the Duke’s lust by sexually luring him towards Gloriana’s dead body (he places poison on her lips), where the old man thinks that she was still alive and is willing to satisfy his sexual desires. Vindice achieves his revenge using gruesome and heartless strategies involving poison and necrophilia, which makes the Duke suffer, although at the cost of his own and Gloriana’s virtue. The role of lust and virtue also extends beyond the mere physical moulding of the play, but also into its conceptual make up such as its themes and dynamic characters. The concepts explore and branch into ideas centred on virginity, chastity, male honour, cuckoldry and seduction. Lust is an ideology that encompasses male honour, which is prevalent through the royal male characters of the play, the Duke and his son Lussurioso. Their perception of male honour is heavily warped as they lustfully seek to capture the chastity of all virtuous women. Thus, the characters of the Duke and his son Lussurioso have been designed with the very purpose of encapsulating the core aspect of sexual lust and a complete lack of virtue, hence ‘evil.’ The Duke as the ruler of Italy is symbolic of the moral degeneration of the place and the times (he symbolises Henry VIII, well known for his six marriages, the murder of some of his wives, and his lecherous ways). He is a “royal lecher” whose “grey-haired” old age has not slowed his lust and it is his uncontrollable lust, which influences him to manipulate the justice system. Thus, the audience is alarmed when they release that the Duke is God’s envoy in Italy and symbolically represents the society over which he rules. The legitimate son of The Duke, Lussurioso, whose name is the literal meaning of “lust/luxury,” is also driven by his desires and is without any morals. There seems to be no end to his sexual appetite, “he must fly out… Each face he meets he strongly dotes upon.”18 To him, people are expendable and his reference to them as “slaves” indicates his complete lack of concern for others. Despite the negative portrayal of lust and male honour, Tourneur instils pillars of virtue within his play, which provide the audience with a sense of moral cleansing or purity. Tourneur does this through the female characters of the play being, Castiza, Gloriana, Gratiana and Antonio’s wife, each of which have in some way or the other refused to sacrifice their virtues. Castiza, as indicated by her name means “chastity”, is a paragon of virtue, and does not feel tempted to squander her virginity and honour for gaining status or riches, so becomes a model for all honourable women. Gratiana’s name means “grace” and theologically this means to be in favour with God. She is too a good person, but being weak minded is tempted by the offer of Lussurioso. Tourneur presents Gratiana’s genuine moral enlightenment and remorse positively. Unlike other wrongdoers in the play, she is genuinely alarmed by her behaviour and begs for forgiveness. She proves her sincerity when further tested by Castiza, and is cleansed of her sins, thus becoming a model for Christian forgiveness. Interestingly, in the play The Revenger's Tragedy, either women form a core point in the portrayal of lust and virtue, where they invoke feelings of lust, or they commit acts of sin, while some remain virtuous even within this overwhelming atmosphere of decadency. This focus on women particular is owing to the fact during that Renaissance era female chastity given special significance within social norms and values, hence male protagonist’s desire to protect virtuous women. In the drama, the three leading women protagonists can be placed within a moral range that covers extreme vice (the Duchess) to absolute virtue (Castiza). The Duchess, who effectively represents extreme lust and corruption in the play, contradicts almost entirely Vindice's views of an ideal woman.19 Vindice's mother, Gratiana, tends to favour the Duchess’s immoral ways, while his sister Castiza's virtue remain untarnished. The tension between lust and virtue is imminent throughout the play, where we find despite Vindice asserting that his lover Gloriana “far beyond the artificial shine [and] bought complexion" of other woman"20 was not capable of committing any vice, yet the very way he states this makes the reader question the conviction in his tone. For instance, he suggests that her great beauty would have lured even the most "uprightest" man to commit sin, and her beauty could have lured a man to waste his money while pursuing her. Even though Vindice feels that Glorian being the ideal virtuous woman would have not undertaken such sinful activities, but knowing ambiguous feeling toward women, we feel his fear that the virtuous of them might fall to lust. Thus, this binary in Vindice's feelings that oscillate between his idealisation of virtuous women and a constant fear that this idealisation may be a mirage, are central to the meaning and impact of the play, thus setting its emotional tone and hence serving the conceptual function within the play.21 In the words of Peter Murray, "Belief in feminine chastity is obsessive with Vindice: he must retain faith in the virtue of Gloriana or be utterly lost. In order to believe in Gloriana, he must also believe in the chastity of his sister.”22 If he did not believe in Gloriana's virtue, then there would be no justification except for only a form of nihilistic anger in his mission for seeking revenge. It is for this reason he describes revenge in terms very similar to those he used while describing Gloriana, "Faith, give Revenge her due, / Sh'as kept touch hitherto."23 Here the implications are that virtue is quality seen rarely in women, even though there is another instance of a virtuous woman, where the Antonio’s wife commits suicide after the Duke's youngest son raped her. Vacillating between seeking an idealised woman and then fearing that it may be an illusion, is at the core of the thematic concept of the drama. It is clearly evident when Vindice claims “Women are apt you know to take false money; But I dare stake my soul for these two creatures; Only excuse excepted, that they'll swallow Because their sex is easy in belief.”24 The Revenger's Tragedy reveals a society where corruption or lust is widely prevalent amongst women and a virtuous woman is "a rare phoenix,"25 where then men (Lussurioso) can assume that even a virtuous woman can be made to commit sin, simply using a "a smooth, enchanting tongue."26 This is evident when in answer to Vindice's expressed doubts over the possibility of a mother being capable of prostituting her own daughter, Lussurioso said, “Nay, then, I see thou'rt but a puny in the subtle mystery of a woman. Why, 'tis held now no dainty dish: the name Is so in league with age, that nowadays It does eclipse three quarters of a mother.” 27 Here the author uses cynicism to highlight Lussurioso’s negative character, even though neither Vindice nor the reader would like to believe that such immoral action is possible from mother’s end (soon proven wrong).28 The play makes use of stylistic languages and devices and language throughout to denote sexuality and this evident in the Vindice's soliloquy, which is at beginning of the play, and which is replete with hints on would happen at later parts in the play. The four chief protagonists are present on stage, and as they pass by, Vindice presents their vices to the readers / audiences in short sentences. He focuses on the sexual desires (lust and depravities) of the Duke and his family, and while accusing them of having committed adultery, he himself supports illegal sex, which is evident in this speech “Marriage is good, yet rather keep a friend. [...] / Vindice: [aside] A very fine religion.”29 He also hates the Duchess owing to her lust, where he claims she “will do with devil,”30 clearly hinting that she is unfaithful to the Duke. Vindice's hate towards lust and corruption is seen here in his judgement. Another significant aspect is Vindice's hatred of the Duke's lecherous behaviour at an old age, “Antonio: …Such an old man as he.” 31 Again, in line 7 there is a pun, where heat (comparable to animal like lust) can also be related to the fires or (heat) of hell, “infernal fire,” which meant that if Vindice followed stoicism and did not try to harm the Duke, the latter would have received punishment in hell, after his death. However, Vindice, did not pay heed to this religious belief (prevalent in the Middle Ages),32 and leaving the virtuous road, set off to take revenge. Here this conflict between religion (virtue) and revenge (an act of sin) is represented by an oxymoron: having faith in religion would mean believing in God to deliver justice, however to take “revenge” is to show lack of faith towards the Lord, where one takes the law into own hands. When the author explains the reason behind Vindice looking for revenge, all his outbursts are shown while he is holding his dead lover’s skull (the most idealised virtuous woman), which manages to give his act of seeking justice (an otherwise sinful activity) almost a divine touch. Conclusion Revenge appeared good to Vindice, owing to the fact that moral values, which made him seek the path to avenge his lover’s death endured throughout the play (and to some extent also in the society through the various ages, thus making readers/audiences feel sympathetic towards Vindice). The satiric measure as represented in the play by Castiza, has managed to survive, and in a personal way even transcended. The author, by providing Antonio with an ambiguous reason for ruling Vindice’s death, questions the ultimate worthlessness of the ensuing devastation, which results from lust, decadence and finally revenge (“this murder might have slept in tongueless brass, / But for ourselves, and the world died an ass”)33 as portrayed in the play.34 The reader/audience cannot hold any faith in Vindice's prediction of a future era that is clean of depravity and corruption, as Antonio (the next ruler), has not been tested in the play. However, the readers have seen Antonio's wife and Gloriana both of whom were martyred owing to their virtuous nature. The readers have also viewed Gratiana and Castiza and seen these two women undergoing tests of virtue (at personal levels), where even though they faltered, they managed to come back to the path of virtue. The author does not paint a picture of a transformed and virtuous society, but implies that even within a society that is engulfed completely by lust, sin, and corruption, virtue, at a personal level, that is, the virtue of the individual reader or spectator, will persevere. The play, for all its degrading quotes that point at women in general, uses them to symbolise virtue (despite Jenkins’s claim that the author represents only immoral and sinful activities in the play), while men represent decadence (symbolised by sexual depravities) of the era. References Champion, L., 1975. Tourneur’s ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’ and the Jacobean Tragic Perspective, Studies in Philology 72.3, 299-321. Dollimore, J., 1984. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eliot, T., 1950. “Cyril Tourneur,” Selected Essays. NY: Harcourt. Ellis Fermor, U., 1947. The Jacobean Drama. London: Methuen. Jenkins, H., January 1941. Cyril Tourneur. RES XVII, 21-36. Kerrigan, J., 1998. Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon. Oxford: OUP. Morgan, K., 1984. The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, P., 1964. Study of Cyril Toumeur. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. Neill, M., 1996. Bastardy, Counterfeiting, and Misogyny in The Revenger’s Tragedy. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36 (2), 397-416. Ornstein, R., June 1954. The Ethical Design of The Revenger’s Tragedy. ELH 21 (2), 81-93. Panek, J., 2003. The Mother as Bawd in ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’ and ‘A Mad World, My Masters.’ Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 43 (2), 415-437. Pearce, H., 1976. Virtu and Poesis in The Revenger’s Tragedy. ELH 43 (1), 19- 37.  Reed, I., and Octavius Gilchrist, 1825. A select collection of old plays: in twelve volumes; with additional notes. London: S. Prowett. A select collection of old plays: in twelve volumes ; with additional notes Ribner, I., 1962. Jacobean Tragedy: the quest for moral order. NY: Barnes & Noble. Shakespeare, W., 2007. Merchant of Venice. Filiquarian Publishing, LLC. Simmons, J.L. 1977. The Tongue and Its Office in The Revenger’s Tragedy. PMLA 92 (1), 56-68.  Tourneur, C., Middleton, T., and Foakes, R., 1996. The Revenger's Tragedy (Volume 1 of Revels Student Editions). NY: Manchester University Press. Woodcock, M., 29th June 2006. Revenge Tragedy. The Literary Encyclopedia, retrieved from http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=951, [Accessed 22 May 2012.] Read More