REVENGE TRAGEDY- SOCIETY'S MIRROR OR THE PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE?
CHEEK BY JOWL’S touring production of the play by Thomas Middleton
Writer, teacher and director MARK WOODCOCK in an exclusive essay for The Cambridge Critique examines the art and artifice of English revenge tragedy.
Revenge (essentially satiric) tragedy established the extraordinary excesses of its remarkable genre during the reign of Elizabeth 1 (1558-1603), going on to sustain itself throughout that of James I (1603-1625), manifesting consistently the creative overdrive which is the hallmark of all theatre during the now long distant English Literary Renaissance. In addition (- it’s important to remember) drama was then written in verse, one aspect of which is compression; and plays, time limited by performance, are inherently concentrated. Outstanding revenge tragedies as a result, if well performed, make for explosive theatre: moving, stimulating, disturbing.
We may also find revenge tragedy challenging. Ours is a primarily visual culture unlike Renaissance England which was first and foremost oral, where poetry was written to be spoken as much as read, and even ordinary people were perfectly accustomed to following long, argumentative sermons. Poetic compression and changes to language usage in the four hundred year interval impose further demands. But revenge tragedy is still perfectly comprehensible, though an audience may be well advised to study a plot summary before venturing to the theatre. It is, however strangely, a product of its time.
England in the reign of Good Queen Bess was not far short of a police state. Sir Francis Walsingham’s spy network reported to William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief advisor for forty years, and later to his son, Robert. The system was cruel but necessary if England was to remain stable and Protestant. For the dangers to the state were real, not least with two major rebellions against Elizabeth to be dealt with. The Northern Rebellion (1569) involved replacing Elizabeth on the throne with the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots (as did other serious plots against Elizabeth in 1571, 1583, 1585 and 1586) whilst the rebellion of the Earl of Essex (1601), Elizabeth’s disgraced, longstanding favourite, was his desperate last throw of the dice in a political power play. Though it came to naught, the invasion threat of the (very Catholic) Spanish Armada (1588) was terrifying. That the political fragility of and danger to the public realm caused by the tensions between puritan ideologues and Catholic reactionaries continued into the reign of James is made clear by the Gunpowder Plot (1605).
It was a momentous point in English history. Shakespeare explains in his revenge tragedy Hamlet (1601) that the function of drama is ‘to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show…the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’. But it was far too dangerous for plays to address social, political and religious issues openly. The Master of the Revels had the authority to imprison, torture or even maim those associated with dissident or unapproved theatrical material. The playwright Thomas Kyd ended up in the Tower of London, tortured; he died, a broken man, at the age of 35. Christopher Marlowe, famous poet, playwright (Dr Faustus 1592), homosexual, atheist and - it is rumoured - spy, was murdered, aged 29. Shakespeare lived on the edge - he was called to explain himself to the authorities when his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was paid to perform his Richard II (about an English monarch being deposed) on the eve of Essex’s rebellion. But Elizabeth did try to walk a middle path; Ben Jonson, a Catholic convert, second only to Shakespeare as a playwright, was able to ridicule the hypocrisy of Protestant zealots in his satiric comedies, as did Shakespeare in his Twelfth Night.
So playwrights could not simply confront the iconoclastic violence of the Reformation or terrorist plots to install a Catholic monarch. Insofar as revenge tragedy addresses the time’s ‘form and pressure’ as regards Catholicism v. Protestantism, it does so in coded, covert fashion but a society where power trumps justice could not be simply ignored. Machiavelli’s arguments in The Prince (1532) for instance that for a ruler, it is much safer to be feared than loved and that ‘the end justifies the means’ provoked in a Christian Europe horror at their cynical realpolitik.
Revenge tragedians looked to the patchwork of dukedoms that was Italy, the exotically wealthy and sophisticated epicentre of the Renaissance, with its scandals - the cynical political feuds and betrayals, orgies, torture, murder, incest and poisoning associated with, for instance, Rodolfo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI), his son Cesare and daughter Lucrezia (between c1480-1519). The corruption of the Borgias may have been sensationalized and exaggerated but setting their plays in that world provided perfect cover and allowed besides indirect allusion to Catholic rituals and iconography.
Shakespeare was careful always to create worlds to all intents and purpose distant but with Hamlet set in tenth century Denmark, he gets close to describing the state of England. Hamlet is at Wittenberg, a protestant university, but his father’s ghost, inhabiting Purgatory, is clearly Catholic. And from the second scene on, Hamlet is, though the crown prince, under house arrest, at the mercy of the machinations of a Walsingham-like Polonius. His spies report to him and he reports to the king, Claudius, in what is clearly a surveillance society. Hamlet comments on their attempts to manipulate him with mordant wit.
Renaissance playwrights, with their re-awakened interest in and knowledge of classical literature, also found inspiration in the Roman stoic philosopher and playwright (- also Emperor Nero’s tutor) Seneca whose series of so-called ‘tragedies of blood’ were, in turn, drawn from the stories of Greek myth. His Thyestes, for example (following Greek tragedian Euripedes’ play of the same name), tells the story of the eponymous hero who unwittingly eats his own children after they have been slaughtered and served up to him at a banquet by his vengeful brother, Atreus. Shakepeare’s debt in Titus Andronicus (between 1588 and 1593), his other revenge tragedy, is clear; Roman emperor Titus revenges himself on Tamara at a reconciliatory feast, revealing to her that the pie he baked which she’s in the process of eating contains the flesh of her children.
Revenge tragedy establishes itself as a dramatic genre in the 1580s with Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. Shakespeare’s contribution takes the form of his two plays already mentioned. Revenge tragedy expands in the Jacobean era, highlights being John Webster’s White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614), Middleton Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) and The Changeling (1622) and John Ford’s 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1626). Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy establishes the tropes on which other revenge tragedies come to rely. A corrupt society in which justice cannot be obtained provoking vigilantism - what Francis Bacon, Elizabethan and Jacobean philosopher, scientist and senior English statesman in his essay on Revenge called ‘a kind of wild justice’. A protagonist, the Machiavellian malcontent - an outsider, the bitterly witty, cynical, even nihilistic commentator on his corrupt society. The malcontent can be either heroic, seeking satisfaction for vile crimes against his loved ones that go unpunished - or villainous, prepared to do anything to gain recognition from the corrupt sources of power when his talents are overlooked - or anything in between…
Thereafter Revenge playwrights can enjoy a smorgasbord: political intrigues, sexual predation, the supernatural (often in the form of a ghost who urges the protagonist to seek vengeance), a play-within-a play (or dumb show), elaborately ingenious murders in number, cruel torture, incest, obsession and madness /the pretence of madness, exotic poisoning and so on. Not for nothing has revenge tragedy with its baroque extremes prefiguring the sadism porn of today’s horror film had to
suffer the accusation of being ‘sick’ or decadent.
But revenge tragedy is not mere extravagant rhetoric and melodramatic excess, it adores gorgeous spectacle, drawing, for instance, upon a Catholic tradition of symbolic tableaux. In The Revenger’s Tragedy the old Duke, comically quivering with sexual arousal (- and age), kisses what he believes to be a shy young virgin. It turns out to be a mannequin topped by a poisoned skull and wig. As he is dying, the malcontent revenger Vindice forces him to watch his wife copulating with his bastard son by ripping off his eyelids so the Duke is unable to shut them. For her part, the eponymous Duchess of Malfi in Webster’s masterpiece is tormented by her lycanthropic brother, Ferdinand, who is insanely obsessed with his sister. He insists on meeting her in the dark where he presents her with a dead man’s hand, supposedly her husband’s, going on to reveal lifelike figures of him and their children as corpses. Next he terrorizes her by having a chorus of dancing madmen sing to her.
There are many reasons why the revenge tragedy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the most brilliant, multi-faceted Koh-i-Noor in the diadem of the English Literary Renaissance but its glittering distinction is to elevate the form of revenge (or satiric) tragedy to that of heroic tragedy. The vigilante pursuit of justice in a corrupt society where might is right is transformed into the traumatic existential pursuit of meaning in a violent, chaotic and incoherent universe. The bitterly witty, cynical railing against a corrupt society of the Malcontent outsider stereotype is replaced by the self-examining philosophic
enquiries of the highly individual Hamlet, a paradoxical insider-outsider.
Middleton may be setting out with his Revenger’s Tragedy to outdo Shakespeare or, a witty but lesser ambition, simply to parody him. His malcontent revenger Vindice continues, after ten years, to obsess over the skull of his poisoned virgin bride, assassinated by the corrupt Duke because she would not surrender to his predatory sexual advances - Middleton is, at the very start of his play, declaring the relationship with Hamlet by quoting the famous moment when a horrified Hamlet stumbles upon the skull of the court jester Yorick. Later, Vindice excoriates his mother for her corrupt behaviour just as Hamlet does with his mother in the closet scene. By the end, Middleton is still in contention with the bard, substituting horror-driven black farce for Shakespeare’s horror-driven tragedy and scoring the highest body count (11 to Hamlet’s 9) of any revenge tragedy (or anywhere else).
The revenger’s awareness of the danger of being corrupted by his violent response to corruption is an index of the seriousness of the writer’s engagement with his problematic subject - or of his indulgent pleasure in meretricious exhibitionism. Hamlet, in vilifying Ophelia, despatching Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, by killing Polonius, is indisputably defiled but by the end refuses to undertake any deliberate revenge against his uncle. Vindice, by contrast, at the very end, surrounded by the corpses of a whole ‘nest of dukes’ whose deaths he has with such fiendish ingenuity wrought, can’t stop himself from boasting ‘Twas somewhat witty carried…’
In the Cheek by Jowl (Italian-speaking) production of The Revenger’s Tragedy currently touring Europe, Declan Donnellan sets aside the intricate (if ludicrous) plotting of Act 5 to present instead a nihilistic, wordless, comedy-horror bloodbath ballet. The reason is, arguably, Donnellan’s incredulous response to our own momentous point in English history as the long distant past no longer feels so remote. We neo-Elizabethans are confronted by wild, bloody chaos as, on the one hand, states across five continents vie with religious and political extremists as to who can commit acts of greater horror to the point where cruel injustices become ubiquitous and quotidian - whilst, on the other, new, perplexing questions of values, rights, truth and justice come at us not as single spies but in battalions at the unstoppable technological revolution’s ever more amazing, society-changing inventions. Once again the basic tenets of western civilization are in question, under threat and up for grabs - just as revenge tragedians struggled with them four hundred and more years ago.
