Revenge Tragedies as Presented in Titus Andronicus and the Duchess of Malfi - Essay Example

REVENGE TRAGEDIES AS PRESENTED IN ‘TITUS ANDRONICUS’ AND THE ‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’ INTRODUCTION A revengetragedy is a play written in the Elizabethan era, between 1590 and 1630, whose main theme is pursuit of revenge at all costs. Revenge is usually carried out for the loss of a loved one. These plays were written to ride on the success of Thomas Kyd’s ‘Spanish Tragedy’ that was published in 1539. Revenge and butchery were prevalent throughout Elizabethan era in the 16th and 17th centuries. While most plays in this time period had one run at the theatre, all the plays that had revenge and butchery themes enjoyed multiple theatre runs. Revenge tragedies were so popular that the more successful ones like the Spanish Tragedy were plagiarised throughout the rest of the 17th century (Nun 2005, p. 45). Even a condensed list of tragedies presented by these plays show the grisly and weird displays of viciousness that the audiences in that era enjoyed: in William Shakespeare’s play ‘Titus Andronicus’, Titus avenges his daughter’s rape by butchering and dismembering the people responsible for his daughter’s rape then baking their bodies in pies and serving it to their mother whom he holds responsible for their character flaws (Blakemore 1974); and in John Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ Giovani d’Aragon’s brothers are bent on a bloody vengeance path for imaginary wrongs done to them (Liebler 1995). These revenge tragedy themed plays employed dramatic scenes and characters to portray viciousness and dismemberment to regale viewers, and sensationalize the human need for control. The characters continually contend with the significance of physical involvement and the need to attach figurative connotations to physiques. They also disclose an obsession with mutilation and decay as a sign of power. Although they primarily seem to obsess with dead body out of reverence for the dead, they ultimately reveal their drives as scheming, foul and offensive. In essence, those who are seeking revenge use mutilated body parts as weapons, spectacles, and revenge justification. By ascribing connotation to corpses in seemingly impulsive, whimsical and fickle ways, those seeking revenge justify their actions (Liebler 2002, pp. 21-25). DISCUSSION Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare (written between 1588 and 1593) In Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare dramatizes the effect of bodily violence and human sacrifice as visceral responses to suffering and injustice, and he interrogates the efficacy of rituals to contribute to social harmony and political stability. The play develops through conflict between the two main characters, Titus and Tamora. Titus is bent on having revenge for his slain son while Tamora is bent on ensuring the safety of her captive people (Berry 1999, p. 24). As seen, in the funeral rituals Titus stages upon his return to Rome, Shakespeare depicts how corporeal violence often intensifies the impact of public demonstrations of power. Although Tamora asserts that Titus has sufficiently displayed Rome’s military might by parading his Goth prisoners of war, Titus justifies Alarbus’s execution as a sacrifice necessary for the completion of the funeral ritual. Lucius calls attention to the excessive bloodshed he perpetrates as if to highlight its role in both appeasing the souls of his dead brethren and punishing Tamora, Chiron, and Demetrius (Nunn 2005, pp. 56-57). Later, Shakespeare dramatizes how ritual violence can be used to exact revenge. He depicts how the imperial hunt fails to reveal human dominance over the beasts and Rome’s social hierarchy stability; the hunt’s ritual calls for ruthlessness, but Titus’s enemies shed human, not animal, blood, turning this ritual into a chaotic massacre. After raping and mutilating Lavinia, Chiron and Demetrius triumphantly mock her silenced, disabled condition. Similarly, Titus justifies his gruesome plans for revenge against Chiron and Demetrius by performing these murders as ritualistic sacrifices. Throughout the play, corporeal mutilation is shown to serve as a spectacular, visceral reaction to injustice and unbearable suffering, but also as a warning against criminal atrocities and social disorder that result when rituals are disrupted or violence is misallocated. By dramatizing the role of extreme violence in both arbitrary criminal activity and customary rituals, the play challenges the potentially therapeutic effects of extreme bloodshed a common occurrence in the 16th and 17th centuries (Anderson 2003, p. 301; Nunn 2005, p. 58-60). The play queries the role of rituals for social order preservation by portraying characters as influencing the rituals to sanction senseless viciousness and deliver vengeance. Although Titus repeatedly turns to rituals to construct meaning, he ends up engaging in the same behaviour for which he is seeking vengeance thus contributing to the fragmentation he wishes to prevent. Titus views rituals he observes as evident signs of Rome’s structure and nobility, but instead he consistently exposes his fixation with physical violence. He maintains that the interment of his slain sons shows his deference to their military accomplishments and indicates the variances between uncultured Goths and cultured Romans and barbaric Goths. However, by sanctioning his sons’ dismembering and executing Alarbus, he is no longer the pious Roman soldier but as a bloodthirsty warrior seeking revenge for his sons’ murder. Thus, the play highlights the potency of rituals while sensationalizing their potential for self-service and corruption. At different junctures in the first half of the play, characters enact rituals to maintain cultural values, celebrate social harmony, and demonstrate political power (Allman 1999, pp. 48-51; David 1996, pp. 22-25). Nonetheless, these ceremonial gestures, intended to commemorate slain military heroes or to establish peace, involve brutal corporeal violence or human sacrifice and, rather than contributing to political stability, lead to deception and injustice, manifested in murder, rape, and cannibalism (Blakemore 1974, pp. 13-14). Girard gives us a better understanding of their definition of ceremonial gestures and sacrifice, and the role they play: “…is to quell violence within the community and to prevent conflicts from erupting… can strike down without fear of reprisal…” (Blakemore 1974, pp. 13-14). The play ultimately confronts audiences with the paradox that humans seek to celebrate and establish social stability using rituals that result in corporeal dismemberment and other types of violation. Depicting a protagonist who initially trusts in the capacity of rituals to bolster social harmony but who eventually manipulates rituals to serve his own vengeful desires, the play clouds distinctions between illegitimate and legitimate viciousness and questions the effectiveness of using rituals to build the community (Mead 1994, p. 459). Indeed, the mutilations conducted in the play are emblematic of social fragmentation. When Chiron and Demetrius rape and dismember Lavinia they violate a ritual intended to commemorate the imperial wedding hunt; through rape, they pervert the matrimonial union and potential procreation it symbolizes, and, through mutilation, they subvert the traditional role of the hunt as a celebratory affirmation of stability and hierarchy. But, the Goths are not the only characters who manipulate rituals; towards the end of the play Titus deceives his enemies by staging a banquet under the charade of peace and reconciliation. During the feast Titus manipulates a ceremony frequently intended to celebrate peace and friendship as an opportunity to gain bloody vengeance; human sacrifice serves as not just an accompanying element to the ritual of the banquet but the central motive for it. Titus in the beginning trusts that the practice of traditional rituals will contribute to social cohesion but later contributes to social descent by gruesomely dismembering and mutilating other characters. Titus seems to be a pretender who hides in rituals while he is in reality a psychopath (Blakemore 1974, p. 109). He demonstrates his thirst for carnage and gore by saying: “Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome to beautify thy triumphs, and return Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke; But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets For valiant doings in their country’s cause?” (Shakespeare 1974, 1.1.109-113) Many scholars examine how the play’s multiple instances of mutilation and dismemberment result from Titus’s insistence on maintaining rituals in a culture experiencing radical social and political transition. Ralph Berry, for example, investigates how Titus’s adherence to traditional conventions of behaviour contributes to the breakdown of civilization: “Shakespeare sees a society given over to a rigid and unreflecting code of patriarchy, which must create such strains as to threaten the stability of the society nurturing the code” (Berry 1999, p. 41). The brutality enacted by the Romans has led many scholars to study how Shakespeare deconstructs binary distinctions characterizing Romans as civilized and their Goth enemies as barbaric. The Rome of Titus Andronicus, according to Ronald Broude, is an empire “in a period of crisis and transition, menaced by . . . the replacement of an ailing dynasty and the assimilation of a conquered people into the Roman commonweal” (Berry 1999, p. 30). Shakespeare dramatizes Titus’s struggle “to adjust to changing conditions and the readiness to supplement the old virtues with new ones appropriate for a new Rome” (Berry 1999, p. 31). Other scholars attribute the perpetuation of vengeance in the play to the failure of the play’s rituals to contain the violence they require. David (1996, p. 101) defines what ensues when violence breeds more violence, as seen in the play when Alarbus’s sacrifice leads to Tamora’s vow of revenge. The execution of Alarbus is meant to display how sacrificial blood maintains the distinction between the pure and the impure, much as sacrifice asserts the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence (Mead 1994, p. 464). But, rather than attaining peace and commemorating Titus’s slain sons, Alarbus’s execution sparks the bloody revenge that leads to Titus’s anguish. Begging Titus to spare Alarbus, Tamora undermines the cultural distinctions that Titus presumes exist between Roman and Goth by asserting that her devotion to her children is similar to Titus’s pride in his sons (Mead 1994, p. 468). By the end of the play, Titus wields power by taking advantage of rituals for his own desire for revenge; he stages the killings Demetrius and Chiron as an act (David 1996, p. 110). Seeking an appropriate physical and linguistic response to the extreme injustice he has suffered, Titus ritualizes this killing. Shakespeare’s early modern audiences probably would have recognized the tensions regarding ritual dramatized again and again in Titus Andronicus (Mead 1994, p. 459). Challenging the conventional ways of responding to viciousness, the play refuses to provide relief from ferocious depictions of suffering. The hunt does nothing to pacify the characters’ desire for mutilation, and the crime and disorder enacted in the forest persist after the characters re-enter Rome; Saturninus refuses to investigate the details of his brother’s murder, and the Roman tribunes ignore Titus’s pleas for mercy. Furthermore, Lavinia’s dismembered body, on stage for much of the play’s remaining action, serves as a graphically mutilated reminder of the revenge Chiron and Demetrius have achieved; she becomes a silenced and disabled manifestation of Titus’s struggle to determine an appropriate response to the extreme brutality inflicted against his family. Motivated to take extreme measures to stem the violence, Titus falls victim to Aaron’s villainy. When Aaron deceives the Andronici into hoping that Martius’s and Quintus’s lives might be saved if Lucius, Marcus, or Titus chops off a hand as ransom, he extends the hope that Rome still respects the proper social convention and ceremony Titus expects from civilized societies. The Andronici contend, in an absurd competition, over whose hand should be sacrificed, and, when Lucius and Marcus run offstage to procure an axe, Aaron helps Titus to chop off his hand. He desperately seeks to ritualize even this grotesque sacrifice; he celebrates the hand as if it were a relic that has served to keep Rome safe and civilized (Blakemore 1974, pp. 195-196). Using language that recalls the solemnity with which he had buried his slain sons at the play’s opening, Titus ceremoniously offers his hand as a sacrifice. The play portrays Titus’s desperation to save his sons and stem the violence perpetrated against his family, but Aaron mocks Titus’s optimism; rather than providing an mitigation of the tension, the play shows this onstage display of self-mutilation as both painful and incongruous, therefore ludicrous (Shakespeare 1974, p. 64). The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster The Duchess of Malfi differs from other revenge tragedies of the time in that its principal couple, the Duchess and her husband, are not the ones perpetrating the evil, instead they are the victims. The Duke feels that his sister has insulted their family by marrying from below their social class. Madness, violence, grotesque, corruption and cruelty are themes present in the play, but the depiction in the play is curiously subtle, with the limits between evil and good distinctive, and many of the characters frankly intriguing psychological subjects. John Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ is a play whose main theme is deadly tragedy. It follows the play follows the life of Giovanna d’Aragona, a Duchess, who marries Antonio Bologna, a man of a lower social class. Her two brothers plan and execute a revenge mission that leaves them both destroyed. In the play, audiences cringe at images of bodies undergoing torture, suffering mutilation, and experiencing decomposition, and they are shocked by graphically bloody, violently dismembered body parts. The play’s characters are both frightened by representations of dead bodies and attracted to decaying corpses dug up from graves. Elaborate and vivid descriptions of dismemberment, burning, or mutilation abound throughout this play (Lieble 1995, pp. 28-29, 70-71). This is seen when Bosola gives a vivid description of a lady he met in France: “a lady in France, that having had the smallpox, flayed the skin off her face, to make it more level” (Webster 1964, 2.1.28-29). Later in the play, Ferdinand imagines vengefully torturing the Duchess and her secret lover by: “having their bodies / Burnt in a coal-pit, with the ventage stopp’d” “or by “dipping the sheets they lie in, in pitch or sulphur, / Wrapping them in’t, and then lighting them like a match” (Webster 1964, 2.5.68-69). Ferdinand, one of the characters in the play, famously produces a dead hand he intends to use as an instrument of torture on the Duchess, and he creates wax statues of her children and husband in an endeavour to scare her into submission (Lieble 1995, p. 60). While audiences may sympathize with the unfulfilled desire and the violent pain that the characters experience, the play’s unique structure does nothing to ease audiences’ sensibilities. The play’s mysterious contradictions and the characters’ confused motives contribute to a lack of overall structure, making audiences feel a desperate meaninglessness linked to action and intention. At the end of act one the Duchess has one child while at the beginning of act three she has three children. This is a clear contradiction. The play has long been faulted for its apparent disorganization, and the amount and variety of literary scholarship studying it testifies to how this play eludes artistic and critical stability. The play, which ends with a stage strewn with dead bodies, leaves audiences physically exhausted (Belsey 1980, 115; Forker 1986, 365). The play also shows how far people would go to achieve their personal goals. Ferdinand lies about the Duchess in his conversation with the Cardinal and pre-empts any chance that the Duchess may have had to get in the Cardinal’s good graces. He describes the Duchess as extremely promiscuous and appeals to the Cardinal’s sense justice (Liebler 2002, 38-39): “Ferdinand: Methinks I see her laughing, Excellent hyena! Talk to me somewhat, quickly, Or my imagination will carry me To see her in the shameful act of sin. Cardinal: With whom? Ferdinand: Happily, with some strong thigh’d bargeman; or one o’th’ wood-yard, that can quoit the sledge or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire that carries coals up to her privy lodgings. Cardinal: You fly beyond your reason. Ferdinand: Go to, mistress! ‘Tis not your whore’s milk, that shall quench my wild-fire But your whore’s blood.” (Webster 1964, 2.5.38-39). There is fragmented chronological progression and vague characters inspirations in terms of the conflicts between private desires and public responsibilities. This is seen when the play’s lack of coherence is related to the specific development of the characters and, more generally, to the duties of political rules and the disorder that results when ranked social organizations are upended. The play stages the mismatch between the desire to gratify personal yearnings, usually showed as selfish and illicit, and the endurance of political organizations, typically described as upholding societal law and order. The Duchess’s role, as the play’s main character, is questioned as either; a heroine victimized at the hands of a patriarchal power structure; or a sexually licentious villain who, rebelling against social morals meant to preserve structure, brings about the disarray and pandemonium that the play aesthetically and thematically illustrates (Ellis-Fermor 1958, pp. 12-14). As its long critical history shows, The Duchess of Malfi resists stable interpretation. The play’s disjointed structure parallels its depiction of mutilated human bodies, demanding sophisticated responses from audiences who view or read it. Participating in publication, Webster makes his play available to diverse audiences and draws attention to the interpretive difficulties involved in reading or watching this complex play. The plays portrayal of mutilations and dismemberments draw a parallel with its deliberately disjointed dramatic structuring. CONCLUSION A glance at performance reviews of 16th and 17th century productions of early modern revenge tragedies suggests that audiences is simultaneously thrilled and repulsed by the bloodshed in these plays. Spectators seemed half to be expecting horror comics, playgoers apparently anticipated the grotesque, macabre terror associated with the horror genre that provoked reactions such as disgust, fear and excitement. The London Express reported that during the production’s run a minimum of three people fainted every night. This shows that despite violence and bloody scenes common in their daily activities, the audience still found them to be disturbing (Allman 1999, pp. 56-57). Studying the significance of rituals in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century literature carries the potential of revealing divisive cultural anxieties and religious tensions during the time period, since, as Burke (1987, p. 225) has shown, early modern culture was very important in articulating and the developing propensity to repudiate ritual. In the wake of the social and religious upheavals stemming from the Reformation, intellectuals and playwrights repeatedly engaged in debates regarding the quantity, quality, and efficacy of ceremonial practice, and argued about the wide-ranging impact of investing in rituals as integral to spiritual belief or as merely symbolic gestures. Reference Allman, J 1999, Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue, Associated University Press, London. 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