The Revengers Tragedy and the Revenge Play Genre - Coursework Example

The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Revenge Play Genre The motivation of revenge is a literary trope that is played out in a number of different styles and literary genres. The history of the revenge tragedy, a phenomenon articulated during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and as a particular instantiation of the theme of revenge played out on stage has its origins in the work of Seneca the Younger (Arkins 1; Thorndike 126). His tragedies such as Thyestes and The Trojan Women depicted radical and existential evil in which the motivation of revenge-for-blood was not the morally problematic motivation it became in Christendom, but a natural mechanism for dealing with troubles. T.S. Eliot recognized the dominance of the Senecan mood in drama during the era of the revenge tragedy when he suggested, “No author exercised a wider or deeper influence upon the Elizabethan mind or upon the Elizabethan form of tragedy than did Seneca” (Arkins 2). Any analysis of the revenge play genre centers on two particular plays, which both typify and transcend the revenge play genre Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and ur-Hamlet. The blueprint of the revenge tragedy is laid out and executed here to brilliant and devastating effect, an effect which indeed defined the notion of how revenge was to be played out on stage. There is of course significant disagreement to how the concept of revenge was interpreted via Elizabethan mores, whether the multitude of avengers in the various stage dramas put on during the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries represented immoral exemplars, examples of Anglo-Saxon barbarianism combined with un-Christian Senecan ethic (Broude 39), or perhaps something more noble like retribution in the mode of divine justice. Regardless, the ethical valence in the standard form of the revenge tragedy was generally unambiguous and robustly on the side of revenge and its attendant carnage. As as interesting caveat to this, Shakespeare’s Hamlet often seen as a response to the non-extant ur-Hamlet offers a level of ambiguity that does not so much negate the vengeful mood of the play but nuances it in such a way that makes Hamlet the singularly important and influential play it is today. A purer example of the revenge tragedy is perhaps Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Though as we will show, while it is most obviously ruled by many of the conventions of the revenge tragedy and is clearly meant to fall within it as an artful example of the genre, it does not adopt all of its conventions carte blanche. In order to make sense of this it will be necessary to delineate the specific features of the revenge tragedy as put forth by scholars and how The Revenger’s Tragedy both clearly accepts the mantle of the revenge play genre and subtly deviates from that form and to this end a thematic and structural comparison to such plays as Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy will be conducted. The central plot element which pervades every revenge tragedy is of course the crime, or what Seneca refers to as scelus (Arkins 3). In his plays such as Thyestes the word scelus is referred to no less than 200 times and becomes the singular obsession of the revenger. The crime usually immediately takes place or its occurrence is established within the first few minutes of the action of the play. It immediately impels the play “towards a disaster for which the cause is established” (Arkins 4). The obsession with the crime often serves to transform the protagonist or revenger, a transformation which often consists of mock or genuine madness, philosophical soliloquies that ruminate on the nature of private revenge and a relentless delaying that does not resolve itself until the end of the play five acts later. The second convention present in many revenge tragedies of the time is the presence of a ghost which charges the revenger with his task, Old Hamlet in Hamlet, and Don Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy. Thorndike in establishing a chronology for the establishment and perpetuation cites a number of sources to suggest that the presence of the ghost in revenge tragedy is a common and ubiquitous element. He establishes this fact through an analysis of other plays and critical works that mention the ghost element obliquely and indirectly revealing that its ubiquity in the conscious of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists was apparent and popular enough to be indirectly commentated upon (Thorndike 128-130). Thus regarding the ghost as a central element of the revenge tragedy is presence or notable absence hinted to the audiences the nature of the play that was to unfold before them. This dramatic convention perhaps engendered sympathy for the revenger in the task he is to undertake for the rest of the play. Insofar that pre-mediated murder was considered morally taboo the inclusion of the ghost, not granted a supernatural license to engage in the cold-blooded act as the revenger or protagonist acts as a tool of the supernatural or divine. The Spanish Tragedy carries this theme further as the ghost is accompanied by an anthropomorphized Revenge itself, further clarifying the license the play seeks to grant. The presence of ambition is another important feature of the genre. All of the dramas in discussion often occur at royal courts, never in provincial settings. Ambition is often a motivation of the initial crime that sets in the play in motion, a desire for power, control or domination that the revenger must set right. The final important and seeming necessary element of a revenge tragedy is that many of the principal characters are murdered or killed at the end of the play including the revenger himself. The catharsis of the total release of bloodshed, often reaches comic proportions at the end of particular tragedies, however the nature of the evil that pervades much of the setting in these revenge tragedies require a Dionysian cleansing. The act of private revenge, even if it perceived as just requires at the end the death of the revenger himself, as atonement for the world put out of joint by the initial crimes. This atonement is of course of the tragedy of the Revenger and one which closes the narrative of the play itself. Though it is outside the scope of this analysis, the authorship of The Revenger’s Tragedy has historically been questioned resulting in sometimes dual attributions to both Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Middleton (Wadsworth 307). This debate becomes notable when considering the other major revenge tragedy attributed to Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedy, especially because of the Calvinist theological strains present in the latter which seem to comment on the unrepentant violence present in the The Revenger’s Tragedy. In either event, for the purposes of our analysis we will refer to Tourneur as the author of the play. In Tourneur’s drama, the crime or scelus is the poisoning of Gloriana by the Duke for her unwillingness to abdicate to his lustful advances. The titular revenger is Vindice who ingratiates himself into the unnamed court of scandal where the action takes place somewhere in Italy. One of the earliest and interesting departures from the common conventions of the revenge tragedy which is immediately noticeable is the absence of any ghost. However, this absence is not merely an arbitrary elision or narrative oversight on the part of the author, the play opens with Vindice talking to the skull of his beloved Gloriana. The skull, a noted memento mori regarding the transitory and ephemeral nature of human existence serves as a jumping off point for Vindice’s vengeance and serves perhaps as a commentary on the nature of the revenge tragedy itself with special reference to Hamlet and his conversation with the skull of Yorick (Simmons 65; McMillin 278-279). Scholars such as Felprin and others have suggested that the The Revenger’s Tragedy is less about moral articulation of revenge and more a direct comment on Hamlet and revenge as dramatic trope in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama (McMillin 275). Shakespeare’s Hamlet as well as the The Spanish Tragedy features a play-within-a-play. The presentation of the The Murder of Gonzago or The Mousetrap within Shakespeare’s play acts as a sardonic commentary on the nature of revenge play, and is often classified as a meta-theatrical move in Hamlet often engendering the anachronistic adjective of “postmodern” (Bell 311-312). The Revenger’s Tragedy then is a further commentary then on Hamlet. Not only does it follow the five act-structure of Shakepeare work, the feigned and self-dramatized madness of the central character, but the minor revenge plots are also recapitulated within Tourneur’s work. Laertes revenge for the murder of his father Polonius and the death of his sister Ophelia is matched if not parodied by the revenge of Duchess, Spurio, Ambitisio, and Supervacuo against Lussurioso (ŞAKİROĞLU 65). The character of Vindice represents the play’s chief moral spokesperson and its most inventive assassin (Brucher 259). The Senecan influence is most clearly seen throughout the revenge tragedy genre, through the articulation of the evil that is present in the court i.e. the world of these characters. Moreover, the licentiousness and wantoness which is omnipresent is quickly highlighted by Vindice in his first few lines of dialogue, as in Don Andrea’s explication of the unjustness in his death in The Spanish Tragedy, Vindice delineates the scandal which pervades the court of the Duke. This morally corrupt milieu allows the private revenge to take on extra-moral approbation as retributive justice, the revenger is a tool of this justice and often equivocates his private revenge with a global purpose. Vindice in order to gain revenge on the Duke, must place himself in the employ of Lussurioso, committing acts of violence and treachery along the way until at last he must kill Piato, his own disguise (Ornstein 88). This final nullification is a move which is present and ubiquitous in this genre and one that is consistently foreshadowed in these plays usually very early on in the narrative. Some have suggested that The Revenger’s Tragedy contains a moral ambiguity (Wadsworth 307; McMillin 275); insofar that Vendice narrow minded focus is too narrowly focused. There is no questioning of his own moral strictures; he hurtles headlong into his tragedy as a happy and willing assailant. The ambiguity then arises as a result of our consideration not of his motivations, but his own disposition towards his task. One in which he seems to enjoy immensely. The punishment aptly fits the crime, but Vindices role as an agent of divine retribution remains ambiguous. He treats the Dukes anguish comically- "Nay, Heaven is just, scorns are the hire of scorns; / I neer knew yet adulterer without horns" but he insists on extreme suffering (Brucher 259): If he but wink, not brooking the foul object, Let our two other hands tear up his lids, And make his eyes, like comets, shine through blood; When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good (The Revenger’s Tragedy III. v.202-205). If indeed there is some ambiguity it is not in the act of revenge, the act itself is complete and total throughout the play. Moreover the ambiguity does not exist in Vendice’s mind either, he recognizes that he must become the very thing he wished to destroy, the revenger becomes his own enemy, and one shouldnt do that. The point is hard to miss, especially when the hero explains it himself at the end: "Tis time to die, when we are ourselves our foes" (The Revenger’s Tragedy V.iii. 110). The ambiguity lies in our interpretation through the lens of history in attempting to gather the Elizabethan and Jacobean mores that existed at the time of the play’s creation. If Vendice’s actions are justified within the play, are they then considered justified outside the frame of the play and in the audience. If they are not justified with the audience, then does the revenge tragedy represent a counter-example of acceptable behavior or perhaps more accurately a fantasy of violence that a previous time would have reveled in. If Vendice’s actions are not justified within the play, i.e. Vendice’s extreme commitment to the violent conclusion that he set for him at the beginning was too easily gained, too easily adopted. In The Spanish Tragedy, Revenge itself makes a promise to Don Andrea after being convinced of the injustice the Don has unduly suffered at the hands of the Duke. In Hamlet, it is the ghost of Old Hamlet, that grants the supernatural license to commit revenge, a madness that the young prince of Denmark must grow into, and transform himself, always with a sense of conviction but simultaneous fear of the conclusion. Vendice relishes his role as one who is to set the world right, he gives in to the art of his own violent end and the personal cost of his life. This sense of violent and theatrical self-abandonment is one that his given significant throat in Tourneur’s play (McMillin). As Brucher suggests, “perhaps ‘Hamlet does not confuse art and life,’ a confusion to which most stage revengers succumb, but this does not mean that however much Hamlet "may justify murder to himself, there is no sign that he can bring himself in action to face the horror of doing it” (Brucher 257-258). Vendice succumbs to it entirely, not just confusing the artistry of his Revenge, but fully conflating the two concepts. This further suggests that The Revenger’s Tragedy, is not only just a further evolution of the revenge tragedy genre, but a comment upon Hamlet and the aesthetic import of the convention in general. Thus by taking the revenge drama to its dramatic limits, Tourneur transcends the genre offering a comment on the dangers of revenge rather than its apotheosis in The Spanish Tragedy or its naturalistic complicity in the work of Seneca the Younger. Works Cited Arkins, Brian. "Heavy Seneca: his Influence on Shakespeares Tragedies." Classics Ireland (1995): 1-8. Bell, Millicent. "Hamlet, Revenge!" The Hudson Review (1998): 310-328. Broude, Ronald. "Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England." Renaissance Quarterly (1975): 38-58. Brucher, Richard T. "Fantasies of Violence: Hamlet and The Revengers Tragedy." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (1981): 257-270. Charnes, Linda. "Review: Revenge Tragedy Aeschylus to Armageddon by John Kerrigan." Shakespeare Quarterly (1997): 501-505. McMillin, Scott. "Acting and Violence: The Revengers Tragedy and Its Departures from Hamlet." Studies in English Literature (1984): 275-291. Ornstein, Robert. "The Ethical Design of the Revengers Tragedy." ELH (1954): 81-93. ŞAKİROĞLU, Belgin. "Senecan Drama and Its Influence on The Spanish Tragedy and The Revengers Tragedy." Journal of Arts and Sciences (2006): 61-70. Simmons, J. L. "The Tongue and Its Office in The Revengers Tragedy." PMLA (1977): 56-68. Thorndike, Ashley H. "The Relations of Hamlet of Contemporary Revenge Plays." PMLA (1902): 125-220. Wadsworth, Frank W. "The Revengers Tragedy." The Modern Language Review (1955): 307. Read More