The Revenger’s Tragedy: The State of Play 9781474280372, 9781474280402, 9781474280396

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The Revenger’s Tragedy

The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series General Editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson Macbeth: The State of Play, edited by Ann Thompson Othello: The State of Play, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin The Sonnets: The State of Play, edited by Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead Further titles in preparation Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper

The Revenger’s Tragedy The State of Play Edited by Gretchen E. Minton

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Gretchen E. Minton and contributors, 2018 Gretchen E. Minton and the contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Shuttershock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8037-2 PB: 978-1-3501-1250-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8039-6 eBook: 978-1-4742-8038-9 Series: Arden Shakespeare The State of Play Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  vii Series Preface  viii Notes on Contributors  ix Acknowledgements  xiii

Introduction  1 Gretchen E. Minton Part One  Religion and Genre 1 Vindice and the Vice of Revenge: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Play Tradition  17 Erin E. Kelly 2 Pleading For and Against the Devil: Satirical Ethics and Efficacy in The Revenger’s Tragedy  39 Eric D. Vivier 3 Playing with Hell: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Infernal  61 Heather Hirschfeld 4 Calvinism and the Problematic of Character in The Revenger’s Tragedy  85 Ian McAdam

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Part Two  History and Topicality 5 Fashioning English Whiteness in The Revenger’s Tragedy  113 Katherine Gillen 6 ‘ ’Cause I love swearing’: Strong Language, Revenge and the Body in The Revenger’s Tragedy  135 Lucy Munro 7 The Dramaturgy of The Revenger’s Tragedy  159 Janet Clare 8 ‘Whose head’s that then?’: Head-­tricks, Bed-­ tricks and Theatrics in The Revenger’s Tragedy  183 Karen Marsalek Part Three  Performance 9 Objects and Gender: The Revenger’s Tragedy in Performance and on Film  207 Katherine M. Graham 10 Forced Modernity in The Revenger’s Tragedy Performances  231 Kevin A. Quarmby Afterword: Doing Battle on Behalf of a Skull  Linda Woodbridge Index  269

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1 Rory Kinnear as Vindice in the opening scene of The Revenger’s Tragedy, dir. Melly Still, National Theatre, 2008. © Johan Persson / ArenaPAL 2 Rory Kinnear with the ‘country lady’ (a puppet topped with the skull of Gloriana) in 3.5 of The Revenger’s Tragedy, dir. Melly Still, National Theatre, 2008. © Johan Persson / ArenaPAL 3 Christopher Eccleston as Vindici, holding the skull of Gloriana in Revengers Tragedy, dir. Alex Cox, 2002. Screengrab by permission of Alex Cox. 4 Stephanie Brittain as the sexualized Castiza embraces Eileen O’Brien as Gratiana at the Manchester Royal Exchange, dir. Jonathan Moore, 2008. Photograph by Jonathan Keenan. 5 Paula James as Gratiana praying fervently for forgiveness in Lazarus Theatre Company’s London fringe production, dir. Gavin Harrington-Odedra, 2015. Photograph by Adam Trigg.

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SERIES PREFACE

The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series Editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson This series represents a collaboration between King’s College London and Georgetown University. King’s is the home of the London Shakespeare Centre and Georgetown is the home of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). Each volume in the series is an expedition to discover the ‘state of play’ with respect to specific works by Shakespeare. Our method is to convene a seminar at the annual convention of the SAA and see what it is that preoccupies scholars now. SAA seminars are enrolled through an open registration process that brings together academics from all stages of their careers. Participants prepare short papers that are circulated in advance and then discussed when the seminar convenes on conference weekend. From the papers submitted, the seminar leader selects a group for inclusion in a collection that aims to include fresh work by emerging voices and established scholars both. The general editors are grateful for the further collaboration of Bloomsbury Publishing, and especially our commissioning editor Margaret Bartley.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Janet Clare is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Co-­ director of the Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Hull. She is the author of Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (second edition, 1999), Drama of the English Republic, 1649–1660 (2002) and Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance (2006). She has published many articles on Renaissance and early modern literature and drama and co-­edited the Journal of Early Modern Studies 2, ‘Shakespeare and Early Modern Popular Culture’. Her most recent book is Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre (2014). Katherine M. Graham is a Lecturer in English Literature (Theatre) at the University of Westminster, where she is also co-­director of the Queer London Research Forum. She is co-­ editor of Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London (Bloomsbury, 2016), in which she has a chapter on queer temporalities, and is currently working on a monograph, Queer Revenge, which explores the link between queerness and vengeance in early modern drama. She also has forthcoming work on the strangeness of revenge and the revenger in The Revenger’s Tragedy and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy. Katherine Gillen is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. She has published essays in several venues, including Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900, Shakespeare Studies and Cahiers Élisabéthains. Her book Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity, and the

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Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. Heather Hirschfeld is Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (2014), Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (2004), and articles in such journals as Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, RES and PMLA. Erin E. Kelly is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada). Her publications include essays and articles on a range of early modern plays, such as Nathaniel Woodes’s Conflict of Conscience, the anonymous Sir Thomas More and Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam. She is currently working on a monograph about representations of religious conversion in sixteenth-­century drama and preparing a new edition of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew for the Internet Shakespeare Editions and Broadview Press. Since 2011, she has served as an associate editor for the journal Early Theatre. Karen Marsalek is Associate Professor of English at St. Olaf College, with a particular interest in the early modern afterlives of medieval theatrical practice. Her publications include articles on stagings of resurrections, Antichrist, and the divorce trial of Henry VIII. Her essay in this volume is part of a larger research project on remains and revenants in the King’s Men’s repertory. Ian McAdam is Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada). He is the author of The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe (1999) and Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama (2009). He is working on a project entitled ‘Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Secular Christ’.

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Gretchen E. Minton is Professor of English at Montana State University. She has co-­edited Timon of Athens (Arden, 2008), edited John Bale’s The Image of both Churches (2014) and Troilus and Cressida (2015), and is currently completing work on the Arden Early Modern Drama edition of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Her other publications, which focus on early modern drama, performance, and the English Reformation, have appeared in journals such as Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, Cahiers Élisabéthains, as well as in various essay collections. She is a frequent speaker at Shakespeare festivals and is the dramaturg for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks. Lucy Munro is a Reader in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (2005) and Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674 (2013), and the editor of Sharpham’s The Fleer, Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles, Brome’s The Queen and Concubine and The Demoiselle, Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed and Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton. Her essays have appeared in Huntington Library Quarterly, Modern Philology and other journals and edited collections. She is currently writing a book about Shakespeare and the King’s Men. Kevin A. Quarmby is Assistant Professor of English at The College of St Scholastica. Quarmby has published in journals including Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare and Shakespeare Bulletin. He is editing Henry VI, Part 1 for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and is Editor of the review journal Scene. His monograph, The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2012), was shortlisted for the Globe Theatre Book Award in 2014. Other work includes essays in Women Making Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Macbeth: The State of Play (Bloomsbury, 2014). Eric D. Vivier is Assistant Professor of English and Faculty Fellow of the Shackouls Honors College at Mississippi State

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University, where he teaches classes on British Literature, Shakespeare, and Great Books. He has published articles on satirical controversy in The Ben Jonson Journal and English Literary Renaissance and has written a review essay for the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. He is writing a book about early modern satire, paradox and religion. Linda Woodbridge is retired from Pennsylvania State University, where she was Distinguished Professor and Weiss Chair in the Humanities. She spent a year as a long-­term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. and in 2008–9 held a Guggenheim fellowship. She has published eight books on English Renaissance literature, on such subjects as women, magical thinking, homelessness, violence, revenge and money. She has chaired a university English department of seventy-­one professors and served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to Ann Thompson and Lena Orlin for their inspiration to include The Revenger’s Tragedy as part of the State of Play series and for their valuable feedback throughout this process. The SAA seminar in 2015 gave this project its genesis, so I am grateful to the organization and to all of the participants – especially to Suzanne Gossett, who served as a brilliant seminar respondent. Special thanks go to Linda Woodbridge and Janet Clare for their willingness to add their experienced voices to contemporary scholarship on Middleton’s play. All the contributors to this volume have been unfailingly generous with their ideas and their time; as a result of their hard work, it is a distinct pleasure to see these exciting essays together in one book. As always, I am extremely grateful to Margaret Bartley, an exemplary publisher who has an astounding ability to help bring projects like this to completion. Closer to home, my thanks go to Abigail Lake for her invaluable help with the references and proofreading, to Linda Karell for enduring research partnership, and to Kevin Brustuen and Luke Minton for their unconditional love and support. Gretchen E. Minton, Bozeman, 2017

PART ONE

Religion and Genre

1 Vindice and the Vice of Revenge: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Play Tradition Erin E. Kelly

There is a long critical tradition recognizing that The Revenger’s Tragedy shares features with medieval morality plays such as Mankind and The Castle of Perseverance. Identifications of Middleton’s play as like, if not necessarily an example of, morality drama date to L.G. Salingar’s 1938 essay ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Tradition’.1 Others relied upon this categorization to argue that the play offers a clear moral message about the inherently sinful nature of human society.2 These readings might now seem questionable since most critics who identified morality drama influences in The Revenger’s Tragedy attributed the play to Cyril Tourneur, striving to square its ethical positioning with the more explicitly Christian rejection of revenge found in Tourneur’s The Atheist’s

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Tragedy. Even so, The Revenger’s Tragedy indubitably resembles medieval morality plays by putting onstage allegorically named characters who seem simultaneously to be individuals capable of specific actions and embodiments of abstract concepts. Jonathan Dollimore notably threw out the possibility that The Revenger’s Tragedy could be a ‘ “late morality” where “the moral scheme is everything” ’ by pointing out all the ways in which it is parodic, subversive and outrageous, ultimately a ‘radical tragedy’ whose extreme violence and pervasive metatheatricality amount to ‘black camp’.3 Others have followed his lead, noting how The Revenger’s Tragedy differs from early morality plays.4 These arguments often imply that the morality is a ‘simpler and cruder ancestor’ of more realistic public theatre plays with psychologically developed characters. Morality plays might then be, at best, of historical importance, but even late examples have been described as lacking ‘dramatic cohesion’ and as showing a ‘tendency to rambling diffuseness’ that makes them bad plays.5 The debate about whether or not to label The Revenger’s Tragedy a morality play hinges on how one defines that genre. Participants in this discussion who have disagreed about how to categorize Middleton’s play too often share mistaken assumptions that morality drama is simple, pious and conservative. In fact, the morality play tradition comprises much more than a few medieval attempts to disseminate Christian teachings through performance. The following survey and analysis of the complex, constant evolution of morality drama across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries demonstrates not only that The Revenger’s Tragedy is a morality play, but also reveals how Middleton commented upon revenge tragedy conventions by reimagining them through the lens of an even older theatrical tradition.

Morality play foundations One challenge for anyone attempting to attach the label ‘morality’ to Middleton’s play is a lack of agreement about

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how to define the term. As Robert Potter notes, ‘The moralities are a tradition and not a rigid type’.6 What’s more, the term does not seem to have been commonly used for plays until well after the end of the Middle Ages, the period normally associated with such drama.7 If The Revenger’s Tragedy is a morality play, it will seem a shockingly late example to anyone who learned in school that morality plays died out when rejection of Catholic beliefs during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI made older plays seem heretical. Even some theatre historians assume no one wrote a morality play after the 1560s, when Elizabethan statutes prohibited plays from engaging with religious controversy. Early morality plays do not typically forward polemical arguments, but many encourage devotional practices that would have seemed problematic to religious reformers. Definitions of the morality usually look to the corpus of plays everyone seems to agree merit that label: The Castle of Perseverance, Everyman, Mankind, Wisdom, and the fragment Pride of Life. Pamela King admits that these texts are not like one another, are not necessarily medieval and may not even all be plays.8 Given that so few early plays survive from what must have been a thriving fourteenth- and fifteenth-­century performance culture, we might add that they could be unrepresentative examples.9 But they are a reasonable place to start. As King puts it, What these plays have in common most obviously is that they offer their audiences moral instruction through dramatic action that is broadly allegorical. Hence they are set in no time, or outside historical time, though their lack of historical specificity is generally exploited by strategically collapsing the eternal with the contemporary.10 Additionally, these morality plays share a theatrical style Potter describes as involving ‘acts of presentation rather than acts of illusion’; for example, the characters Mercy and Satan in Mankind have more lines in which they explain themselves

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directly to the audience than in which they talk to other characters. Morality plays usually begin with such declamatory moments in a prologue or opening speech that ‘Freely [acknowledges] the audience’s presence [and] . . . makes clear the argument of the play or sets the scene’.11 The allegorical names of characters seem the most obvious characteristic Middleton adopted from the morality play tradition. The anonymous play Wisdom (1460–70) begins with both Wisdom and Soul offering speeches in which they name themselves.12 The corruption of Soul involves vices perverting Mind, Understanding and Will. The character names in The Revenger’s Tragedy are less Anglicized but equally suggestive of abstract qualities. As Florio’s Italian dictionary for English speakers A worlde of words explains, Lussurioso means ‘lusty, lecherous’, Ambitioso ‘ambitious’, and Spurio ‘a bastard, one base born’ – and these characters manifest through their actions the qualities signalled by their names. Conversely, Castiza, whose name means chastity, and Gratiana, whose name is associated with grace, play out their parts as one would expect – Castiza is steadfast in protecting her virginity while Gratiana offers a problematic kind of social grace when she yields to Lussurioso’s suit before receiving true grace in the form of her own repentance and her sons’ forgiveness. Vindice’s true name fittingly indicates that he is ‘a reuenger of wrongs, a redresser of things, and abuses, a defender, one that restoreth and setteth a libertie or out of danger, a punisher of things done amisse’, while his alias Piato signals humiliation and hypocrisy since the word means both ‘a plea, a suite in law, a controuersie, a processe, a pleading’ and ‘flat, squat, cowred downe, hidden, close to the ground, euen, leuell, iust, razed with the ground’.13 These names would be more apparent to a reader of the play with a dramatis personae list on hand than to someone in the audience for a performance. In a production, we learn that the dead woman whose skull has been turned into a murder weapon was named Gloriana only when the Duke is in his final throes (3.5.150), thus implying that this figure represents a powerful achievement of ‘glory’ by poisoning the man who poisoned her.

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Moments later, the play’s main character reveals his name by shouting to the Duke, ‘ ’Tis I, ’tis Vindice, ’tis I’ (5.3.167). Name, character and action intertwine as the figure on stage most clearly identifies himself as Vindice when he is in the midst of carrying out revenge. (Only retrospectively for an audience member, or retroactively for a reader flipping pages, does it become apparent that when Vindice in his opening monologue speaks of ‘Vengeance’ (1.1.39) and notes we must ‘give Revenge her due’ (1.1.43) he might be talking about himself.) The play text deploys character names and descriptions in such a way that it is sometimes difficult to determine which is which. The first line, ‘Duke, royal lecher, go, grey-­haired adultery’ (1.1.1), describes the character, but it also suggests his name might be Adultery, and his misdeeds both before and during the play merit that designation.14 Hippolito and Vindice talk about the Duchess, who has helped Hippolito find a place at court, so shortly after they share quips about ‘that bald madam, Opportunity’ (1.1.55) that it seems fitting to think of her as such, especially when she takes the opportunity to revenge herself against the Duke by seducing Spurio. As does any morality play full of allegorically named characters, The Revenger’s Tragedy blurs the agency underpinning action. Just as Avaritia in The Castle of Perseverance must greedily seek power over human souls and tempt mankind to covetousness, Vindice can be nothing other than a revenger, do nothing other than seek revenge. The play’s names slip so easily from being labels for stage figures to character descriptions to abstract qualities in part because of the play’s abstracted setting. The Revenger’s Tragedy takes place in Italy, so the play seems more rooted in the world than Castle of Perseverance (1382–1425), which stages its action around a castle set in the middle of scaffolds representing Flesh, World, Belial and Avarice. But Middleton’s Italy is more symbolic and less specific than Hamlet’s Elsinore or even Hieronimo’s Spain. A judge’s comment that the virtue of Lord Antonio’s wife attracted admiration ‘Over all Italy’ (1.2.57) doesn’t make explicit that the Duke governs a city-­state in Italy,

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much less which one. Time seems similarly indistinct – as the Duke dies, Vindice gloats, ‘nine years’ vengeance crowd into a minute’ (3.5.122), but this phrasing does not necessarily mean Gloriana has been dead for exactly nine years. Nor does it clarify questions about how long Vindice’s father has been deceased, how many weeks (or months?) Lussurioso has spent trying to seduce Castiza, or how much time passes between the suicide of Lord Antonio’s wife and his ascension to the dukedom. The out-­of-time and out-­of-place quality of the play as much as the allegorical character names compel an audience to look for symbolic resonances and abstract ideas, if not necessarily clear morals, rather than a realistic representation of individualized people and specific events. Everyman (c. 1519) achieves similar effects by expanding the moment between an individual’s encounter with death and his actual demise into a thousand-­ line exploration of how the soul might be saved, while Castle of Perseverance condenses human life and afterlife into about four thousand lines. As Middleton’s play bends time and blurs place, it suggests the sins of the Duke and his family represent eternally problematic types of human corruption rather than the specific foibles of one court. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus begs to be encountered as a morality play.15 Vindice’s opening speech through its presentational style is very much in the tradition of morality play prologues, signalling to the audience that they are about to watch a play, suggesting what type of play it is and demanding an interpretive stance. As the immoral characters of the court make their way across the stage, Vindice calls them ‘Four exc’llent characters’ (1.1.5). His exposition of prior events that motivate his revenge, particularly the death of his fiancée, is framed as a condemnation of the vices of the present day. And the entire speech ends with a memento mori message: For banquets, ease, and laughter Can make great men, as greatness goes by clay, But wise men little are more great than they. (1.1.47–9)

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This message plays out as those who think themselves at the height of their powers experience sudden downfalls – the Duke about to seduce a country maiden, Junior about to be pardoned for committing rape, Lussurioso at his coronation, and even Vindice assuming his acts of revenge will be celebrated all come to be ‘As bare as this’ (1.1.47) skull that appeared in the play’s first moments. The Revenger’s Tragedy might not offer a moral in the form of a lesson about Christian doctrine, but it seems a descendant of plays like Everyman or Castle of Perseverance when it reminds its audience that all human beings will die and exposes success in the earthly realm as vanity. This invocation of the morality tradition is no accident; morality plays impacted Middleton’s works throughout his career.16 The Black Book (printed 1604) introduces itself as ‘A Moral’ and begins with a stage direction that would not be out of keeping in medieval drama, ‘Lucifer, ascending as a Prologue to his own play’.17 Similarly, one of Middleton’s earliest works, The Ghost of Lucrece (c. 1597–1601), includes both a ‘Prologue’ and an ‘Epilogue’ surrounding a long monologue in which the title figure ponders whether her soul can ever be redeemed from hell, despite her lack of chastity and continuing desire for revenge against her rapist.18 The final play of Middleton’s career, A Game at Chess (1624), is a battle between good and evil represented through encounters between virtuous, white, English Protestant chess pieces and duplicitous, black, continental Catholic pieces. Their conflicts occur at the level of the social and political rather than within one individual’s conscience; nonetheless, the rescue of the White Queen’s Pawn from physical and spiritual debasement by lusty Catholics offers the play’s audience an everywoman story.

Morality plays across the sixteenth century – and beyond But how can we explain Middleton’s late-­sixteenth- and early seventeenth-­century fascination with the conventions of

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morality plays? Would his engagement with the morality play tradition have seemed academic (a form of proto-­medievalism) or nostalgic (hearkening back to outdated theatrical tropes)? To understand Middleton’s work, especially The Revenger’s Tragedy, we need to examine drama across the entire early modern period. Although morality plays originated in the Middle Ages, the majority of English drama featuring allegorical characters in unspecified locations and relying upon a presentational style to offer an audience a moral message dates to the sixteenth century. By the first decades of Elizabeth’s reign, many morality plays were not obviously Christian or even moral; to call The Revenger’s Tragedy a morality play, therefore, puts it in like company. King estimates ‘seventy or so surviving interludes written between the period of the medieval saints’ plays, scriptural plays, and morality plays and the construction of the first Elizabethan theatres’ have much in common with medieval morality plays.19 Plays ranging from John Skelton’s Magnificence, usually dated between 1520 and 1522, to Nathaniel Woodes’s Conflict of Conscience, likely composed shortly before 1581, rely on allegorical characters and feature conflicts between virtue and vice characters to represent the struggle for an individual’s soul. Some later plays make only minor changes to the conventions found in medieval drama. For example, John Bale adapted the morality play to disseminate Protestant doctrine in plays like Three Laws (1538) by staging vices in the guise of hypocritical Catholic clerics. Some of these morality plays were performed at court, but a significant number appeared in school and university settings for educational as well as entertainment purposes, and quite a few have been associated with public performances by travelling companies. As one would expect of any long-­lived theatrical tradition, morality plays did not remain static across decades. Earlier morality plays often focus around a central humanus genus character who stands in for all people. (That said, even the plays with titles linked with this trope seem less universal when analysed carefully – Everyman is a particular type of man, a

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merchant, and Mankind is a farmer.) More individualized central characters receive attention in later plays. For example, a subset of allegorical drama, including Youth (1513–14), Wit and Science (1539), Lusty Juventus (1547–53) and The Disobedient Child (1559–70), considers the spiritual and moral wellbeing of school-­aged young men. A number of these plays move away from offering the explicitly Christian messages – instead, large-­scale, court-­associated plays like the Marian Respublica (1553) and the Scottish Satire of the Three Estates (first performed 1540 and revised 1552 and 1554) present lessons about good governance while small-­cast plays for public presentation like The Trial of Treasure (1567) and The Tide Tarrieth No Man (1576) focus on how to manage worldly wealth. Later morality plays often turn their attention to practical problems resulting from sin, representing social problems as allegorical vices in satirical – and highly entertaining – ways. The militantly Protestant New Custom (1550–73) makes Ignorance an old and foolish Catholic priest. In The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (1559–68), Ignorance is a fun-­loving friend who has a bad influence on Moros, while Discipline is a morally upright but unexciting schoolmaster. The Play of Wit and Science (1539) has Idleness dress the fallen Wit in the ridiculous clothing of her son Ignorance. While there were presumably recognizable conventions associated with the staging of some allegorical figures, the fact that a quality like ignorance could be manifested in so many different ways suggests later morality plays’ interest in selectively skewering particular forms of corruption. The Revenger’s Tragedy might be seen as an extension of this tradition as it shows Vindice engaging with and punishing characters who outrageously act out their lust and ambition. Some later morality plays have something else in common with The Revenger’s Tragedy: final scenes in which a central character does not achieve a happy ending (in the form of earthly happiness or spiritual salvation). Enough is as Good as a Feast (1559–70) concludes with Worldly Man struck down

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by God’s Plague before being carried off to hell by Satan. The Disobedient Child (1559–70) states in its prologue that the audience will learn the dangers of parents being too lenient with their children, but the play also shows the young man refusing to follow his father’s wise guidance; the question of whether father or the son is more at fault seems no easier to answer after the Devil appears onstage to claim responsibility for the son’s petulance, so the moral one should derive from this morality is unclear. Like Will to Like is dominated by the vice Newfangle, who receives orders from Lucifer to help corrupt mankind by helping people find companions who share their sinful inclinations. Thus, drunkards and criminals wind up being paired off, and they all come to a bad end. Teleological narratives that describe the rise of Renaissance drama as a secularizing adaptation of medieval religious drama have been around as long as scholars have undertaken serious study of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries; a story of religious morality plays evolving into more socially concerned drama that eventually turns into more realistic public theatre tragedies and comedies fits well with this narrative.20 As it attempts to explain key structural features of early modern plays, David Bevington’s seminal Mankind to Marlowe implies that Renaissance drama became more sophisticated as it progressively evolved out of and moved away from morality plays.21 Discussions of morality play conventions often rest on this hypothesis, assuming that playwrights stopped staging allegorical figures that represented virtues or vices, that only transitional plays presented a Vice figure, and that plays performed at the time of Middleton peopled the stage with a very different type of individualized, psychologically developed characters.22 References to morality plays in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-­century plays appear to reinforce these suppositions. When Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592; first printed 1597) describes himself as being ‘Like the formal Vice, Iniquity’ (3.1.81),23 he can be seen as both accurately evaluating his own character and linking himself to a medieval past

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associated with plays of Richard’s times rather than with those being performed at the Globe. Sir Thomas More (c. 1590– 1600) establishes the historicity of the events it stages by having its title character stage for his household guests an old-­ fashioned morality play identified as The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom (Scene 9).24 Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass (c. 1616) opens with the minor demon, Pug, asking Satan for a ‘brave’ Vice like Iniquity before being chided for thinking he will be helped by such an old-­fashioned type of character; in the seventeenth century, the devil explains, vices are ‘stranger and newer: and changed every hour’ (1.1.102)25 to the point where human depravity outstrips anything found in hell. But this is very thin evidence on which to base our understanding of theatre history; rather than identifying morality plays per se as outmoded, all of these references could just as well imply that the morality play elements of these later works self-­ consciously differ from, but are also in conversation with, earlier drama.26 As Alan Dessen once proposed, ‘one could argue that the period between 1558 and 1590 represents the golden age of the morality play’;27 however, a survey of plays performed from the 1590s to the closing of the theatres in 1642 reveals that while the morality play was no longer a dominant form, highly allegorical drama was hardly moribund. Robert Wilson’s plays about the fall and redemption of Lady Conscience, Lady Love and Lady Lucre, The Three Ladies of London and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, were both printed and probably performed in the 1590s. The Contention Between Liberality and Prodigality was printed in 1602 after being performed at court in the previous year; its many scenes of different types of characters appealing to Fortune for her son Money sent a clear message to the queen about the importance of rewarding virtuous service. Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon responded to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot by pitting its title character against a perfectly virtuous and virginal fairy queen, Titania; just in case anyone failed to understand the allegory, the printed text of this play

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(1607) features a dramatis personae list and marginal glosses that clearly identify what key characters represent. These and too many other plays to mention continued the morality play tradition on commercial stages. But allegorical, moralizing drama was even more common in Jacobean and Caroline court settings in the form of the court masque. Furthermore, universities regularly staged allegorical drama, and such plays must have seemed appropriate for a sophisticated, educated audience as well as of interest to London readers, based on the evidence of Thomas Tomkins’s Lingua (which was reprinted numerous times after it first appeared in 1607), Barten Holiday’s Technogamia, or The Marriage of the Arts, and the anonymous Pathomachia, or The Battle of Affections (the latter two being printed in 1630 but probably performed at Oxford around 1618). Perhaps allegorical public theatre plays of the seventeenth century do not look back to an older tradition so much as they attempt to replicate elite, contemporary refinements of a long-­established type of performance. Then again, it is possible that playwrights for commercial theatres were simply offering their audiences plays reliant upon familiar conventions; after all, Londoners could witness lavish allegorical performances once a year in the form of Lord Mayor’s shows, not to mention the occasional coronation procession or other state event. Taking this wide range of performances into account, we can assume that when Middleton presented The Revenger’s Tragedy, audiences would have recognized its morality play conventions as such.

Revenge as vice Our question should therefore be not whether The Revenger’s Tragedy is a morality play, but what effects might be generated by a revenge tragedy that is also a morality play. By blending these two types of drama, Middleton calls attention to the generic conventions of both even as he holds his audience in suspense about which will predominate.28 Middleton’s Vindice

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is certainly a revenger, and by 1606 audiences would know from their long experience with plays like Thomas Kyd’s wildly popular Spanish Tragedy (first performed 1587 and first printed in 1592) and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1592) and Hamlet (c. 1600–1) that the conclusion of a revenge tragedy usually featured the revenger’s death, often at his own hand. But Vindice is also a vice figure, a character type closely related to the allegorical vices in early morality plays. By the late sixteenth century, vice figures seem to have been the main attraction of morality plays, usually speaking the most lines. Like other vice figures, Vindice is highly theatrical, entertaining and morally ambiguous; he speaks directly to the audience, encourages bad behaviour by others, stage manages mischief and gleefully gloats over the suffering of others. Peter Happé’s catalogue of vice figures gives more than thirty examples dating to between 1547 and 1579, the period he considers the height of this character’s popularity, as well as more than fifty later iterations in plays up to 1621.29 Just one example can clarify what audiences would expect from the vice. Thomas Preston’s Cambises (c. 1560–70) has its vice Ambidexter enter the play announcing that since King Cambises has gone into battle, temporarily leaving his realm in the hands of Sisamnes, he will ‘give [. . .] a leap to Sisamnes the judge / I dare avouch you shall his destruction see’ (2.30–1).30 Shortly thereafter, Ambidexter meets with the king’s deputy to declare him ‘unwise’ (3.19) if he does not take his official position as an opportunity to take bribes. After the king discovers Sisamnes’s corruption and has the judge flayed, Ambidexter playfully queries the audience, ‘How like you Sisamnes for using of me?’ (6.4). The vice leads others to act immorally and then takes pleasure in their downfall. Rather than being outrageously innovative, Vindice carries on the tradition of the vice figure whenever he tempts audiences to laugh uncomfortably with his jesting over a corpse. As the play bearing his name continues, Cambises becomes a bloody tyrant who shoots a child through the heart with an

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arrow; has his brother murdered; and forces his cousin into an incestuous marriage. Ambidexter responds to events like the execution of the queen by momentarily feigning sorrow before resuming his typical irreverence: ‘Ah, ah, ah, ah! I cannot choose but weep for the Queen. / Nothing but mourning now at the court there is seen. / Oh, oh, my heart, my heart! Oh, my bum will break’ (10.189–91). Then, at the end of the play, Ambidexter simply takes his leave of the audience. The king has died in front of him after an accident getting onto his horse, inspiring Ambidexter to comment: Alas, good King! Alas, he is gone! The devil take me if for him I make any moan. I did prognosticate of his end, by the Mass. Like as I did say, so is it come to pass. I will be gone. If I should be found here, That I should kill him it would appear. For fear with his death they do me charge, Farewell, my masters, I will go take barge. (10.233–40) Even though he has stirred up and cheered on sin over the course of the play, Ambidexter walks offstage without punishment. In this way, he is a typical vice figure – these characters might be chided or exiled, but morality plays conventionally leave their vice figures alive. As a revenger, Vindice would be expected to die, most likely by suicide, at the end of The Revenger’s Tragedy, but as a vice figure, he would surely live on, perhaps after promising to carry out more revenge in the future. The final scene of The Revenger’s Tragedy combines both conventions. Vindice will die, one presumes, after Antonio commands, ‘Lay hands upon these villains’ and orders his guard to ‘Bear ’em to speedy execution’ (5.3.99, 101). And yet as he leaves the stage, Vindice once again displays the swaggering wit of a vice figure even as he figures himself as the victim of his own scheming:

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Now I remember too, here was Piato Brought forth a knavish sentence once: ‘No doubt’, said he, ‘but time Will make the murderer bring forth himself’. ’Tis well he died; he was a witch. (5.3.114–18) With this complex ending, Middleton satisfies neither those expecting Vindice to make his end atop a pile of bloody bodies nor those who think he might walk away from his many murders scot-­free. Vindice is a murderer who, in a seeming expression of the world’s slant towards virtue, exposes his own crimes and is sentenced to an appropriate punishment. Yet Revenge is an abstract human impulse that cannot be completely eradicated, so it makes sense that Vindice, the embodiment of this vice, appears for the last time in the play making lively and dangerous jokes rather than as a static and safely dead body. Indeed, by sending this revenger offstage for officially sanctioned state execution, The Revenger’s Tragedy reimagines and interrogates revenge. It is no longer a form of wild justice as in so many revenge tragedies. Revenge is instead reduced to the status of a crime that can be punished by destroying the individuals who carry it out. Even so, the immorality of revenge, particularly revenge that amounts to what Antonio labels ‘treason’ (5.3.128) because it seeks the life of a corrupt ruler, seems impossible either to exile from or accommodate within a well-­ordered state. Rather than eliminating the vice by condemning Vindice, Antonio finds himself carrying out a kind of revenge against the man who murdered his predecessor – a seemingly necessary action that makes The Revenger’s Tragedy’s ending very different from that of, say, Hamlet. Is Antonio’s revenge the same as or different from that of Vindice? The play offers no clear answer to this question. Instead, Middleton’s conclusion forces a confrontation with revenge upon a ruler who wishes to be virtuous and then refuses to

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make clear to the play’s audience exactly what would be the right thing for him to do. The Revenger’s Tragedy was not the first morality to wrestle with questions of when and whether revenge could be justified. John Pickering’s A New Enterlude of Vice Conteyninge, the Historye of Horestes with the cruell reuengment of his Fathers death, vpon his one naturall Mother first appeared in print in 1567, and we assume it was written and performed relatively close to this date.31 The play is most commonly discussed under the short title Horestes, but its title page gives first billing to the ‘Vice’, who introduces himself with false names including Patience and Courage but whose true identity is Revenge.32 Through key characters’ interactions with Vice and their ability to receive his advice critically rather than unthinkingly, the play offers a complex message about revenge. In his first appearance onstage, Horestes explains that his mother Clytemnestra and her new husband Egistus murdered his father Agamemnon, thus giving him good cause to act, and Revenge urges him to punish them both (A4v). The Vice even passes himself off under the pseudonym ‘Courage’ as a messenger sent from the gods to tell Horestes that revenge must be carried out in this case (B1r). And yet Horestes still seeks additional advice and approval before acting, kneeling before his surrogate father Idumeus for approval and then waiting for Idumeus to get a formal statement from Councell (seemingly an allegory of a monarch’s advisory council) that revenging his father’s death would be a moral and legal act (B1v–B2). After being defeated in battle, Clytemnestra and Egistus do not die at Horestes’s hand but rather face judicial execution as a result of his orders – Egistus by hanging and Clytemnestra by beheading (D2r–D2v). Such a cautious approach to revenge, the play suggests, is the only way that a cycle of perpetual violence can be prevented. When Horestes is later approached by Clytemnestra’s brother Nestor, this well-­established prudence dissuades the uncle from his initial impulse to seek revenge and instead leads him to offer Horestes the hand of his daughter Hermione in

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marriage. Because Horestes avoids bloodthirsty revenge – instead seeking retribution only so far as the laws of the gods, man and morality allow – the play ends not with a bloodbath but instead with the vice Revenge forced to beg for subsistence from the audience’s hot-­headed women before he is displaced onstage by Duty and Truth’s celebratory speeches. The ultimate message of Horestes seems to be that within the confines of an orderly, lawful, moral society the impulse to revenge when one has been wronged can be contained and safely redirected even as justice is served.33 Subsequent to Pickering’s play, revenge tragedies raised the stakes for revengers, putting individual characters in situations where no such justice seemed, or likely would be, available. How can Hieronimo find justice when those guilty of murdering his son are the royal heirs of Spain and Portugal? How can Hamlet get advice and approval from the king’s council if the murderer he wishes to punish is the king? Even though these characters die after they have killed the enemies who motivated their revenge, death seems for them either an end to earthly suffering or perhaps a tragic outcome for an individual more sinned against than sinning. Coming at the other end of the revenge tragedy tradition than Horestes, The Revenger’s Tragedy raises similar questions about the morality of revenge, but it comes to different conclusions. The vice in Horestes is Revenge, and he is unscathed at the end of the play (although he is rejected by the principal characters). Middleton’s play cannot tolerate the continued existence of Vindice, perhaps because so many other plays have made revenge seem justified or attractive.

Conclusion Does the recognition that The Revenger’s Tragedy is a morality play mean that Middleton was self-­consciously thinking of specific morality plays, perhaps even Horestes, as he wrote? Not necessarily: instead, what Revenger’s Tragedy offers is a case study of how literary conventions develop, not as part

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of neat evolutionary narratives in which drama pushes towards ever-­increasing sophistication or realism, but rather as intersecting and mutually influential traditions. As is clear from the case of Horestes, the morality play tradition is one thread that leads to the revenge tragedy even as morality plays continued to be staged and developed separately from revenge tragedies.34 It thus shouldn’t seem odd when a revenge tragedy deploys the conventions of the morality play for new purposes – an over-­determined relationship between these two early modern genres makes a blending of them richly suggestive. We live in a similar web of traditions and genres. The popularity of film and television westerns led Gene Roddenberry to create a western in space he called Star Trek.35 Star Trek, in turn, generated a host of science fiction television and film programs. When a later science fiction film hearkens back to the western – for example in the Star Wars: A New Hope Mos Eisley Cantina scene that replicates the atmosphere of a Hollywood wild-­west saloon – it suggests to a knowing audience how familiar texts come into conversation with and comment upon one another. Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy is able to offer such a complex, morally ambiguous, metatheatical response to the revenge tragedy tradition because of, not in spite of, the fact that it is a morality play.

Notes 1 L.G. Salingar’s ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Tradition’ first appeared in Scrutiny in 1938; rpt. in Elizabethan Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. R.J. Kaufmann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 208–44. 2 See John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) and Robert Ornstein, ‘The Ethical Design of The Revenger’s Tragedy’, ELH 21.2 (1954): 81–93. 3 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 139.

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4 For example, the blending of revenge tragedy with metatheatrical commentary inspires invention of the label ‘crisis literature’ rather than invocation of the term ‘morality play’ in Brian Jay Corrigan’s ‘Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and Crisis Literature’, SEL 38.2 (1998): 281–95. Similarly, fascinating explorations of the play’s misogynistic moments overlook the play’s own attempts to offer generalized social commentary through allegory; see Jennifer Panek, ‘The Mother as Bawd in Revenger’s Tragedy and A Mad World My Masters’, SEL 43.2 (2003): 415–37 and Kathryn Finan, ‘Re-­membering Gloriana: “Wild Justice” and the Female Body in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Renaissance Forum 6.2 (2003): 34 par. 5 Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 245, 242. A similar attitude can be found in Steven Mullaney’s article ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the final Progress of Elizabeth I’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45.2 (1994): 139–62; Mullaney assumes that morality plays are characterized by unsophisticated ‘abstract personification of states-­of-being’ (144), so he implies that compelling characters like Vindice in Revenger’s Tragedy mean Middleton’s work cannot be a morality play. 6 Robert Potter, The English Morality Play: Origins, History, and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1975), 199. 7 See Alan Dessen, ‘The Morall as an Elizabethan Dramatic Kind: An Exploratory Essay’, Comparative Drama 5.2 (1971): 138–59, esp. 138–49. 8 Pamela King, ‘Morality plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd ed., eds Richard Beadle and Alan Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 235–62. 9 For a sense of how many plays must once have existed, see Peter Holland, ‘Theatre without Drama: Reading REED’, in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, eds Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 43–67. 10 King, ‘Morality Plays’, 235. 11 Potter, The English Morality Play, 32.

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12 Approximate dates for the composition and performance of early English plays noted parenthetically derive from Darryll Grantley’s English Dramatic Interludes, 1300–1580 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13 All quotations here are from John Florio, A worlde of wordes, or Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598; STC 11098). 14 This naming dynamic came to my attention through Celia Daileader, ‘Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare, and the Masculine Grotesque’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, eds Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 457. 15 For a discussion of time in the morality play, see Potter, The English Morality Play, 32. 16 Dessen would add The Phoenix (c. 1603; first printed 1607) to this list; see ‘Middleton’s The Phoenix and the Allegorical Tradition’, SEL 6.2 (1996): 291–308. See also Douglas Bruster, ‘Middleton’s Imagination’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, 526 for a discussion of allegory as a characteristic element of Middleton’s literary imagination. 17 Thomas Middleton, The Black Book, ed. G.B. Shand, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 204–18; l. 37, l. 38. 18 Thomas Middleton, The Ghost of Lucrece, ed. G.B. Shand, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1985–98. 19 King, ‘Morality Plays’, 262. 20 Such narratives derive largely from E.K. Chambers’s The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903) and The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), and Chambers in turn relies upon terminology (e.g. ‘morality play’) that originates with Robert Dodsley’s 1744 anthology A Select Collection of Old Plays; see Emma Maggie Solberg, ‘A History of “The Mysteries” ’, Early Theatre 19.1 (2016). Although not often stated explicitly, the assumption that earlier Tudor drama is allegorical, religious and crude, while later Renaissance drama is sophisticated, secular, and focuses on

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individualized characters still pervades much critical work on early modern English drama. 21 David Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe: The Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 22 Alan Dessen has consistently resisted these assumptions by identifying persistent morality play conventions in plays well into the seventeenth century; for example, see ‘Allegorical Action and Elizabethan Staging’, SEL 55.2 (2015): 391–402. 23 William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). 24 For readings of these references as self-­conscious antiquarianism, see Lucy Munro, ‘Archaism, the “Middle Age” and the Morality Play in Shakespearean Drama’, Shakespeare 8.4 (2012): 356–67. 25 Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass (1616, modern edition), in The Cambridge Editions of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, ed. Anthony Parr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 26 Potter suggests as much when he points out morality play elements in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, describing numerous Shakespearean examples and discussing at some length Doctor Faustus, 1 Henry IV and Volpone (The English Morality Play, 123–70). See also Alan Dessen, Jonson’s Moral Comedy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 27 Dessen, Jonson’s Moral Comedy, 10. Dessen’s chapter ‘The Dramatic Legacy of the Elizabethan Morality’ offers a helpful overview (8–36). 28 Paul Budra argues that by allegorizing and exaggerating typical elements of the revenge tragedy, Middleton makes his The Revenger’s Tragedy parodic, shocking and fun. While I think the play engages seriously with questions about the morality of revenge, I would not disagree with Budra’s reading; see ‘The Emotions of Tragedy: Middleton or Shakespeare’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, 494–5. 29 Peter Happé, ‘The Vice: A Checklist and an Annotated Bibliography’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 22 (1979): 17–35; Vindice appears in this list as a late example. See also Happé, ‘The Vice and the Popular Theatre, 1547–80’, in

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Poetry and Drama, 1570–1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks, eds Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond (London: Methuen, 1981), 13–31. 30 Parenthetical citations reference Thomas Preston’s Cambyses: King of Persia, in Drama of the English Renaissance I: The Tudor Period, eds Russel A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 61–80. 31 Parenthetical citations reference signature numbers in John Pikering, A newe enterlude of vice conteyninge, the historye of Horestes with the cruell reuengment of his fathers death, vpon his one naturill mother (London, 1567; STC 19917), EEBO. 32 For a discussion of the importance of Revenge in this play, see Howard Norland, ‘The Allegorizing of Revenge in Horestes’, in Tudor Theatre: Allegory in the Theatre (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 169–85. 33 This careful treatment of revenge so as to justify the execution of a queen who has murdered her husband may be the playwright’s attempt to show the Elizabethan government how to handle Mary, Queen of Scots. This reading is presented in Robert Knapp, ‘The Uses of Revenge’, ELH 40.2 (1973): 205–20. 34 For a discussion of morality plays (including Horestes) that can be seen as influencing revenge tragedy, see Ronald Broude, ‘Vindicta Filia Temporis: Three English Forerunners of the Elizabethan Revenge Play’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 72.4 (1973), 489–502. 35 ‘A First Showing for “Star Trek” Pilot’, The New York Times, 22 July 1986.

2 Pleading For and Against the Devil: Satirical Ethics and Efficacy in The Revenger’s Tragedy Eric D. Vivier

The Revenger’s Tragedy is a strange revenge tragedy. Nearly all of its modern readers have noted ways that it either fails to adhere to or actively disrupts conventions of the genre that had been well-­established by 1606. Its revenger-­hero, Vindice, is surprisingly untroubled by the ethics of revenge and embraces his role with an unsettling exuberance; the unnamed Italian court in which he moves is filled with openly corrupt characters who act like – and indeed are named as though they are – allegorical representations of the seven deadly sins; and the central act of revenge, accomplished in outrageously violent fashion, occurs in the third act. The desire for vengeance is

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ubiquitous, aimless and ridiculous: nearly every character in the play issues a call for vengeance, and the Second Lord’s suggestion that ‘Our wrongs are such, / We cannot justly be revenged too much’ (5.2.8–9) is patently absurd. Indeed, the humour of the play – its verbal jokes, its comic misunderstandings, its bawdy double entendres – as well as its interest in wit and tricks make the play seem as much like a city comedy as a revenge tragedy. So too does The Revenger’s Tragedy seem preoccupied by satire. Vindice keeps turning away from – or even forgetting – his ‘tragic business’ (3.5.99), both to test the chastity of his mother and sister, and to remark, in extended satirical fashion, upon the general corruption of the world both onstage and off. At times, in fact, it seems like there’s more satire in the play than revenge. Other revengers had been satirists – as Alvin Kernan points out, the revenger and the satirist share similar melancholic dispositions, occupy similarly impossible positions in a morally sick world, and employ similar weapons1 – but Vindice seems more like a satirist who also happens to be a revenger. I would like to suggest, in fact, that revenge tragedy provided Middleton with a vehicle for his demonstrable interest in satirical experimentation. In one sense, The Revenger’s Tragedy is an allegorical fantasy of an Elizabethan satyr-­satirist: Vindice literalizes the metaphorical weapons of the satirist and purges the unnamed Italian court by destroying the embodiments of its Lust, Ambition and Pride. But the play itself is also satirical in its attack upon the lechery of contemporary London. Moreover, the play is self-­reflexive about satire. The Revenger’s Tragedy explores several paradoxes about the ethics and efficacy of early modern satire, paradoxes of which most early modern satirists – perhaps none more than Middleton – were keenly aware: first, the satirist who denounces sin reveals his own fascination with that sin, reveals his own extensive (and therefore problematic) knowledge of that sin, and ultimately associates himself with it; and second, by drawing attention to concealed sin, the satirist may do as much to instruct his audience in that sin as

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he does to dissuade them from it. Middleton’s response to the ethical and rhetorical complicity of the satirist, I hope to show, is at once self-­damning and playful, at once troubled by the possibility of spiritual corruption and confident in its performance of providentialist conversion.

Middleton’s satirical experimentation Recent discussions of satire have tended to stress its humour and its willingness to speak truth to power, as though satire is a kind of comedy with a subversive political purpose.2 But early modern satire looked very different from twenty-­first century satire: its practitioners imitated classical models, drew upon medieval morality plays, and incorporated rhetorical and religious aspects of early modern sermons.3 Whether writing in verse, in prose, or for the stage, early modern satirists set out to defend Christian morals, the church, the social hierarchy and English customs against the threat posed by vice, unruly women, papists, puritans, upstarts, usurers and foreign fashions – targets that were threatening precisely because they were popular and because they could otherwise appear innocuous. Early modern satirists felt compelled to render vice in such a way that its viciousness could be seen for what it really was; they needed to make vice seem ugly, to ‘shewe it to the world’ in such a way ‘that all men may shunne it’.4 This was a rhetorical project, and satirists used the rhetorical tools of epideictic speech to accomplish it: they inflated their targets to grotesque, monstrous, disgusting, or disturbing proportions; they deflated their targets to absurd, laughable, or ridiculous proportions; and they associated their targets with objects or acts that their audiences found shameful.5 Thomas Middleton experimented with various satirical forms throughout his career, from poetry (Microcynicon: Six Snarling Satyres, 1599) to prose (The Black Book, 1604), from city comedy (A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 1613) to tragedy (The Changeling, 1622) to history (A Game at Chess, 1624). He

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self-­consciously imitated a wide range of satirical predecessors, trying on different styles even as he developed new combinations of his own. Microcynicon imitated John Marston’s The Scourge of Villainy (1598); Plato’s Cap (1604), a satirical mock-­almanac, borrowed liberally from Simon Smellknave’s Fearful and Lamentable Effects of Two Dangerous Comets (1591); Father Hubburd’s Tales (1604) deliberately echoed Edmund Spenser’s satirical beast fable, Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberd’s Tale (1591?); and The Black Book capitalized on Robert Greene’s promise to deliver a book of that title in The Black Booke’s Messenger (1592) even as it served as an explicit sequel to Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592). The range, extent and duration of his satirical experimentation ranks Middleton among the most innovative and important satirists of the early modern period. Most readers of The Revenger’s Tragedy have noticed its protagonist’s interest in and affinity for satire.6 The play opens with Vindice’s Juvenalian assault on the Duke and his court as they progress across the stage, and his most famous speech is notable not for his reflections upon revenge but for his satirical attack upon the hollow vanity of women’s fashion. Holding the naked skull of his dead beloved – who, he has already told us, was largely innocent of such vanity – he asks, Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours For thee? For thee does she undo herself? Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute? [. . .] Does every proud and self-­affecting dame Camphor her face for this? And grieve her maker In sinful baths of milk, when many an infant starves For her superfluous outside – all for this? (3.5.72–5, 84–7) Nearly every moment in the play offers a new opportunity for Vindice’s satirical castigation. Even Hippolito’s description of

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Vindice as a melancholy figure who ‘Keeps at home, full of want and discontent’ (4.1.47) fits that of the typical melancholy Elizabethan scholar-­satirist figure, like Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse, whose education and social expectations are at odds with his unemployment. But in fact, the play’s interest in and experimentation with satire is considerably more thorough than most critics have recognized. Vindice is neither simply nor straightforwardly a satirist and neither simply nor straightforwardly adopts a satirical disguise. There are moments, such as those quoted above, when he rails openly on vice in the manner of a satyr-­ satirist, but there are other moments when his comments reflect ironically upon vice, such as when, dressed as Piato, he insists to Lussurioso that he has known ‘strange lust’: ‘Any kin now next to the rim o’th’ sister / Is man’s meat in these days’ (1.3.57, 64–5). His remarks to his sister are similarly layered, serving on one hand as literal temptation, but on the other hand as ironic castigation of changing economic conditions: ‘It was the greatest blessing ever happened to women / When farmers’ sons agreed and met again / To wash their hands and come up gentlemen’ (2.1.212–14). This is notable both for its rapidly shifting form of attack and because it unsettles Kernan’s reading of Vindice as a satirist within the play. Vindice’s attention continually turns from the vice unfolding around him onstage to the vice unfolding around him offstage, from an unnamed Italian court to contemporary England. ‘If every trick were told that’s dealt by night’, he remarks cheekily to Hippolito, glancing at the audience, ‘There are few here that would not blush outright’ (2.2.145–6). The targets of his satire are consistently English, not Italian, and when he holds up Gloriana’s skull he looks through it to address the English women in the audience: ‘Here might a scornful and ambitious woman / Look through and through herself. See, ladies, with false forms / You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms’ (3.5.95–7). Middleton’s experimentation is even more evident in the strikingly original manner that the satirical voice wanders

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from character to character throughout the play. It may not be surprising that Vindice’s brother, Hippolito, occasionally offers a satirical remark, such as his suggestion that ‘’Tis common to be common through the world, / And there’s more private common shadowing vices / Than those who are known both by their names and prices’ (3.5.39–41). But the vicious characters themselves frequently provide satirical reflections as well, either in remarks that serve as justification for their own behaviour or in frank acknowledgement of their own viciousness. Lussurioso admits that he is ‘past [his] depth in lust’ (1.3.90) and recognizes, when Vindice does not, that the name ‘bawd’ ‘Is so in league with th’age nowadays / It does eclipse three quarters of a mother’ (1.5.56–8). Spurio apparently shares Middleton’s own view of puritan hypocrisy (2.3.57–9), and he sounds remarkably like Nashe when he imagines his own adulterous conception (1.2.176–84). The Duke, for his part, holds himself up for us as an example of the monstrosity of lust in an old man: ‘Age hot is like a monster to be seen; / My hairs are white and yet my sins are green’ (2.3.129–30). Even the idiotic Supervacuo and Ambitioso occasionally sound like satirists: ‘Most women have small waist the world throughout’, Ambitioso says, repulsed by his mother’s lustful relationship with Spurio, ‘But their desires are thousand miles about’ (4.3.15–16). The wandering satirical voice diffuses satirical authority throughout the play, unsettles any one character’s (e.g., Vindice’s) claim to sole satirical or moral authority and relocates that satirical and moral authority offstage – to Middleton himself. For despite The Revenger’s Tragedy’s dark humour and irreverence, its overt project is moral. This is clearly evident in the way its scurrility is frequently punctuated by very serious references to heaven, hell and the wages of sin. Spurio knows, for example, that ‘one incestuous kiss picks open hell’ (1.2.173), and when the Duchess coaxes him by suggesting that ‘there’s no pleasure sweet but it is sinful’, he laments that the ‘Best side to us is the worst side to heaven’ (3.5.205–7). The Duke knows that he has ‘great sins’ that will take ‘days, / Nay months [. . .]

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with penitential heaves / To lift ’em out and not to die unclear’ (2.3.9–13). Lussurioso, likewise, knows that ‘It is our blood to err, though hell gaped loud’ (1.3.74) and recognizes that he has sent Piato not only to tempt Castiza to sleep with him, but also to tempt her soul: ‘Hast thou beguiled her of salvation / And rubbed hell o’er with honey?’ (2.2.20–1). And although Vindice attacks the court in humorous terms, he also serves as a Christian moralist, our constant reminder that what is at stake is not our body but our soul. Dressed as Piato and recounting his knowledge of hidden ‘fulsome lust’ (1.3.58), he punctures the comfort sinful men take in daytime social anonymity by offering reassurance that is in fact rather distressing: ‘When they are up and dressed and their mask on, / Who can perceive this, save that eternal eye / That sees through flesh and all?’ (1.3.66–8). Vindice reminds us that the woman who paints her face ‘grieve[s] her maker’ (3.5.85), that some rich men would ‘rather be damned indeed than damned in colours’ (4.2.103–4) and that ‘there would be no damnation’ were it not for ‘gold and women’ (2.1.250). These and other remarks serve as constant reminders of the play’s underlying moral project. The play makes passing reference to a number of Middleton’s favourite targets – usurers, spendthrift heirs, upstart gentlemen, lawyers and so on – but by far and away its principal concern is lust. Some critics have detected a latent nostalgia for Elizabeth and a bitter reflection upon the lasciviousness and sumptuousness of the Jacobean court, ‘a classic expression of the so-­called Jacobean disillusionment’.7 This is certainly possible, but lechery had been a central preoccupation of the Elizabethan satyr-­satirists as well as in Middleton’s earlier satires; it seems more likely that The Revenger’s Tragedy continues this rather typical attack upon the lust that turns all men away from the ‘only God on high’ (4.4.14). Neither men nor women are free from lust in the play, but women are singled out because of the constant sexual temptation they pose to men: the dead Gloriana was so beautiful ‘That the uprightest man – if such there be / That sin but seven times a day – broke custom / And made up eight with looking after

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her’ (1.1.23–5); Junior Brother found himself ‘moved unto’ Lady Antonio by her beauty and by his ‘flesh and blood’ (1.2.47–8), despite the fact that she was ‘As cold in lust’ when she was alive ‘as she is now in death’ (1.4.35).8 The play works to expose lust wherever it manifests itself and to render it disgusting, grotesque and hateful. Lussurioso’s all-­consuming lust is no less repulsive than the Duchess’s incestuous desire for her own son-­in-law, which is itself no less awful than Junior Brother’s rape of Lady Antonio (and his continued desire for her after her suicide). As the figure of ‘grey-­haired adultery’ (1.1.1), the Duke’s youthful lust is both ridiculous and repugnant, and it is only fitting that his death should come through an act of necrophilia. Indeed, the real threat facing the court is not (or is not only) the injustice of a tyrannical ruler but ‘fulsome lust’ (1.3.65), whose elimination is more difficult and takes longer to accomplish than Vindice’s revenge upon the Duke. The fact that the Duke is only one of many embodiments of Lust at court – and that as a satirical scourge Vindice’s real task is to eliminate Lust in all its forms – helps to explain why the play is not over with Vindice’s act of revenge in Act 3. The play ends only after all the embodiments of lust have been killed and when the threat to Gratiana and Castiza has been cleared. Only then can Vindice declare confidently that he and Hippolito ‘have enough, i’faith: / We’re well, our mother turned, our sister true; / We die after a nest of dukes. Adieu’ (5.3.123–5). The Revenger’s Tragedy, in other words, is principally concerned with its satirical attack upon – and the allegorical elimination of – lust.

Pleading for and against the Devil Although early modern satirists largely claimed to be engaged in a deliberately moral enterprise, some contemporaries argued that satire did more harm than good. Francis Bacon, for example, objected to Martin Marprelate’s ‘immodest and deformed manner of writing [. . .] whereby matters of religion

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are handled in the style of the stage’.9 Gabriel Harvey likewise objected to the anti-Martinists who answered Martin in his own satirical vein: ‘If the world should applaude to such roisterdoisterly Vanity, [. . .] what good could grow out of it, but to make euery man madbrayned, and desperate; but a generall contempt of all good order, in Saying, or Dooing; but an Vniuersall Topsy-­turvy?’10 Duke Senior scolds Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It for asking permission to speak as a satirist, claiming that ‘chiding sin’ is itself a ‘Most mischievous foul sin’ (2.7.64).11 The world is already ‘sore with sinne’, John Weever declared in his fascinating Whipping of the Satyre (1601), yet instead of ‘balme’ the satirist ‘powres out blame thereon: / With filthie rancour still he vomits out / The poysoned malice of his spitefull thought’.12 Weever’s Whipping, in particular, explicitly acknowledges two important paradoxical aspects of early modern satire. First, the satirist who denounces sin reveals his own fascination with – and problematic knowledge of – that sin, often taking obvious pleasure in compiling long lists of very specific examples to denounce them. ‘[T]ouching examples of Venerie’, Weever tells the Epigrammatist (probably Everard Guilpin), ‘I thinke, you had gotten a whole Sampler-­full from Venus her selfe, so that you might well haue place and applause aboue all others for that faculty’. The very act of exposing and attacking sin in fact associates the satirist with that sin: ‘know, thou filthy sweepe-­chimney of sin’, Weever tells the Satyrist (probably Marston), ‘The soyle thereof defiles the soule within’. The satirist can never completely hold himself apart from the sin he castigates, can never keep his hands completely clean from the pitch he touches. By ‘defaming others’, Weever claims, the satirist is himself ‘defam’d’; by ‘blaming others’, the satirist ‘merits others blame’.13 Middleton had explored the complicity of the satirist in the sin he castigates in several earlier works. Whereas Ben Jonson carefully distinguished between his morally upright satirists and the envious roles they played in each of his three comical satires (1599–1601) – for which he was excoriated in Thomas

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Dekker’s Satiromastix (1601) – Middleton playfully drew explicit attention to the inevitable complicity of the satirist. In the fifth satire of Microcynicon, for example, the speaker realizes that in exposing ‘Sinful Pyander’ as an ingle and a fraud he is also exposing himself as a frequenter of brothels and a dupe; in the sixth satire, the railing satirist and the fool gradually become indistinguishable from one another.14 In The Black Book, Middleton takes this sense of satirical complicity a step further: the satirist who roams around the seedy underbelly of London exposing its viciousness to our view is Lucifer himself, who, as R.V. Holdsworth notes, is ‘inseparable from the evil he studies’.15 So, too, does Lucifer fulfil the request for patronage Pierce Penilesse had made in Nashe’s original Supplication, bequeathing his ‘tithe of all vaulting-­houses’ to the penurious author; as a result, the Devil becomes the patron of satirical prose and the satirist becomes the heir of the Devil. In the epilogue, finally, Middleton wryly acknowledges the contamination that comes with ventriloquizing the Devil and writing on his behalf with a darkly equivocal remark: ‘Do I deserve my dark and pitchy title? Stick I close enough to a villain’s ribs?’16 The satirist’s performance of villainy ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the villainy he exposes. Vindice’s similar complicity in the sin of the court in The Revenger’s Tragedy is widely recognized.17 Once he emerges from his nine-­year retirement from court to become ‘a man o’th’time’ (1.1.94), he is unable to hold himself apart from the corruption he condemns. This is apparent not only in his unhesitating willingness to commit murder and treason, but also in the way Middleton undercuts the significance of the revenger/satirist’s disguise. Vindice first disguises himself as Piato by dressing in his own clothes (he already owns ‘a habit that will fit it quaintly’ [1.1.102]), then, when Piato falls out of favour with Lussurioso, Vindice returns to the court ‘disguised’ as himself and commits the same crimes all over again. Vindice’s sinful complicity is also apparent in the verbal and visual echoes between Vindice/Hippolito and Ambitioso/Supervacuo – both of whom plot to kill Lussurioso, both of whom draw

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their weapons on their mothers, both of whom have a tendency to congratulate themselves for their own wit – which become more and more obvious until the two sets of brothers are visually and morally indistinguishable in the deadly masque of the final act. ‘Now comes in / That which must glad us all’, Vindice tells his co-­conspirators, ‘we to take pattern / Of all those suits, the colour, trimming, fashion, / E’en to an undistinguished hair almost’ (5.2.14–17).18 As Vindice famously recognizes at the end of the play, he has become his own enemy: ‘ ’Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes’ (5.3.109). Vindice’s sinful complicity is perhaps more evident, however, in his fascination with lust. Despite his absence from court, he has a problematically extensive knowledge of ‘Dutch lust, fulsome lust’, and he rather obviously takes pleasure imagining fathers sliding ‘from the mother’ to ‘cling [to] the daughter-­inlaw’, uncles being ‘adulterous with their nieces’, and brothers sleeping with their brothers’ wives (1.3.58, 61). His erotic excitement builds in the repetition of ‘apace’ as he imagines the ‘juggling of all sides’ that occurs when most of the world has gone to bed: ‘Some that were maids / E’en at sunset are now perhaps i’th’ toll-­book. / [. . .] Now cuckolds are / A-coining, apace, apace, apace, apace’ (2.2.34–5, 39–40). His desire for revenge bleeds very quickly into sexualized lust, and we can hear something orgasmic as he imagines murdering the Duke: ‘O, sweet, delectable, rare, happy, ravishing! [. . .] I’m lost again; you cannot find me yet; / I’m in a throng of happy apprehensions’ (3.5.1, 29–30). His conversion of his mother at his rapier’s point is overtly if unintentionally sexualized, as is his remark that the slap from his sister ‘is the sweetest box that e’er my nose came nigh’ (2.1.41).19 His determination not to kill Lussurioso by stabbing him in the back is nakedly homoerotic: ‘Sword, thou wast never a backbiter yet. / I’ll pierce him to his face. He shall die looking upon me. / Thy veins are swelled with lust. This shall unfill ’em’ (2.2.90–2). This catalogue could go on and on; as Leslie Sanders points out, ‘[t]here are very few lines in The Revenger’s Tragedy that

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do not permit of sexual interpretation’.20 The point is that Vindice’s complicity with the sin of the court has as much to do with his fascination with and participation in sexualized lust as it does with the murder for which he is eventually punished. The second paradoxical aspect of satire John Weever highlights in his Whipping of the Satyre is that the satirist corrupts the very audience he seeks to purify. Weever repeatedly scoffs at the idea that ‘foule words can beget faire manners’ or that ‘bitter euill slanderous speach, / Were fittest method vertuous deeds to teach’. Instead of purifying ‘the sincke of all mens sinne’, the speech of the satirist ‘putrifies within’. By ‘handling Lecherie’ and ‘Lauishing out such vilde lasciuious speach’, in fact, the satirist acts as though he ‘would inuite one vnto Venerie, / Disclosing things that neuer Bawd could teach’.21 By drawing attention to hidden sin – sin that he hopes to eradicate by revealing it – the satirist provides a kind of instruction manual. For Weever, in other words, satire is not just rhetorically ineffective, but is in fact morally destructive: by drawing attention to concealed sin, the satirist makes the world more sinful. Middleton had explored this second paradox in his earlier satires as well. He consciously echoes Robert Greene’s coney-­ catching tracts in the fourth satire of Microcynicon, ‘Cheating Droone’, which tells the story of the ‘silly cony’ who enjoys a night of eating, drinking and musical entertainment at a new friend’s expense only to awake to discover that he has in fact paid for everything;22 like Greene’s tracts, the story could serve equally well as a guide for an aspiring cheat as it could a cautionary tale for the trusting innocent. Middleton toys with this paradox even more overtly in The Black Book, which is wryly dedicated to those who ‘can touch pitch and yet never defile themselves’, a proverbial impossibility. Those who ‘read the mischievous lives and pernicious practices of villains’ contained in the book, such a paradoxical dedication playfully suggests, are sure to be ‘worse at the end of the book’ rather than ‘confirmed the more in their honest estates and the uprightness of their virtues’. Their souls will be just as

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metaphorically defiled as their hands will be literally stained from the book’s solid black cover.23 As both the heir and the ventriloquist of the Devil, Middleton’s satirist tempts as much as he upholds, taints as much as he purifies. ‘Qui color albus erat, nunc est contrarius albo’,24 the epigram to Microcynicon darkly declares; the same could be said for all of Middleton’s satirical work. The Revenger’s Tragedy toys with its effect upon its audience in the same way. Hippolito seems to allude to the audience’s complicity in the collective vengeance of the final act when he refers to the ‘five hundred gentlemen in the action / That apply themselves and not stand idle’ (5.2.21–2). More relevant, perhaps, is the way the play knowingly invites and then evacuates the audience’s pleasure in Vindice’s exposure of sexual licence. As Sanders notes, ‘The audience, in the position of co-­plotters, become caught up in Vindice’s machinations in a manner frequent in Jonson’s plays. Vindice carries the audience with his wit, glee and energy until the audience, like the protagonist, wake to find they too have lost themselves.’25 Vindice offers both devilish temptation and moral castigation, and he plays these roles both for Castiza and Gratiana and for the audience. Even though he is almost willing to ‘stake [his] soul for these two creatures’ (1.1.105), Vindice initially corrupts Gratiana; the same may well be true for members of the audience, whose soteriological security cannot be so readily determined. After her re-­conversion two acts later, Gratiana draws explicit attention to Vindice’s troublingly doubled role, connecting him thematically to Middleton’s earlier satirists: ‘I’ll give you this, that one I never knew / Plead better for and ’gainst the devil than you’ (4.4.89–90).

Satirical ethics and efficacy It’s tempting to follow Jonathan Dollimore and others in ascribing the playful ‘double subversion’ of moral authority I have been tracing in The Revenger’s Tragedy to a secularist

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parody of providentialism.26 Similar assertions have been made about nearly all satirists of the 1590s and early 1600s, whose moralist pronouncements can seem like mere excuses to indulge in violent and prurient raillery. But we should hesitate before doubting or dismissing the fervour of these satirists’ religious and moral convictions. The anonymous Martin Marprelate was a radical puritan willing to stake his life for the cause of presbyterian reform; Thomas Nashe was a committed Church of England conformist whose harrowing Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593) leaves little doubt about the intensity of his fear of God; both Edmund Spenser and Thomas Dekker were militant Protestants; and numerous prominent satirists of the 1590s – including Joseph Hall, John Donne and John Marston – went on to take holy orders. And although there are certainly scholars who have read and continue to read The Revenger’s Tragedy and other Middleton plays through secular lenses, there does seem to be a growing critical consensus that Middleton’s work demonstrates a fairly serious and sustained Calvinist commitment.27 Dollimore’s influential argument is based on his assertion that there was a fundamental conflict in the early modern period between two concepts of mimesis – between Philip Sidney’s idealist claim that a poet’s task was to represent the world better than it was and Francis Bacon’s empiricist insistence that a poet’s task was to represent the world as it actually existed. The Revenger’s Tragedy, he claims, repudiates Sidney’s providentialist mimesis by reducing retributive justice ‘to a parody of theatrical convention’ and offers instead its own discomforting version of empiricist mimesis, ‘a realism which sees the social aberration of court life as rooted in the prior fact of an aberrant nature, ungoverned by any kind of law – social, natural, or supernatural’.28 But thinking about The Revenger’s Tragedy in terms of satire disrupts this reading, for satire in fact served as a third form of mimesis in this period, a kind of anti-­idealist mimesis: it offered the possibility of representing the world worse than it really was. Like idealist mimesis, satirical mimesis served moral and didactic purposes:

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if idealist mimesis created golden worlds in order to praise virtue, satirical mimesis created hellish landscapes in order to blame vice. As Neil Rhodes notes, early modern satire ‘vacillated wildly between the strident invective of the pulpit orator and the flippant, verbal tumbling tricks of the clown, the lord of misrule and similar representatives of the folk culture of late medieval England’.29 This mixture of the godly and the profane may strike us as strange, but it was characteristic of much popular writing of the period,30 and it helps to explain why The Revenger’s Tragedy swings between seriousness and scurrility – as well as why modern scholarship on the play has swung back and forth over the fundamental question of the play’s morality. Scholars who have attempted to make sense of The Revenger’s Tragedy within a Calvinist framework have rightly revived interest in the play’s depiction of ‘mankind’s inescapable damnation without the divine miracle of grace’,31 re-­asserted a providentialist view of delayed punishment as divine punishment and re-­emphasized earnest interpretations of Antonio, Castiza and Gratiana. But most have also downplayed the humour and playfulness of the play. Holdsworth’s and Stachniewski’s accounts of Middleton’s Calvinism are particularly bleak: they cite Calvin’s stress on predestination, the universal depravity of man, the immutability of God’s decrees, and the impossibility of knowing for certain whether one is a member of the elect as evidence for a reading of Middleton’s plays in which characters can only ever discover that they have always already been saved or – what’s more likely – damned.32 As Herbert Jack Heller reminds us, however, Middleton was also very interested in the repentance and conversion precipitated by ‘God’s conviction of sin and the offer of salvation’.33 At the heart of this problem is a larger question about the possibility of satirical ethics and efficacy in a Calvinist world. Orthodox Calvinism would seem to deny both. Calvin held that men are not just sinful but thoroughly depraved, corrupted by the hereditary taint of Adam’s original transgression from the very moment of our birth, for which we are ‘deservedly

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condemned by God’; without grace, Calvin insisted repeatedly, man is utterly incapable of any kind of moral action, and even after regeneration, man still ‘has no ability in himself to do righteousness’.34 So too did Calvin claim that man could do nothing to effect his own or others’ conversion, election, or salvation: ‘When the will is enchained as the slave of sin, it cannot make a movement toward goodness, far less steadily pursue it. For such movement is the first step in that conversion to God, which in Scripture is entirely ascribed to divine grace’.35 Without the ability to perform good works, satirists could never hope to write moral satire; without the ability to affect election, satirists could hardly be morally persuasive or effect the moral reform they so often promised. But what should be paralyzing instead seems to be liberating for Middleton. The impossibility of moral purity allows him to accept the unavoidable depravity of the satirist and the freedom to be playful with the sin he castigates. The impossibility of moral persuasion also frees Middleton from worrying about purifying his entire audience: those who remain reprobate will continue to ‘provoke the anger of God against them, and give evident signs of the judgment which God has already passed upon them’,36 but those who have been regenerated by faith will find themselves reminded to look to their sins and ‘serve God’ (3.5.56). Middleton’s ability to align satirical ethics and efficacy with Calvinism is rooted in the very providentialism – the very idea that ‘all events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God’37 – that Dollimore’s influential account of the play denies. For if, as Calvin argued, ‘thieves and murderers, and other evil-­doers, are instruments of divine providence, being employed by the Lord himself to execute the judgments which he has resolved to inflict’,38 then the well-­intentioned but necessarily depraved satirist could be confident that he too served as an instrument of the Lord’s providential wrath. And if ‘the elect are brought by calling into the fold of Christ, not from the very womb, nor all at the same time, but according as God sees it meet to dispense his grace’,39 then the harsh rebuke

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of the providential satirist could also be as effective a catalyst for conversion as the harsh rebuke of the preacher.

Providentialist conversion One cannot help but think Middleton would have been pleased to know that so many readers have found his depiction of sexual and economic lust in The Revenger’s Tragedy distasteful, because that is largely the point. We are supposed to be put off by the grotesque depths of Lussurioso’s lust, by Junior Brother’s mocking indifference to his rape of Lady Antonio, by the Duchess’s pursuit of Spurio, by the Duke’s ‘grey-­haired adultery’ (1.1.1). Our revulsion at these naked displays of lechery should have the same effect upon us as our revulsion at the nakedness of Gloriana’s skull: ‘Here’s an eye’, Vindice says, ‘Able to tempt a great man – to serve God’ (3.5.56). In fact, this speech in particular is peppered with explicit references to the rhetorical purpose of the skull as a memento mori that also speaks to the rhetorical basis of the play and early modern satire more broadly: Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble, A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo ’em To suffer wet damnation to run through ’em. [. . .] It were fine, methinks, To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts, And unclean brothels. Sure, ’twould fright the sinner And make him a good coward, put a reveller Out of his antic amble, And cloy an epicure with empty dishes. (3.5.58–60, 90–5) Like the skull, The Revenger’s Tragedy strips the alluring trappings of lustful behaviour to reveal its ugly – and deadly – interior. The play works to make vice seem monstrous,

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ugly, disgusting and ridiculous: it shows vice – and the consequences of vice – in order to make the audience shun it. Vindice may reveal his own depraved fascination with the lust he decries, and he may do as much to instruct some members of his audience to pursue lust as to shun it, but he does serve as a catalyst of providentialist conversion for at least one character in the play. His mother, Gratiana, has acted reprehensibly – she has accepted money for her daughter’s virginity and she has been carried away by remembering ‘What ’twere to lose it’ (2.1.149) – but in response to Vindice’s harsh language and public exposure of her secret sin, she weeps tears of repentance and begs heaven to ‘Take this infectious spot out of [her] soul’ (4.4.53). Castiza’s independent test of her mother indicates that Gratiana’s conversion is real, and the concluding lines of the fourth act explicitly underscore the rhetorical nature of both the scene and, more broadly, the play: ‘Faith and thy birth hath saved me. / ’Mongst thousand daughters happiest of all others, / Be thou a glass for maids and I for mothers’ (4.4.155–7). Middleton probably had few hopes that The Revenger’s Tragedy would entirely reform his audience, but he certainly leaves open the possibility that the satirist can function as an instrument of divine providence – or even of grace.

Notes 1 Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 219–20. 2 See e.g. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson, eds, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 3 J.B. Leishman, ed., The Three Parnassus Plays (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson Ltd, 1949), 45–9. 4 Thomas Nashe, The Anatomy of Absurdity, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald McKerrow (1904; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 1.9.

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5 Magnification, minimization and association are the three tools Aristotle associates with epideictic speech (praise and blame). See Aristotle, Rhetoric, ed. Lane Cooper (New York: Pearson, 1960), 1.9. 6 Kernan’s reading of the play (224ff) is in many respects my point of departure, but see also John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 255–87; Inga-Stina Ekeblad, ‘The Structure of The Revenger’s Tragedy’ (1960), in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (London: MacMillan, 1990), 58–65; J. Mark Heumann, ‘Death Culture and the World of The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Gradavia 1.1 (1976): 48–64; J.L. Simmons, ‘The Tongue and Its Office in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, PMLA 92:1 (January 1977): 56–68; Robert C. Jones, Engagement with Knavery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 126; Peter Mercer, Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 90–117; R.V. Holdsworth, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy as a Middleton Play’, in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (London: Macmillan, 1990), 79–105; Michael Neill, ‘Bastardy, Counterfeiting, and Misogyny in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, SEL 36.2 (1996): 397–416; MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Introduction to The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 543–7; and Heather Hirschfeld, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy: Original Sin and the Allures of Vengeance’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, eds Emma Smith and Garrett Sullivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 200–10. 7 Neill, ‘Bastardy’, 412. See also Steven Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45. 2 (1994): 139–62; and Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. 68–79. 8 For similar remarks about the way women cease to lure men to sin only after they are dead – and in general about the way the play ‘obsessively repeats both the virtuous enclosure of female chastity and the “false forms” of deceptive womanhood’ – see

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Peter Stallybrass, ‘Reading the Body: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption’, Renaissance Drama 18 (1987): 121–48. 9 Francis Bacon, ‘An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England’ (1589), in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. 10 Gabriel Harvey, ‘An Aduertisement for Papp-­hatchett, and Martin Marprelate’ (1589), in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander Grosart (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 2.131. 11 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 2.7.65. 12 W.I. (John Weever?), The Whipping of the Satyre, ed. Arnold Davenport (London, 1601), sig. D5r. 13 Weever, Whipping, sigs. A3v, B8r, E7r, B8v. 14 Thomas Middleton, Microcynicon (1598), ed. Wendy Wall, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1970–84; 5.47, 6.29–38. 15 Holdsworth, ‘Middleton Play’, 83. 16 Thomas Middleton, The Black Book, ed. G.B. Shand, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 204–18, 800–2, 824–6. 17 See e.g. Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587– 1642 (1940; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), 133–4; Holdsworth, ‘Middleton Play’, 83, 103; Thomas Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 154–60; Hirschfeld, ‘Original Sin’, 208. For dissenting views, see Jonas Barish, ‘The True and False Families of The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in English Renaissance Drama: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Doran and Mark Eccles, eds S. Henning, R. Kimbrough and L. Knowles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 142–54; and Karen Robertson, ‘Chastity and Justice in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, eds Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 215–36.

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18 See Scott McMillan, ‘Acting and Violence: The Revenger’s Tragedy and Its Departures from Hamlet’, SEL 24.2 (1984): 275–91, 288. 19 Judith Deborah Haber rightly notes that this line is ‘astonishingly filthy’. Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 65. 20 Leslie Sanders, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy: A Play on the Revenge Play’, Renaissance and Reformation 10 (1974): 25–36, 29. 21 Weever, Whipping, sig. A3r, D5v, F5r, E6r. 22 Middleton, Microcynicon, 4.25. 23 Middleton, The Black Book, 3–11. For the cover, see G.B. Shand’s ‘Introduction to The Black Book’, 204. 24 Middleton, Microcynicon, Epilogue 7. ‘[I]ts colour, that once was white, is now the very opposite’ (Wall, 1984). 25 Sanders, ‘Revenge Play’, 28. 26 See Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Two Concepts of Mimesis: Renaissance Literary Theory and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Themes in Drama: Drama and Mimesis, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 25–50; and ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy: Providence, Parody and Black Camp’, in Revenge Tragedy: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Stevie Simkin (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 107–20. 27 See Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theater: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Holdsworth, ‘Middleton Play’; John Stachniewski, ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’ (1989), in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (London: Macmillan, 1990), 226–47; N.W. Bawcutt, ‘Was Thomas Middleton a Puritan Dramatist?’ Modern Language Review 94 (1999): 925–39; Herbert Jack Heller, Penitent Brothellers: Grace Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000); and Ian W. Archer, ‘Religious Identities’, in Thomas Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 135–43. 28 Dollimore, ‘Two Concepts of Mimesis’, 35–6, 43, 38.

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29 Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 3–4. 30 See Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 32–64; and Peter Lake, ‘Religion and Cheap Print’, in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1, ed. Joad Raymond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 217–41. 31 Simmons, ‘Tongue and Its Office’, 58. 32 See Stachniewski, ‘Calvinist Pshycology’, 244. 33 Heller, Penitent Brothellers, 33. 34 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 2.1.6, 2.2.6. 35 Ibid., 2.3.4. 36 Ibid., 3.23.12. 37 Ibid., 1.16.2. 38 Ibid., 1.17.5. 39 Ibid., 3.24.10.

3 Playing with Hell: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Infernal Heather Hirschfeld

Revenge tragedy enjoys a special relationship with the infernal. The genre’s abiding fascination with sin, crime, justice and punishment fuels its persistent traffic with the underworld, that literary and theological landscape for matching with obsessive precision earthly deeds and eternal consequences.1 Recent scholarship on early modern revenge plays has given fresh attention to this relationship, clarifying the ways in which contemporary religious, epistemological and cartographic change contributed to the genre’s dramatizing of cosmic geographies and the spaces of the afterlife.2 This essay builds on such studies by exploring the ways in which The Revenger’s Tragedy’s invocations of hell reinforce some of its central representational fascinations, preoccupations that make it a play, in T.S. Eliot’s apt phrasing, ‘in which a horror of life, singular in [its] own or any age, finds exactly the

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right words and the right rhythms’.3 First, I study the play’s references to hell as a means of parodying Hamlet, particularly the protagonist’s understanding of the afterlife in the pursuit of revenge. Then I discuss how the play’s gestures to the infernal draw on satiric morality traditions reincarnated in Elizabethan and Jacobean prose accounts of the netherworld. Taken together, such ‘playing with’ the infernal, I suggest, exploits hell’s immense conceptual purchase as both doctrinal reality and literary device, as both material yet otherworldly place and figurative yet existential state. Middleton’s play thus outstrips conventional critical concerns with whether or not ‘the allusions to sin and hell in the play have [any] bearing on the way the characters behave’.4 Instead, The Revenger’s Tragedy’s use of hell tests the limits of early modern notions of metaphoricity, materiality and intertextuality.

‘A hell besides this’: infernal parody Reflecting on the depredations of the two European world wars, George Steiner writes compellingly that the first half of the twentieth century witnessed the ‘transference of hell from below the earth to its surface’ in the shape of the Nazi concentration camps and their ‘regulated gradations of horror’. He calls this transference the ‘mutation of hell into metaphor’, and he attributes it to a moral gap – ‘the absence of the familiar damned’ – opened up by the secularizing imperatives of modernity.5 Steiner’s evocative account depends upon a persuasive but suspiciously overgeneralized chronicle of hell, one that traces a steady trajectory from premodern conviction in hell as a literal, localized place to an Enlightenment and then modern understanding of it as a figurative image of torment and retribution.6 Rachel Falconer has called attention to the shocking inversion of penal logic assumed by the account, according to which a modern, metaphoric hell oversees the suffering of innocents rather than the punishment of the sinful.7

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But I am more concerned here with how Steiner’s formulation glides over the complex linguistic and ontological status of hell in early modernity. For the period of The Revenger’s Tragedy, that is, hell was already operating metaphorically as well as literally, and its figurative function was enabled by, not antithetical to, its reference to a doctrinally secure (although not unquestioned) locale of eternal punishment.8 Hell’s signifying value – its value as a means for ‘humans [to] discuss other things, such as human identity, culture, justice, forgiveness, suffering, political affiliation, and death’ – derived from its status as a rhetorical device as well as a real region, and from the conceptual porosity between these two states.9 In a further ironic twist, hell’s figurative role – its power to name, in the absence of other convincing terms, a universe of violation and appropriate penalty – depended precisely on the way it denotes the unnameable, the incommensurate, the endless. These multiple valences are embedded in original, even radical, ways in The Revenger’s Tragedy. In the play’s opening lines, for instance, when the protagonist Vindice notes that age ‘kindle[s] infernal fires / Within the spendthrift veins of a dry Duke’ (1.1.7–8), the physical furniture of hell becomes both the material of the human interior and an expression of its sinful passions. By the play’s closing sequence of masques, when Lussurioso promises that his hated siblings will ‘dance next in hell’ (5.3.41), the symbol of corrupt, ephemeral court ceremony – dancing, masquing, playing – becomes capable of conveyance to the realm of eternal punishment. Later I discuss the linguistic logic of this kind of imagery. But first I look at how such references contribute to one of The Revenger’s Tragedy’s signature concerns, its sustained parody of Hamlet, particularly the latter play’s portrayal of the relation between life and afterlife. Because of its centrality to Reformation doctrinal conflict, recent critics have focused almost exclusively on the fraught place in Hamlet of Purgatory, the ‘middle space of the realm of the dead’ codified in Catholic doctrine in the twelfth century and embodied in Hamlet in the figure of the Ghost.10 In his

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seminal account, Stephen Greenblatt tracks the vehement Protestant rejection of Purgatory as poetry or fable, suggesting that this rejection made a ‘crucial body of imaginative materials [. . .] available for theatrical appropriation’; Shakespeare, he explains, used them in Hamlet to ‘intensif[y] a sense of the weirdness of the theater’.11 Kristen Poole has linked the play’s references to Mount Hecla as a way of imagining a real, mappable locale for Purgatory and thus of ‘comprehending the supernatural in a newly cartographic world’.12 And most recently, Zakariah Long has suggested that Purgatorial torment is crucial to the way Hamlet both thinks and remembers: ‘when Hamlet peers out at the world through the fumes of his melancholy, he projects Purgatory onto it. [And] if this is so, it is only because he first introjected it – that is, because Purgatory had already been seized from the world “out there” and turned into a model for his inner world, the theater of his mind’.13 But Purgatory is not the only supernatural landscape central to Hamlet and Hamlet, nor was it the only supernatural landscape subject to Reformation controversy.14 Hell, the ‘divinely sanctioned place of eternal torment for the wicked’, is frequently on the tip of the protagonist’s tongue.15 Indeed, while the Ghost implies that he inhabits a purgatorial arena, ‘doomed for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away’ (1.5.10–13), Hamlet continues to speak of the infernal: the Prince who has just returned to Denmark from Wittenberg, seat of the European Reformation, is explicitly attached to hell even if his father’s ghost never names it.16 He boasts to Horatio, Bernardo and Marcellus that if he sees a ghost ‘assume my noble father’s person, / I’ll speak to it, though hell itself should gape / And bid me hold my peace’ (1.2.265–7); when he sights that ghost in the following scene he considers whether it brings ‘airs from heaven or blasts from hell’ (1.4.45); and after his wrenching conversation with it he exclaims, ‘O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? / And shall I couple hell?’ (1.5.99–100).

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If the first reference smacks of bravado, the latter two echo the play’s more characteristic dissolution of personal and conceptual boundaries. Hamlet is not puzzled about the existence of hell, but he is uncertain of the Ghost’s provenance as well as the status of his own soul should he pursue the Ghost’s injunction to revenge. And if he ‘couples’ hell, he worries, he not only designates it as the Ghost’s ‘resting’ place, but his own as well. By Act 2, when Hamlet declares himself ‘prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell’ (2.2.519), the opposing realms of a dual afterlife, like so many of the play’s seemingly binary categories, have collapsed into one another. Hamlet separates the two after the inset play in 3.2. As he plots his next move he refers only to hell: ‘ ’Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world’ (3.2.378–80). His language is similar when he declares his intentions for the praying Claudius: Up sword, and know thou a more horrid hent. When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed, At game, a-­swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in’t – Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, And that his soul may be as damned and black As hell, whereto it goes. (3.3.93–100; emphasis added) Roland Mushat Frye describes with a sense of regret Hamlet’s pleasure in ‘the prospect of entrapping his victim’, in taking on the ‘role as judgmental gatekeeper of hell’.17 But even in this scene the infernal registers with Hamlet in a ‘questionable shape’. If in Act 1 he was not certain whether hell would open up before him, here, in Act 3, Hamlet is still unsure whether he can successfully orchestrate Claudius’s descent there. Like so much else in the play, that ‘trip’ is postponed until an unidentified future, a ‘when’ qualified by multiple ‘or’s and

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‘may’s. A scene later, Hamlet is not even convinced (unlike Vindice at his play’s start) that hell ‘canst mutine in a matron’s bones’ (3.4.93). It is this hesitation, this deferral, which The Revenger’s Tragedy mocks in its own unsparing, uncompromising references to hell. The bastard character Spurio delights that ‘one incestuous kiss’ with his stepmother ‘picks open hell’ (1.2.173); Lussurioso admits that ‘[i]t is our blood to err, though hell gaped loud’ (1.3.74). Most striking is Vindice’s extraordinary arrangement of the Duke’s murder in Act  3, during which he both performs and guarantees the kind of damnation for the Duke that Hamlet imagines but cannot confirm for Claudius (until, perhaps, his play’s final moments). In what many scholars consider the play’s centrepiece, Vindice poisons the Duke using the skull of his beloved Gloriana and then forces him to watch as Spurio and the Duchess meet in an amorous, adulterous, incestuous embrace. ‘Is there a hell besides this, villains?’ (3.5.184), the Duke asks Vindice and his co-­conspirator Hippolito, acknowledging that the duo have brought to earth, as a kind of prologue, a punishment that both depends upon and reinforces its full performance in a region of the afterlife. The fifth act provides the final punch-­ line in this parodic treatment of Hamlet’s prayer-­scene speech, as Vindice, having been hired by Lussurioso to kill his alter ego Piato, presents him with the disguised, slumped body of the dead Duke. Believing it to be a drunk Piato, Lussurioso relishes the opportunity to murder him and ‘let him reel to hell’ (5.1.51). In this he repeats Hamlet’s intent for Claudius even as he narrates, unwittingly, what the audience has already seen happen to the Duke. Such references are consistent with The Revenger’s Tragedy’s other parodic strategies – the protagonist’s nine years-­deferred revenge, for instance, or his manic melancholy and delighted assumption of multiple disguises – that cut to the core of Hamlet’s deep metaphysical strain and its protagonist’s efforts to ‘come to terms with [. . .] an outside world warped through no act of his – a world miasmal with mystery, disease,

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degeneration, death, betrayal, and false seeming.’18 Vindice has accepted this miasmal world – he does not need to come to terms with it – and his invocations of the infernal apply the same certitude to the prospect of hell. What is for Hamlet a disturbing ambiguity or threat is for Vindice a palpable conviction and source of perverse glee. David Nicol has noted that for Middleton’s characters ‘the notion that they are damned is almost invigorating’; we might say the same for their notion of the place of the damned.19 Vindice assents with delight to the tangibility and inevitability of hell, to how close both he and his antagonists are to it. This outlook, in turn, reflects what scholars consider the playwright’s own ‘life-­long Calvinism’, not only Calvinism’s denial of Purgatory, but also its doctrines of inherent human depravity and the implacability of predestination to damnation.20 Vindice has absorbed these doctrines, but in his case the absorption has triggered not the obsessive rigours of introspection encouraged by some forms of practical Calvinism (and given dramatic shape in other revengers’ painful, morbid self-­examinations) but rather a kind of feverish activity born of the assumption that he and others around him are already damned.21 Such behaviour, as Ian McAdam suggests in Chapter  4, represents a particular response to the psychic pressures of Protestant devotion, one that implicitly accepts, even as it explicitly perverts, the salvific intent of its doctrinal foundations. This sensibility has affinities with that of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, whose enthusiastic contract with the devil takes aim at, even as it derives from, a soteriology that makes belief in one’s damnation a sign of that damnation.22 In his parody, however, Middleton takes aim not at this theological principle but at its opposite: at the embodiment in Hamlet of a species of questioning that has not consigned its thinker to a postmortem fate and location. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s ironic energies target the brooding or meditative revenger, mocking scepticism about hell – scepticism about one’s relation to it, if not scepticism about its existence – in the pursuit of vengeance. Vindice promotes instead a theatre of

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revenge that takes a real hell as its protagonist’s origin and telos. His drama has no room either for either an ‘undiscovered country’ or for a Ghost returning from it. This is simultaneously a theological and generic contest, one over both the meaning of predestination as well as the mentality of the revenger and the shape of his plot.

The Menippean tradition Hell’s role as an arena for such intertextual as well as doctrinal engagement has a robust heritage, most recognizable in the early modern period in the trope of the epic descent, the katabases linking Homer to Virgil to Dante to Spenser to Milton. But hell was central to another genre, the Menippean dialogue, which consisted of satiric travel narratives to the netherworld. In one salient section of Lucian’s Menippus, for example, its speaker, who has visited the netherworld, counsels against accumulating riches. He reports on a law resolved in Hades that ‘when [the rich] die their bodies be punished like those of the other malefactors, but their souls be sent back up into life and enter into donkeys until they shall have passed two hundred and fifty thousand years in the said condition, transmigrating from donkey to donkey, bearing burdens, and being driven by the poor; and that thereafter it be permitted them to die’.23 This tradition, present most immediately to Middleton in a series of pamphlets around Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), also determines the references to hell in The Revenger’s Tragedy.24 These references, like the ones discussed above, preserve a sense of the reality and materiality of the infernal; they also insist on their own artificiality, their design as a literary inheritance where sojourners track shadows of their past or symbols of others’ futures. But, as opposed to Vindice’s earlier personalizing of images (the ‘infernal fires’ kindling in the Duke’s veins, for instance), they register as emblematic, anecdotal, sententious. They take shape in exclamations like

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Castiza’s, when she appears on stage for the first time at the start of Act 2 and asks: ‘Why had not virtue a revenue? Well, / I know the cause: ’twould have impoverished hell’ (2.1.7–8). Her tone and intent (to deplore earthly riches in the language of commerce) inform Vindice’s comments later in the scene, when his mother, Gratiana, agrees to prostitute Castiza in order to make money. Vindice expands Castiza’s critique, first mapping the otherworld into a fantastic metadramatic programme that calls attention to his own artifice and then suggesting a special relation between hell and women:25 Why does not heaven turn black, or with a frown Undo the world? Why does not earth start up And strike the sins that tread upon’t? O, Were’t not for gold and women, there would be no damnation, Hell would look like a Lord’s great kitchen without fire in’t; But ’twas decreed before the world began That they should be the hooks to catch at man. (2.1.247–53) And later, when auditioning before Lussurioso for the role of malcontent murderer, Vindice paints a verbal picture of a ‘usuring father to be boiling in hell and his son and heir with a whore dancing over him’ (4.2.86–7). Vindice’s portrait of the usurer is the play’s most direct link to contemporary prose narratives of infernal trafficking. The image is, of course, conventional to late medieval and early modern sermonic literature and other written, oral and pictorial presentations of the Seven Deadly Sins; it also recalls the structures of morality-­play allegory with which The Revenger’s Tragedy has long been allied (see Chapter 1).26 But the portrait, along with other moral devices, was being reoriented in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean satiric prose that traced a deliberately comic, Menippean path to and from the infernal. The centre of the reorientation, the treatise that ‘translated the Seven Sins into a London comedie humaine’,

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was Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, in which the titular persona, an impoverished writer, pens a mock appeal to the Devil for money.27 The Devil, Pierce explains early in the pamphlet, was ‘so famous a politician in purchasing, that hell, which at the beginning was but an obscure village, is now become a huge city, whereunto all countries are tributary’.28 Nashe thus grounds his chronicle of the moral failings of London on the literal and symbolic landscape of hell, as his supplication becomes a series of portraits of sins so novel and effervescent as to cancel out ‘any moralistic point’.29 Pierce Penniless closes by returning to the geography and the punitive calculus of hell, as Pierce asks the Devil’s messenger, the so-­called Knight of the Post, to tell him the state of your infernal regiment; and what that hell is, where your lord holds his throne; whether a world like this, which spirits like outlaws do inhabit, [. . .] or whether it be a place of horror, stench, and darkness, [. . .] where, permutata vicissitudine, one ghost torments another by turns, and he that all his lifetime was a great fornicator, hath all the diseases of lust continually hanging upon him, and is constrained, the more to augment his misery, to have congress every hour with hags and old witches; [. . .] as the usurer to swallow molten gold, the glutton to eat nothing but toads, and the murderer to be still stabbed with daggers, but never die.30 Vindice’s own reference to the usurer boiling in hell draws on Pierce’s treatment of the infernal and its inhabitants, which, as Lorna Hutson celebrates in her work on Nashe, ‘is less like homage to the homiletic tradition than like a grotesque dismemberment of the political reclassifying of deadly sins in the interest of economic individuality’.31 Vindice’s version has a similar but distinct drive, condemning the usurer to an infernal punishment that is as much a topical comment on profligacy as it is on miserliness. And if Pierce’s emblems of hellish retribution, as Hutson has explained, ‘masquerad[e] as

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the conventional probing of moral abuses’ while claiming ‘moral and economic authority from a diabolic buffoon’,32 Vindice’s graphic image of the usurer puts the portrayal of divine punishment for worldly evil in the mouth of a triumphantly amoral revenger. Middleton had already been experimenting with Nashe’s pamphlet and its Lucianic overtones before The Revenger’s Tragedy. Indeed, Vindice’s references to hell in the play can be seen as an extension, writ small but fierce, of his work in his 1604 The Black Book, an ‘exuberant sequel’ to Nashe’s fiction that imagines Lucifer’s journey from hell to London to visit the impoverished Pierce.33 Such a ‘resurrection’ of Pierce, as Molly Hand aptly calls it, is also a resurrection of the underworld as the literary realm on which to launch a ‘radical critique of [contemporary] socio-­economic conditions’.34 And these conditions include those of the writer, dramatist and actor. Thus, The Black Book shares with its generic fellows a metadramatic sensibility that ‘draws on metaphors of stage practice and on stylistic stage effects’35 which in turn rely on hell as both image of and deferred but eternal penalty for economic inequality. Like Greene’s Newes Out of Heaven and Hell (1593) and Henry Chettle’s Kind Hart’s Dream (1593) as well as Pierce,36 The Black Book thrives on associations with the drama and its practices and practitioners to shape its narrative: Lucifer ‘ascends as Prologue to his own play’ and then ‘turns actor’; he observes Pierce through ‘the sullen blaze of a melancholy lamp that burnt very tragically upon the narrow desk of a half bedstead’, where he sees ‘spiders that stalk as if they had been conning of Tamburlaine’.37 The Black Book, then, not only promulgated a moralizing message meant to lay bare the city’s ‘infectious bulks of craft, coz’nage and panderism’ (l. 25); it also reinvigorated for the opening years of James’s reign a 1590s genre that used hell as a backdrop to authorize the writer and player’s place in social critique.38 So even though it is set on the streets of London, The Black Book uses an infernal backdrop to stage comparison after comparison between spectral personae and their punishments, including a

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parodically homiletic nod to a usurer who would not spend money on coal: ‘Is it possible [. . .] a usurer should burn so little here, and so much in hell?’ (ll. 283–5). When Middleton has Vindice call up the image of the usurer boiling in hell, then, he alludes to his own The Black Book and to its genre of netherworld locodescription; he connects revenge drama with satiric pamphlet at the point at which they use the realm of the damned dead to address social, political and religious inequities and violations. Both these genres depend, of course, on hell’s resonance in Western European culture as both a ‘region of punitive justice’ and a ‘sense of collectively recognized evil’.39 But the shapes they take on stage and page, I want to emphasize, also depend upon hell’s status as a linguistic and conceptual phenomenon. The capacity of hell to signify literally and figuratively, as a spiritual reality and as a code for mundane punitive suffering, was extended in the period generally and in particular for Middleton, whose The Revenger’s Tragedy seizes in special ways on its representational resources.

Figuring hell Scholars trace to the Church Fathers what we might call hell’s ‘double referentiality’, its role in naming both damnation after death and guilt during life. As early as the first centuries after Christ, hell designated postmortem physical pain and earthly psychological suffering; as Alan Bernstein writes, it ‘invade[d] a living person’ through his or her conscience.40 According to this logic, hell is literal and figurative, real and metaphoric: hell, the receptacle of the damned, serves as the vehicle or source for hell the tenor or target, the state of a guilty, pained conscience alienated from God.41 This literal and figurative formula was preserved well into the seventeenth century, even as the elaborate urbanized infrastructure of the high medieval hell gave way to a sense of hell as an undifferentiated, unstructured landscape.42 But Reformation doctrinal debate, Peter Marshall

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has suggested, put fresh pressure on hell’s function as fact and figure. In an interpretive strategy he calls ‘comparative infernalism’, Marshall observes that Catholics and Protestants shared traditional ideas of ‘special torments tailored to the particular sins of the damned’ as well as a lurid iconography meant to dissuade believers from sin. ‘In many ways’, he writes, ‘it is surprising how little the rival theologies of grace seem to have impacted upon reformed and counter-­reforming discourses about hell’.43 Nevertheless, Marshall insists, there were ‘divergences along broadly confessional lines’, divergences concerned specifically with the placement and the grammar of hell.44 Protestants, he explains, were wary about identifying the exact location of hell while Catholics placed it confidently at the centre of the earth; Catholics believed in the materiality of hell-­fire while many Protestants considered it an allegory or metaphor, ‘a figure for the literally indescribable torments awaiting the damned in hell’.45 Certainly both groups participated in a longstanding tradition ‘in which the psychology of evil is explored in such a way that the wicked soul is seen as subject to self-­imposed suffering, which has analogies with the sufferings of hell’.46 But for Protestants ‘there was [. . .] a greater openness to the possibility of allegory and metaphor in making sense of the reality of hell’.47 The possibility of metaphor in making sense of the reality of hell: this is the linguistic process that The Revenger’s Tragedy stretches and probes. For the work of figurative language in this procedure is multifaceted, shaped not only by competing theologies, but also by the nature of linguistic comparison, the way, as different theorists have explained, it stages a ‘commerce between thoughts, a transaction between contexts’.48 Indeed, insofar as metaphor does not simply make sense of an objective reality but rather, according to contemporary sociolinguists, has ‘the power to create [. . .] reality’,49 Middleton’s use of the language of hell offers a new vision of revenge in the mundane and postmortem worlds. Such a sense of the power of metaphor was current, if expressed in different terms, in early modern England. For

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George Puttenham, it allowed a word to become ‘more significative’: metaphor, his manual explains, is the ‘figure of transport’ in which ‘there is a kind of wresting of a single word from his own right signification to another not so natural, but yet of some affinity or conveniency with it’.50 As various scholars have shown, rhetorical handbooks such as Puttenham’s treated metaphor not merely as a literary ornament, but as a creative force, producing fresh meaning and achieving various aesthetic and psychological effects.51 Metaphor, like other literary figures, functioned as a form of knowledge production;52 it ‘permeated Renaissance literature and culture as [a] dynamic and evolving nucle[us] of thought and expression’.53 And, as Patricia Parker has written, it generated plot itself, stories both creative and violent in which ‘metaphor as the foreigner or “alien” usurp[s] the place properly occupied by the original term’.54 Middleton’s figurative use of hell works in these and other ways in The Revenger’s Tragedy. It seizes on hell as the ultimate ‘dead metaphor’, as an established way of naming sin and punishment in the mundane and eternal worlds, and forms it into fresh images, gives it new signifying life. Such ‘galvanizing’ of a trope, as Daniel Jacobson has suggested, is characteristic of the play: ‘one of the main resources of language exploited by the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy is the tendency of common words to acquire in their historical evolution encrustations of meaning which begin as figurative extensions and eventually harden into further levels of literalness’.55 In his wordplay on hell, then, Middleton reactivates the orthodox ‘transport’ between hell as state and hell as place in ways that call attention to the unstable nature of the relation and realign it. Looking closely at Spurio’s comment that an adulterous kiss ‘picks open hell’, for instance, Jacobson observes that the reference ‘telescopes’ illicit sex and ‘the idea of the damnation that is consequent upon it’.56 This formula is certainly a conventional, Augustinian way of talking about sin as its own punishment, but Spurio’s language is more active, suggesting that adultery, in ‘picking’ hell open, comes into physical contact

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with it as a place. The same principle is at work when Lussurioso wonders whether Vindice has tried to seduce his own sister on Lussurioso’s behalf, asking the protagonist if he has ‘rubb’d hell o’er with honey?’ (2.2.21). Here the language stresses the literal as well as figurative proximity of worldly and otherworldly realms, collapsing their geographic and referential distance. Hell is a spiritual idea only insofar as it is a physical place that Vindice can sugarcoat; it is a material reality only insofar as it needs mundane tropes to describe its pains. The image insists that, when it comes to hell, the literal is figurative and vice versa: the afterlife is both vehicle and tenor. Such rhetorical play shows Middleton investigating the full range of hell’s linguistic functions, insisting, in fact, on its attendant metonymic force, as a comparison based on contiguity which is ‘always literal as well as figurative’.57 As we have seen, hell had long been understood as a metaphor for describing a guilty conscience. But the metonymic strain of hell was baked into its theological underpinnings as well. For insofar as sin was seen to lead to (or, in more predestinarian terms, indicate) damnation, and insofar as a guilty conscience was seen to rehearse postmortem suffering, activities on earth were metonymically connected – as cause and effect, as foreshadowing and realization – to hell. Middleton’s language emphasizes this connection, dramatizing the exchange of the figurative and the literal in the theology of hell. The play thus shares the compulsion, which scholars have observed in both Catholic and Protestant sermonic rhetoric, to ‘collect the various “traditional” ideas about the torments of Hell and weave them into [an] alarming pattern’.58 As John Casey writes in his survey of ideas about the afterlife, early modern preachers on hell ‘wanted to give people an imaginative sense how the other world was as real as this one’; at the same time, they also wanted to ‘persuade people to see their sins in all their loathsomeness’.59 Certainly the play, like the sermons, conveys viscerally both other and present worlds. But Middleton’s portrayal of hell’s nearness, as we have seen, has a different effect than do the doctrinal accounts. By weaving the images

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into the voices and characterizations of its personae, the play exposes the slipperiness of the language of hell, destabilizing the infernal’s referential fixity rather than reinforcing it. This dynamic is consistent with what some scholars see as the play’s fundamental secularism: its vision, Jacobson writes, is of a ‘hellish world’ which is nevertheless ‘clearly the world as it is – corrupt, licentious, treacherous, violent’.60 But such a formulation underestimates the linguistic strength of the play, its ability to bring a figure to life so that we see that the ‘world as it is’ is hell.61 The play’s understanding of the figural reality of hell differs from Steiner’s model of the infernal world of the twentieth century. In that model, hell comes to earth to metaphorize – to signify or stand in for – the horrors of the trenches and concentration camps precisely because it no longer exists as a reality in European culture. In Middleton’s depiction, by contrast, hell comes to earth because it does exist, and the relation between it and the corruptions of the seventeenth-­ century court is metonymic rather than metaphoric. In its most extreme moments – for instance, when Vindice admits that his ‘life’s unnatural to me [. . .] / As if I lived now when I should be dead’ (1.1.120–1) – the relation is one of identity: hell and earth are the same thing, same place, same idea. It is important to recognize that this view also differs from other revenge tragedies. The Revenger’s Tragedy, in other words, is more radical in its depiction of the infernal than its most influential predecessors. Those plays – The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, Antonio’s Revenge – maintain explicit commerce with the underworld, of course: Kyd’s play begins and ends in the Hades of Virgil and features the spirit of Don Andrea as its Chorus; Shakespeare’s and Marston’s plays provide a Ghost who speaks directly to the protagonist. But these conduits between the mundane world and the afterlife actually serve to reinforce the distinction between the two realms, preserving, among other things, the possibility of a redeemed earth. Thus Hamlet’s arresting double vision, his recognition of alternatives:

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I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily with me that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (2.2.261–9) Vindice offers no such assessment. No ghost appears to him to trace a path from the afterlife to Italy. Nor do the earth and the air seem or appear as something else to him; they are infernal. Ultimately, this colours the play’s very concept of revenge. Earlier revenge dramas, despite their notorious excesses of symbolic violence, attempted to restore balance to a world they presented as out of joint; they held out the hope that their revengers, whether as scourge or minister (or both), could set things right. But the notion of restoration or equilibrium, insofar as it depends on a redeemable earth, is entirely alien to Vindice. The fantastic viciousness of his revenge plots, then, aim to reproduce themselves, to multiply, like infernal punishments, endlessly. And they end only when earth and hell, revenger and villain, are revealed as the same thing: ‘ ’Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes’ (5.3.109).

Notes 1 For a powerful discussion of this precision in terms of early modern record keeping, see Linda Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15–16, 84–105. 2 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Zakariah Long, ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet: Infernal Memory in English Renaissance Revenge Tragedy’, ELR 44 (2014): 153–92; Kristen Poole,

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Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 3 T.S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), 124. 4 R.A. Foakes, ‘Introduction’, Thomas Middleton/Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. R.A. Foakes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 23. 5 George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 53, 55, italics mine. Consider also Alan Bernstein, who observes that in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries hell ‘has been dismissed as an artifact of the imagination’ only to ‘reappear as a result of the human imagination, the work of human hands, the manmade horrors of the Nazi death camps, the Gulag, and the atomic bomb’ (‘Thinking About Hell’, Wilson Quarterly 78 [1986]: 89). 6 For the early modern rejection of hell, see D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). For a revision of the secularizing sensibility, see Philip Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 7 ‘Modern hells are places of injustice where the innocent suffer. [. . .] If in pre-­modern times damnation was at least a sign of divine justice in operation, in modern times the reverse is most likely to be true. Now hell is the state one enters when facing a death that is meted out arbitrarily, senselessly’, R. Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Descent Narratives since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 18, 24. 8 See Peter Marshall on the ‘beginnings of a fundamental reconceptualisation’ of hell during the Reformation, what he calls ‘a tectonic shift in accepted and permissible modes of representation’ (‘ “The map of God’s Word”: Geographies of the Afterlife in Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 130).

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9 Isabel Moreira and Margaret Toscano, ‘Introduction: Holding Ajar the Gates of Hell’, in Hell and Its Afterlife, eds Isabel Moreira and Margaret Toscano (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2010), 1. 10 Quotation from Greenblatt, Hamlet, 3. For the long history of ideas of purgatorial suffering and their institutionalization in the place of Purgatory in twelfth century Christianity, see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For a powerful discussion of the genre of revenge tragedy in relation to the loss of Purgatory, consider Michael Neill’s formulation: ‘It was revenge tragedy that spoke to the anxieties produced by this painful transformation in relations with the dead’ (Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], 245). 11 Greenblatt, Hamlet, 249, 253. 12 Poole, Supernatural, 105. 13 Long, ‘Infernal Memory’, 189. 14 Poole does attend to Hamlet and hell in the Introduction to Supernatural Environments, though hell is not significant in her longer account of the play (see 1–17). For controversies about the existence of hell, see Peter Marshall, ‘The Reformation of Hell? Protestant and Catholic Infernalisms in England, c. 1560–1640’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61.2 (2010): 279–98. 15 Alan Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 3. 16 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006). 17 Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 195, 196. 18 James Calderwood, To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 20. 19 David Nicol, Middleton & Rowley: Forms of Collaboration in the Jacobean Playhouse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 48.

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20 Gary Taylor, ‘Lives and Afterlives’, in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 451. 21 See, for instance, R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 22 See John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 292–331. Later critics have clarified Stachniewski’s assertions that self-­doubt in Calvinism always implies the doubter’s damnation, but his reading of Doctor Faustus remains persuasive. 23 Lucian, Menippus, or the Descent into Hades, trans. A.M. Harmon, Loeb Classical Library 162, 105–7. 24 For Nashe’s Lucianic heritage, see Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 172. 25 For Vindice’s orchestration of metadramatic moments to undermine the idea of providential design, see Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For the misogyny of the play that would allow a statement that holds women responsible for men going to hell, see Steven Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45.2 (1994): 139–62, esp. 158–62. 26 ‘The characters in the Moralities are personified abstractions and moral or social types, representing the main forces for or against the salvation of the individual and social stability; they have no dramatic functions outside the doctrinal scheme. The actions on the stage are symbolic, not realistic, and the incidents are related to each other logically, as parts of an allegory or as illustrations of the argument. The Revenger’s Tragedy is constructed on closely similar lines’, Leo Salingar, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Tradition’, Scrutiny 6 (1938): 402–24, reprinted in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: The Revenger’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, The Changeling: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (London: Macmillan, 1990).

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27 Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 101. 28 Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J.B. Steane (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 56. 29 Nicholl, Cup, 101. 30 Nashe, Pierce, 118–9. 31 Hutson, Thomas Nashe, 180. 32 Ibid., 174. 33 G.B. Shand, ‘Introduction’, The Black Book in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 204. 34 Molly Hand, ‘ “Now is hell landed here upon the earth”: Renaissance Poverty and Witchcraft in Thomas Middleton’s The Black Book’, Renaissance and Reformation 31.1 (2008): 84, 80. 35 Karen Kettnich, ‘Nashe’s Extemporal Vein and His Tarltonizing Wit’, in The Age of Nashe, eds Stephen Guy-Bray, Joan PongLinton and Steven Mentz (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 100. 36 Pierce Penniless features an extended defence of the theatre as a remedy for the vice of sloth as well as a great teacher of moral wisdom, instructing the audience in the ‘ill success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissension, and how just God is evermore in punishing of murder’ (Nashe, Pierce, 114); it concludes with a round-­up of respected contemporaries, including ‘famous Ned [Edward] Alleyn’, Richard Tarlton, Knell and Bentley. Greene’s Newes Out of Heaven and Hell (London, 1593) features Greene discussing his own books with various ghosts; and Henry Chettle’s Kind Hart’s Dream (London, 1593[?]) refers to visitations from Tarlton and Greene as well as from Pierce himself and his Knight of the Post. 37 Thomas Middleton, The Black Book, ed. G.B. Shand, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 204–18; ll. 38, 62, 407–8, 417–18. 38 Both Thomas Dekker’s Knight’s Conjuring (London, 1607) and the anonymous The Returne of the Knight of the Poste from

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Hell, with the Diuels Aunswere to the Supplication of Pierce Penilesse (London, 1606) quickly followed Middleton’s piece. 39 Falconer, Hell, 18, 17. 40 Alan Bernstein, ‘Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: 1100–1500’, in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Christianity in Western Europe, 1100–1500, eds Miri Rubin and Walter Simmons, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 201. 41 Although this logic may be seen to inform the distinction by Christian theologians between poena damni (the penalty of loss of God presence) and poena sensus (physical pain), both of these experiences apply to the afterlife and are meant to be seen as aspects of suffering in a real, regional hell. 42 ‘The Dantean hell was ordered, even hierarchical. The hell of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, as well as most Protestant versions of hell, gave up that order in the interests of the psychological drama of damnation, with millions of the damned crushed promiscuously together, with a revolting stench’; John Casey, After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 193. 43 Marshall, ‘Infernalisms’, 282, 286. 44 Ibid., 289. 45 Ibid., 290. 46 Casey, After Lives, 139. 47 Marshall, ‘Infernalisms’, 295. 48 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-­disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 80. 49 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 145. 50 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, eds Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 264, 262. 51 The scholarship here is vast. For a helpful summary, see Maria Franziska Fahey, Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), xiv– xvii, 1–21.

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52 Jenny Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 19. 53 Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber, ‘Introduction’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, eds Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11. 54 Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 37. 55 Daniel Jacobson, The Language of The Revenger’s Tragedy (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974), 69–70. He takes the term ‘galvanizing’ from H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 348–9. 56 Ibid., 165. 57 Ibid., 204. 58 C.A. Patrides, ‘Renaissance and Modern Views on Hell’, The Harvard Review 57.3 (1964): 218. 59 Casey, After Lives, 8. 60 Jacobson, Language, 122. 61 Una Ellis-Fermor’s analysis is wonderfully apt: The Revenger’s Tragedy’s characters are ‘animated corpses’ that ‘do so adequately mimic life’ (The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation [London: Methuen, 1953], 164, 153).

4 Calvinism and the Problematic of Character in The Revenger’s Tragedy Ian McAdam

This essay proposes to explore a theological rationale for the apparent absence of interiority in the characters of Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Admittedly there could be several reasons, related to genre, for this artistic feature, which is not necessarily a limitation. One obvious explanation is that the character types, bordering on allegorical representations of lechery, bastardy, ambition, chastity, and so on, arise from the playwright’s conscious intent to deploy the features of the morality play to parody the overt didacticism of a providential viewpoint, as in Jonathan Dollimore’s oft-­cited reading. While it is difficult to deny the elements of parody and black comedy in the play, the bitterness of the humour and the nightmarish quality of the action nevertheless raise questions about cultural pathology in the world Middleton depicts – questions that are not limited to the excessively conservative, timidly strait-­ laced readers, dismissed by Dollimore, who are eager to ‘render respectable’ an ‘otherwise very disturbing play’.1 Gary

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Taylor enthusiastically endorses T.S. Eliot’s observation that Middleton is ‘both a great comic writer and a great tragic writer’, ranking him with Shakespeare and virtually no other English playwright.2 Yet what could be termed the disconcerting simultaneity of the comic and tragic expression remains a vexing critical issue: this striking feature of Middleton’s work may be linked to the coincidence of his astonishing gifts as a satirist with his apparent commitment to a religious ideology that may leave little or no room for human self-­improvement, indeed even for human agency. Such theological commitment will be my focus in the following discussion, but specifically in light of the following consideration. The Revenger’s Tragedy may be less a parody of the morality tradition than a parodic response – albeit an ideologically and psychologically complex one – to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a text which, probably more famously than any other early modern play, constitutes a significant promulgation of human interiority. My initial approach to this topic was in fact influenced by Shakespeare’s commonly noted overshadowing, through his psychological profundity, of another contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, whose theological associations parallel Middleton’s. With respect to this particular overshadowing, the critical consensus, even before Harold Bloom introduced the currently highly controversial phrase, was that Marlowe and other playwrights of the 1580s arrived, or flowered artistically, a little too early to take advantage of Shakespeare’s supposed ‘invention of the human’. Thus in the 1980s Simon Shepherd observed, while composing his study of Marlowe, a television programme ‘in which extracts from pre-Shakespearean plays are read [by RSC actors] in silly voices to show how unreal they are, and extracts from Shakespeare are read earnestly to show how “natural” and real is the achievement of his blank verse’.3 The irony of this observation nicely underlines the perniciousness of critical and historical prejudice, but does not quite dismiss the real distinction of Shakespearean psychological insight. I perhaps want to have my critical cake and eat it too when I challenge the seemingly absurd assertion that

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Shakespeare ‘invented’ the human but recognize something fundamentally revolutionary about the way he imagined human character. But since his artistry contrasts with the achievements of dramatists who both predate and postdate his example, I propose in this case a theological rationale to explain the distinction: Middleton, like Marlowe before him, was deeply influenced by, and/or arguably strongly reacting against, Calvinist doctrine, the dominant form of Protestantism in early modern England. This argument does not suppose that Shakespeare, by contrast, was a committed Catholic whose work consistently reflects or subtly promotes such an ideological agenda – only that something in his Catholic upbringing4 produced a detachment or a distance from what I consider a specific cultural pathology of his age, in the sense that Freud described societies themselves as becoming ‘neurotic’.5 The generally Calvinist context of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is now widely accepted, although interpretations vary over the extent to which Marlowe directly interrogates the religious ideology underpinning his play. While emphasizing a Lutheran rather than Calvinist theology but nevertheless recognizing a similar pattern of potentially aggressive but radically unstable self-­ assertion, G.K. Hunter significantly anticipated the present ‘turn to religion’ in his reading of Tamburlaine when he located its roots in Reformation concerns: the ‘attitude of mind [. . .] depicted [in Tamburlaine is] an atheistic version of the Lutheran soul in its search for justification through faith – atheistic because in this case the believer has simply excluded God from the equation and concentrated his faith on himself’.6 As a University Wit at Cambridge, Marlowe was exposed to a profoundly Calvinist environment, since his arrival there ‘coincided with the period when William Perkins became known by his preaching as the most popular and effective spokesman for the extreme Calvinists’.7 Middleton’s Calvinist credentials are perhaps even more emphatically established in early modern literary scholarship; as Gary Taylor’s well-­known summary states, Middleton’s

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‘literary practice and his representation of writers reflect a specifically Protestant poetics. He had strong and varied personal and professional connections with Puritans [. . .] The vocabulary and psychology of his major tragedies is strongly Calvinist’.8 The impact of Protestantism upon early modern dramatists has been widely discussed in recent years. Such influences have been observed in Webster, for example, particularly in The Duchess of Malfi, with Dena Goldberg in the 1980s asserting that ‘the Duchess is a perfect Puritan heroine’, and Huston Diehl in the 1990s developing a reading based on the assumption that this tragedy ‘is deeply informed by English Calvinism’ since the ‘tragic predicament of characters like Bosola’ reflects notions of predestination.9 More recently Adrian Streete has offered a compelling analysis of the influence of Protestant theology on early modern drama, in particular the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton.10 Even Ben Jonson’s sporadic commitment to Protestantism, interrupted by his ten-­year foray into the Catholic fold, may have influenced his dramatic portrayal of (for example) gender in ways that transcend the mere satire on Puritanism.11 Nevertheless, Middleton’s work suggests the deepest kind of commitment to, or obsession with, Calvinist doctrine. Such commitment problematizes human agency – and by extension, in a patriarchal culture, masculinity – in ways that resemble anxious masculine self-­authorization in other playwrights of the period. Yet in Middleton the process by which uncertain subjectivity extends into forms of dehumanization is, I suggest, carried disturbingly further.

Theology of grace and masculine incapacity I wish then to investigate the peculiar trauma associated with a culture which has embraced the key doctrine of sola fide, justification by faith alone – but significantly a faith granted by

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God’s grace only to the elect, as a predestined condition – and more specifically the political trauma in effect inflicted by such a belief system on traditional hierarchies of gender and class. I contend that the Protestant denial of the efficacy of works in the process of salvation placed a particular strain on constructions of masculinity. Furthermore, the insistence on human depravity admittedly inherent in all forms of Christianity which assert the doctrine of Original Sin translated, to a nightmarish degree, into a demonization of sexuality within the theological constructs of Protestant cultures. Alexandra Shepard identifies ‘the impact of the Reformation (and the Protestant rejection of clerical celibacy) on the range of male identities’12 as one lacuna in the historiography of early modern masculinity. While no one would claim the absence of misogyny in Catholic societies and households, the radical subversion of human (and masculine) integrity inherent in a theology of grace led, I suggest, to a peculiar intensification of idealized female chastity, and of the male responsibility for and obsession with its maintenance within political and especially domestic contexts. More generally, such theology encouraged the convenient displacement of an insupportable sense of human (sexual) depravity onto the scapegoat of women. In England, theological concerns were intensified by tensions arising from related social transformations. Tanya Pollard interrupts her general description of Renaissance revenge tragedy to offer a familiar but helpful description of the social scene which reminds us of the increasingly high stakes, and increasing personal anxiety, in the process of social advancement and the assertion of political control for men of various classes: ‘The Elizabethan court’s growing monopoly on power weakened the status and fortunes of the aristocratic classes, as well as those who depended on them for employment and patronage. [. . .] The emergence of a market economy, meanwhile, opened up prospects of social mobility for those in the middle class with education and entrepreneurial instincts’.13 Shakespeare himself engages with the psychological challenges of the Reformation in the ‘great’ tragedies at the

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height of his career, where Calvinist conceptions, or rather traumatic limitations, of male self-­authorization are gradually worked through, imaginatively, as a prelude to his more comprehensive attempt to integrate masculine and feminine polarities in the final tragicomedies. This process clearly constitutes an enormous, and separate, topic.14 Let me nevertheless raise here a central issue which impacts a variety of early modern English writers: the ‘mystical’ dimension of self-­fashioning in the context of Reformation theology can hardly be exaggerated. Redcrosse’s struggle with the dragon near the end of Book 1 of The Faerie Queene is emblematic: as Satan, the dragon must be defeated through heroic endeavour, but its fire simultaneously and paradoxically represents God’s burning wrath.15 Thus the salvation of the human self amounts to the destruction of the human self, and metaphysical good and evil are apparently impossible to tell apart from a human perspective. This paradox is essentially Pauline: ‘For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. [. . .] Mortifie therefore your members which are on the earth, fornication, unclenness, the inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, & covetousnes which is idolatrie’ (Colossians 3.3–5, Geneva Bible). Unless we regard the entire work as simply a gesture of hypocrisy or ideological opportunism, Middleton’s personal investment in such theology may be ascertained from his pamphlet The Two Gates of Salvation (1609), which clearly demonstrates ‘the dramatist’s acquaintance with and interest in a typological vision’, and in which he clearly asserts, ‘To preserue the memory of this expected Redeemer [Christ], more liuely, sundry pictures of him (as it were) were drawne in the persons of others. Kings, Priests and Prophets, were appointed to be shadowes of him that was the true and only substance’.16 That is, according to this theology, Christ constitutes the only genuine identity; all the rest of human experience and human interaction which does not directly anticipate or reflect his Incarnation is the shadow-­play of souls bound only – regardless of their temporary triumphs and failures, their personal losses and gains – for irrevocable damnation.

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This argument sheds light on another contradiction or apparent paradox in Middleton’s art, the fact that a Calvinist emphasis on self-­cancellation, a lack of human integrity, actually forms an impetus, at this historical moment, for a depth model of the self. John Stachniewski has argued that ‘the Reformation, especially Calvinism, seems [. . .] to be the main cultural origin of what eventuated in Freudian depth-­ psychology’.17 For Stachniewski, this phenomenon arises primarily from the unconscious nature of the soul’s predestined state; thus, for example, The Changeling’s Beatrice-Joanna can optimistically assume a life of opportunity, of ‘election’, with initially only intimations of her darkly reprobate character. Admittedly social ambition, especially on the part of individuals with origins in the lower classes, did much to increase the appeal of Calvinism in early modern England – Nicholas Tyacke reminds us of ‘the incipient egalitarianism of Calvinism’,18 and so the theology’s attraction for playwrights like Marlowe and Middleton, in spite of what we now clearly identify as its psychological terrors, is understandable.19 But the frequently self-­destructive nature of both playwrights’ protagonists might also suggest why the socially revolutionary potential of their art seems so often subsumed in a vision of the general corruption of humanity. Indeed, Dollimore’s observation that ‘the futility and destructiveness of social life seem to have their source in some deeper condition of existence; at the very heart of life itself there moves a principle of self-­ stultification’20 strikes me as simply an accurate description of the Calvinist ideology underpinning The Revenger’s Tragedy. From this assertion it is a short ideological distance to Heather Hirschfeld’s persuasive suggestion that the action of The Revenger’s Tragedy may be considered as a significant but futile attempt to transcend Original Sin: ‘While they are obviously occasions for punishing the guilty, Vindice’s efforts at revenge, particularly his use of disguise, are also opportunities for him to fashion himself free of the moral and sexual stain preached by contemporary religious discourse and ascribed to all humans as the necessary bequest of one’s parents’. The

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irony, however, of Vindice’s disguise as Piato ‘is that [his] attempt at self-­making only reinstalls the original, and originally sinful, Vindice’. The upshot of this ironic failure of ‘genuine’ self-­fashioning is that Vindice ‘becomes the ultimate object of his destructive tendencies, fulfilling his own suggestion that he has been hired to kill himself’.21 When Hirschfeld refers to the ‘moral and sexual stain [. . .] ascribed to all humans as the necessary bequest of one’s parents’, we are reminded not only of the parallel trauma regarding sexual and parental origins in Hamlet, but also of the very different version of ‘working through’ offered by the Shakespearean characterizations. Hirschfeld makes a nice distinction which I would like to develop: ‘the question that is most important to Vindice is not focused on who he is (the issue that haunts Hamlet), but who has made him who he is’.22 While Shakespeare depicts a character famously obsessed with fathoming his own interiority, Middleton offers a protagonist whose erratic career reflects a desperate attempt to fashion himself in the face of uncertain ontological origins and a suspicion of their irrevocable corruption.

Fathers imitable and inimitable Hirschfeld refers significantly to The Revenger’s Tragedy’s deliberate parody of Hamlet, in particular the protagonist’s tormented relationship to the afterlife (see above, Chapter 3). The appearance of a ghost from Purgatory in the apparently Protestant context of Shakespeare’s Denmark seems, in my own reading experience, not only less odd than it used to, but in some ways almost historically predictable or inevitable. According to Protestant propaganda, the fiction of Purgatory constitutes, ultimately, an enormous financial scam, with no scriptural authority whatsoever, on the part of the medieval church, but in Hamlet the oddness of the ghost’s provenance in fact constitutes an implicit challenge to the doctrine of Original Sin and the Atonement. In Greenblatt’s succinct formulation,

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Purgatory contains ‘souls destined for Heaven, but they cannot enter its sacred precincts with the burden of even relatively minor sins upon them. Why did God’s sacrifice of his own Son not suffice to clean the slate of each soul? Because that sacrifice did not erase individual moral responsibility’.23 In the patriarchal context of early modern England, Prince Hamlet’s tormented relationship to the afterlife therefore involves a progressive attempt to imagine an adequate, imitable masculine role through which responsible human agency can be grounded. In contrast to Middleton, Shakespeare’s ultimate interest is in human integrity; if he favours hierarchy, he is ultimately drawn to hierarchies of merit, anathema to the Calvinist worldview. Gary Taylor argues that, while Shakespeare’s portrayal of the nobility ‘is not always flattering’, his ‘many royal protagonists are almost always the focus of intense psychological engagement and empathy. Their dramatic presence and power is unmistakable. In Shakespeare kings matter’.24 Anyone at all familiar with Shakespeare’s work will find this claim generally incontestable, although some qualification might be encouraged by the more recent attention to Shakespeare’s possibly republican leanings, as in Andrew Hadfield’s suggestion that ‘a more careful analysis of the political options open to Shakespeare, and his use of them in his plays and poetry, will reveal a highly politicized and radical thinker, interested in republicanism’. In spite of Hadfield’s somewhat ambiguous treatment of the development of republican thought, especially in the latter stages of the playwright’s career after ‘the republican moment had passed with the death of Elizabeth’, this critic’s general emphasis on ‘the republican ideal of a society that can promote virtue and eliminate vice’ again suggests Shakespeare’s ideological distance from Calvinist assumptions regarding (the impossibility of) human perfectibility.25 While I don’t propose a simplistic resolution to the sometimes intriguing contradictions raised by the complex question of Shakespeare’s political affinities, I suggest that it may be critically helpful to propose that the playwright’s work emphasizes not so much the importance of

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kings, as the importance of fathers who serve as sound authorities and role models. Definite traces of ‘nostalgia’ for the old religion, the old order, can on occasion be identified in Shakespeare. But while ‘Shakespeare makes the past real [. . .] Middleton makes the present unreal’.26 Vindice, unlike Hamlet, does not deeply mourn (is not haunted by) his father, although Vindice admits, ‘since my worthy father’s funeral / My life’s unnatural to me, e’en compelled, / As if I lived now when I should be dead’ (1.1.119– 21). The apparently suicidal sentiment here understandably motivates Brian Gibbons’s comment that ‘The analogy with Hamlet seems clear and deliberate,’ but the effect of the comparison underlines the radical devaluation of the fatherly role in Middleton.27 Since Vindice’s father has ‘died / Of discontent, the nobleman’s consumption’ (126–7), the class status of the family appears to be, vaguely, some type of lower-­ level aristocracy that is now languishing due to its failure to procure further favour from social superiors. The main legacy from his father which Vindice emphasizes is the inheritance of misogynistic attitudes, as he approves of his father’s distrust of his mother – ‘Wives are but made to go to bed and feed’ (132), he says in reference to his parents’ erotic and emotional rapport. We might attribute the distinction between the father-­son bonds in Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy to the different biographies of Middleton and Shakespeare. As Gary Taylor observes, ‘to a five-­year-old boy the death of his father is almost always unexpected and unexplainable’; Middleton’s then rather elderly mother, ‘an affluent propertied widow’, made the mistake of marrying a man twenty years her junior and of highly questionable character. The subsequent legal battles in this ‘classic dysfunctional marriage’,28 and the presumed effect on the playwright’s later interpretations of conflict and competition in Jacobean London, are well known from the biographical summaries of Middleton’s life. Even better known is the story of the eldest son William Shakespeare’s presumably close identification with his father John, whose notable social

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climbing career apparently reached its apex in 1576, with his impressionable son in early adolescence; the reasons for John Shakespeare’s subsequent fall from social grace remain controversial, but are possibly related to his recusant status in the Warwickshire social context. The prosperous playwright’s eventual attainment of a coat of arms for the Shakespeare family in 1596 is often read, unsurprisingly, as a kind of vindication for the thwarted ambitions of his father, who had first sought the honour thirty years earlier. However naïve the clash between the cynical and the sentimental in these two admittedly speculative life histories, their differences may nevertheless represent something significant in the contrasting attitudes of the two playwrights toward paternal authority. Yet theological distinctions can provide further suggestive reasons for varying attitudes toward idealized fatherhood. Adrian Streete, in his discussion of The Revenger’s Tragedy, considers the following intriguing passage from Calvin’s popular Sermons . . . on the Epistles of S. Paule to Timothie and Titus (1579): The name father is so honorable, that it belongeth to none, but to God onely. Yea in respect of our bodies. And therefore, when we say, that they which have begotten vs, according to the flesh, are our fathers, it is an vnproper kind of speech: for no mortall creature deserueth this so high and excellent dignitie: yet so it is, that God of his singular goodnesse aduaunceth men, to this so high a steppe, that he will that they be called fathers: and he doth it to this end and purpose, that they should acknowledge them selues to be so much more bound vnto him. According to Streete’s reading of this passage, ‘the role of Father is only grudgingly bequeathed to fallen humankind. Because it is only ever a fallen, fleshy and immanent copy of God’s patriarchy, the name of the Father represents, at best, a surrogate title, and at worst, traumatic abandonment’.29 The word ‘traumatic’ indicates a developing pathology, and there is

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definitely a perverse emphasis in Calvin’s own logic concerning the deity’s honouring men with the name of ‘father’ – that is, a role of authority but also more crucially of loving and dedicated responsibility – only so that they will become more (cripplingly) dependent on Him. Not only is the Calvinist God inimitable, but the earthly fathers he authorizes are so alienated from their own physicality that they encourage, or contribute to, a general deracination of masculinity. As observed above, Vindice in the opening scene only fleetingly idealizes his father with the adjective ‘worthy’. His primary motive appears to be revenge for the murder of his betrothed, famously objectified in the skull he carries onstage, coupled with sexual nausea directed at the corruption of the court. His cultural critique is memorably underlined in his opening soliloquy, where he functions as a satirical chorus denouncing the members of the Duke’s family as they pass over the stage in torchlight. His special target is the vile nature of the murderer of his betrothed, the Duke as ‘royal lecher’ or allegorized ‘grey haired Adultery’:     Oh that marrowless age Should stuff the hollow bones with damned desires And, ’stead of heat, kindle infernal fires Within the spendthrift veins of a dry duke, A parched and juiceless luxur! Oh God, one That has scarce blood enough to live upon, And he to riot it like a son and heir? (1.1.5–11) Brian Gibbons’s annotation to this passage cites the ‘prodigal son’ as ‘a stock type in dramatic satire of city and court at this period’. Unlike the prodigal son of the parable, however, there is no redemptive possibility in this Duke, who as reigning patriarch is oddly described as the junior recipient, not the senior donor of wealth and sustenance, implying the inversion or collapse of social hierarchy, as well as a general infantilization of the characters in the play. Indeed, the image,

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which might be read as emblematic of the play’s entire action, recurs in fourth act. After Vindice has achieved his revenge upon the Duke, he pursues (now in propria persona) his vendetta upon the son Lussurioso, whom he teases with a picture of ‘A usuring father to be boiling in hell and his son and heir with a whore dancing over him’ (4.2.86–7). The tableau suggests that, in Middleton, the role of father and son does not involve respectful emulation and eventual loving succession through manly inheritance of responsibility, but a hellish form of parasitical consumption by both usuring father, preying upon the financially needy, and the greedy, expectant son, heartlessly and foolishly squandering his inheritance in anticipation. Such hellish composition seems the natural result of a theology which completely denies the desideratum of human integrity.

The intensification of misogyny Even the whore in this tableau appears the inevitable demonized doppelganger of the wife prized and objectified only for her idealized chastity, as the projection of the husband’s own obsession with spiritual purity. What reader does not note the irony that Vindice ultimately forces the remains of his ‘beloved’ Gloriana into the very prostitution with the Duke that she sacrificed her life to avoid? In the opening scene, Vindice laments the ‘ragged imperfections’ of Gloriana’s skull, ironically recalling the ‘hollow bones’ of the Duke himself, and remembers when ‘life and beauty naturally filled out’ the ‘bright face’ (1.1.6–17); but such memory leads directly to the assertion that ‘she was able to ha’ made a usurer’s son / Melt all his patrimony in a kiss’ (26–7), so that even at her best and brightest Gloriana served simply as fuel to male lust and dissipation. In Act  3, Vindice’s famous, and appalling, apostrophe to the skull, now ‘dressed up in tires’ just before the murder of the Duke, seems neatly to displace the blame for sexual corruption onto womankind in general:

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And now methinks I could e’en chide myself For doting on her beauty [. . . .] Does every proud and self-­affecting dame Camphor her face for this? And grieve her maker In sinful baths of milk, when many an infant starves For her superfluous outside – all for this? (3.5.69–87) Careful readers or spectators will also note that, when the other female corpse appears on stage, the widower Antonio denounces the Duchess’s youngest son for a ‘long lust to eat / Into my wearing’, and for singling out among all the ladies ‘that dear form, who ever lived / As cold in lust as she is now in death’ (1.4.32–5) – not only conflating loving husband and rapist in a radical objectification of women, but underlining a sense of sterility in the society as a whole. Sickness follows sickness here, from an excessive idealization of form that denies, or rather perverts, the reality of human processes grounded in the physical world. That Hippolito wishes to ‘dip’ the ‘fair . . . monument’ of Antonio’s wife’s corpse ‘in the defacer’s blood’ (67–8) suggests a surprising conflation whereby little ethical difference remains between men who ‘honour’ women and men who defile them. A similar conflation is conveyed obliquely later when Junior, irritated by his incarceration for rape and impatient for his elder brothers to effect his relief, exclaims, ‘Is’t not strange that a man should lie in a whole month for a woman?’ (3.4.15–16), where the careful sequestering of a beloved wife after childbirth is equated with his own apparent ‘inconvenience’ due to lawless and violent desire. Yet disturbingly the behaviour and ethical values of the abhorrent ducal family differ little from the outraged subjects who oppose them. We should not, perhaps, express surprise at the level of misogyny in this play, when we recall Steven Mullaney’s observation that ‘Revenge tragedy has long been recognized [. . .] for the speed with which it becomes virtually synonymous

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with stage misogyny’. Yet even Mullaney, in comparing The Revenger’s Tragedy with Hamlet, must admit that Vindice ‘can easily make Hamlet sound like a proto-­feminist’,30 and I would like to consider more closely this critic’s crucial analysis of the relation between the two texts. Mullaney is concerned with Hamlet as a play ‘keenly aware of its late Elizabethan status’, and Middleton’s early Jacobean response to it is clearly underlined by the fact that Vindice’s beloved Gloriana carries the sobriquet of ‘Elizabeth’s idealized royal persona’.31 The parallel between Elizabeth and Gertrude which Mullaney assumes suggests that ‘Mourning for a dead king, even revenge, is displaced or at least overlaid and complicated by misogyny toward a queen who is too vital, whose sexuality transgresses both her age and [in Gertrude’s specific case] her brief tenure as a widow’. Thus Hamlet’s melancholy is ‘produced as much by Gertrude’s sexual vitality as by his father’s death’. In response, Hamlet in the graveyard scene – another crucial moment that clearly catalyzed Middleton’s interest – contemplates Yorick’s skull, which ‘prompts not a reflection on human or even male mortality but a triumphant reading and declaration of female mortality: “Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come”.’ Yet how then can we agree that Hamlet presents but a mitigated version of Vindice’s misogyny? Mullaney partly provides a rationale when he observes that ‘Yorick’s tenure in the grave, twenty-­three years, dates [. . .] a specific moment in the past, Hamlet’s age when Yorick died, and it is hardly an insignificant number. Seven was not only the canonical age of reason. In the Renaissance, it was also the age of transition from childhood to youth [. . .] the breeching age’. Therefore, like Leontes in the second scene of The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet also ‘recoils exactly twenty-­three years to remember an early modern version of a pre-­oedipal phase’.32 But if, according to Mullaney, ‘the confrontation with Yorick’s skull produces the one clear instance of successful mourning in the play’,33 then the graveyard scene constitutes, I suggest, a radical difference from Vindice’s perverse obsession

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with Gloriana’s skull, which has in fact led to an unexplained emotional paralysis of nine years (3.5.122). A distinction between the forms of paralysis in the two revenge plays needs to be drawn. I suggest that in Hamlet the memory of the father’s jester, while a temporary regression, also constitutes a distinct case of reculer pour mieux sauter, and therefore that Yorick serves as a kind of surrogate father for Hamlet at a crucial moment after his return from the aborted voyage to England. Hamlet’s subsequent declaration, ‘I loved Ophelia – forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum’ (5.1.258–60),34 does, in spite of his earlier brutalization of her, suggest at least an attempt to transcend a misogynistic objectification of his beloved. In Act 5, Hamlet is no longer haunted by the contradictorily purgatorial presence of his overly idealized father, as he has begun to achieve a more coherent interiority. His self-­construction is grounded neither in the theoretical absence of responsibility postulated by a Calvinist theology of grace, nor – what is in effect the inevitable and fantastical opposite of the psychological binary – in the narcissistic and desperate assumption of ‘Christhood’, of absolute responsibility indirectly encouraged in Protestant doctrine by an unqualified identification with a Heavenly Father through an unmediated relationship with God. A dialectically medial psychological position has been achieved: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-­hew them how we will’ (5.2.10–11). My most controversial claim will therefore involve a challenge to, at least a qualification of, Mullaney’s assumption that ‘the more rigidly hierarchical the system of patriarchy, the more rabid and chronic are its expressions of misogyny’.35 In general, ‘rigid’ patterns of identification certainly produce anxiety and potentially violent reactions, but I suggest that the narcissistic erosion of clear patterns of masculine identification in this historical case accentuates the misogynistic cultural formulations. Mullaney’s identification of Gertrude with Elizabeth I is interesting and compelling, but also directly contradicts the historicized reading of Andrew Hadfield, who

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instead suggests a parallel between Gertrude and Mary, Queen of Scots: in the face of ‘Hamlet’s aggressive misogyny when he confronts his mother with her complicity in Claudius’s deeds (3.4) [. . .] the audience cannot be sure whether Hamlet is most enraged about her complicity [. . .] or her choice of sexual partners, an ambivalence mirrored in anti-Marian propaganda.’ Thus Hadfield implicitly supports the reading of Howard Erskine-Hill, who argues that the play ‘dramatized the position of King James VI [. . .] the tragically incapacitated inheritor of the unnatural scene into which he had been born’.36 My point here is to suggest that artistic or cultural identification with various monarchs, either female or male, while significant, may not be so historically fundamental to the issues at hand as the inherent ‘effeminization’ or undermining of human agency due to a theology of grace, a process that Shakespeare in a sense attempts to work through artistically and psychologically, but which Middleton, in spite of his satirical brilliance, effectively reifies.

The reification of corruption Such reification in Middleton, as we have seen, takes on an unusual intensity of parasitical consumption and predatory competition between infantilized men. This process is undoubtedly highlighted and assisted by the corrupt women of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Gratiana, for example, easily agrees to prostitute her daughter to Lussurioso, proving her own lack of human integrity and belying the sanctity of her morality name. When her husband fails to immediately dismiss the rape charge against her youngest son, the Duchess bitterly observes, ‘an old man’s twice a child’, and, surprised at her own ‘mildness’, imagines, ‘Some now would plot his death / With easy doctors, those loose living men, / And make his withered grace fall to his grave / And keep church better’ (1.2.93–100). For her, the only valid agency is thus rank perversion of justice, the only valid ‘church’ a depository for such failed agency. This

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corruption of humanist agency is virtually celebrated in Vindice’s final, self-­parodic anagnorisis: ‘ ’Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes. / When murd’rers shut deeds close, this curse does seal ’em: / If none disclose ’em they themselves reveal ’em’ (5.3.108–11). Black comedy or tragic farce? It is the simultaneity of the comedy and tragedy that, as noted at the outset, emphasizes the moral problem in Middleton. In fact, the inevitable pattern of parasitical consumption and predation varies little between his tragedies and his comedies. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, for example, offers the memorable image of the ‘wittol’ or willing cuckold Allwit, who happily celebrates his ‘founder’ Sir Walter Whorehound as one who has ‘maintained my house this ten years, / Not only keeps my wife, but a keeps me / And all my family. I am at his table; / He gets me all my children, and pays the nurse’ (1.2.16–19).37 But of course Whorehound is just another kind of parasite, who borrows heavily on the expectation of an inheritance that slips through his fingers in the end due to the surreptitiously adulterous conception of Lady Kix at the hands of her ‘physician’ Touchwood Senior, whose sexual virility does not guarantee his manliness but threatens to ruin him (it doesn’t help that he, like Whorehound, is chronically addicted to adulterous liaisons). The situation is undoubtedly hilarious, but the denouement perhaps less so. Whorehound’s pursuit of the generous dowry of Moll, daughter of the prosperous goldsmith Yellowhammer – ‘I shall receive two thousand pound in gold / And a sweet maidenhead worth forty’ (4.4.54–5) – brings him in competition with the protagonist Touchwood Junior, whose motives are only arguably, or parodically, more romantic. The resulting violent altercation leaves Whorehound seriously wounded, and the news of Lady Kix’s pregnancy encourages the Allwits to heartlessly abandon their ‘founder.’ Yet the downfall of Whorehound contributes to the play’s most interesting ideological effect. He abruptly becomes more psychologically realistic than the other characters and demonstrates an interiority that challenges the conventions of comedy:

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    Let me for ever hide my cursed face From sight of those that darkens all my hopes, And stands between me and the sight of heaven! His subsequent moral struggle is strongly reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Claudius: O, how my offences wrestle with my repentance! It hath scarce breath; Still my adulterous guilt hovers aloft, And with her black wings beats down all my prayers Ere they be halfway up. (5.1.68–77) It may be that the comic form of the play forces us to read this as a parody of repentance, but I have lingered over this textual moment because it seems to develop a technique evident even in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the composition of which predates Chaste Maid by about a half-­dozen years.38 There the despicable Duke, debating whether to forgive his son for apparent, if mistaken, treason and attempted patricide, pauses to observe:     It well becomes that judge to nod at crimes That does commit greater himself and lives. I may forgive a disobedient error That expect pardon for adultery, And in my old days am a youth in lust. Many a beauty have I turned to poison In the denial, covetous of all. (2.3.122–8) While perhaps not demonstrating the same complexity as Whorehound’s repentance, this speech conveys the similar odd effect of attributing to the play’s antagonist or villain a greater sense of conscience, and a deeper interiority, than the protagonists or heroes with whom we are apparently invited

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to identify. Although an admission of crimes might be considered typical of the morality tradition, in that tradition such heartfelt language is more typically assigned to the protagonists; in Middleton the rhetoric of Whorehound and the Duke, both despised and distanced from audience sympathy, indicate an apparently incongruous depth of soul-­searching (and therefore of soul) absent in the other characters – as if the only possible human depth is the depth of corruption.39 In fact the morally and artistically constrained resolutions of four of Middleton’s most well-­known plays seem to evidence a similar problem: the coffin trick and mock resurrections at the end of Chaste Maid, which carry the parody of romantic conventions to an uncomfortable, potentially profane, extreme; the notorious concluding masque of Women Beware Women, sometimes read as artistically incompetent, inadvertently or perhaps rather intentionally comic (as a parody of tragedy); the complex masquing that almost farcically resolves the action of The Revenger’s Tragedy, where the tone of black comedy seems perhaps more consistent, both with the preceding action and the gleeful final self-­erasure of the tragic protagonist; the pat moralizing by the unbearably self-­righteous Alsemero at the conclusion of The Changeling, which leads to debates concerning possible differences of reception between early modern and postmodern audiences. All these issues may be related to what Anthony Dawson, in a highly compelling treatment of feminist political implications in Women Beware Women, identifies as a ‘double commitment’ to ‘two coherent and independent modes of thinking and dramatizing which come into overt conflict’.40 Middleton’s increasing artistic stature in a postmodern age arises in part from how his now archaic theological determinism fuels a vision of social determinism, which chimes with present cultural attitudes. It is in fact not really a new critical observation to suggest that ‘Middleton’s life and art both suggest one who responded to rather than created circumstances, who was pessimistic about his ability to shape events, and painfully conscious of the limitations placed on human freedom by social and economic

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conditions’.41 But the aporia between the two modes identified by Dawson – the traditional ‘Christian’ morality and the Marxist or materialist determinism – still represents, or at least resembles, a significant ideological impasse of our own. At the beginning of this discussion I hedged my critical bets by asserting that Middleton, like Marlowe, was arguably strongly reacting against Calvinist doctrine. Perhaps through a ‘presentist’ urge, this is what I wanted to discover, what I repeatedly perceive in Marlowe and Shakespeare: a sustained and persistent interrogation of a religious ideology that strangles or distorts constructive psychological and social development. I do not therefore wish to deprecate the current revival of interest in Middleton, who remains unrivalled as a satirist and creator of an astonishing form of black humour. But his inability or unwillingness to challenge an ideological commitment to Calvinism might clarify why earlier critics, before the present celebratory rediscovery of his cultural significance, distanced Middleton from the line of more humane English dramatists, from Marlowe to Shakespeare and then on to Jonson. That people can become (in the broadest sense) morally or spiritually alive without denying their productive humanity is an idea, even intimation, I find nowhere in Middleton’s art. Middleton’s nightmarishly satirical morality types in The Revenger’s Tragedy, which explode the possibility of providential interpretation, ironically have their roots in the anti-­humanist element of Reformation theology which denies integrity or viable agency to any subjectivity not grounded, through typological thinking, in a direct identification with, or in direct relation to, Christ. While we would be astonished to discover Marlowe or Shakespeare as author of a work like The Two Gates of Salvation, Middleton’s authorship comes as really no surprise at all. As Thomas Luxon reminds us, ‘Even in his Christology Calvin emphasizes the distinction between, rather than the combination of, the divine and the human. [. . .] The divine may manifest itself in the human [. . .] but the two remain as distinct as sign and thing signified. In this world there is no fulfillment, only signs and shadows’.42 There is a

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direct ideological relation between this lack of ‘fulfillment’ and the lack of interiority in Middleton’s characters, both female and male, in ways that could be further explored in scholarship on his plays and his other forms of writing. From the perspective of a humanist reader who finds both doctrinal orthodoxy and a purely materialist worldview problematic as a constructive guide to human experience, Middleton’s corpus constitutes an often highly amusing but nevertheless cautionary kind of tale, since the dark logic of Calvinism lies at the heart of the disturbing paradox that a playwright apparently devoted to or at least obsessed by a spiritual belief system focuses so emphatically and bleakly on humankind’s material conditions.

Notes 1 Jonathan Dollimore, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy (c. 1606): Providence, Parody, and Black Camp’, in Radical Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 139–50, 139. 2 Gary Taylor, ‘Live and Afterlives’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 58. 3 Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), 72. 4 Colin Burrow assumes, in the course of his review of Greenblatt’s Will in the World, that the document discovered in the roof space of John Shakespeare’s house in Henley Street in 1757 is ‘too good to be true’; nevertheless, I am in full agreement with Patrick Collinson’s response to this assumption: ‘Sammy Schoenbaum, who provided most of the facts, had his own reservations as to the value of the Borromeo text as evidence of John Shakespeare’s Catholicism. I am not so cautious’ (London Review of Books 27.3 [3 February 2005]). 5 S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 110. 6 G.K. Hunter, ‘The Beginnings of Elizabethan Drama: Revolution and Continuity’, Renaissance Drama, n.s., 17 (1986): 29–52, 39.

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7 G.M. Pinciss, ‘Marlowe’s Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus’, SEL 33 (1993): 249–64, 252. 8 Gary Taylor, ‘Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton’, ELR 24 (1994): 283–314, 289. 9 Dena Goldberg, Between Worlds: A Study of the Plays of John Webster (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1987), 107; Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 182, 207. 10 Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 11 As I argue in ‘The Puritan Dialectic of Law and Grace in Bartholomew Fair’, SEL 46 (2006): 415–33. 12 Alexandra Shepard, ‘From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 281–95, 287. 13 Tanya Pollard, ‘Tragedy and Revenge’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, eds Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 59–60. 14 I have made some attempt to trace Shakespeare’s artistic response to this theological challenge in the central chapters of Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern Drama (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009). 15 See the commentary to 1.11.26 in Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), 148. 16 Paul Mulholland, ‘The Two Gates of Salvation: Typology, and Thomas Middleton’s Bibles’, English Language Notes 15 (1985): 27–36, 27, 28; quoting The Two Gates of Salvation, sigs. B2r–B2v. 17 John Stachniewski, ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’, in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1990), 228. 18 Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 246. 19 G.K. Hunter’s exploration of self-­justification in Tamburlaine, considered above, is consistent with this subversive aspect of the

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dramatic texts, in spite of the Lutheran rather than Calvinist emphasis of that argument. See Streete, Protestantism and Drama, 203–10, for a helpful introduction to the sometimes vexed distinctions between the relative political radicalness of Lutheranism and Calvinism in early modern Europe. 20 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 146. 21 Heather Hirschfeld, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy: Original Sin and the allures of vengeance’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, 201, 203, 208. 22 Ibid., 206. 23 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 66. 24 Taylor, ‘Forms of Opposition’, 310. 25 Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12–13, 205, 207. 26 Taylor, ‘Forms of Opposition’, 311. 27 Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: A&C Black, 1991). 28 Taylor, ‘Lives and Afterlives’, 30–1. 29 Streete, Protestantism and Drama, 213. 30 Steven Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 139–62, 144, 159. 31 Ibid., 149, 160. 32 Ibid., 149, 153, 154, 155–6. 33 Ibid., 156. 34 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006). 35 Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny’, 157. 36 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 202, 198; quoting Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 107. 37 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, ed. Linda Woodbridge, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 907–58.

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38 Whorehound’s repentance, parodic or otherwise, is also anticipated by the sudden qualms of conscience expressed by the adulterous Penitent Brothel in A Mad World, My Masters, another moral ‘crisis’ which in this early play does – though in a deeply ironic fashion – have a limited effect on the social corruption at large. 39 This feature in Middleton differs from the oft-­noted depth of, and uneasy sympathy for, supporting roles in Shakespearean comedy and tragedy (for example, Shylock, Malvolio, Claudius, Edmund). In these instances, such characters are hardly unique in their complexity, and the dialectical interaction between characters at least offers the possibility of moral and psychological growth, even when tragically occluded. 40 Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape’, SEL 27 (1987): 303–20, 315. 41 David L. Frost, Introduction to The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), ix. 42 Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4.

PA RT TWO

History and Topicality

5 Fashioning English Whiteness in The Revenger’s Tragedy Katherine Gillen

About to protest that he cannot stand to watch his bastard son have sex with his wife, the Duke in Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy utters the words ‘I cannot brook –’ (3.5.219), at which point the avenger Vindice interrupts him with the punning line, ‘The brook is turned to blood’ (3.5.219). Vindice’s quip attests to the massive quantities of blood that wash through the Italian court, as variants of the words ‘blood’ and ‘bleed’ appear thirty-­six times. Often this blood is physical, used in the sense of ‘Blood which is or has been shed’ (OED 2a), but this usage is complicated by other connotations of the word that pertain to personal, familial or national character. Lussurioso explains his lechery, for example, with the excuse that ‘It is our blood to err, though hell gaped loud’ (1.3.74), while Vindice states that he will ‘Venture [his] lands in heaven upon’ the ‘blood’ of his sister and mother (1.3.185). The play’s instances of ‘blood’ frequently have a class dimension, as in OED definition 9a, ‘Aristocratic birth; “good” family or

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parentage; gentility’, an association underscored by the frequent rhyming of ‘blood’ and ‘good’ in The Revenger’s Tragedy and throughout the Middleton canon. Supervacuo asserts that ‘The Duchess’ sons are too proud to bleed’ (3.1.21), and when the Duchess’s youngest son is about to be executed, he asks ‘Must I bleed, then, without respect of sign?’ (3.4.77), indicating that one’s aristocratic essence, rooted in the blood, is diffused when one bleeds, dissolving identity. Blood in The Revenger’s Tragedy, moreover, is associated with semen, another bodily fluid thought to contain one’s essence and to transmit aristocratic lineage. Spurio, for instance, imagines murdering his father in flagrante delicto and predicts, ‘After your lust, O, ’twill be fine to bleed’ (2.2.125), linking blood loss to ejaculation. Throughout, The Revenger’s Tragedy’s generic concern with violently spilled blood converges with cultural understandings of blood as ‘the inherited characteristic (later as the vehicle of hereditary characteristics) distinguishing members of a common family, nation, breed, etc., from other groups’ (OED 5). As Jean Feerick has demonstrated, discourses of blood were integral to early modern thinking about race, as blood functioned as ‘a repository of sacred principles and properties, the locus of a family’s virtue and social standing’.1 Although the term ‘blood’ was originally associated with high social rank, it evolved throughout the early modern period to inform emerging understandings of race that emphasized ethnicity and phenotype. Though imagined as a stable source of familial essence, blood was also considered volatile, one of the four humours and a material substance that could not easily be contained within the body. Early modern writers, Feerick contends, emphasize this unstable aspect of blood, ‘actively interrogating its status as a transcendent signifier, the cornerstone of the social hierarchy structuring England from within’.2 By disaggregating blood from social class, these writers rethink race as a category to which they, and not just elites, could belong, and they begin to think about cultural outsiders as belonging to alternate races. The Revenger’s

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Tragedy, I argue, participates in this cultural shift by marshalling the genre’s bloody thematics to interrogate residual class-­based understandings of race and to explore the implications of emerging racial ideologies in which shared blood linked not only all English people but, potentially, all Europeans.

English chastity and Italian corruption The Revenger’s Tragedy’s engagement with questions of race is shaped by its Italian setting, as Italy figured centrally within England’s negotiation of national identity. Admired as the centre of humanist learning but also reviled as a hotbed of court intrigue, lechery and idolatry, Italy simultaneously represented England’s cultural aspirations and functioned as the Catholic other against which Protestant England defined itself. As such, the Italy of the English stage is ideologically overdetermined, neither signalling the historical Italy nor functioning as a simple mirror of English politics, but rather acting as a complex construct deployed to navigate the challenges of modernity as well as questions of religious, cultural and national difference.3 A mercantile crossroads and cultural contact zone, Italy often reflects anxieties about England’s increased involvement with foreign nations. These fears intensified as James I departed from Elizabeth I’s insular foreign policy in his attempts to forge the union of Great Britain, make peace with other European countries, and expand England’s colonial reach in the Americas.4 In addition, Italy figured prominently in England’s relationship to emerging ideologies of pan-European whiteness. According to Mary Floyd-Wilson, the English sought to revise the Classical geohumoural system that took Italy as its centre and depicted the English as ‘impressible, barbaric, and inversely defined by the traits and temperament of dark peoples on the other side of the world’.5 As a result, England sought to position

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itself as central rather than peripheral to the world order; in the process, the English racialized Italians as marginally white even as they hoped to create ‘a European race that united a wide range of colors and complexions under an invisible badge of inherited superiority’.6 This paradigm, I argue, informs the racial politics of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Revenge tragedy is not often considered to speak to questions of race, as noted by Ayanna Thompson in an essay on Titus Andronicus: ‘In a genre that is obsessed with bodies, corpses, and body parts it is amazing how uninterested revenge tragedies are in race’.7 Thompson is of course correct that revenge tragedies rarely feature black bodies (with Aaron in Titus as an obvious exception); however, The Revenger’s Tragedy points to the racial implications of the genre’s conventions and thematic concerns. In particular, The Revenger’s Tragedy explores England’s fraught relationship to Italy, presenting Italy alternately as representative of foreign corruption and as a potential partner in the project of instantiating pan-European whiteness. The Revenger’s Tragedy approaches these questions of racial mixing in gendered terms, presenting a series of fair, chaste women who are violated or pursued by racialized Italian men. Deploying Elizabethan iconography in which the chaste woman’s body represents the boundaries of the nation, the play associates these women with England – most notably in the case of Gloriana, whose name evokes the idealized image of Elizabeth I. Cultural exchange is thus presented as the contamination of English blood, suggesting that union with Italy may adulterate and even subsume England’s national identity. Even as it raises such fears, however, The Revenger’s Tragedy undermines the English obsession with purity, both by associating chaste whiteness with death and by showing blood itself to be a volatile substance with the potential to compromise personal and national integrity. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s discourse of blood is informed by its preoccupation with adulterous sexuality, which is presented as a symptom of court corruption and a cause of aristocratic decline. With the Duke, the ‘royal lecher’ (1.1.1), at its head,

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the court encourages adultery, a tendency manifested in Lussurioso’s attempt to seduce Castiza, in the Duchess’s youngest son’s rape of Antonio’s wife, and in Spurio’s willingness to have sex with his stepmother. Such behaviour is engendered by the consumptive practices of the court; the bastard Spurio attributes paternity to the food itself, claiming, ‘Some stirring dish / Was my first father [. . .] I was begot in impudent wine and lust’ (1.2.179–80, 190). In turn, Spurio embodies adulterating chaos; he explains his decision to sleep with the Duchess by saying, ‘Adultery is my nature’ (1.2.177) and suggesting that ‘a bastard by nature should make cuckolds / Because he is the son of a cuckold-­maker’ (1.2.201–2). By this logic, adultery multiplies, further corrupting bloodlines; as Vindice exclaims, ‘Now cuckolds are / A-coining, apace, apace, apace, apace’ (2.2.139–40). Adulterous sexuality connotes unnatural exchange, which produces illegitimate spurs in the family tree that challenge the sanctity of aristocratic blood and threaten to dismantle the system of primogeniture. Moreover, as Michael Neill points out, adultery in The Revenger’s Tragedy is literally adulterating, with ‘Bastardy constitut[ing] a form of adulteration because it [is] the fruit of forbidden mixture, polluting the “pure” blood of legitimate descent’.8 As it corrupts family lineages, adulterous sexuality compromises the landed aristocracy, disrupting the social hierarchies deemed essential to national stability. Vindice accuses the gentry of selling their land to buy clothing for their mistresses; loose women, he comments, ‘Walk with a hundred acres on their backs, / Fair meadows cut into green foreparts’ (2.1.210–11). As Neill notes, The Revenger’s Tragedy’s anxieties about legitimate lineage centre on the female body, as ‘the very definition of a bastard as “whore’s son” implies that the anxieties surrounding bastardy had a great deal to do with its disruption of the proper line of paternity through the creation of a child that could only be defined as its mother’s son’.9 In Vindice’s comment, patriarchal lines of inheritance are disrupted by open female bodies, while the land, the bedrock of the aristocratic class, is commoditized, alienated by

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the impecunious sexual impulses of its owners. Vindice-­asPiato brags, ‘I have seen patrimonies washed a-­pieces, / Fruit-­ fields turned into bastards’ (1.3.51–2). Sold to facilitate adulterous exchanges, the fields are themselves bastardized, transformed into illegitimate pieces of patrimony no longer connected to the larger aristocratic landscape. The presumed supremacy of the aristocracy, their superior blood, loses its ideological grounding as landed estates are destroyed. As Feerick contends, such narratives of degeneration reflect the fracturing of the period’s older racial paradigm, in which the aristocracy’s blood was intimately linked to and derived from the land.10 Vindice attributes this degeneration to adulterous sexuality, which drains aristocratic bank accounts, partitions estates and corrupts bloodlines. The Revenger’s Tragedy further links this degeneration with emerging racial paradigms by blaming the aristocracy’s decline on adulterous liaisons with those who are coded as foreign outsiders. Because Italy functions simultaneously as a mirror of Jacobean England and as a site of racial foreignness, aspects of the play’s action, setting and characters appear more English, while others seem more Italian. In this context, adultery has racial as well as class-­based consequences, and the bastard’s status as ‘a corrupt hybrid, or species of monster’ is compounded by his mixed racial composition.11 Although the landed estates to which Vindice refers are technically Italian, purity – of both land and bodies – is coded as English, though it is threatened by Italianate forces. This dynamic is made explicit in the figure of Gloriana, Vindice’s deceased lover whose marvellous chastity resembles that of her namesake Elizabeth I and whom the Duke poisoned ‘Because [her] purer part would not consent / Unto his palsy lust’ (1.1.33–4).12 Gloriana’s chastity, moreover, is associated with whiteness, the fairness of her unadorned beauty contrasting with the ‘bought complexion[s]’ (1.1.22) of the court women. That Gloriana lacks ‘complexion’, figured in terms of cosmetic alterations that signal transgressive sexuality, positions English whiteness as a pure, naturalized state, free of adulterating corruptions. Gloriana is subjected to corruption,

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however, when she is poisoned by the Duke, a stereotypically Italian method of murder.13 Her poisoning indicates that Italian blood has infiltrated English purity, racially as well as sexually. A similar dynamic is evident in the dismantling of aristocratic estates, wherein English patrimonies are destroyed by courtiers’ penchant for Italian whores whose ‘bought complexion[s]’ are incommensurate with England’s ideal of natural integrity. Female chastity thus comes to represent English purity and social stability, whereas female sexuality is coded as foreign and destructive because it facilitates the adulterous mixtures that compromise national identity.

Revisiting Lucretia: violated chastity and the construction of national identity Even as it functions as an originary moment that inspires revenge, ostensibly establishing a dichotomy between English purity and Italian lechery, Gloriana’s death by poison underscores the porousness of bodies, the body politic as well as the physical body. Gloriana’s death has national implications, for her body, like that of Elizabeth I, reflects the contained yet vulnerable boundaries of the English nation.14 As Mary Douglas argues, ‘the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious’.15 The body of the chaste woman comes to represent not only the nation, but also whiteness itself, as chastity, stemming from the Latin carere, ‘to be cut off from or lack’, connotes the condition of being protected from contact or contamination.16 In part for this reason, whiteness is most commonly associated with women, as Kim Hall notes, with the quality of fairness acquiring notable racial significance during the early modern period.17 In The Revenger’s Tragedy, chastity is figured as resisting the racialized Italianate forces that threaten it. Women in the play

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are generally figured as penetrable, leaking, and excessive, verbally as well as sexually – ‘Tell but some woman a secret over night’, Vindice avers, ‘Your doctor may find it in the urinal i’th’ morning’ (1.3.84–5). Whereas these women secrete the nation’s essence and function as conduits for foreign contamination, the chaste woman regulates and denies such exchange. In the play’s degenerating culture, however, such contained purity invites repeated assault, suggesting that established national and racial borders are difficult to maintain. The national implications of violated chastity are further emphasized in the rape and suicide of Antonio’s wife. Raped by the Duchess’s youngest son, the wife is linked to Gloriana through her sexual violation by a member of the ruling family. Antonio draws this connection to Gloriana on a linguistic level when, lauding his wife’s decision to kill herself, he states that ‘Violent rape / Has played a glorious act’ (1.4.3–4). As with Gloriana’s poisoning, the rape of Antonio’s wife has damaging consequences for the state, as her ‘name has spread such a fair wing / Over all Italy’ (1.2.56–7). As a result, the Duke admits, if disingenuously, that the son’s ‘violent act has e’en drawn blood of honour / And stained our honours, / Thrown ink upon the forehead of our state’ (1.2.2–4). As the youngest son bloodied the wife’s body, he also bloodies the state, thus affirming the national implications of female chastity. It is this atrocity, moreover, that inspires revenge: joining the play’s metaphorics of chastity and blood, Vindice and his compatriots vow to avenge the rape if the judges ‘spare the blood’ of the perpetrator (1.4.61). The case of Antonio’s wife largely mirrors the story of Lucretia, in which the rape and suicide of a chaste woman leads to rebellion against the tyrannous Roman state. Antonio reports that his wife’s prayer book was open to a line expressing Lucrectia’s rationale, ‘Melius virtute mori, quam per dedecus vivere’ (1.4.14), ‘Better to die in virtue than to live with dishonour.’ As with the raped Lucretia, Antonio’s wife serves a sacrificial function, her violation mobilized to purify the state. Women were frequently considered natural candidates for

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sacrifice; just as their menstrual blood was believed to restore health to the body, the blood resulting from their deaths restores the health of the body politic.18 The rape sacrifice thus enables the fantasy that a purified, ‘chaste’ condition can be restored, both to the female body and to the state itself, once corrupting influences have been expelled. As such, the legend of Lucretia encourages what Stephanie Jed has termed ‘chaste thinking’, a mode of thought that divorces an idea or identity from the ideological messiness that undergirds it.19 Middleton interrogates these dynamics in his earlier narrative poem The Ghost of Lucrece (c. 1600), in which Lucrece tells her story from the underworld. Rather than maintaining an idealized image of Lucrece’s bodily integrity, the poem presents her as corrupted by the rape, her body leaking with excessive tears and blood. After recounting the ‘tide of blood’ (122) that results from her suicide, Lucrece states that she has ‘made [her] breast an ivory bowl / To hold the blood that streameth from [her] vein’ (124–5), and she instructs Tarquin to ‘Drink to my chastity, which thou hast slain’ (126) and ‘Instead of milk, suck blood and tears and all’ (137).20 Lucrece’s blood becomes a sign of her damaged and porous body rather than of her purity, and her depleted chastity lacks the power to restore the body politic. Middleton returns to these themes in The Revenger’s Tragedy where he critiques the cultural obsession with violated chastity, showing it to be both morbid and fantastical. The Revenger’s Tragedy, moreover, underscores the racial aspects of chaste thinking, already implicit in the association of Lucretia’s sexual purity with whiteness that is then transferred to the state. As Arthur Little argues, Lucretia’s ‘self-­ sacrifice, sustaining the fiction that it is simply taking back her virginity and whiteness, also manages to imbue that same virginity and whiteness with national and imperial definition, significance, and purpose’.21 The Revenger’s Tragedy draws out the racial dynamics present in the Lucretia story, as Vindice associates rape with racial contamination and hopes to mobilize this fear in the interests of overthrowing a tyrannous state. Even though the rapists are cultural insiders they, like

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Tarquin, are depicted in racialized terms, their moral and physical darkness contrasted with the whiteness of the fair female body. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus confirms Little’s contention that ‘The miscegenational rape or the possibility of it sits right at the basis of national, imperial, familial, and social fears’.22 Specifically, the rape of Antonio’s wife, like the poisoning of Gloriana, raises the threat that racialized Italians, the degenerate progeny of Rome, will infect English purity. By mobilizing the chaste thinking implicit in the Lucretia story, Antonio and the avengers promote the fantasy that Englishness, whiteness and even the conceptual boundaries of the nation can remain pure, uncomplicated by material realities. The Revenger’s Tragedy presents all sexual exchange, not just rape, in terms of national corruption. This tendency becomes most evident when Castiza, the play’s allegorical embodiment of chastity, is pursued by Lussurioso. On a structural level, Castiza is herself a cultural hybrid, possessing Gloriana’s fairness and purity along with a clearly Italian name. As such, she provides the play’s closest approximation of unmarked European whiteness, presumably possessing the ‘Fair skins’ if not the ‘new gowns’ that Vindice calls ‘the best of wishes to [her] sex’ (2.1.28–9). Like female characters such as Portia and Rosalind who blend English and Italian traits to create a transcendent sense of whiteness, Castiza is a virgin of marriageable age who presents the potential for procreative exchange, exchange that registers culturally as well as sexually. However, The Revenger’s Tragedy largely rejects the chaste thinking implicit in pan-European whiteness, in which union with Italy ostensibly occurs without contaminating exchange. In contrast to her comedic sisters, Castiza’s chastity possesses no restorative power in the degenerate world of The Revenger’s Tragedy, where all intercourse is presented as corrupting. Sex with Lussurioso, the Duke’s son and ‘[t]he next of Italy’ (2.1.56), would be unequivocally damaging, depicted by Vindice in terms of the unnatural exchanges of usury and prostitution. This exchange is racial as well, as Vindice asserts that ‘Many a maid has turned to Mohamet / With easier working’ (2.2.27–8),

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indicating that Castiza’s potential turn toward Lussurioso entails conversion away from fair, English chastity and toward racialized licence, an implication present in the English cultural obsession with ‘turning Turk’.23 Although Castiza ultimately maintains her chastity, preserving it from the sexual violence inflicted on Gloriana and Antonio’s wife, she remains embattled. ‘A virgin honour is a crystal tower,’ she states, ‘Which, being weak, is guarded with good spirits’ (4.4.152–3), thus attesting to virginity’s significance as vulnerable site of purity. In this degenerate society in which ‘All thrives but Chastity, she lies a-­cold’ (2.1.220), it is the dead virgin, lying literally a-­ cold, who operates as the play’s most efficacious purifying force. Following the logic of the Lucretia story, a dead woman such as Antonio’s wife who ‘lived / As cold in lust as she is now in death’ (1.4.34–5) is the most assuredly chaste woman and, for this reason, Vindice and his fellow avengers seek to channel the force of her inert chastity to inspire revenge against the tyrannous state. Such thinking is rendered macabre in Vindice’s fetishization of Gloriana’s skull, which he carries with him as a spur to revenge. The skull’s association with death animates its power, as it functions as a memento mori that forces people to consider their sins. It can ‘fright the sinner / And make him a good coward, put a reveller / Out of his antic amble / And cloy an epicure with empty dishes’ (3.5.92–5). This purifying power is most evident in the murder of the Duke. As Vindice says of the skull, he ‘ha[s] not fashioned this only for show / And useless property. No, it shall bear a part / E’en in it own revenge’ (3.5.100–2). An efficacious stage property, the skull brings about the Duke’s death, with Vindice dressing it as a prostitute and putting poison on its lips for the Duke to kiss. In Vindice’s vision, the dead woman does not simply inspire revenge, as do Lucretia and Antonio’s wife, but literally enacts it, the chaste essence of Elizabeth I transformed into a murderous purgative. Vindice’s use of Gloriana’s skull, moreover, suggests that the chaste thinking at the heart of the Lucretia myth is both perverse and fantastical. The very fact that he fetishizes the skull, hoping

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that it will stand in for a living woman, points to the absurdity of the cultural valorization of dead women. As Christine M. Gottlieb contends, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy deconstructs the category of the dead chaste woman and shows the absurdity of applying our notions of sexual propriety to dead objects’.24 In its critique, the play registers disgust at the Catholic veneration of relics. If absolute sexual purity can be embodied only by a piece of bone, then national and racial purity are shown to be similarly perverse, fetishes that prove damaging as well as unrealistic. In addition, the chastity ascribed to Gloriana’s skull is compromised by its participation in the murder.25 Earlier in the play Vindice remarks to the skull that, because the court is asleep, ‘Thou mayst lie chaste now’ (3.5.90), linking its chastity to its inert state and suggesting that this quality will recede with activity. The skull’s chastity is further compromised by its prostitute’s garb and by the poison it transmits. As with the Duke’s initial poisoning of Gloriana, the poisoning of the Duke also signals corrupting intercultural exchange, as Gloriana ‘shall be revenged / In the like strain and kiss his lips to death’ (3.5.104–5). Reversing the power dynamics of her own death, in which Italian poison/semen infiltrates English purity, Gloriana now effects the dissolution of the Italian Duke, causing his lips and tongue to dissolve. Not even the purgative skull – the sign of absolute, inert purity – can escape cross-­cultural exchange. Read allegorically, Gloriana’s fate indicates that, even if England acquires the supremacy it desires, national purity will be impossible to maintain, as the very act of rooting out impurities involves intercultural contact.

Unstable semiotics of blood and the impossibility of chaste thinking Myths of cultural purity are further undercut by The Revenger’s Tragedy’s translation of the Lucretia myth’s blood motif to the genre of revenge tragedy, where spilled blood refuses to stay

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contained in a manner conducive to national or racial integrity. Vindice imagines that taking revenge will reinforce the national character of the avengers and he encourages his compatriots to ‘strike old griefs / Into other countries / That flow in too much milk and have faint livers, / Not daring to stab home their discontents’ (5.2.1–4). Here Vindice assumes Brutus’s role in the revenge plot by acting as a castigator lacrimarum who encourages rebellious action over lamentation.26 He distinguishes between effeminate nations, those associated with mother’s milk, and those nations whose masculine virtue is proven through their willingness to phallically stab their enemies and draw blood. Employing similar rape imagery, Hippolito avers in reference to Antonio’s wife’s body that ‘ ’Twere pity / The ruins of so fair a monument / Should not be dipped in the defacer’s blood’ (1.4.66–8). Here he reverses the imagery of rape in which the perpetrator ‘dips’ his phallus in the woman, sullying her white body with semen and its analogue blood; instead, he contends that the wife’s chaste body should be dipped in the blood of the rapist. Hippolito’s statement calls attention to the paradoxical nature of blood as both purifying and contaminating, a sign of bodily integrity as well as its undoing. Marking the wife’s body with blood simultaneously repeats the contamination of the rape and attests to the damaged bodily integrity of the perpetrator, recalling the adulterous capacity of blood to transgress corporeal boundaries. In this way, Hippolito inadvertently questions the logic of chaste thinking, which as Jed notes enables the separation of mind from body that undergirds ideologies of contained, Classical masculinity.27 Read in racial terms, the ‘fair monument’ of the wife’s corpse is corrupted by the implicitly darker blood of the Italian noble, her marked body visibly manifesting her inner sexual stain. The purgative bloodletting central to the Lucretia myth, therefore, ceases to function properly, as it both fails to purify the wife’s body and extends the quality of vulnerability to men. Whereas depictions of penetrable female bodies traditionally deflect attention from men’s vulnerable bodies, The Revenger’s Tragedy draws on the generic emphasis of retributive violence to underscore the susceptibility of male bodies to

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penetration – penetration that, in the logic of the play, is cultural as well as physical. Hippolito’s imagery also foreshadows the play’s violent ending, in which revenge against the tyrannous state proves incapable of bringing about cathartic purification. The culminating massacre further highlights the unstable nature of blood, as the multiple killings conducted by two sets of murderers result in a chaotic bloodbath that undermines any claims to moral or cultural purity. Vindice imagines his coup de théâtre as a purifying bloodletting that will occur during the revels, the epitome of the court’s effeminate, consumptive vice: ‘In midst of all their joys,’ he proclaims, ‘they shall sigh blood’ (5.2.22). The avengers seek to redress chastity’s violation by obliterating the Duke’s family and, in so doing, violently establish the court as a space of renewed sexual, moral and national purity. As Jed points out, ideologies of purity – and I would add of whiteness – invite violation, which in turn inspires ‘the violent reestablishment of more chaste and cut-­off spaces’.28 This endeavour is complicated, however, both by the inherently unstable nature of blood and by the competing murder plot, in which the Duke’s sons kill one another in hopes of advancing in the line of succession. This comically excessive counter-­plot, also enacted by means of the masque, highlights the problematic aspects of Vindice’s plan to bring about purity through theatrical violence. Just as the idea of killing the heir to the throne results in a potentially unending series of murders, the logic of killing to achieve purity ultimately unravels, creating moral as well as material messiness and provoking retribution. The ensuing deluge of blood compromises the stable boundaries that Vindice wishes to maintain. As the murder plots converge, the several deaths – of Lussurioso and three nobles by Vindice’s gang and then of Supervacuo, Ambitioso and Spurio – blend together, following upon one another in quick succession. The identities of the murderers and victims become virtually indistinguishable as the blood merges; when Lussurioso states, ‘Those in the masque did murder us’ (5.3.67), it is unclear to whom he refers. Initially presented as the site of essential

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character and family lineage, blood proves incapable of being contained; once spilled, it becomes diffuse and transgresses boundaries, mixing avenger with tyrant, virtue with vice, English with Italian. This final mingling of the blood of the avengers with that of the corrupt Italians underscores Vindice’s own problematically hybrid status. A combination of English Puritan and conniving Italian, Vindice revels in the theatricality, sexual depravity and violence he claims to abhor. This paradox is encapsulated in his disguise as the bawd Piato, in which he nearly succeeds in prostituting his sister to Lussurioso even though he claims to act in the interests of preserving her virtue. Vindice’s internal conflict is ultimately untenable, as shown when he is hired to kill Piato, causing a moment of existential crisis in which Hippolito exclaims, ‘Brother we lose ourselves’ (4.2.199). The conflict is again made evident when Vindice cannot help but confess his role in the murders. Vindice is unable to die a stoic death, to maintain his own bodily boundaries, because he falls prey to the verbal incontinence he identifies in women, insisting on ‘be[ing] bold / To speak it now’ and boasting about the brothers’ role in the plot that ‘ ’Twas somewhat witty-­carried’ (5.3.96–7).29 Vindice attempts to secure his and his brother’s identities as avengers, proclaiming that they will submit to execution because they ‘hate / To bleed so cowardly’ (5.3.122– 3) and gloating that they ‘die after a nest of dukes!’ (5.3.125). Despite Vindice’s attempt to distinguish between cowardly and valiant bleeding, however, his comments indicate that he and Hippolito will join the collective bleeding of the court, with the blood leaving their compromised bodies figuratively joining that of their victims. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus makes literal the generic commonplace in which the avenger’s actions implicate him in the ethical morass he wished to eradicate. More broadly, the final massacre undermines the chaste thinking that fuelled the revenge plot. It exposes pure chastity as unattainable and, by emphasizing the open male body, destabilizes the gender binary that posits female sexual purity as the basis of both the integrated male body and the contained

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borders of the nation state. Further, the play’s ending exposes the reality occluded by myths of national and racial purity that blood, like semen, is not in fact a discrete entity comprising the character of a person, family, or nation. Blood is diffuse: it exceeds the boundaries of the body, family and nation, and it comingles in acts of violence as well as through procreation. Although Antonio, ‘the hope / Of Italy’ (5.3.84–5), concludes the play by praying that the ‘blood’ of ‘[t]hose tragic bodies’ will ‘wash away all treason’ (5.3.127–8), it seems unlikely that this blood retains its purgative potential. Rather, according to the logic of rape in which The Revenger’s Tragedy traffics, blood functions as the antithesis of purity, the sign that chastity has been compromised.

The Revenger’s Tragedy’s ambivalent racial politics Despite pathologizing cultural exchange as the cause of aristocratic decline, The Revenger’s Tragedy’s rendering of racial dynamics remains ambivalent as it depicts the maintenance of national boundaries as untenable. Symbolized by Gloriana’s death’s head, the ideal of national purity is exposed not only as nostalgic, but as the necrophilic worship of a condition so inert that it cannot sustain life. Preserving such purity proves impossible, as both blood and chastity resist reification as markers of stable identity. Additionally, the play’s critique of James I’s court gestures toward the possibility that cultural corruption may actually be generated from within; despite his association with foreignness, James I, like Tarquin and the lecherous Italian nobles of the play, is the consummate insider. The King’s court may seem Italianate, but it is nonetheless resolutely English. The Revenger’s Tragedy proves only slightly more open to emerging discourses of pan-European whiteness. In Castiza we see the potential of incorporating upper and middle class

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Europeans into one white race, as her sexual purity translates into a whiteness that is marked neither by Englishness nor Italianness. Not even Castiza’s unmarked white chastity, however, can facilitate productive generation in her degenerate society. In this way, The Revenger’s Tragedy resists the chaste thinking implicit in ideals of pan-European whiteness, which posits a shared racial composition while denying, or cutting off, the intercultural exchange that makes this ideal possible. In contrast to the Lucretia myth, in which chastity is seamlessly linked to national purity, The Revenger’s Tragedy exposes the complex dynamics of exchange that undergird – and at the same time undermine – sexual, national and racial constructions. As such, neither nationalism nor pan-European whiteness ultimately provides a satisfactory rejoinder to the decline in aristocratic blood. Middleton’s play, moreover, points to the racial dynamic present in revenge tragedy more broadly. The genre’s emphasis on cycles of retributive justice inspires interrogations of exchange, as warring factions inflict blows that, though intended to reinforce division, result in increased contact and interaction. Attempts to maintain personal, familial, or cultural integrity inevitably break down as violent acts of revenge compromise the very stability they are intended to protect. Bodies – symbolic of bounded cultural units – are disintegrated, penetrated and dismembered through acts of rape and murder. This fascination with the breakdown of ontological boundaries speaks to anxieties about race and racial hierarchies. The popular Italian settings of revenge tragedy may further make manifest the racial dimensions of this paradigm, as abstract questions of exchange intersect with topical socio-­political concerns engendered by England’s expanding empire. On one hand, staging Italians in England and having them speak in English verse constitutes an act of cultural appropriation, claiming for England a cosmopolitan status if not national supremacy.30 On the other hand, the prevalence of Italian settings in English plays indicates the extent to which Italianness has infiltrated England’s sense of its own national

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identity, making it difficult to identify what traits are properly English and which are Italian imports. The Revenger’s Tragedy, as I have shown, exploits the racial implications of its genre and Italian setting to interrogate emerging ideologies of whiteness. Historically, English racial supremacy struck an uneasy balance between pan-European whiteness and a more nationalist English whiteness that drew on England’s pastoral roots. Though these ideologies often worked in tandem to fashion Britain’s imperial identity, The Revenger’s Tragedy exposes fissures in this racial project, dramatizing a moment in which pan-European whiteness threatened to subsume and adulterate England’s national character – or, in the discourse of the play, its blood. As such, the play participates in the history of race, delineating conflicting ideological strains within an emerging English whiteness that was defined not only in opposition to dark-­skinned people, but also in relation to European allies and rivals. In keeping with its genre, moreover, The Revenger’s Tragedy reminds us that whiteness is itself violent, as it must carve out spaces of ideological and physical purity. These spaces are forged through chaste thinking that cuts them off from complex webs of sexual, cultural, economic and literary exchange; such chaste spaces invite violence and are maintained through violence, as their boundaries must be vigilantly policed. The Revenger’s Tragedy is, therefore, a tragedy of whiteness: even as Vindice glorifies racial purity, Gloriana’s skull reminds us of the pathological nature of white supremacy, in both its nationalist and cosmopolitan varieties.

Notes 1 Jean E. Feerick, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 14. 2 Ibid., 21. 3 For an in-­depth discussion of the English stage’s use of Italy, see Michele Marrapodi et al., eds, Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of

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Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 4 Kim F. Hall makes this point in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 126–7. 5 Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. 6 Ibid., 19. 7 Ayanna Thompson, ‘The Racial Body and Revenge: Titus Andronicus’, Textus 13.2 (2000): 325–46. 8 Michael Neill, ‘Bastardy, Counterfeiting, and Misogyny in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, SEL 36.2 (1996): 397–416, esp. 399. 9 Ibid., 398. 10 Feerick, Strangers in Blood, 16. 11 Neill, ‘Bastardy’, 399. 12 For a fuller analysis of the play’s invocation of Elizabeth I, see Steven Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45.2 (1994): 139–62. 13 For a discussion of the association of poison with Italy, see Tanya Pollard, ‘Drugs, Poisons, Remedies and the Theatre’, in Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 287–94, and Mariangela Tempera, ‘The Rhetoric of Poison in John Webster’s Italianate Plays’, in Marrapodi, Shakespeare’s Italy, 229–50. 14 For discussions of this dynamic, see Susanne Scholz, ‘Textualizing the Body Politic: National Identity and the Female Body in The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 132 (1996): 103–43, and Susan Frye, ‘The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury’, Sixteenth Century Journal 23.1 (1992): 95–114. 15 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 115. 16 For a discussion of this etymological connection, see Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucrece and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 8.

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17 Hall, Things of Darkness, esp. 3–4, 9. 18 For a discussion of the link between menstruation and sacrificial blood, see Helen King, ‘Sacrificial Blood: The Role of the Amion in Ancient Gynecology’, Helios 13 (1987): 117–26. 19 Jed, Chaste Thinking, 12. 20 Thomas Middleton, The Ghost of Lucrece, ed. G.B. Shand, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1985–98. 21 Arthur L. Little Jr, Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2. 22 Ibid., 44. 23 See Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave, 2003). 24 Christine M. Gottlieb, ‘Middleton’s Traffic in Dead Women: Chaste Corpses as Property in The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Lady’s Tragedy’, ELH 45.2 (2015): 255–74. 25 For discussions of the way that Vindice’s manipulation of the skull compromises claims that it represents sexual or representational purity, see Kathryn R. Finin, ‘Re-Membering Gloriana: “Wild Justice” and the Female Body in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Renaissance Forum 6.2 (2003): 1–34, and Karin S. Coddon, ‘ “For Show or Useless Property”: Necrophilia and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, ELH 61.1 (1994): 71–88. 26 For Brutus’s role in the Lucretia myth, see Jed, Chaste Thinking, 10–11, 18–50. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 Ibid., 45. 29 For a reading of Vindice’s verbal incontinence in relation to the play’s depiction of carnivalesque female bodies, see Peter Stallybrass, ‘Reading the Body: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption’, Renaissance Drama 18 (1987): 121–48.

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30 For the argument that, by making English the dominant language of Italy, dramatists attribute to the language a desired international status, see A.J. Hoenselaars, ‘ “Under the dent of the English pen”: the language of Italy in English Renaissance Drama’, in Marrapodi, Shakespeare’s Italy, 272–91.

6 ‘’Cause I love swearing’: Strong Language, Revenge and the Body in The Revenger’s Tragedy Lucy Munro

In the third scene of The Revenger’s Tragedy, the disguised Vindice agrees to procure his own sister, Castiza, for the Duke’s son and heir, Lussurioso. Lussurioso tells Vindice, ‘Come, I’ll furnish thee. But first / Swear to be true in all’ and the dialogue briefly pivots on the question of whether Vindice will swear this oath that he apparently cannot keep: vindice

True.

lussurioso     Nay,

but swear.

vindice

Swear? I hope your honour little doubts my faith. lussurioso

Yet for my humour’s sake, ’cause I love swearing.

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vindice

’Cause you love swearing, ’slud, I will. lussurioso             

Why, enough. (1.3.161–5)

Punning on the two senses of the word ‘swear’ – to make a promise, and to utter a profanity – Lussurioso appears to downplay the seriousness of the undertaking he requires of Vindice. Vindice’s reply, in turn, acknowledges the pun and in some sense enacts it, conflating the act of making a binding promise with the blasphemous oath ‘ ’slud’, a contraction of ‘by God’s blood’ – that is, the blood shed by Christ on the cross.1 To swear ‘by God’s blood’ was to seal a promise with the most powerful of guarantees, yet Vindice’s oath of loyalty to Lussurioso is a promise to whore his own sister. Vindice is well aware of this tension, making a new oath shortly after Lussurioso exits: ‘Swear me to foul my sister! / Sword, I durst make a promise of him to thee: / Thou shalt disheir him; it shall be thine honour’ (172–4). To pursue his promise to his dead fiancée Gloriana to murder the Duke, Vindice swears an oath that requires him to attack the very structures of his own family. He then caps this oath with a new promise of violent retribution, initiating in the process the secondary revenge action against Lussurioso that propels the later scenes of the play. Incorporating as it does a visual, linguistic and theatrical echo of Shakespeare’s Hamlet – like Vindice, Hamlet swears on his sword and uses the oath ‘ ’sblood’ – this moment suggests not only the crucial role that swearing plays in The Revenger’s Tragedy, but also its place at the heart of early modern revenge tragedy more broadly. Its centrality to the genre’s narrative and ethical structures is underlined when characters use profane oaths such as ‘ ’slud’. In a genre that abounds in excessive and transgressive language, swearing is not only a point of ethical and religious tension, but also a theatrical opportunity, an opportunity that The Revenger’s Tragedy exploits. This essay therefore seeks to fill a lacuna in

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the recent scholarship on swearing in early modern culture at large and The Revenger’s Tragedy in particular.2 It draws on the important work of Frances A. Shirley on swearing in Shakespeare’s plays to argue that we should take seriously not only the promissory function of oaths in The Revenger’s Tragedy, but also the theological and emotional force of profane swearing itself.3 The violent revenge action of The Revenger’s Tragedy is embedded within a linguistic framework that itself links the fragmentation of the body with questions of salvation and damnation. Swearing thus has the power to connect tragedy’s language with its ethical and theatrical strategies, a function that Middleton exploits in crucial scenes such as those surrounding the execution of Junior and the murder of the Duke. The bodily associations of the strongest oaths mean that swearing carries with it an implicit commentary on violence, attacks on the integrity of the human body and dismemberment, themselves prominent features of revenge tragedy as it was developing in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. On another level, moreover, swearing reinforces the play’s Calvinist structures.4 Characters such as Lussurioso, Spurio, Supervacuo, Ambitioso and Junior use the strongest oaths in the play and are also some of its most morally compromised figures. Jacobean audiences may have been justified in seeing these characters’ swearing as an indication that they were reprobates, individuals who according to Calvinist theology were damned to spend eternity in hell before they were even born, in contrast with the elect who were predestined to heaven. However, given that Vindice and Hippolito both use these oaths, swearing also enables Middleton to articulate the ambivalent response to extra-­ judicial vengeance that was becoming characteristic of revenge tragedy. Written at the very moment at which contemporary tensions about profane swearing were coming to a head, The Revenger’s Tragedy makes a strong case for swearing’s aesthetic, dramatic, theological and ethical utility on the playhouse stage.

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Swearing in early modern culture The moment at which Lussurioso declares that he loves swearing and Vindice agrees to swear with the words ‘ ’slud I will’ encapsulates some of the problems that attended swearing in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. As the Calvinist divine William Perkins summarized it, an oath ‘is either assertorie or promissorie. Assertorie, by which a man auoucheth that a thing was done or not done; Promisserie, by which a man promiseth to doe a thing or not to doe it’.5 At its most basic, an oath might be nothing more complex than the statement ‘I will’, but it attracted various forms of reinforcement and validation. Blasphemous oaths such as ‘ ’slud’ had their origin in medieval systems of swearing, in which the assertion or promise might be reinforced by a reference to the body of the crucified Christ, the Virgin Mary or the Mass itself.6 The drunken Miller in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for example, swears ‘By armes, and by blood and bones’ that he can tell a better tale than the Knight’s, while the narrator in The Book of the Duchess swears ‘by the masse’.7 The Reformation had long-­lasting effects on the ways in which English men and women swore. By the late sixteenth century, oaths such as ‘Marry’ (a contraction of ‘by the Virgin Mary’), ‘Mass’ and ‘by the Mass’ had become associated with older generations and Catholicism; as Gillian Woods notes, ‘by the Mass’ had ‘an obvious Catholic heritage’ and for many Protestant thinkers ‘swearing by the idolatrous mass [was] idolatry doubled’.8 The associations between these oaths and Catholic doctrine thus meant that they could simultaneously be dismissed as outmoded and prohibited as idolatry. In contrast, oaths focusing on the body of Christ retained their currency and old force, even when they began to appear in contracted or ‘minced’ forms in the later sixteenth century. In fact, monosyllabic oaths such as ‘ ’slud’ or ‘ ’sblood’, ‘ ’sfoot’ (‘by God’s foot’), ‘ ’swounds’ (‘by God’s wounds’), ‘ ’slid’ (‘by God’s eyelid’) and ‘ ’sheart’ or ‘heart’ (‘by God’s heart’) seem to have proliferated, perhaps because they were both satisfying to say

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and easily adapted to serve as spontaneous expressions of surprise or anger, becoming detached in the process from their original function but retaining some of their transgressive power. In theory, to swear an oath was to make a terrible, binding promise. In practice, oaths were often used carelessly or unconsciously – all too often, as far as many commentators were concerned.9 Stories about swearers who took their oaths too lightly appear regularly in sixteenth- and seventeenth-­ century texts: William Perkins’s A Direction for the Government of the Tongue According to God’s Word (1593), for example, presents the story of ‘a serving man in Lincolnshire’, who had still in his mouth an use to sweare, Gods pretious blood, and that for very trifles: being often warned by his friendes to leave the taking of the Lords blood in vaine, did notwithstanding still persist in his wickednesse, untill at the last it pleased God to acite him first with sicknesse, and then with death: during which time of the Lordes visitation, no perswasion could moue him to repent his foresaid blaspheming, but hearing the bell to towle, did most hardly in the verie anguish of his death, start up in his bed, and sware by Gods blood this bell towled for me. Whereupon immediatly the blood abundantly from all the joynts of his body, as it were in streames, did issue out most fearfully from mouth, nose, wrestes, knees, heeles, and toes, with all other joyntes, not one left free, and so dyed.10 The power of the anecdote derives from the equation that it makes between the sin and its divine punishment, between words and their physical counterparts: the serving-­man swears ‘by Gods blood’ and is ‘immediately’ drained of his own blood. This story was not original to Perkins’s book: it appears, as he acknowledges, in a 1581 book by Philip Stubbes, and it reappeared regularly for over a century as part of a set of cautionary tales about swearing and cursing.11 It features a man of comparatively low status, but swearing was associated

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as much, if not more, with men of high status, or aspiring to high status, and occasionally with women too.12 It also serves a didactic function that is reinforced by Perkins’s comment, ‘These and such like judgements must be as warnings from heauen to admonish us, and to make us afraid of the abuse of the Tongue: especially when it tendeth to the dishonour of God’.13 As I will explore in further detail below in relation to The Revenger’s Tragedy itself, one of the reasons to fear and avoid oaths was the connection that Calvinist divines such as Perkins and Arthur Dent made between swearing and damnation.14 The unfortunate serving-­man uses a strong oath, ‘by God’s blood’, but many commentators held that there was no such thing as a mild oath. Perkins, for example, attacks the belief that ‘a man may lawfully sweare when hee speakes nothing but the truth: & sweares by nothing but that which is good, as by his faith or troth’ or ‘a man may sweare by the Masse, because it is nothing now: and byr Ladie, because she is gone out of the country’.15 Similarly, Dent argues that even euphemistic oaths such as ‘by Cock, or Pie, or Mouse-­foote’ are prohibited because ‘to sweare by creatures, is to forsake God’.16 Nonetheless, some of the strongest opprobrium was reserved for oaths that invoked God directly, and especially those that were sworn on the fragmented body of the crucified Christ. John Downame is typical in his comment that ‘Some sweare by the creatures, some by the Saints, Masse and Rhoode, some by the dreadfull name of God; but most of all blaspheme our Sauiour Christ himselfe, pulling his soule from his bodie, and tearing peecemeale his precious members one from another, diuersifying their oathes according to the diuers parts of his sacred bodie’.17 The image of the blasphemous swearer tearing at the body of Christ exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century writers. Mincing or contracting the oath did not necessarily improve matters: another preacher, Walter Powell, attacks those who mince their oaths ‘as if God could not espy them, when as men may; as, by Dickins, Maskins, s’lid, burlady, s’foot, by my fay,

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by St Tan, yea Mary, by yea and by nay’.18 Moreover, the monosyllabic oath appears to have gained a force of its own, as I explore in further detail below. Swearing was a part of oral culture that is not generally recorded in printed texts; plays are an exception because they so often seek to represent colloquial speech and the extremes of linguistic expression. Furthermore, swearing and the playhouses were closely associated in the popular imagination. Philip Stubbes, who may have brought the story of the Lincolnshire serving-­man to broader public attention, also attacked the theatre, listing swearing among the (many) bad habits that one could learn there: ‘if you will learn to playe the vice, to swear, teare, and blasp[h]eme, both Heauen and Earth’, he tells his readers, ‘if you will learne to comtemne GOD and al his lawes, to care neither for heauen nor hel, and to commit al kinde of sinne and mischéef you néed to goe to no other schoole, for all these good Examples, may you sée painted before your eyes in enterludes and playes’.19 Stubbes associates swearing with the personified Vices that stalked the stage of the 1560s and 1570s and were its main proponents of swearing; their use of residually Catholic oaths such as ‘Marry’ and ‘by the Mass’ underlined their status as a threat to Protestant doctrine. In the following decades, even as plays began to move away from the purely allegorical structures of the Tudor morality play, oaths stuck in the mouths of the descendants of the Vice: Richard of Gloucester in Richard III; Aaron in Titus Andronicus; Iago in Othello. However, theatrical swearing also bled out from the Vices and the prodigal young men that they ensnared, moving into the dialogue of a greater range of characters. By the early seventeenth century, swearing in the playhouse had become a matter of pressing concern. As Brian Cummings suggests, one of the problems with theatrical swearing was that it was mimetic: in performing the role of a character who uttered profane oaths, actors were required to swear, and playgoers had to listen to their profanities.20 The authorities decided to take action, and on 27 May 1606 Parliament approved An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players:

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For the preuenting and auoyding of the great abuse of the holy Name of God in Stage-­playes, Interludes, Maygames, Shewes, and such like, Bee it enacted by our Soueraigne Lord the Kings Maiestie, and by the Lords Spirituall and Temporall, and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by the Authoritie of the same, That if at any time or times, after the end of this present Session of Parliament, any person or persons, doe or shall in any Stage-­ play, Interlude, Shewe, Maygame, or Pageant, iestingly or prophanely speake or vse the holy Name of God, or of Christ Jesus, or of the holy Ghost, or of the Trinitie, which are not to bee spoken but with feare and reuerence, [such person or persons] Shall forfeit for euery such offence by him or them committed tenne Pounds; The one moytie thereof to the Kings Maiestie, his Heires and Successors, The other moytie thereof to him or them that will sue for the same in any Courte of Record at Westminster, wherein no Essoign, Protection or Wager of Law shall be allowed.21 As Gary Taylor has explored in detail, the Act had a marked effect on the ways in which plays were written and performed, even if successive Masters of the Revels had different ideas about what constituted swearing.22 Legislation against swearing in society at large did not follow until 1624, so the stage was a particularly early test-­case in a larger attempt to purify England’s spoken language.23

Swearing in The Revenger’s Tragedy Emerging from the same cultural moment as the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, The Revenger’s Tragedy is alert to the transgressive potential of swearing and its capacity to speak to broader aesthetic, narrative and ethical structures.24 Its distribution of oaths largely mirrors that of early modern drama in general. The most prolific swearers are the young men: Vindice, Hippolito, Spurio, Lussurioso, Supervacuo,

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Ambitioso and Junior, all of whom use strong, bodily oaths such as ‘heart’, ‘ ’slud’ or ‘ ’sblood’, and ‘ ’sfoot’. Vindice and Lussurioso also use ‘Mass’ and ‘by the Mass’, and Lussurioso says ‘By this light’ when he agrees with Gratiana’s statement, reported by Vindice, ‘Women with women can work best alone’ (2.2.62). The Fourth Noble says ‘ ’Sblood’ and ‘Heart’ when he is accused of murder in the final scene, suggesting that he should be cast as a young man. Spurio, Vindice and Gratiana all use ‘Marry’; Vindice apparently copies his mother’s oath in Act 2, Scene 1, when he comes to her in disguise (2.1.67–8), but he also uses it in later scenes (e.g. 2.2.72, 4.2.85, 5.1.74). The milder oaths, ‘faith’ and ‘troth’, are used by Gratiana, Castiza and the Duchess as well as the young men; the Duchess also swears ‘by yonder waxen fire’ (3.5.210). The older men swear rarely, if at all: Antonio uses ‘faith’ when he tells Piero that the judgement against Junior ‘cools and is deferred’ (1.4.51), but the Duke does not swear. A handful of characters – Vindice, Gratiana and Lussurioso – say ‘O God’ or ‘O Heavens’, exclamations that were also to be banned under the 1606 Act. Some of the oaths in The Revenger’s Tragedy have the promissory function that swearing traditionally carried. As we have seen, Vindice’s declaration to Lussurioso, ‘ ’slud, I will’, is part of a set of promises that Vindice makes and breaks in the pursuit of his revenge. In a similar fashion, profane oaths are intertwined with the play’s broader structures of revenge. For instance, just before the murder of the Duke, Hippolito asks Vindice, ‘Prithee, tell me, / Why may not I partake with you? You vowed once / To give me share to every tragic thought’, and Vindice replies, ‘By th’ mass, I think I did too. / Then I’ll divide it to thee’ (3.5.5–9). Here, the oath recalls and underlines the promise of revenge that Vindice made to Gloriana, and his subsequent vow to share his plans with Hippolito. However, the early seventeenth-­century oath might in some contexts lose both of the promissory and assertory functions described by Perkins, becoming in the process difficult to distinguish from expressions such as ‘push’ and ‘puh’ that

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appear frequently in Middleton’s plays, exclamations of distain, anger, impatience or disgust that often had the same syntactic and expressive function as a monosyllabic, minced oath. Some oaths in The Revenger’s Tragedy are used merely for emphasis or to express emotion. Vindice, Hippolito, Lussurioso and Spurio routinely utter oaths such as ‘Mass’, ‘heart’ and ‘ ’sfoot’ when they are surprised by the arrival of other characters or become aware of their presence. Oaths are also used to express other forms of shock or surprise. In Act 2, Scene 3, the Duke momentarily frustrates Supervacuo and Ambitioso’s plot against their stepbrother by declaring that he will have Lussurioso released from prison: duke

I know ’twas but some peevish moon in him. Go, let him be released. supervacuo [aside] ’Sfoot, how now, brother? ambitioso

Your grace doth please to speak beside your spleen. I would it were so happy. duke Why, go release him. supervacuo

O, my good lord, I know the fault’s too weighty And full of general loathing, too inhuman, Rather by all men’s voices worthy death. (2.3.90–6) Supervacuo’s oath is an empty expression of rage rather than a promise – implicit or explicit – to commit to a course of action or an assertion of the truth of a situation; it is a momentary articulation of his true emotional state, which Ambitioso apparently ignores when he cuts across him by speaking directly to the Duke. Supervacuo apparently then gathers himself together and joins Ambitioso’s offensive. While Supervacuo’s use of ‘ ’sfoot’ signals anger and shock, Junior uses a similarly strong oath merely for emphasis. The

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moment at which he receives Supervacuo and Ambitioso’s letter features some self-­aware play on the nature of oaths:         Nothing but paper comforts? I looked for my delivery before this, Had they been worth their oaths. Prithee, be from us. [Exit Keeper] Now, what say you, forsooth? Speak out, I pray.         [He reads the] letter ‘Brother be of good cheer.’ – ’Slud, it begins like a whore, with good cheer. (3.4.4–9) We have seen enough of Ambitioso and Supervacuo to sense that their oaths – in the sense of promises – are given lightly, and that their speech is larded with profanity. Junior is therefore right to question both whether they will keep their promises and whether they will live up to their highly-­charged language. His own use of oaths in this speech charts his response to the letter, as he moves from the very mild oath ‘forsooth’, often associated with women and children in the early modern period, to the much stronger oath, ‘ ’slud’, which underlines his derision for its anodyne opening. Simultaneously, Junior’s casual use of violent language – and, in particular, his use of ‘ ’slud’ – recalls the act of sexual violence for which he is imprisoned, and which he attempted to excuse by claiming that he was prompted ‘by flesh and blood’ and that the rape of Antonio’s wife was only ‘sport’ (1.2.47, 65). Middleton insistently links profanity with bodily and sexual violence, assisted by the multiple meanings and associations of words such as ‘ ’sblood’, ‘ ’slid’ and ‘ ’sheart’; he inscribes revenge tragedy’s abjection of the body onto the linguistic structures of his play. Supervacuo and Ambitioso are especially prone to use language as a form of emotional release – we might also look to their response to Junior’s death and Lussurioso’s ‘resurrection’

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in Act 3, Scene 6, where their exclamations fall into a call-­andresponse pattern across the verse line: ambitioso

O death and vengeance! supervacuo       

Hell and torments!

[. . .] ambitioso  

O furies!

supervacuo       Plagues! ambitioso           Confusions! supervacuo               Darkness! ambitioso                 

  Devils! (65, 75)

The brothers’ blasphemous oaths thus form part of their general tendency to use language in emotional and uncontrolled ways, in contrast with the more calculated uses of language that Lussurioso, Hippolito and, especially, Vindice employ. It is noticeable, for instance, that while Vindice swears throughout the play, he occasionally modulates his oaths to fit his deceptions. In Act  4, Scene 2, when he plays out the role of the rustic malcontent for Lussurioso’s benefit, he uses ‘i’faith la’ (79). Both ‘i’faith’ and ‘la’ were often associated with unsophisticated speech, and the oath is of a piece with his greeting ‘God you god den’, of which Lussurioso comments, ‘How strangely such a coarse, homely salute / Shows in the palace [. . .] Should we name God / In a salutation ’twould ne’er be stood on – heaven!’ (44–6, 47–8). Both greeting and oath are part of a linguistic impersonation, a mark of Vindice’s ability to deceive and manipulate the characters around him.

Salvation and damnation Despite the emotional force that swearing could invoke, there is something habitual and unconscious about the ways in which oaths are used in The Revenger’s Tragedy, and characters’

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offhand profanities may underline their place within Calvinist frameworks of belief. In Arthur Dent’s hugely popular dialogue The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, which boasted on its title-­page that it provided the means ‘Wherein euery man may clearely see, whether he shall be saued or damned’, oaths are a sign that the speaker was a reprobate. Philagathus, ‘an honest man’, suggests to the divine, Theologus, that they ‘proceed to speake of the fift signe of condemnation, which is swearing’, and Theologus replies, ‘It may wel indeed be called a signe of condemnation: for I thinke it more then a signe. It is indeed an euident demonsration of a reprobate: for I neuer wist any man truly fearing God in his hart, that was a vsual and a common swearer’.25 In an influential essay on ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’, John Stachneiwski notes that ‘Interest in the logic of an inner, unknown self was mobilised by the Calvinist determination to read polarised endings, in heaven or hell, back through entire lives which might not always exhibit extreme differences’.26 In this context, swearing might be a marker of the reprobate status of a speaker whose life was otherwise without reproach, and the stronger the oath, the more violent was God’s response likely to be. Although Theologus condemns all forms of swearing other than the oaths sworn before magistrates and other forms of authority, he reserves a special condemnation for oaths involving the body of Christ, a subject that Antilegon, ‘a notable Atheist, and cauiller against all goodnesse’ (B1v), raises with him: Antil .

What say you then, to them, that sweare wounds and bloud, and such like, in a brauery, thinking that it setteth out their speech very well? Theol . Hell gapeth for them. And they shall know one day what it is to blaspheme God. Antil . What may wee thinke of such as sweare by Gods life, Gods soule, Gods body, Gods heart?

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Theol .

That their case is most wofull and dangerous: and I quake at the naming of them. They are most horrible, monstrous and outragious blasphemies, enough to make the stones in the streete to cracke, and the cloudes to fall vpon our heads. And we may thinke that all the diuels in hell are in a readinesse to carie such blasphemous villains headlong into that lake which burneth with fire and brimstone for euer. (L8r) These oaths are not merely the sign of an individual’s future damnation; they also potentially have the capacity to bring immediate judgement upon the speaker, just as the serving-­ man in Perkins and Stubbes’s anecdote is drained of his blood at the moment at which he says ‘by God’s blood’. The underlying back note of blasphemous oaths such as ‘Mass’, ‘’slud’, ‘’sfoot’ and ‘heart’ in The Revenger’s Tragedy thus provides a constant reminder of the extent to which characters may already be damned, regardless of their specific actions. It is noticeable that one of the characters who does not swear, the Duke, is already aware of the fate to which his sins have consigned him, commenting ‘Age hot is like a monster to be seen; / My hairs are white and yet my sins are green’ (2.3.129–30). The Duke’s failure to swear is both generationally and morally appropriate – unlike the play’s younger men, he labours under no misconceptions about the state of his soul. Although his essay focuses on The Changeling, Stachneiwski also offers some suggestive comments on The Revenger’s Tragedy, drawing attention to Vindice’s resonant statement, ‘I think man’s happiest when he forgets himself’ (4.4.85) and to the connections between the play’s language of ‘flesh’ and ‘blood’ and its Calvinism.27 ‘Predestination to damnation’, he writes, ‘unfolds through the constraint “the flesh” places on men to sin’.28 Junior’s justification of his rape of Antonio’s wife as the prompting of his ‘flesh and blood’ (1.2.47) has particular resonance within this theological framework,

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while Lussurioso’s declaration that ‘It is our blood to err, though hell gaped loud’ (1.3.74) has a similar force. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus sustains a linguistic structure in which oaths sworn on the fragmented body of the crucified Christ intermingle with a broader discourse of flesh and blood, itself emanating from Calvinist theology. Moreover, the fragmentation of Christ’s body in an oath finds a yet more blasphemous echo in the theatrical representation of violence in the play’s action, in which characters’ own bodies are liable to fragmentation and destruction, aided by technologies of stage blood and prosthetic body parts. The violence of swearing was a regular feature of anti-­ swearing tracts in both the late medieval and early modern periods. In Stephen Hawes’s The Conversion of Swearers (1509), Christ begs the swearer to ‘Tere me nowe no more / My woundes are sore’, and – as Sandy Bardsley describes – the image of swearers dismembering Christ also appears in fifteenth-­century wall paintings.29 One of Middleton’s contemporaries, Abraham Gibson, expounds on this theme in a 1613 sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, reproving the use of impious and fearefull Oaths, which (me thinketh) I am afraid to mention, blasphemous, horrible, terrible, by the parts or adiuncts of Christ, as by his life, death, passion, flesh, heart, wounds, blood, bones, armes, sides, guts, nailes, foote, with many hundred more, which a gracious heart cannot but melt to heare, tremble to speake, quake to thinke, and yet (good Lord) how common are they in the mouthes of the prophane sonnes of Beliall, whereby they peirce the sides, wound the heart, teare the soule, and rend in pieces the body of our blessed Sauiour; worse then Iudas, who betraied him to be crucified for mony: these crucifie him themselues meerely vpon vanitie: worse then the Souldiers, that diuided his garments; these diuide his person, his natures, his members: worse then the Iewes, who cryed to Pilate, Crucifie him: these instead of Crosse & Nailes, do between their owne teeth grinde him, and teare him.30

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Gibson uses the expansive structures of the early seventeenth-­ century sentence to intensify the emotional power of his description of Christ’s pain, invoking bodily responses (melting, trembling, quaking) that culminate in the grotesque image of the swearer tearing at Christ with his own teeth. Thus, profane swearers not only put their own souls at risk, but also re-­ enacted the crucifixion itself, tearing Christ’s body repeatedly through their careless or vicious language, which becomes almost a form of cannibalism.

Execution and murder The impact of such thinking in The Revenger’s Tragedy is registered especially strongly in the central scenes of the play that deal with the execution of Junior and the murder of the Duke. Apparently betrayed by Supervacuo and Ambitioso, Junior begs the Officers, ‘Since I must / Through brothers’ perjury die, O let me venom / Their souls with curses’ (3.4.74–6). Two scenes later, an Officer brings his ‘bleeding head’ to Supervacuo and Ambitioso, who initially believe it to be that of Lussurioso. The Officer then describes his death: supervacuo

How died he, pray? officer       

O, full of rage and spleen.

supervacuo

He died most valiantly, then. We’re glad To hear it. officer

We could not woo him once to pray. ambitioso

He showed himself a gentleman in that, Give him his due. officer But in the stead of prayer He drew forth oaths. supervacuo Then did he pray, dear heart,

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Although you understood him not. officer

My lords, E’en with his last, with pardon be it spoke, He cursed you both.

supervacuo

He cursed us? ’Las, good soul. (3.6.42–50) Junior makes the archetypal ‘bad’ death – he refuses to acknowledge his sins, or to beg for God’s forgiveness, and he dies unreconciled with his fate or those responsible for his death. The comments of Supervacuo and Ambitioso – who, we should recall, think that they are talking about their despised stepbrother – underline the connections made in early modern culture between atheism, excessive language and social status. If Lussurioso/Junior has refused to pray and instead utters oaths and curses, he acts like the stereotypical irreligious gentleman or gallant of popular culture. The blasphemous quality of Junior’s oaths is underlined in Supervacuo’s assertion that oaths were his way of praying – he calls on God in the ‘wrong’ way, rather than through prayer and repentance. The presence of Junior’s dismembered head in the shape of a theatrical prop underlines the violence that he did to his soul in refusing to make a good death, and the capacity of his oaths to tear at Christ’s own body. It creates a potent dialogue between speech, prop and reported action that is set up by Supervacuo and Ambitioso’s uses of ‘Heart’ (3.6.9) and ‘ ’Sfoot’ (10) as they squabble at the beginning of the scene. The two scenes dealing with Junior’s death bookend the central act of violence in the play, Vindice and Hippolito’s murder of the Duke, in Act 3, Scene 5. Andrew Sofer brilliantly draws our attention to the fact that Gloriana’s skull bears with it not only the violence of her death, but also the posthumous act through which it was severed from her body. He argues that ‘Gloriana transforms her lover, who has desecrated her wish to remain pure and intact by disinterring and mutilating her corpse, into the instrument of her own infernal revenge on

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the men who treat her like dirt’.31 While Junior is reduced to a prop, the prop skull of Gloriana gains an uncanny kind of agency, oscillating ‘between subject and object, person and prop’.32 Early modern commentators would have rejected any kind of connection being drawn between the crucified Christ and Vindice’s murdered lover, not least because revenge is explicitly condemned in Christian doctrine. However, the ripping of Christ’s body that is enacted in the blasphemous oaths uttered by Supervacuo, Ambitioso, Hippolito and Vindice in the scenes surrounding Gloriana’s revenge provides an unsettling fusion of the physical and metaphysical signs of salvation and damnation. Moreover, although the Duke does not himself use profane oaths, his murder fragments his body into its constituent parts. The Duke complains that his teeth are ‘eaten out’ by the poison that is transferred to his lips as he kisses Gloriana’s skull, and he exclaims ‘O, my tongue!’ (3.5.159, 162). Vindice then tells him ‘You have eyes still’ and directs him ‘Look, monster, what a lady hast thou made me / My once betrothed wife’ (164–6). When Spurio and the Duchess enter, attention is again drawn to the constituent parts of the Duke’s body, as Vindice tells Hippolito, Nail down his tongue, and mine shall keep possession About his heart. If he but gasp, he dies. [. . .] Brother, 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. (196–7, 199–202) They do not cut out his tongue at this moment; instead, as Brian Gibbons comments, ‘the brothers station themselves on either side of the Duke, their daggers pointing at his treacherous tongue and false heart’.33 The stage image’s ‘ironic and emblematic aptness’ – as Gibbons terms it – is underscored by

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its relationship with the play’s broader discourses of bodily fragmentation and their association with Calvinist structures of salvation and damnation. Together with the phrase ‘Nail down his tongue’, Vindice’s repeated references to blood and ‘tear[ing] up his lids’ create a network of references to bodily violence that recall the very terms of profane swearing itself. ‘When the bad bleeds’, Vindice declares, ‘then is the tragedy good’. Roger Holdsworth has argued that Middleton shows comparatively little interest in revenge ‘as an issue of complex debate’, noting of The Revenger’s Tragedy, ‘as far as any “theme” of the legitimacy of retaliation is concerned, it is soon clear that Vindice’s career will simply illustrate the truism voiced by Votarius in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy: “Revenge / Does no man good but to his greater harm” ’.34 Yet the ways in which The Revenger’s Tragedy links violent action and violent language suggest that Middleton is nonetheless alert to the moral complexity of revenge. If men such as Vindice and Hippolito utter profane oaths before they have even begun to embark on their revenge, it is not the capacity of revenge to corrupt and endanger the immortal soul that is at stake, but the character of those who are attracted to vengeance and their impact on the world around them. Perhaps, the play suggests, revengers – like blasphemers – reveal themselves as reprobate through their actions and their very words. The Revenger’s Tragedy was written at a moment of transition in the theatrical use of oaths, just before censorship curtailed their expression on the English stage. Its modes of expression were therefore on the verge of becoming archaic – or at least the authorities might have hoped that they were about to become so. In the twenty-­first century, however, the problem with ‘ ’slud’ is not its transgressive power but its loss of that very power, as religious oaths have slipped out of the language at large, fossilized in comparatively anodyne terms such as ‘crikey’, ‘blimey’ or ‘gosh’. It seems fitting, therefore, that one of the very few stage or screen adaptations to engage

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productively with the play’s swearing is Alex Cox’s temporally ambiguous Revengers Tragedy (2002). Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script not only keeps some of the play’s original oaths, but also inserts some of their contemporary equivalents. Notably, at the moment that Vindici produces Gloriana’s skull in the film’s version of Act  3, Scene 5, Castiza – who in this adaptation takes an active part in the revenge – takes Hippolito’s line, ‘Is this the form that living shone so bright?’ (3.5.67) while Hippolito, here called Carlo, comments ‘Ah, fucking hell, mate’. Such a movement into present-­day English enables the film to connect past and present on an aural level, just as the hyper-­contemporary clothing and the setting in a dystopian Liverpool of an alternative present or near future do on a visual level. In addition, the use of the phrase ‘fucking hell’ enables a twenty-­first century viewer to have a direct emotional response to the oath – be it one of recognition, humour or disgust – while also registering the connection between early modern oaths and the questions of salvation and damnation explored above. Cox and Boyce thus retain the playfully serious use of emotionally and theologically charged language in The Revenger’s Tragedy in their contemporary reworking of Jacobean revenge tragedy. Moreover, the use of twenty-­firstcentury profanity reminds us, perhaps more powerfully than all of the textual evidence marshalled above, of the force of oaths such as ‘ ’slud’ in early modern England. Swearing in The Revenger’s Tragedy may be careless at times, but its effects are anything but artless.

Notes 1 For an alternative reading of this scene, which stresses the importance of Vindice’s making an oath that he should not keep, see Beatrice Groves, ‘New Directions: The Salvation of Oaths: Grace, Swearing and Hamlet in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in The Revenger’s Tragedy: A Critical Reader, ed. Brian Walsh (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 123–42, 126–9. Grove’s essay was published as I was preparing my own essay for publication, and I have

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benefitted greatly reading it, even though its approach and conclusions differ from my own. 2 See Hugh Gazzard, ‘An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 61 (2010): 495–528; Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 147–67; John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), with a brief discussion of The Revenger’s Tragedy on 143; Groves, ‘Salvation of Oaths’. For useful histories of swearing, see Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A History of Foul Language and Profanity in English (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Tony McEnery, Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh*t: a Brief History of Swearing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 3 See Frances Shirley, Swearing and Perjury in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979). 4 For important accounts of Calvinism in The Revenger’s Tragedy and the plays of Middleton, see John Stachneiwski, ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies’, in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (London: Macmillan, 1990), 226–47, 228; Holdsworth, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy as a Middleton Play’, in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies, 79–105; Herbert Jack Heller, Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), esp. 1–34; Groves, ‘Salvation of Oaths’. 5 William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience Wherein is Set Downe the Nature, Properties, and Differences Thereof (London, 1596), E3v. 6 On medieval swearing, see Lynn Forest-Hill, Transgressive Language in Medieval English Drama: Signs of Challenge and Change (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late-Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), esp. 95–9; Mohr, Holy Sh*t, 88–128. 7 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Oxford:

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Oxford University Press, 2008), l. 3125, and The Book of the Duchess, l. 927. 8 Gillian Woods, Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–2. 9 On the place of profane oaths in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean society, with further examples of attacks on profanity, see Shirley, Swearing and Perjury, 1–23; Gazzard, ‘An Act’. 10 William Perkins, A Direction for the Government of the Tongue According to Gods Word (London, 1593), E6v. 11 See Philip Stubbes, Two Wunderfull and Rare Examples, of the Undeferred and Present Approching Judgement of the Lord our God (London, 1581), A2v–A3r; Richard Younge, The Drunkard’s Character (London, 1638), H8r; Richard Ward, Theologicall Questions, Dogmaticall Observations, and Evangelicall Essays (London, 1640), Y6r; Walter Powell, A Summons for Swearers (London, 1645), F7v; Samuel Clarke, A Mirrour or Looking-Glasse Both for Saints and Sinners (London, 1654), O7v–8r; William Turner, A Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences Both of Judgment and Mercy (London, 1697), 3C1r; George Meriton, Immorality, Debauchery, and Profaneness, Exposed to the Reproof of Scripture, and the Censure of the Law (London, 1698), E4r. 12 Two of the most notorious early modern swearers were Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke – whose unruly speech was parodied in a series of pamphlets between 1647 and 1650 – and Elizabeth I, who was reputedly partial to the oath ‘God’s death’. Women also feature in some of the texts cited above, and in cases that were presented to the ecclesiastical courts. See Shirley, Swearing and Perjury, 8–10. 13 Perkins, Direction, E6v–E7r. 14 See Perkins, A Golden Chaine, or the Description of Theologie Containing the Order of the Causes of Saluation and Damnation, According to Gods Word (London, 1591), H1r–v; Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-­way to Heaven (London, 1601), L3r–M1v. 15 Perkins, The Foundation of Christian Religion Gathered into Sixe Principles (London, 1591), A2r, A3r. 16 Arthur Dent, Plaine Mans Path-­way, H5v.

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17 John Downame, Foure Treatises Tending to Disswade all Christians from Foure no Lesse Hainous then Common Sinnes; Namely, the Abuses of Swearing, Drunkennesse, Whoredome, and Briberie (London, 1609), D4v. 18 Walter Powell, A Summons for Swearers, D4r. 19 Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), L8v. 20 Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 154. 21 An Acte to Restraine Abuses of Players, in An[n]o regni Iacobi, regis Angl. Scotiae, Franc. & Hybern. viz. Angl. Franc. & Hybern. 3°. Scotiae 39° at the Second Session of Parliament Begun and Holden by Prorogation at Westminster the Fifth Day of November [. . .] to the High Pleasure of Almighty God, and to the Weale Publique of this Realme, were Enacted as Followeth, second impression (London, 1606), H5r. For important discussions of the Act see Gary Taylor, ‘Swounds Revisited: Theatrical, Editorial, and Literary Expurgation’, in Shakespeare Reshaped 1606–23, eds Gary Taylor and John Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 51–106; Gazzard, ‘An Act’. 22 See Taylor, ‘Swounds Revisited’. 23 On the 1624 Act see Gazzard, ‘An Act’, 519. 24 MacDonald P. Jackson notes that a possible reference to the Gunpowder Plot, ‘there’s gunpowder i’ the Court’ (2.2.171) hints that The Revenger’s Tragedy was written after 5 November 1605, and he argues that the play’s relationships with The Yorkshire Tragedy, The Puritan, Timon of Athens, Volpone and King Lear also ‘suggest that Revenger was written in early spring 1606’ (Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007], 362–3). The 1607–8 quarto edition was not entered in the Stationers’ Register until 7 October 1607, and it may bear signs of censorship at 4.2.48 and 4.4.14 (see the Textual Notes to The Revenger’s Tragedy in Taylor and Lavagnino, 555, 556). 25 Dent, Plaine Mans Path-­way, L3r. 26 Stachneiwski, ‘Calvinist Psychology’, 228. On Middleton and Calvinism see Holdsworth’s comments in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies, 98–9; and Heller, Penitent Brothellers, esp. 1–34.

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27 Christopher Ricks’s ground-­breaking essay ‘The Moral and Poetic Structure of The Changeling’, Essays in Criticism 10 (1960): 290–306, first drew attention to the importance of ‘blood’ in Middleton’s plays. 28 Stachneiwski, ‘Calvinist Psychology’, 234. 29 See Stephen Hawes, The Co[n]uercyon of Swearers (London, 1509), A3v; Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 97–8. 30 Abraham Gibson, The Lands Mourning, for Vaine Swearing: Or The Downe-­fall of Oathes (London, 1613), D1v–D2r. 31 Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 112. 32 Ibid., 113. 33 Brian Gibbons, ed., The Revenger’s Tragedy, revised ed. (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2008), 3.6.192–4n. 34 Holdsworth, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy as a Middleton Play’, 99.

7 The Dramaturgy of The Revenger’s Tragedy Janet Clare

The Revenger’s Tragedy (c. 1606) entered the dramatic tradition of revenge nearly twenty years after The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Thomas Kyd’s pioneering and enormously popular vernacular revenge play.1 After instigating a vogue for stage revenge, The Spanish Tragedy was revised in the early seventeenth century, continuing to move audiences by now familiar with more recent plays of revenge: Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600), Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1601) and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. In their unique fictional worlds and very different dramatic styles and idioms these plays illustrate the remarkable versatility of revenge tragedy. The rhetorical laments of Hieronimo, for example, contrast with the existential angst of Hamlet and with Vindice’s manic obsession with revenge. As Andrew Gurr has reminded us, the popularity of playgoing in Elizabethan and Jacobean London meant that playgoers demanded ‘a constant supply of novelty’.2 In its dramaturgy The Revenger’s Tragedy rises to this challenge. Nevertheless, revenge plays have a genre identity, and the very

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title of The Revenger’s Tragedy would have prompted a Jacobean audience to relate it to other revenge plays and respond not only to what was arrestingly new in its dramaturgy, but to what was familiar in the theatrical experience. Early modern playgoers would have watched the play through the lens of other revenge plays, and expectations would have been generated by experience of those plays and responses determined by the play’s striking divergences and generic subversions. In this essay, I want to explore The Revenger’s Tragedy as an innovative play of revenge, in the context of the ‘stage traffic’ of early modern revenge drama, with the aim of recapturing something of its early reception on the Jacobean stage. Stage traffic is a term that I have used elsewhere to capture the way narratives, scenarios, motifs, stage effects circulated amongst early modern playwrights, playing companies and communities of playgoers, subject to change and adaptation. Over time, playwrights adapted and converted to new use familiar conventions not only to fit with prevailing ideology, but also on the basis of performance venue and the tastes and expectations of audiences.3 As I will argue, the traffic of revenge plays, as with other plays of the period, affects not so much narrative – although revenge plays do share narrative motifs – but dramaturgy. Dramaturgy relates to theatre practice, moving from the internal structures of a play text through to staging and the calculated manipulation of audience response.4 A dramaturgical analysis of a text takes into account its formal elements, including plot, narrative structure, character, time-­frame and stage-­action. It also includes the specific use made of theatrical conventions, such as asides and soliloquies, and of non-­textual effects: visual, such as disguise, dumb shows, stage properties; and sound effects, such as, for example, music and thunder. As a tool of analysis dramaturgy moves from the creation and the construction of a play to its wider social function, implicating spectators’ response to the performance. Twenty-­first century spectators, as a rule, do not deconstruct a performance into its component parts.

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Meaning is generated through the confluence of such dramatic components. An audience experiences a production aesthetic, determined by a director, which aims to bind its parts together. But for an early modern audience well-­acquainted with revenge tragedies, part of the pleasure in watching The Revenger’s Tragedy would have been bound up with deconstructing a new play in the genre. That the play deliberately invites such a response through its self-­conscious allusions, in-­jokes and playful treatment of familiar conventions is fundamental to my argument.

1 To say that revenge constitutes the scaffolding of The Revenger’s Tragedy might sound tautological. Surely all revenge tragedies are constructed by schemes for retribution. But this is not quite the case. In certain plays, which we might justifiably describe as revenge tragedies – Webster’s The White Devil and Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, for example – other narratives and motifs are interlaced with revenge plotting. There are many byways to the dramatic structure of Hamlet which have little to do with revenge, and for a substantial part of its critical reception Hamlet has not been discussed in terms of revenge tragedy. In contrast, revenge proliferates – often comically – in The Revenger’s Tragedy, inflecting almost every action and conveying the play’s self-­conscious take on the revenge sub-­genre. Revenge is often spurious, in keeping with what I see as the play’s vein of excess, and used as a pretext for intrigue, to the extent that virtually every male character is plotting revenge. Characters contrive revenge against one another in order to right some real or half-­imagined wrong, with the lines of vengeful intent criss-­crossing one another or converging. Spurio, the Bastard, expresses early on the wish that ‘all the court were turned into a corse’ (1.2.36) and with warped logic convinces himself that his revenge is just: ‘there’s the vengeance that my birth was wrapped

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in’ (167). The Duchess, burning with resentment towards her husband, longs to ‘kill him in his forehead’ (107), avenging herself by making him a cuckold. Spurio plans to destroy Lussurioso by damning him in his pleasure. Urged on by Vindice that it will be glorious ‘to kill ’em doubled’ (2.3.4, echoing Hamlet’s desire to kill Claudius in ‘the pleasure of his incestuous bed’ [3.3.90])5, Lussurioso bursts into the Duke’s bedchamber thinking to surprise his stepmother and Spurio together. The revenge plots of Vindice and Antonio’s faction are thrown into relief by those of the ducal family, inviting an audience to make comparison with the diverse motives and modes of revenge. Among the extended ducal family, revenge is treated with levity and quick egotism. Vindice’s revenge is presented with dark and mordant relish, whereas for the courtiers avenging the death of Antonio’s wife revenge is a ritual, grave in tone. The dramaturgy of the play coheres around the role of Vindice who – rather like a dramaturge – directs the audience towards the play’s artefact and exposes its mechanisms and techniques. He opens the play with his soliloquy, addressed not only to the audience, but to a skull, a memento mori of his murdered love, Gloriana. There is no stage direction in the 1607–8 text to indicate that Vindice is holding a skull. This posture – which must surely have evoked Hamlet’s address to Yorick’s skull, all the more so if Richard Burbage played both Hamlet and Vindice6 – can only be deduced from the text, that is, in Vindice’s morbid address to the ‘sallow picture’ of his ‘poisoned love’ (1.1.14). Hippolito’s entry confirms the scenario with his mocking ‘Still sighing o’er death’s vizard?’ (49),7 putting the play as a tragedy into its place. There may be a double joke here at the expense of both character and actor. Vindice is Hamlet in excess: possibly, the actor is replicating an earlier role as revenge-­driven hero. A cause for vengeance has been established, but, in case a long-­dead love may not have sufficient weight, another – again, gesturing towards Hamlet – is slipped in later in the scene when Vindice tells his mother he intends to travel:

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vindice

For since my worthy father’s funeral My life’s unnatural to me, e’en compelled, As if I lived now when I should be dead. mother

Indeed, he was a worthy gentleman, Had his estate been fellow to his mind. vindice

The Duke did much deject him. Much. vindice   Too much. And through disgrace oft smothered in his spirit When it would mount. Surely I think he died Of discontent, the nobleman’s consumption. mother

(1.1.119–27) The allusion to his father’s death is brief and hardly picked up again. It is as if Middleton did not want to miss a trick and is paying lip service to the scenario, familiar from Hamlet and Hoffman, of the son avenging the father. Further, the death of the father motif somewhat teasingly induces an audience familiar with Hamlet to consider the respective roles of the mother, Gratiana and Gertrude. Gratiana’s comment on her husband with its qualification of his worthiness in temporal terms raises questions about her constancy, preparing the ground for her later susceptibility to money and power when her daughter is propositioned. Nine years brooding on retribution for the murder of Gloriana, and to no effect, well exemplifies Francis Bacon’s maxim that dwelling on revenge keeps ‘the wounds green’.8 Revenge is seldom, if ever, achieved speedily in revenge tragedies. Hamlet delays and prevaricates until the last scene of the play, despite his intention to ‘sweep’ to his revenge ‘with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love’ (1.5.29– 30). The process is generally protracted, entailing disguise, subterfuge and deception. Revengers have to take time in plotting and scheming or deliberating on retribution for the

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dramaturgically practical reason that without delay between the call for and the execution of revenge there would be no play. In dramatic terms, the delay engages the audience with the sufferings, dilemma and sense of injustice felt by the revenger over a protracted period. Nine years is, however, an inordinate amount of time to wait to exact revenge. Such obsessiveness is consistent with a play distinguished – to some blackly comic effect – by the way it takes revenge conventions, in themselves structured towards excess, to the point of greater excess. It is dramatically significant that this passage of time is not represented in the play. An audience is not engaged with the sufferings and dilemma of the revenger, as it is with Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy and with Hamlet. Instead, the audience is repositioned as accomplices, not witnesses, and this is central to the dramaturgy. Vindice shares all his stratagems and techniques with the audience, letting them in on the secret and showing how less ingenious plotters like the Duchess’s sons cannot hope to pull off their plots. Throughout the play, he alerts his audience not only to layers within the deceptions in the play, but to the methods of artifice. When he finds himself in the absurdly comic position of being hired, as Vindice, to kill his alter ego, Piato, he hits on the ingenious plan of dressing the murdered Duke in Piato’s costume, confiding in us as well as Hippolito: ‘What say you then to this device? / If we dressed up the body of the Duke –’ (4.2.205–6). As revenger, Vindice’s coup de théatre is his wittily appropriate and grotesque employment of Gloriana in his/her revenge, and again we become party to the design: Look you, brother, I have not fashioned this only for show And useless property. No, it shall bear a part E’en in it own revenge. (3.5.99–102) Evidently Vindice sees no incongruity in using Gloriana’s skull as a stage prop and casts it as another actor in the deadly show he is devising.

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The malcontented Vindice is socially marginalized, but – as is apparent from the dramaturgy of the opening scene – he is theatrically privileged. Beginning a play with a soliloquy is a bold move. Shakespeare had done it in Richard III, giving Richard a theatrical advantage and establishing immediately a degree of complicity on the part of the audience with Richard’s ambitions. Moral judgement is placed on hold. Chettle opens his tragedy of Hoffman with Hoffman’s soliloquy in the presence of the tortured cadaver of his father, incorporating on stage his motivation for revenge. Addressing his father’s flayed corpse, stolen from the gallows, Hoffman vows to repay the public hanging with private revenge: ‘I will not leave thee, untill like thy selfe, / I’ve made thy enemies, then hand in hand / We’ll walke to paradise’.9 As Hoffman proclaims ‘myne’s a cause that’s right’ (l.12), thunder and lightning are heard and seen, a sure indication to Hoffman that he is to delay no further in seeking vengeance. A similarly arresting and macabre effect is created in The Revenger’s Tragedy’s opening scene as Vindice confronts himself and the audience with the most popular emblem of death, the skull, although, as I have suggested, the authenticity of the moment is playfully undercut by Hippolito’s reaction with its theatrical implications of an absurdly extended delay. The theatrical effectiveness of Vindice’s soliloquy is enhanced by the split staging of the scene. As Vindice addresses skull and audience, the ducal family processes across the stage by torchlight, in a dumb show. In spatial terms, Robert Weimann’s classic definitions of theatrical space, locus and platea, evident from medieval drama, seem particularly apt for the crafting of the scene.10 For Weimann, the locus is a rudimentary representation of a fixed, symbolic location, which in The Revenger’s Tragedy can be identified as the court, while the platea is an unlocalized or neutral space. Vindice occupies the platea, a theatrical dimension of the real world, and from this privileged position moral weight is given to his blistering condemnation of the Duke and his family, and his determination to revenge. Occupying the space of the platea, Vindice has access to the audience, denied to the court in the first scene, and

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this interactivity of actor and audience seeks to engage the audience’s sympathy from the beginning of the play.11 Vindice’s platea status is maintained through other aspects of dramaturgy, specifically in his use of the aside and his assumption of disguise and role-­playing. The play exploits these familiar theatrical conventions to an inordinate degree – both metatheatrically, to allude to the nature of performance itself, and also metaphorically, as a means of drawing attention to the endemic duplicity of the court. Disguise is crucial to plot and dramaturgy, enabling Vindice to infiltrate the court and the dramatist to trade in the dramatic irony essential to the play’s take on revenge. The audience is in the superior position of penetrating all disguises and share Vindice’s delight when members of the ducal family are completely taken in by his deceptions. Vindice, dedicated to avenging the murder of a woman who had resisted corruption, is obliged in his assumed role to go through the motions of corrupting his sister, and the would-­be corrupter, Lussurioso, unwittingly engages her brother to act as his agent. Irony is not limited to situation. It informs the dialogue most prominently – and emerging seamlessly from the given situation – when Lussurioso confronts Vindice/Piato, faithful for nine years to a memory, with his passing lusts: Give me my bed by stealth, there’s true delight; What breeds a loathing in’t but night by night? (1.3.107–8) In due course the Duke, too, thinks he has found in Piato the right man to set up a sexual assignation in an ‘unsunned lodge’ (3.5.18) and hires him to be his pander, an encounter turned with full dramatic irony into an assignation with death. Asides also privilege the audience: even the arch-­deceivers, Vindice and Hippolito, do not know what others have said in their absence or disclosed to the audience in their soliloquies. Asides are present throughout the play’s dialogue. Ambitioso and Supervacuo, for example, superficially in alliance are, in

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reality, as their asides reveal, deadly rivals. They plot against Lussurioso: supervacuo         

Then let’s set by the judges And fall to the officers. ’Tis but mistaking The Duke our father’s meaning, and where he named ‘Ere many days’, ’tis but forgetting that And have him die i’th’ morning. ambitioso Excellent, Then am I heir – duke in a minute! supervacuo [aside] Nay, An he were once puffed out, here is a pin Should quickly prick your bladder. (3.1.8–14) The transparency effected by the aside is technically a foil to duplicity, and the audience responds to the various shades of irony that depend on its knowing more than any of the characters on stage. It is, though, Vindice who most employs the device, and to different effect than the other characters; his asides underline his unique position within the play and playhouse as he draws the audience’s attention to the irony of a situation or to his clever management of a scenario. While his use of the aside defines his duplicity in dealing with the ducal family, it also discloses how he stands outside their duplicity and corruption. This is evident in his exchanges with Lussurioso and in the mock temptation of Castiza when his lengthy attempts to corrupt her are interspersed with asides rejoicing in her chastity. The asides of the ducal family reveal how deep they are in corruption, those of Vindice that he is still a moral being. The playwright gives little social or psychological complexity to Vindice since everything the character does is subordinated to the function of his role as avenger. Vindice’s relationship to members of his family is partly an exception. These relationships give him a fuller individual identity, though they also coincide with his revenge agenda: Hippolito is his reflection, like

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Horatio to his Hamlet; Castiza operates as another Gloriana, the innocent quarry of the Duke’s lecherous son; and Vindice’s mother falls prey to the corrupting potential and manipulative ways of rank and wealth. His soliloquies maintain the distinction between overt and covert, player and role, and his asides have the same function, often with grim humour. The audience is privy to these shifts between role and identity, invited to enjoy its complicity with the plotters and relish the many occasions of dramatic irony ingeniously devised. An outstanding instance is found in the dialogue that ensues when Vindice presents himself in his own person to Lussurioso as someone up to the job of killing his alter ego, Piato. The dramatic irony is palpable, further, in a playful moment of stagecraft: Lussurioso forgets the name of his hired assassin, allowing Vindice to respond with double entendre and dead pan irony: lussurioso

Thy name? I have forgot it. vindice

Vindice, my lord.

lussurioso

’Tis a good name that. vindice

Ay, a revenger.

lussurioso

It does betoken courage. Thou shouldst be valiant And kill thine enemies. vindice That’s my hope, my lord. (4.2.172–5) Vindice is fully aware of the irony of his name and shares that with the audience, drawing attention to the convention of ‘meaningful’ names in the tradition of both the old morality drama and contemporary satirical and citizen comedy of which, of course, Middleton was a practitioner. The morality tradition is invoked, but its didactic purpose is subverted for satirical effect and dramatic irony.12

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Whether Vindice retains the moral high-­ground he occupies in the early scenes of the play and mirrored in their staging is open to question. To revenge the death of Gloriana he is forced to resort to subterfuge: a political necessity. Even in Titus Andronicus, where the avengers are powerful, trickery is the theatrical mode. In Vindice’s case, it is prescribed by his subordinate status. Middleton turns this political necessity into an elaborate dramatic aesthetic of disguise and masquerade. The artistry by which Vindice contrives the Duke’s death – the dressing up of Gloriana, the scene-­setting of the ‘unsunned lodge’ and the presence of an audience/voyeurs in himself and Hippolito? coheres with the play as theatrical artefact. The plot seems driven by a motive that has lost some of its potency, as revenge becomes detached from its cause. Vindice directs Hippolito to step back as the Duke enters and all recollections of the skull as the remains of a loved one have been erased: ‘Brother, fall you back a little / With the bony lady’ (3.5.120–1). A little earlier in the scene in a mock dialogue with the ‘bony lady’, Gloriana is treated as a ventriloquist’s dummy. In what Hippolito describes as the ‘quaint malice’ of Vindice’s revenge against the Duke, there is gross sadism as Vindice exults in watching the Duke tormented by poison, nails his tongue down with his dagger and forces the Duke to watch the sexual assignation of the Duchess and his bastard son. Here, Middleton employs the mirroring motif of revenge dramaturgy in which punishment matches or exceeds the original crime. Hamlet in his dying moment forces Claudius to drink the poisoned wine which has killed his mother, at the same time emulating Claudius’s use of poison in killing Old Hamlet. Hoffman crowns his victims with a searing hot crown, imitating the public execution of his father. Although there is nothing Senecan in the rhetoric or idiom of The Revenger’s Tragedy, Vindice does take his cue from Seneca’s portrayal of excess, exemplified in Atreus: ‘You cannot say you have avenged a crime / Unless you better it’ (Thyestes, 2.195–6).13 The spectacular grimness and grotesque appropriateness of Vindice’s stratagem in arranging the Duke’s murder meets this requirement to the letter.

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2 Integral to the dramaturgy is the orchestration of two revenge plots. Vindice’s stratagems are thrown into relief by a second, less substantiated revenge plot, occasioned by another act of sexual violence, a plot controlled by a court faction of uncertain leadership. When the unnamed wife of a lord simply known as Antonio is raped and takes her own life, Piero and a group of anonymous nobles swear revenge on the perpetrator, Junior Brother, the Duke’s stepson. The gathering is skillfully stage-­ managed by Antonio, providing a hint of how he will later behave towards Vindice in clearing the path towards his accession. The stage direction informs us that he ‘discovers’ the body of his wife to Piero, certain lords, and to Hippolito. Having no position at court, Vindice is not present. Antonio presumably draws back the curtain of a discovery space, revealing the body, and then in his lines particularizes the tableau of his wife lying with a prayer book under her cheek and holding in her hand an unspecified book with a tucked-­up leaf and a hand pointing to words glossing her suicide. His construction of the scene is evocative of paintings of the death of Lucrece, popular in the Renaissance:             I marked not this before – A prayer-­book the pillow to her cheek; This was her rich confection; and another Placed in her right hand, with a leaf tucked up Pointing to these words: Melius virtute mori, quam per dedecus vivere. (1.4.12–17) The words ‘better to die virtuous than live with dishonour’ arouse streams of praise from Antonio and Hippolito contemplating the dead body, and the nobles vow to take revenge. But the focus of their vow is temporarily lost when the two elder brothers unwittingly bring about the death of Junior Brother through their incompetent scheming. The rape

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now becomes symbolic of endemic court corruption and feeds into the occasion for rebellion. The scenario of death as the honourable – and only – solution for the woman stigmatized by rape would have been familiar to the early modern audience from Titus’s killing of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. A more overt template, as already suggested, is the rape of Lucrece, a story retold in verse by Shakespeare (The Rape of Lucrece, 1594) and by Middleton (The Ghost of Lucrece, c. 1600), before being dramatized by Thomas Heywood in The Rape of Lucrece.14 Heywood’s play was published in 1608, a year after The Revenger’s Tragedy, but possibly performed earlier. Like Lucrece, Antonio’s wife has been raped by the youngest son of a ruler, with the difference that in The Revenger’s Tragedy, Junior Brother is a stepson and not, like Sextus Tarquinius, a direct descendant of a king. Still, the structural parallel is there. More to the point is the idea – more latent in The Revenger’s Tragedy – of political appropriation of domestic violence to fire a plot against a corrupt regime. Lucrece’s rape is the ostensible cause for the nobility to rise against the Tarquins and the leader of the rebellion, Lucius Junius Brutus, becomes a hero in Rome’s liberation from monarchical tyranny. Lucrece has agency and a voice. She declares that she prides ‘her life lesse than her honour’d fame’ (l. 2490),15 while, at the same time, inciting Junius Brutus, her husband and her father to rise and depose Tarquin. In contrast, the function of Antonio’s wife is passive; she has no direct agency in promoting rebellion, though her suicide is perceived as an exemplary protest. It is possibly the underlying presence of the classical template that prompts her to be celebrated, not castigated, in an ostensibly Christian court, for taking her own life (Ophelia in Hamlet is denied full burial rites for the ‘sin’ of suicide). In both Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece and The Revenger’s Tragedy the female body is a stimulus to insurrection or is used to this end. Brutus orders the removal of Lucrece’s ‘chaste body’ to the marketplace:

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           beare that chaste body Into the market place: that horrid object, Shall kindle them with a most just revenge. (ll. 2512–14) Revenge is to be taken not just against Sextus Tarquinius, but against the whole Tarquin family – ‘The hearts of all the Tarquins shall weepe blood’ (l. 2535). Brutus exploits the rebellion to gain power, but it is Collatine, husband to Lucrece, who succeeds Brutus as consul, acknowledging himself as one of Jove’s agents in revenging rape and punishing pride. The body of Antonio’s wife is not given such public prominence, yet its display to members of the court serves as the catalyst for the second revenge plot. For most of the drama the latter has no part in the action, resurfacing only in the penultimate scene. The sub-­plot then merges with the main plot when the stage direction announces the entry of Vindice and his brother Hippolito ‘with Piero and other Lords’. Vindice addresses the lords, enjoining them ‘to blast this villainous dukedom’ (5.2.6) and he orchestrates the final act of vengeance against the ducal family during the celebrations for the accession of the new ruler. The play’s closure ironically contrasts the fates of the avenging parties. Vindice, exultant that his purpose has been achieved, is led off with his brother to execution. Antonio is the beneficiary of the rebellion and – having kept his hands clean – is proclaimed duke. The distinct plots of The Revenger’s Tragedy are mirrored by distinctive groupings. Absent or present women – Gloriana, Antonio’s wife and Castiza – who are actual or potential prey to the Duke or members of his family stand apart as the antipode of the grouping of the ducal family with its ruthless sexual appetites. These women conduct their lives with exemplary chastity, representing a challenge to the lust and power of their persecutors. Antonio’s wife and Gloriana, innocent victims of the powerful, exert considerable symbolic power as the moral justification for revenge. It falls to Castiza, however, to articulate a spirited defence of sexual integrity and

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express contempt and defiance towards the ducal clan. Enacted on stage, Castiza’s indignant rejection of Lussurioso’s sexual propositioning gives a voice to violated femininity. The tempting of Castiza is essential to the play’s dramaturgy. By this means, the virtues of the silent, Gloriana and Antonio’s wife, are given a vigorous, living counterpart, free of posthumous – male – ennobling. Through their inner integrity this group of women generate an energy of protest and resistance that is transmitted to the avengers – notably all men – and both inspires and justifies their actions. The manipulation of the two plots against the ducal family is quite deliberate. It is Vindice’s private revenge that dominates the action, whereas the oppositional court faction appears in one scene in Act 1 and re-­emerge suddenly at the climax of the play. I would argue that the deployment and synchronization of these two rebellions are more than simply matters of the play’s design or structure, relating to the broader matter of the play’s social function – that is, the extent to which the work expresses and might be said to influence the culture of which it is part. Through the control of these two plots, the play’s subversiveness – uprising, regicide and regime change – is ostensibly neutered. Although the Duke’s tyranny is presented rather obliquely, or metaphorically, in sexual rather than political terms, he is undoubtedly a tyrant. He is given a soliloquy, after he has pardoned Lussurioso, ironically, for what the audience knows is a non-­crime, in which he admits to abuses of power: ‘Many a beauty have I turned to poison / In the denial, covetous of all’ (2.3.127–8), at the same time conveying that any motion of guilt is weak and gives way to sexual appetite. The soliloquy is reminiscent of Claudius’s soliloquy in Hamlet in which he too confesses to murder, whilst admitting that he cannot relinquish what he has gained by his crime. In the Duke’s soliloquy, however, there is no question – as there is in Hamlet and other tragedies of state – that the murderer is not the legitimate ruler. Although the emphasis in The Revenger’s Tragedy is on sexual transgression and abuse – to the extent of murdering the unwilling – shifting

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the focus away from a politically motivated rebellion, the Duke’s removal, as well as that of his heir, are acts of regicide. The action of The Revenger’s Tragedy moves decisively, and dangerously, against the dominant ideological position of passive obedience and non-­resistance even under tyranny. We have only to look at Ben Jonson’s categorical and circumspect rejection of tyrannicide which accompanied the published text of Sejanus, in 1605, a year before The Revenger’s Tragedy, to see how close Middleton was sailing to the wind in presenting regicide on-­stage. In ‘The Argument’ to Sejanus – a play presenting monstrous images of absolute power, in this instance under the Roman Emperor Tiberius, and for which Jonson had been questioned by the Privy Council – Jonson extracted a political moral: This do we advance as a mark of terror to all traitors and treasons, to show how just the heavens are in pouring and thundering down a weighty vengeance on their unnatural intents, even to the worst princes; much more to those for guard of whose piety and virtue are in continual watch, and God himself miraculously working.16 Jonson makes it clear that God will thunder down ‘a weighty vengeance’ not on corrupt princes, but on those who seek to oppose them. In the later 1616 Folio text of Sejanus, Jonson omitted this explication of his artistic purpose, indicative of the fact that in 1605 – the year of the Gunpowder Plot – there was some obligation to impose an orthodox reading on his drama of imperial tyranny and aristocratic plottings against the regime.17 Middleton makes a playfully provocative allusion to the Gunpowder Plot in Hippolito’s gleeful anticipation of the fallout from Lussurioso’s expected discovery of the Duchess in bed with Spurio: ‘There’s gunpowder i’the court’ (2.3.168). But, far more politically provocative is the way the play engages with usurpation and regicide. The Duke may qualify as amongst ‘the worst Princes’, yet, in Jonson’s terms, that would still not justify Vindice’s quietly and ingeniously

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conducted tyrannicide. Nor would Lussurioso’s carnal pursuit of Vindice’s sister justify murdering him. Vindice’s intense feelings of loss and injustice and the verve with which he plays the part of the avenger bring the audience on his side, but theatre is not state. The dramaturgy has to resolve the tension between the logic of theatre – an audience wants Vindice to exact revenge – and the law of the state which demands the death of a regicide. At this juncture the dramaturgy may be seen transgressing the bounds of performance and engaging with the political culture of which it is part. In condemning Vindice to death the play is meticulously orthodox. At the same time, the play preserves its artistic integrity. Vindice’s final confession is that of the dramaturge who cannot bear to let the credit slip for a wonderful performance and a cleverly staged and ‘witty’ production: vindice

We may be bold To speak it now. ’Twas somewhat witty-­carried, Though we say it. ’Twas we two murdered him. antonio  You two? vindice

None else, i’faith, my lord. Nay, ’twas well managed. (5.3.96–9) His confession perpetuates the inevitable denouement in which the revenger is shown that vengeance is his only on penalty of death, but any possible sense of tragedy is lost through the peripeteia of the final scene and Vindice’s exultant dance towards death: ‘ ’Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes’ (109). The reversal of Vindice’s fortunes from jubilant executioner to condemned criminal takes place in some thirty breathless lines. Far from being dismayed, Vindice seals his life’s work with wit and aplomb. Yet, a whole dynasty has been wiped out, and a new ruler who appears to have no legal right to the dukedom is installed. Antonio’s ascent to power has been facilitated in part by Vindice, whose role as avenger extends to that of proxy avenger, settling scores for the violation of

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Antonio’s wife. A rebellion takes place, backed by five hundred nobles, which is in essence a coup, but through Antonio’s non-­ participation and his scapegoating of Vindice, regicide and rebellion are naturalized as legitimate accession.

3 The stage managing of the Duke’s death is characteristic of the self-­conscious theatricality of The Revenger’s Tragedy, not only in its relation to other revenge plays, but in its constant allusion to tropes of performance. When Vindice at last gains entry into the Duke’s inner circle, enabling him to plot his revenge, he is exultant, perplexing his brother as to the cause of his jubilation: hippolito

Why, what’s the matter, brother? O, ’tis able To make a man spring up and knock his forehead Against yon silver ceiling.

vindice

(3.5.2–4) The idea of literally jumping for joy at the prospect of imminent revenge is typical of the play’s colloquial idiom. At the same time the lines contain a metatheatrical allusion as Vindice points or looks up to the silver ceiling of the Globe’s ornate canopy, actor and audience colluding in the intrinsically theatrical device of breaking the theatrical illusion. Other aspects of stagecraft are heightened as the play frequently and explicitly shatters the illusion of the play. When Lussurioso hires him to kill his alter ego, Vindice, rather like a stage prompter, calls out for thunder to register the outrageousness of the act. Vindice appeals to the heavens: O, thou almighty patience! ’Tis my wonder That such a fellow, impudent and wicked,

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Should not be cloven as he stood, Or with a secret wind burst open. Is there no thunder left, or is’t kept up In stock for heavier vengeance? There it goes. (4.2.193–8) The invective of protest at the seeming impunity of wickedness evolves into an allusion to playhouse practice, in which thunder is ‘kept in stock’ (in reserve); then, after ‘thunder’, the line turns colloquial, with more than a touch of bathos. ‘There it goes’ readily suggests the thunder machine.18 As Vindice, Hippolito and two unnamed nobles stab Lussurioso and three courtiers, the stage direction indicates that thunder is heard again. Vindice responds with irreverent jubilation, again drawing attention to theatrical artifice: Mark, thunder! Dost know thy cue, thou big-­voiced crier? Dukes’ groans are thunder’s watchwords. (5.3.42–4) The idea that the groans of a dying ruler serve as a signal or a stage cue for thunder continues the self-­conscious use of theatrical mechanisms. The Duke’s groans are part of the presentational dynamics of the play as Vindice draws attention to the fact that verbal cues are essential for the sound effects of performance. At another dramatic moment, the predicted stage effects do not respond to cue. In a flagrant lie, Lussurioso tells Vindice how he reacted against Piato for dishonouring Castiza; Vindice, in an aside, questions the lack of any sign of divine disapproval at such enormity: ‘Has not heaven an ear? / Is all the lightning wasted?’ (4.2.158–9). Unlike the thunder which is kept ‘in stock’, the lightning has been wasted, presumably on lesser wrongs. Thunder variously functions on the early modern stage and in early modern culture. Jonson’s cautionary note to Sejanus

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had alluded to God’s vengeance ‘thundering down’. In King Lear when the old king is on the heath, a storm rumbles in the distance and then breaks out, a metaphor of cosmic chaos equal – in Lear’s mind – to the representation of the unnatural character of filial ingratitude. In Hoffman, the protagonist links the thunder he hears as an angry response to his apparent failure to revenge his father. Thunder can be taken both literally and symbolically, as an index to universal and abstract truth. The Revenger’s Tragedy plays on these tropes, leaving their meaning ambivalent, perhaps strategically so. In arguing for the play’s political and religious subversiveness, Jonathan Dollimore has contended that there is derision in Vindice’s summoning of providence, a parody of the providential viewpoint. For Dollimore, God’s wrath is simply ‘an undisguised excuse for ostentatious effect’.19 Certainly in performance such cues can come across effectively as a comic allusion to a melodramatic convention with actor and audience in on the joke.20 But, in a culture where life was understood as intimately linked to eternal verities, signs of those eternal verities were discovered in the everyday. Lussurioso’s superstitious viewing of the comet at his accession banquet as a bad omen is quite understandable. Stage thunder could not have been so outmoded in 1606–7, only two years after the fury, power and awesome grandeur of the storm in King Lear. I would argue that, as with the dramaturgy of the rebellion and regicide, there is a strategic ambiguity of presentation and hence representation of these aural effects. Vindice’s words do subvert the illusion of theatre, although not entirely. His couplet ‘No power is angry when the lustful die. / When thunder claps heaven likes the tragedy’ (5.3.47–8) leaves much open to interpretation. The sardonic ‘big-­voiced crier’ has been replaced by the more reverential ‘heaven’, leaving a providential interpretation just about possible, though it is undermined by treating thunder and heaven as members of an audience: one claps and the other in a low key merely ‘likes’ the tragedy. Much depends on performance. Stage effects could be indicative of divine, moral judgement in a grotesquely sinful world or simply a contrived

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thunder clap, a motif of an agnostic play which above all else has privileged theatre and the mechanisms of performance. Earlier critics tended to look for a moral pattern in The Revenger’s Tragedy, with particular emphasis on character and characterization, and such readings continue to be influential in shaping arguments about the play. R.A. Foakes, for example, has argued that Vindice loses his privileged position as morally justified avenger and aligns himself with the other villains in the play.21 To say that Vindice is aligned with the villains of the play pays scant regard to its structure. The Duke and his family murder or plan murder or have murderous wishes out of pique, or ruthless ambition, or gratuitous resentment or because a servant is suspected of trickery and knows too much. In every case the occasion for murder or murderous intent is slight. All this forms a stark contrast with Vindice, emphasizing the ethos and instrumentation of revenge where the punishment fits the crime. This essay has sought to shift the emphasis away from an essentially moral perspective on character and action to discover through a focus on dramaturgy the relationship between presentation and representation. As a highly wrought artistic form, critically and theatrically self-­conscious, it could be argued that The Revenger’s Tragedy is not socially contingent, alien to the world of its spectators. In its extravagant plotting and aesthetic of excess, the play can hardly be regarded as mimetic. Yet, the theatrical milieu of The Revenger’s Tragedy is far from alien. By the time the play had entered the dramatic tradition in the early Jacobean period, spectators were thoroughly familiar with its scenarios, its roles, plot devices and techniques: the spectacle of a corrupt ruler, head of an equally corrupt family, abusing innocence; and of the often ingenious plotting of the socially marginalized and malcontented avenger. The play depends upon such knowledge, an intimacy with the stage traffic of the revenge play, for its force, which is more often satirical or parodic than it is tragic. Indeed, tragic events – the deaths of Gloriana and Antonio’s wife – are dramatic marginalia, removed to a timeframe prior to the

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action of the play. To describe The Revenger’s Tragedy as a satirical tragedy would not be far off the mark. Through the novel role of Vindice seemingly created both as a way of representing a generic type and as a way of exposing the mechanisms of the revenge genre, the audience are given a privileged position. Theatricality is inclusive: the audience are in on the deceptions and can predict how things are likely to end for each character. Yet such intimacy exposes an audience to the abusive power structures of the play: the grotesquely ruthless self-­indulgence of the regime with its destruction of life and love. A concern with stage aesthetics, a fascination with component parts of revenge and a sustained generic ambivalence between farce and tragedy chafes against the damning indictments of the play. The tragedy of a revenger whose life has been narrowed and warped is placed in the context of monstrous excess, comic asides and outlandish deceptions to create a particularly equivocal theatrical experience: tragedy tilted towards parody.

Notes 1 The dates of composition and performance of early modern plays are difficult to fix. I have adopted the limits as recorded in Alfred Harbage, The Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. Samuel Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964). 2 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 115. 3 See Janet Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–28. 4 See Mary Luckhurst, Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 5 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006).

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6 The 1607 title page states that the play has been ‘sundry times Acted, by the Kings Majesties Servants’. Burbage was the celebrated tragedian of the King’s Men and played the part of Hamlet, thus it is probable that he would have taken the lead in The Revenger’s Tragedy. Middleton wrote a short elegy on Burbage. 7 Jackson’s edition of the play substitutes the 1607 ‘death’s vizard’ with ‘death’s visor’, which Jackson annotates as ‘mask, or face suggestive of a mask’. Jackson’s modernization rather reduces the resonance of the 1607 text. ‘Vizard’ carries the meaning of ‘a phantasm or spectre’ not shared by ‘visor’. See OED 4. 8 Francis Bacon, ‘On Revenge’, in The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 73. The essay is reproduced in Four Revenge Tragedies, New Mermaids (London: Methuen Drama, 2014). 9 Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, Malone Society Reprints, ed. Harold Jenkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 1.1.23–5. 10 Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 73–85. 11 James Condon discusses Vindice’s control of theatrical space as a means of combatting his marginalization in political space; see James J. Condon, ‘Setting the Stage for Revenge: Space, Performance, and Power in Early Modern Tragedy’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 25 (2012): 62–82. 12 For a discussion of the play in relation to the medieval morality tradition, see Leo Salingar, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Morality Tradition’, reprinted in Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans: Essays by Leo Salingar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 206–22. See also Chapter 1 above. 13 Seneca, Thyestes in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. and ed. E.F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). 14 See also Chapter 5 above. 15 Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece, ed. Allan Holaday (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950).

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16 ‘The Argument’, Sejanus His Fall, ed. Tom Cain in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, eds David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), vol. 2, 230. 17 For this reading to make sense, Sejanus must have been printed after 5 November 1605. See Sejanus, ed. Cain, 201. 18 ‘There it goes’ also means to come up with an idea. The peal of thunder does double duty as both the sound effect arriving on Vindice’s cue and as the signifier of his moment of inspiration. 19 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd ed. (Hempel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 140. 20 When Anthony Sher challenged the heavens, ‘Is there no thunder left?’ in the 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production, he accompanied his call with throttled laughter. 21 R.A. Foakes, ‘The Art of Cruelty: Hamlet and Vindice’, Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973): 21–32. See also Foakes’s Introduction to The Revenger’s Tragedy, Revels Student Editions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 21–2.

8 ‘Whose head’s that then?’: Head-­tricks, Bed-tricks and Theatrics in The Revenger’s Tragedy Karen Marsalek

Often considered the play’s central question, Hamlet’s first line, ‘Who’s there?’, might logically be answered, ‘Yorick’. Since his debut on Shakespeare’s stage, Yorick’s skull has become a character, rather than a prop.1 Despite appearing in only one scene, the skull exerts a powerful influence over the prince, as well as over audiences across time and space. Although the shock of learning Yorick’s identity troubles Hamlet’s sense of self, the skull’s iconographic afterlife perpetually recreates the prince, for it is the presence of ‘Yorick’ that makes an image legible as ‘Hamlet’.2 The question ‘Who’s there?’ takes on new urgency when the deceased jester is ‘played’ by real human remains; such choices threaten to disrupt the fiction of the play and insert other disturbing

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identities for the skull.3 Offstage and on, Yorick seems to have a life (or lives) of his own. A spate of other skulls followed Yorick into the theatre in the early seventeenth century, suggesting that early modern audiences were equally fascinated by the skull’s unsettling origins and provocative power in Hamlet.4 However, when Shakespeare’s company next performed with a skull, this time in a drama also featuring a severed head, the tone was quite different. I argue that The Revenger’s Tragedy responds to Yorick’s impact in Hamlet by wrenching the skull back into its proper(tied) theatrical sphere, and that this move is informed by head substitutions in another preceding play with Middletonian connections, Measure for Measure.5 As Vindice substitutes the skull for a living virgin in a perverse bed-­trick, and as Junior’s head is mis-­taken for that of Lussurioso, Middleton seems to revel in the exchange and anonymity of ‘heads’, reducing them once more to items among the King’s Men’s properties. While generically distinct from The Revenger’s Tragedy, Measure for Measure evinces a similar theatrical sleight of heads, and this intertextual relationship offers a new perspective on Middleton’s engagement with Shakespeare in plays for the King’s Men. In addition to positioning Middleton as ‘our other Shakespeare’, Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s Collected Works of Thomas Middleton has spurred critical interest in connections between the two authors’ writings. My project here aligns with recent essays in this vein by Regina Buccola, Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.6 Like Buccola, I place one of Middleton’s plays in a new conversation with Measure for Measure; this reconsideration is prompted by John Jowett’s arguments that Middleton revised Shakespeare’s problem comedy in 1621, but was influenced by it much earlier than that.7 Like Maguire and Smith, I see key props as dramaturgical links connecting Middleton and Shakespeare in a network of several King’s Men plays. Aware of both Hamlet and Measure for Measure as he composes The Revenger’s Tragedy, Middleton appropriates the skull from the tragedy and adapts the comedy’s theatrical bed- and head-­trick. In so doing, he asserts

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the King’s Men’s practice of theatrical recycling and their ‘ownership’ of these corporeal props.

‘This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull’ As he crafts the skull’s stage debut, Shakespeare moves it out of the two-­dimensional world of visual art and personalizes the anonymous charnel-­house remains that were a fact of life in early modern London. Andrew Sofer has illuminated the riskiness of this theatrical move, explaining that this unusual prop steals focus from the other actors and disrupts audience perception of the onstage subject in a kind of ‘anamorphosis’: while the scene initially offers the ‘conventional memento mori tableau’, a second, coexisting perspective emerges ‘in which the skull takes on an active role that undermines the very selfhood the protagonist seeks to establish’.8 Drawn to two skulls unearthed by the Gravedigger, Hamlet initially interprets them emblematically by riffing on the possible owners as social types – politician, courtier, lady, lawyer, landowner (5.1.73–105). These abstractions disappear when the First Gravedigger focuses the prince’s attention on one skull through a positive identification: ‘This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester’ (5.1.170–1).9 In the First Folio, this revelation of the previous owner is even more emphatic: ‘This same skull, sir – this same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.’10 Any uncertain origin that enabled Hamlet’s earlier speculation about that skull is dissolved. ‘Naming the skull’, argues Sofer, ‘is a moment of unmetaphoring in which the conventionalized figure of speech has suddenly become humanized. No longer can Hamlet ring the changes on the skull’s identity; he has come face to face with someone he once knew and cared about’.11 The skull becomes a character, demanding the kind of personal response Hamlet would give to Horatio or the Gravedigger.

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As a skull prop ‘oscillat[es] between subject and object’,12 so does Hamlet between fond memory of the living Yorick and visceral response to the reality of his remains: I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your jibes now? – your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning, quite chapfallen. (5.1.174–82) While Hamlet might return here to the ‘tired ubi sunt motif’ in an effort to contain the skull’s powerful effect, as Sofer claims,13 the remarks lack the conventional abstraction of his earlier reflections on the anonymous skulls. These are personal, intimate recollections, despite their black humour. And the scene has begun with the Gravediggers’ discussion of another individualized corpse – that of Ophelia, which later makes its own entrance on the stage. In the context of the graveyard episode as a whole, the eulogized remains of these two loved ones also imply unknown histories for the anonymous skulls, histories that Hamlet cannot appropriate with his moralizing. In this way, the boundary between subject and object traversed by Yorick’s skull raises uncomfortable questions about the extrafictional identities of the skulls in the play. Sofer argues that the trick of anamorphosis also alters the spectator’s relation to the play’s action: ‘Once we focus on it, the skull decenters our own “objective” grasp of its stage symbolism and our presumption of autonomous gazing from outside the emblem’s “frame”.’14 Similarly, I propose that the skulls force an audience to think beyond the play frame and to question where these ‘props’, named or unnamed, came from. Just as knowledge of this provenance eludes scholars now, it would

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probably have been titillatingly unavailable to Shakespeare’s audiences.15 The ubiquity of human remains in early modern London would not make them fair game as props; statutes against grave robbing and regulation of anatomists’ use of corpses suggest that public display of Hamlet’s unusual props would create a frisson like that of real skulls in modern performances.16 While it would be a mistake to universalize audience response across the centuries, Hamlet’s critical observation of the Gravedigger implies that Shakespeare was aware of the actors’ own transgressive theatre. ‘Has this fellow no feeling of his business?’ (5.1.61) Hamlet asks, dismayed by the Gravedigger’s songs. Later he complains of the irreverent, playful handling of bones: ‘Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with ’em?’ (5.1.86–7). Disrupting tragedy with his songs, jokes and play with bones, the Gravedigger resembles the actors themselves. However, Horatio’s justification of the Gravedigger, ‘[c]ustom hath made it in him a property of easiness’ (5.1.63–4), fails to normalize the company’s first use of stage skulls, properties that bring with them decidedly uneasy questions about their provenance and anxiety about the propriety of their staging. Centuries of Hamlet performance have familiarized us with Yorick, but consideration of the skull’s initial impact contextualizes Middleton’s intensely theatrical treatment of it in The Revenger’s Tragedy, a play that insists on the skull as ‘a property of easiness’.

Useful properties: skull and head in The Revenger’s Tragedy While Hamlet shocks the title character and the audience with the unearthing and transgressive handling of progressively personalized human remains, The Revenger’s Tragedy begins with a skull that is already identified, and already in Vindice’s possession. This opening circumstance establishes a different

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classification for the skull; as Christine M. Gottlieb notes: ‘Gloriana’s skull is in the tradition of dead body parts that have circulated outside of the scope of legal protection for centuries: in museums, curiosity cabinets, and anatomy schools. These are remains that are not considered human, or whose claim to dignity is overshadowed by their necessity to the work of another (the anatomist, the collector, the revenger).’17 The first scene of the play also reverses Hamlet’s pattern of subsuming multiple archetypal identities for the skull into one intimately-­known previous owner. While Vindice already knows the skull to be Gloriana’s, he and his brother successively abstract it into a decorative or didactic object, a prop or mask, and an allegorical emblem. As signalled by Gottlieb’s comment, it begins as something from a cabinet of curiosities: ‘Thou sallow picture of [Vindice’s] poisoned love / [his] study’s ornament’, and the ‘shell of death’ (1.1.14–15), distinguished from the third-­person ‘lady’ whose naturally radiant complexion had once outshone those ‘bought’ through cosmetics (1.1.14–22). For a brief moment, he conflates the skull with its owner: ‘Thee, when thou wert apparelled in thy flesh, / The old Duke poisoned, / Because thy purer part would not consent / Unto his palsy lust’ (31–4). Yet even as Vindice imaginatively restores Gloriana to bodily integrity and reconstitutes the poisoned woman from the skull, he still separately anatomizes that ‘purer part’ that resisted the Duke’s advances. Rather than honouring the skull as a personalized relic that still participates in the purity of the deceased, Vindice reduces it to an anonymous memento mori, distinguished from carnal courtiers only by the absence of flesh. The radiant skin, the body she was ‘apparelled in’ during her pure life, becomes equivalent to the ‘three-­piled’ velvet flesh of ‘courtiers’, which will be ‘worn off / As bare as this’ (31, 46–7). Vindice subsequently represents the skull as a kind of mask or prop, implicitly referencing its history in the company repertory. As if performing a scene from a morality play, he exhorts the skull, ‘Advance, thee, O thou terror to fat folks’ (45), imagining, perhaps miming, a confrontation between the

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skull and guests at a banquet. His subsequent exchange with his brother reinforces this emerging sense of the skull as theatrical object. Entering with the jest ‘Still sighing o’er death’s visor?’ (50), Hippolito identifies Vindice’s metadramatic pose, the melancholy revenger holding a skull of a loved one. Though the comment evokes Hamlet’s now-­iconic pose with Yorick, Hippolito withholds human identity from the skull and terms it a thing of the theatre: a mask or vizard for death.18 This reduction of subject to object continues as the members of court are described as ‘things’ that ‘go’ in costume, ‘In silk and silver, brother, never braver’ (51–2), and Vindice matches his brother’s theatrical frame of reference with a pun: ‘Thou play’st upon my meaning’ (54, emphasis added). Even before Vindice deploys the skull in his personal revenge play, this exchange winkingly acknowledges the King’s Men’s reuse of their own prop. The fictional owner of the skull, Gloriana, remains unnamed in the scene, and potential questions about its extrafictional owner, previously opened up in Hamlet, are here effaced by allusions to the skull’s more immediate theatrical biography. Memory of the skull’s previous owner recedes still further as Vindice redirects the conversation from ‘things’ to the allegorical image of chance, ‘that bald madam, Opportunity’ (55). Skull-­like in her lack of hair, save one long forelock for the ambitious to seize, this figure from emblem books inspires a new use of the skull.19 Vindice sees Opportunity as a sexually available woman who responds to forceful manipulation; thus he adapts the skull to this persona in 3.5. As Vindice’s Opportunity for revenge, it is ‘dressed up in tires’, a term which could include a wig, headdress and other costume pieces (3.5.43+ SD).20 Previously described as death’s mask, the skull now hides behind a mask (3.5.49). Vindice’s speech repeats the associations with ‘velvet’ and ‘shell’ that previously highlighted the skull as bare, anonymous death’s head in Scene 1. Here, however, the words transform the skull into a compliant conquest for the Duke: her assignation will be worth ‘three

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velvet gowns’ and any potential disgrace is minimized as a ‘poor thin shell’ (3.5.46–7). Unlike Hamlet, who is struck with Yorick’s individuality when the skull is named, Vindice persists in allegorical and theatrical uses of the skull. When Hippolito indirectly recalls the skull’s identity, asking, ‘Is this the form that living shone so bright?’ (3.5.67), Vindice agrees, ‘The very same’, but then embarks on a sequence of rhetorical questions reconstructing it as an anonymous emblem of female vanity and mortality, unworthy of the expenses incurred to maintain it: Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours For thee? For thee does she undo herself? [. . .] Why does yon fellow falsify highways And put his life between the judge’s lips To refine such a thing, keeps horse and men To beat their valours for her? [. . .] Does every proud and self-­affecting dame Camphor her face for this? And grieve her maker In sinful baths of milk, when many an infant starves For her superfluous outside – all for this? (3.5.76–9, 84–7) Vindice’s moralizing progressively evacuates identity from the skull, moving from the direct reference ‘for thee’ to the hybrid collocation of ‘such a thing’ and ‘for her’, to the bare, inanimate pronoun ‘for this’. The process makes the skull available for Vindice’s further exploitation. In Thomas Rist’s estimation, Vindice’s manipulation in this scene turns the skull into a ‘plaything’ rather than a ‘thing of honour’.21 I would subtly revise his punctuation to ‘play-­thing’, an object that can be adapted to the needs of a given production. Vindice asserts his command of the skull’s theatrical utility in lines that pun on the exposed, fragmentary qualities of the prop, and its passivity. Unmasking it, he crows that he has ‘fitted’ the ‘bare bone’ to the Duke (3.5.53–4), and later

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explains, ‘I have not fashioned this only for show / And useless property. No, it shall bear a part / E’en in it own revenge’ (3.5.100–2). Not simply the ornamental ‘bare’ objet of 1.1, the ‘bare bone’ has now been ‘fashioned’ for a purpose – which is to ‘bear a part’. In these lines Sofer finds evidence that the skull is actually the manipulator; ‘using Vindice as her costumer, valet, and means of transportation to keep her fateful tryst with the duke, literally melting him with a kiss’.22 While Sofer counteracts a simple reading of Vindice’s gruesome puppetry and expresses the force he sees in the stage skull, his argument oddly represents Gloriana as seeking out the very tryst she died to avoid. I see instead in Vindice’s language a contrast between a delicate prop and one that can sustain hard use – one that can ‘bear’ a part he assigns to it.23 In addition, ‘bear a part’ carries bawdy connotations that highlight the sexual subjugation of the prop in Vindice’s plan.24 The encounter between the skull and the Duke plays out the loss of maidenhead that Gloriana had previously resisted, and as the theatrical devices of the scene multiply, the head-­trick also becomes a perverse bed-­trick. Pursuing the maidenhead of a ‘country lady’ (3.5.133), the Duke finds himself with an unexpected partner who replaces the figural death of orgasm with all-­tooreal murder.25 Indeed, Vindice imagines the couple’s false climax as shared extinction: ‘As much as the dumb thing can, he shall feel’ (3.5.106). After 3.5, the skull disappears from the play, its usefulness exhausted. However, the head- and bed-­trick of that scene are related verbally and structurally to interchanging and proliferating heads elsewhere in Act  3, and this dramaturgy intensifies Middleton’s evacuation of identity from the skull property. Ambitioso’s gloating anticipation in 3.1 initiates a series of heads that are imprisoned, severed or released. Having plotted the execution of his imprisoned stepbrother Lussurioso, Ambitioso looks forward to his position as heir: ‘I am next now; I rise in just that place / Where thou’rt cut off – upon they neck, kind brother; / The falling of one head lifts up another’ (3.1.26–8). Here Ambitioso sees his own head replacing

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Lussurioso’s for the ducal coronet. However, a different head replacement ensues. While Ambitioso has also devised a ‘trick’ to rescue his youngest brother Junior, imprisoned for rape, the instructions are bungled and Junior, not Lussurioso, is taken away to the headsman. In the play’s time scheme, this offstage execution coincides with Vindice’s onstage murder of the Duke: in 3.4 Junior is led away to the block; in 3.6 his still-­ dripping head is presented to Ambitioso and Supervacuo as they congratulate themselves on having secured Lussurioso’s death. Between these two scenes, Vindice kills the Duke by substituting Gloriana’s poisoned skull for the promised ‘country lady’. Although Vindice does not cut off the Duke’s head in that murder, his closing couplet expresses a metaphoric performance of that act: ‘The dukedom wants a head, though yet unknown. / As fast as they peep up, let’s cut ’em down’ (3.5.222–3).26 The condensed syntax of his couplet allows ‘unknown’ to describe both the Duke’s death (a development that will remain undiscovered by the court until Act  5) and the identity of the new heir – the ‘head’ that the dukedom wants. This reference to an ‘unknown’ head at the end of Scene 5 sets up the bleak humour of mistaken identity in 3.6, where verbal and visual collocations of ‘head’ and ‘trick’ reemerge. The two brothers exult over the execution they have managed and Ambitioso insists ‘it was in my head’ (12) where he has a still-­unnamed ‘trick’ for releasing Junior (26). At the entrance of the Officer with a head, Supervacuo questions, ‘How now, what’s he?’ (30). Ambitioso understands this query as a reference to the Officer, yet the line also reminds us that the head’s identity is still not properly known. Their ensuing feigned grief over the head they believe to be Lussurioso’s is abruptly and comically cut off by the entrance of that same brother, alive and well, prompting the new, enraged question ‘Whose head’s that then?’ (3.6.72). This failure to recognize the severed head until it is explicitly identified extends the epistemological question of the skull’s identity to its fleshy equivalent, en route to skull-­dom. Yet how

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could the brothers make such a mistake? Editor MacDonald P. Jackson naturalizes the error with his stage direction: ‘[Enter an Officer carrying a head in a bag]’ (3.6.29 SD). The dis-­covering of the head then parallels the revelation of Gloriana’s skull in the previous scene. I submit, however, that Junior’s head is unconcealed, and that a more complex, double-­barreled (or Hydra-­like?) joke is at work, the first part on two brothers who are too dim to recognize the head of their cherished sibling, and the second on the theatrical property itself, allowing the audience to enjoy the disconnect between a stock prop head and the specific identity assigned to it through convention. In Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, Erika T. Lin offers a similar argument about dismembered body parts in Selimus and Cymbeline. In the first play, the severed hands of Aga, a blind man, are held up, and he is asked to determine right from left. The request, notes Lin, draws attention to what the blind man cannot see but playgoers can: left and right hand are inverses of each other. Just as many property hands look alike Aga’s fictional hands are indistinguishable from one another. In Cymbeline, Cloten’s body is likewise portrayed as interchangeable [. . .] Rather than trying to naturalize the material conditions that circumscribed performance, Selimus and Cymbeline play upon – and play up – those theatrical conventions.27 While the joke on the severed head resembles these moments in Selimus and Cymbeline, Middleton reduces the human quality of the prop even further. As Supervacuo wields the head as a weapon against the Officer with the threat ‘Villain, I’ll brain thee with it’ (2.6.77), he both continues his inept performance of fraternal love and emphasizes the prop’s flexibility by reconfiguring it for yet another purpose.28

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Even the brothers’ subsequent laments fail to establish the head as distinctively Junior’s; instead the two brothers figure it as an unwelcome substitute for Lussurioso’s remains: ambitioso

Did we dissemble?

supervacuo

Did we make our tears women for thee? ambitioso

Laugh and rejoice for thee? supervacuo

Bring warrant for thy death? ambitioso

Mock off thy head? (79–82)

Structurally and tonally, the series of rhetorical questions recalls Vindice’s moralizing on the skull as a barren emblem in the previous scene: Junior’s head represents the futile outcome of the brothers’ immoral actions more than it represents Junior himself. Jeremy Lopez finds that this ‘parody of the skull that Vindice carries’ demonstrates ‘the ridiculousness of talking to a severed head’.29 His observation is even more apt in light of the play’s project to dissever skulls and heads from fixed identities and reinscribe them as props.

The ‘course is common’: Measure for Measure’s theatrical conventions The Revenger’s Tragedy entered the King’s Men’s repertory in 1605–6, one year after Measure for Measure, which also centres on exchanges of heads. Angelo offers Isabella the chance to ‘[r]edeem’ her imprisoned brother Claudio (head still attached), by giving up her own maidenhead (2.4.163–4).30 This situation leads to both a bed-­trick and a head-­trick. Although they don’t occur in the same scene, the devices are connected; as Carol Chillington Rutter phrases it, the play ‘will produce a head

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trick, because the bed trick won’t work’.31 Angelo still demands the head of Claudio, even after his encounter with the woman he thinks is Isabella. In addition to the interaction of these devices, several features of the bed trick itself indicate that Middleton was inspired by Measure for Measure. In the ‘unsunned lodge’ to which the Duke in The Revenger’s Tragedy is enticed (3.5.18) Brian Gibbons sees an allusion to the corresponding sexual venue of Angelo’s ‘garden-­house’ (5.1.208).32 A second similarity, unremarked by Gibbons, is the language of manipulation applied to the female participants in the two bed-­tricks. The disguised Duke Vincentio asserts, ‘The maid will I frame and make fit for his attempt’ (3.1.255–6, emphasis added), and while he means here to ‘direct’ Mariana in the plot or ‘ready’ her for it, the words also imply physical action upon a material object and prefigure the disguised Vindice’s ‘fashioning’ of the skull.33 Not only does Middleton heighten Vindice’s control of the bed-­trick, but he also brings the event itself on stage; Gibbons observes that the event in Measure for Measure is ‘left to the audience to imagine’, while Middleton’s ‘episode is a spectacular piece of staged action’.34 Much of that spectacle depends on the skull prop, as I have already demonstrated. And while Measure for Measure does not require a skull, it does set up another joke on interchangeable heads that Middleton has adapted and extended. The staging of Junior’s head as a metatheatrical joke builds on Measure for Measure’s substitution of one severed head for another – indeed, three other substitutes are suggested for the head of Claudio, who has been imprisoned for sexual intercourse with his betrothed. As in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the head here is to be presented as proof that the execution has been carried out. When the Duke, dressed as a friar, asks the Provost to delay death, the Provost makes the first reference to exchangeable heads: ‘Alack, how may I do it, having the hour limited, and an express command under penalty to deliver his head in the view of Angelo? I may make my case as Claudio’s to cross this in the smallest’ (4.2.165–8). To disobey Angelo would put the Provost in the same case, or situation, as

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Claudio’s. The connotation of the phrase is even more corporeal and immediate; since a ‘case’ could also refer to a skin or body, the Provost fears his own head would be produced to satisfy the corrupt deputy.35 Vincentio has a different exchange in mind, and it is this second substitution for Claudio that attracts Middleton’s energies. Another convict, Barnardine, should ‘be this morning executed, and his head borne to Angelo’ (4.2.170–1). In The Revenger’s Tragedy, Supervacuo and Ambitioso suspect the Officer has played the same kind of trick and deliberately deluded them with a substitute for the head they desire (3.6.66). Of course, they make that accusation only after they have seen the still-­living Lussurioso; the sight of the head itself does not arouse their suspicions. When Shakespeare’s Provost worries that Angelo will not be fooled, Vincentio initially argues that one severed head is not so different from another: ‘O, death’s a great disguiser’ (4.2.174), he explains, a factor that could also justify the error of Junior’s brothers in Middleton’s play. Indeed, this line may even be Middleton’s own. John Jowett has tentatively placed it among Middleton’s revisions to Measure for Measure, since the word disguiser is otherwise unique to Middleton among early modern playwrights.36 Perhaps the playwright, previously influenced by this scene, recursively amplified its connection to The Revenger’s Tragedy in his revisions to Shakespeare’s text. To help death’s disguise along, the Duke additionally recommends a material and theatrical process for defamiliarization: ‘Shave the head and tie the beard, and say it was the desire of the penitent to be so bared before his death; you know the course is common’ (4.2.175–7). Certainly, a trip to the barber was a ‘common’ means for altering one’s appearance in early modern England; and Catholic martyrs might choose to be shaven and tonsured before their death,37 but here the strategy applied to a head alone suggests instead a standard way – a ‘common course’ – for a theatre company to recycle one of their property heads. As Lopez has argued, theatrical technology for dismembered limbs needed to be

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‘simple enough to be used widely and as needed, but sophisticated enough in its effects to be worth whatever trouble it was’.38 This balance would be particularly important in the early modern repertory system. If a company needed a Claudio-­like head for Measure for Measure one day and a Macbeth-­like head the next, a simple way to effect the change would be through a wig and false beard.39 To represent the head as Vincentio imagines it, no wig at all would be used, and the Claudio-­like beard might be tied shorter, trimmed, or left off altogether.40 Duke Vincentio’s orders prepare the audience to accept that the substitute head will not actually look like Claudio (or even like Barnardine), but will nonetheless content Angelo. The situation is thematically relevant to the Duke’s authority as well; disguised as a friar, he insists that even a visually different ‘substitute’ should have the same authority as an identical one would. Having gestured towards stock heads that lacked resemblance to their purported owner, the King’s Men ultimately produce a head that will ‘satisfy the deputy’ and the audience as well (4.3.72). In a heavenly ‘accident’ another prisoner dies, [one] Ragusine ‘of Claudio’s years, his beard and head / Just of his colour’ (4.3.74, 68–70). When it is brought on stage, the Duke approves it as ‘convenient’ (4.3.99), a term describing both its appropriate resemblance to Claudio, and its relatively easy production.41 The different head substitutions, proposed and performed, evoke what Lopez describes as the ‘tension between efficiency and disruption that primarily fuels Elizabethan and Jacobean plays as they negotiate the turbulent space between the bare stage and the imagination, between literal and figurative modes of experience’.42 The head-­trick here becomes a kind of reverse bait-­and-switch that ultimately pleases the audience with some resemblance, even as it acknowledges the inevitable shortcoming of the recycled prop. Like the Original Practices productions of Twelfth Night by Shakespeare’s Globe (2002, 2012–13), which demonstrated that two dissimilar actors can be accepted as ‘twins’ through wigs, makeup and costume,

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Measure for Measure foregrounds the theatrical prosthetics that enable acceptance of the prop head as Claudio’s.43 In The Revenger’s Tragedy, such ‘tires’ help Vindice turn the skull with its uncanny potential for subjectivity into a mere prop for his revenge, while the severed head, already understood as a prop, is rendered even more unrecognizable and anonymous. In this respect, the head-­trick and bed-­trick of Measure for Measure anticipate the more outrageously self-­conscious theatrics of Middleton’s play. In addition to these devices, other aspects of plot and characterization suggest Middleton was thinking about Measure for Measure. Incarcerated for rape, Junior offers a much darker version of Claudio’s imprisonment, and Junior’s refusal to repent of his crime, or to believe he will be executed, recalls the debauched Barnardine, who ‘will not consent to die this day, that’s certain’ (4.3.52–3). In one of the few comparative studies of the two works, Dieter Mehl also addresses their shared attention to sexual corruption, Christian imagery and the role of the ‘disguised manipulator’. He further argues that ‘in its analysis of society and corrupt authority Measure for Measure seems [. . .] closer to The Revenger’s Tragedy than any other play by Shakespeare, save Timon of Athens’.44 While Mehl assigns authorship of Revenger’s to Tourneur, our awareness now that Middleton had a hand in all of these works can expand our perceptions of The Revenger’s Tragedy within the King’s Men’s repertory in many ways, including new considerations of the shared material elements that helped to ‘make’ that repertory.45 In Hamlet, such material elements, the provocative new skull properties, unleash a charge that The Revenger’s Tragedy seeks to contain; and the severed head property in Measure for Measure opens up a way to do so. Middleton’s response to Hamlet is so successful, Vindice’s objectification of the skull so extreme, that it distracts audiences from the original transgressions of the King’s Men themselves. As Gottlieb trenchantly observes, ‘The critical dismay regarding Vindice’s theatrical use of chaste Gloriana’s remains has not been matched by critical dismay regarding the King’s Men’s theatrical use of a human skull as a stage

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property’.46 If Hamlet asks ‘Who’s there?’ and invites Yorick’s skull into the position of subject, Middleton revises the question to ‘Whose head’s that then?’ and offers a theatrically-­expedient, fungible head and skull to demonstrate the King’s Men’s answer: ‘Ours’.

Notes 1 Hamlet appears to be the first English play to use skulls onstage; Roland Mushat Frye highlights the theatrical novelty in The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 206. 2 Yorick’s ‘unruly’ intertextual and extrafictional movements are mapped by Pascale Aebischer in Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 83–101. 3 Prompted in part by the uproar over the RSC’s use of Andre Tchaikovsky’s skull in rehearsals and performance, several scholars have considered the effect of real human remains in the play’s larger production history, see Aebischer, Violated Bodies, 83–101; Elizabeth Williamson, ‘Yorick’s Afterlives: Skull Properties in Performance’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 6.1 (2011); and Aiofe Monks, ‘Human Remains: Acting, Objects, and Belief in Performance’, Theatre Journal 64 (2012): 355–371. 4 Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson record eight plays, all postdating Hamlet, that require either a skull or ‘death’s head’ in stage directions; see A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66, 202. 5 Editor MacDonald P. Jackson suggests that the play is ‘like a version [of Hamlet] by Yorick – as jester, and as skull’, a formulation that neatly shares control of the play between the living and the dead, performers and prop; see his introduction to the play in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 543.

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6 Regina Buccola, ‘ “Some Woman is the Father”: Shakespeare, Middleton, and the Criss-Crossed Composition of Measure for Measure and More Dissemblers Besides Women’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 28 (2015): 86–109; Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, ‘ “Time’s Comic Sparks”: The Dramaturgy Of A Mad World, My Masters and Timon Of Athens’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, eds Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 181–96. 7 Jowett and Taylor argue for Middleton’s role as reviser of Measure for Measure in Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606–1623, Oxford Shakespeare Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 107–236; these arguments also inform Jowett’s edition of ‘Measure for Measure: A Genetic Text’ in The Collected Works, 1542–1585. In his introduction, Jowett notes that ‘Measure itself seems to have influenced Middleton long before he adapted it’ (1544), though he does not discuss how that influence is manifested. 8 Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 92. Here Sofer is describing the effect he sees in three plays – Hamlet, The Honest Whore, Part 1 and The Revenger’s Tragedy. While I also believe The Honest Whore, a collaboration by Middleton and Dekker performed by the Admiral’s Men, offers another response to the skull in Hamlet, I am concerned here with the repertory of the King’s Men, and as I argue below, I see containment, rather than continuance, of this effect in The Revenger’s Tragedy. 9 Quotations are taken from the Arden 3 edition of Hamlet, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006). 10 In an essay on the theatrical dynamics and textual variants of the scene, Hardin L. Aasand points to two other editorial interpretations of this Folio repetition: the Gravedigger’s expression of self-­importance, or his hesitation and re-­ consideration of the point. See Aasand, ‘“Pah! Puh!”: Hamlet, Yorick, and the Chopless Stage Direction’, in Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions, ed. Hardin L. Aasand (Madison, NJ: Associated University Press, 2002), 218. 11 Sofer, Stage Life of Props, 98. 12 Ibid., 92.

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13 Ibid., 98. 14 Ibid., 92. 15 Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith acknowledge the possibility that the King’s Men used real skulls, but also note that in its materiality and fictional history, ‘Yorick’s skull is as present as the physical body of a living actor. In this sense, Yorick’s skull, like all stage props, is “real”.’ See Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (Oxford: John Wiley, 2012), 182. 16 Writing about a full skeleton prop in Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman, Richard Sugg speculates that a company might have obtained bones of a convicted criminal as anatomists did, but the feasibility of their theatrical display continues to trouble him. Richard Sugg, Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 23–5. 17 Christine M. Gottlieb, ‘Middleton’s Traffic in Dead Women: Chaste Corpses as Property in The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Lady’s Tragedy’, ELR 45 (2015): 273. 18 See OED ‘vizard’ n. and adj. 1, or Jackson’s modernization, OED ‘visor’ n. and adj. 2 and 4. Although the word can also simply mean a face, the other three instances of it in the play refer to the costumed skull (3.5.149) or to disguises for masques (1.4.41; 5.1.84). Death figures that would have been masked appear in earlier interludes such as the N-Town Death of Herod, The Castle of Perseverance, The Pride of Life, and Everyman, as well as in later plays such as Kyd’s Solomon and Perseda; see Phoebe Spinrad, The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance Stage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987). 19 In the Alex Cox film Revengers Tragedy (2002) the skull is already a figure of Opportunity, as it still bears some of Gloriana’s long red hair. See Chapter 9. 20 OED ‘tire’ n.1, 2.a. and 3. 21 Thomas Rist, Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England (New York: Ashgate, 2008), 103. 22 Sofer, Stage Life of Props, 112.

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23 Use of this prop in modern productions has often been quite vigorous; see, for example, Regina Buccola’s description of the 2008 National Theatre production: ‘Entirely caught up in his own fantasy, [Rory] Kinnear forced the torso of the bony lady over by roughly shoving down its head for the lines: “Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships / For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?” (3.5.74–5), violently thrusting his pelvis back and forth, miming sex. His feigned sexual assault on the bony lady, topped with the rotted skull of his deceased love, offered a disturbing vision of Vindice’s own degeneration, and the extent to which any interaction with the corruption of the court – even to attack it – could prove contagious’; Buccola, ‘Giving Revenger’s Its Due’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, eds Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 510. 24 For ‘part’ as genitalia see OED ‘part’ n.1 4. Middleton also makes bawdy references to women ‘bearing’ men in The Lady’s Tragedy (1.2. 312) and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman (1.2.79); see the editions of Julia Briggs and John Jowett, respectively, in the Collected Works. 25 Marliss C. Desens, The Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 136–7. One might see the fatal kiss as the second bed-­trick the Duke has been involved in, for in 2.3 Lussurioso intends to attack his mother in bed with Spurio, but bursts in to find her with the Duke. Instead of focusing on the partners in the sexual act, Middleton revises the bed-­trick theatrically to target the onstage voyeur, and, by extension, the audience. Though he does not identify this scene as a version of the bed-­trick, Alan Dessen links Lussurioso’s discovery in 2.3 and the initial revelation of the costumed skull in 3.5 as ‘two surprises for an onstage character that also surprise us’; see ‘Eyeballs and Icicles, A Swimming Pool and a Dummy: Shakespeare and The Revenger’s Tragedy Onstage in 2008’, Shakespeare Bulletin 26.4 (2008): 63. 26 In the National Theatre production, Vindice did ‘[slice] a bloody trench down the middle of his bald head’ before stabbing him repeatedly. See Buccola, ‘Giving Revenger’s Its Due’, 511.

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27 Erika T. Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (London: Palgrave, 2012), 136. 28 Michael J. Hirrel considers the possibility of a ‘macabre joke on interchangeable heads’ here, but dismisses it as unlikely given the brothers’ initial failure to remark on the head, and the logistical benefits of swinging the head in a bag to ‘brain’ the Officer; see ‘Alcazar, the Lord Admiral’s, and Aspects of Performance’, Review of English Studies 66 (2014): 58. 29 Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 112. 30 Measure for Measure, ed. John Jowett, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1542–85. 31 Carol Chillington Rutter, ‘Talking Heads’, in Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, eds Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 123. 32 Brian Gibbons, ed., The Revenger’s Tragedy, New Mermaids (London: A&C Black, 2008), xxvi. 33 OED ‘frame’ adj. II. 4. and 5.; ‘fit’ adj. 5.a. 34 Gibbons, ed., The Revenger’s Tragedy, xxvi. 35 OED ‘case’ n2, 7b and c. 36 Jowett, Measure for Measure, 154 n. 174. 37 See the gloss to ‘bar’de’ in Mark Eccles, ed., Measure for Measure, The New Variorum Shakespeare (New York: MLA, 1984), 207. Will Fisher demonstrates that clean-­shaven faces materialize Catholic identity in early modern England, paying particular reference to The Book of Sir Thomas More; see Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 99–101 and 127–8. 38 Lopez, Theatrical Convention, 109. 39 It is true that our strongest piece of documentary evidence for prop heads, inventories in Henslowe’s Diary, indicates that some heads were purpose-­built, or at least character-­specific. The entries – four ‘Turckes hedes’, ‘owld Mahemetes head’, ‘Argosse head’, ‘Ierosses [Iris’] head’ and heads for a boar,

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bull and lion, as well as three heads for Cerberus – suggest that Henslowe’s heads were produced for foreign or non-­human characters with dark skin or non-­human identities (divine and/or bestial). Heads for other characters would be more easily and cheaply achieved with the prosthetics of beards and wigs. See Henslowe’s Diary, eds R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 317–20. 40 See the glosses to ‘tie’ in Eccles, ed., Measure for Measure, 206. 41 OED ‘convenient’, adj. 4.b. and 6. 42 Lopez, Theatrical Convention, 99. 43 Although Michael Hirrel argues that the head should clearly resemble Claudio since we have been led to expect a head that Angelo will accept, he puts more weight on facial features than I think is necessary. Hirrel, ‘Alcazar’, 56–7. 44 Dieter Mehl, ‘Corruption, Retribution and Justice in Measure for Measure and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison, ed. E.A.J. Honigman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 126. 45 Carol Chillington Rutter concludes her excellent essay about heads in Shakespeare’s theatre with the reminder that ‘heads on the early modern stage, like the heads on Shakespeare’s stage today, were made things: of wood and leather, rubber and silicone’ calling attention to the mutually constituted material and literary crafts of the theatre. Rutter, ‘Talking Heads’, 127. 46 Gottlieb, ‘Middleton’s Traffic’, 273.

PART T HREE

Performance

9 Objects and Gender: The Revenger’s Tragedy in Performance and on Film Katherine M. Graham Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy is littered with objects; skulls, heads, daggers, scabbards, money and jewels all play an active role in the development of Middleton’s narrative and in the symbolic lexicon of the play. In performance, these objects take on a new material life and, as Andrew Sofer has suggested, ‘props seduce our attention [. . .] they become drawn into the stage action and absorb complex and sometimes conflicting meanings’.1 Thus, when considering performances of The Revenger’s Tragedy we must consider the work that objects are doing to act as a conduit for the meanings of the text, but we must also consider the extra-­textual meanings that they might generate. In this chapter, I argue that objects in two twenty-­first-­century performances of The Revenger’s Tragedy function as material loci through, and around, which questions about gender are foregrounded. To support this assertion, I shall look at Melly Still’s 2008 National Theatre production

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and Alex Cox’s 2002 film version of the play, considering in particular how they stage the skull of Gloriana and the money used to corrupt Gratiana.2 In considering the money and the skull, I wish to use an understanding of objects that emphasizes their motion. Sofer underscores the importance of a prop’s motion when he posits that ‘[b]y definition, a prop is an object that goes on a journey; hence props trace spatial trajectories and create temporal narratives as they track through a given performance’.3 Here Sofer is drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s influential notion of ‘things-­in-motion’.4 In his collection The Social Life of Things Appadurai argues that [e]ven if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-­in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.5 Both the National Theatre production and the Cox film make specific interpretive choices about how to stage the objects under consideration, choices regarding what those physical props are, what they look like, and how they are used. Those choices, in turn, affect the trajectories that those objects undertake. As Appadurai suggests, we must follow the things themselves as a way of considering the human transactions, transactions which make up the gendered social contexts of the play, and I shall argue that these transactions are framed and focused by the objects in question.

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‘These are they . . . that enchant our sex’ Central to the treatment of women in Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy is the moment when Vindice, disguised as Piato, tests the chastity of his sister, Castiza, and the integrity of his mother, Gratiana. Sent to corrupt Castiza by the Duke’s son, Lussurioso, Vindice finds his sister firm in her resolve to remain a virgin and so he works on Gratiana, telling her that Lussurioso has ‘long desired your daughter’ (2.1.73) and that she should ‘chide away that foolish country girl / Keeps company with your daughter, Chastity’ (81–2). Vindice begins his approach with words, and those words seek to emphasize the financial gain associated with sleeping with the future Duke: ‘[l]ive wealthy’ (80), Vindice (disguised as Piato) bluntly advises. At first Gratiana resists, claiming ‘O fie, fie, the riches of the world cannot hire / A mother to such a most unnatural task’ (83–4). But her weakness is soon evident and she declares ‘[t]his overcomes me’ (103) a mere twenty lines later. As effective as Vindice’s verbose persuasion is, he doesn’t ‘seal the deal’ until he declares ‘I keep the best for last. Can these persuade you / To forget heaven . . .’ (118–19). The non-­specific nature of the demonstrative ‘these’ advises the audience that we’ve moved from a linguistic register to a visual one. This new register is powerful: mother

Ay, these are they – vindice

O!

mother        

– that enchant our sex. (2.1.120)

This fragmented dialogue moves away from the longer speeches that mark Vindice’s initial attempts at persuasion and underscore for the audience the power of the object Gratiana is engaged with. Her speech shows her as so rapt and enchanted by the material object that she addresses it in apostrophe:

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That woman Will not be troubled with the mother long That sees the comfortable shine of you. I blush to think what for your sakes I’ll do. (2.1.122–5) As Sofer reminds us, ‘[p]rops have many lives – practical, referential, rhetorical, phenomenological, psychological, ideological’.6 But I want to emphasize the material qualities of the object. This is especially important given that the moment at which Gratiana blushes to think what she’ll do is also the moment at which she is holding the object and is confronted with its ‘shine’.7 While Middleton’s text implies that ‘money’ is the object that ultimately persuades Gratiana,8 both Still and Cox’s productions depart from Middleton’s text in how they present that object. Still multiplies the number of objects Rory Kinnear’s Vindice employs, using the money indicated in the text, but also offering jewellery; here the objects used to corrupt multiply as Gratiana succumbs. Cox also multiplies the objects, with Christopher Eccleston’s Vindice offering a jewel in addition to the money – a jewel that goes on to play a prominent role in the scene. Both directors emphasize the material qualities of the object that convinces Gratiana to give in to Lussurioso’s demands. In both productions then, the emphasis on materiality coupled with the use of a second object intersects with questions of gender because our understanding of Gratiana’s greed changes when it isn’t simply, singularly, the money that persuades her. Melly Still’s 2008 National Theatre production worked to mark the importance of the material qualities of the two objects Vindice offered to Gratiana to tempt her to corruption. The first of these objects was a briefcase of cash. When Kinnear’s Vindice opened it in front of Barbara Flynn’s Gratiana, the warm wash that had lit the scene changed and the two were encircled in a cold blue light, while a gentle hum further marked the moment. This lighting change and sound

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effect tightened the focus of the audience onto the money. Flynn’s Gratiana, who was seemingly pulled towards the money, mirrored this focus, taking and caressing some notes, then quickly returning them, clenching her fists as she did so, as if to hold on to the feeling of the cash. Her returning the money to the case prompted ‘Piato’/Vindice to produce the second object, a necklace, asking ‘can these persuade you?’ (2.1.118) as he did so. The appearance of this new material object was again accompanied by sound (here a tinkling fairy-­ like noise) and Flynn turned, grabbing the chain, running it through her hands, a gesture which suggested that the feminine necklace was much more affecting than the money. While the first sound effect seemed ominous, this second seemed markedly lighter, and indeed Flynn’s Gratiana also seemed ‘lighter’, as if suddenly relieved of her moral quandary. Placing the chain round her neck, she stated ‘that woman / Will not be troubled with the mother long’ (2.1.122–3), and as she spoke she continued to touch and fondle the necklace, her speech lighter, her conflict gone – wearing the object was transformative. The audience were encouraged to read this enchantment as demonstrating the feminine weakness epitomized by ‘these are they . . . that enchant our sex’ (2.1.120). Indeed, Still’s production emphasized the particular gendered qualities of Gratiana’s greed; cash weakened her, but it was jewellery that convinced her. The production went on to underscore this through Gratiana’s next appearance. In 2.1, Flynn’s Gratiana wore plain black clothes, her hair simple and greying, the only jewellery a silver cross. But 4.4 saw a marked change in her appearance: her hair was blonde and the cut sharper; she wore a tailored red jacket and kitten heels; and her simple cross necklace had been replaced with a large gold necklace and augmented with large gold earrings and a thick gold bracelet. Her corruption was marked by the multiplication of the corrupting objects, or as the reviewer for The Evening Standard commented, ‘she transform[ed] from penniless frump to corrupt pander (all blow-­dry hair and Versace baubles)’.9 Thus, if we might read Middleton’s text as associating Gratiana’s

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greed with her femininity, then Still’s production underscored such a reading through the escalation from the fairly neutral money to the more directly gendered jewellery. This multiplicity of objects, the multiplying jewellery, functioned in Still’s production as a visual mark of Gratiana’s corruption – as the object multiples, our understanding of her corruption increases. Cox’s film, however, asks the viewer to focus on a single object – a jewel. Middleton’s text offers a comparison between Castiza and Gratiana, using Lussurioso’s attempt to corrupt Castiza to juxtapose them as strong and corruptible, respectively. Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script rewrites the scene to make Middleton’s comparison between them even more direct, and Cox’s visual language intensifies and focuses this comparison through the use of the jewel – an inherently tactile object. The use of a jewel as the corrupting object is first evident when Lussurioso (Eddie Izzard) gives Vindici the task of ‘procuring’ Castiza (Carla Henry); as he does so Izzard plunges his hands into a box full of jewels, letting them luxuriously slip through his fingers, emphasizing their tactility, before giving one to Vindici.10 The importance of the object is further emphasized through the structuring function that the jewel performs in the film’s interpretation of 2.1. The scene begins with Vindici offering the jewel to Castiza and ends with Hannah (the film’s renaming of the mother, Gratiana, played by Margi Clarke) demanding ‘the jewel, sir. The jewel!’ The final shot of the scene shows Vindici placing the jewel in her outstretched hand. Cox’s film visually insists on the importance of the jewel to the scene when Vindici comes to the house and the viewer sees the jewel before seeing him. The scene begins with Castiza waking in the night, getting up and going to the fridge; as she does so a hand thrusts forward, holding a jewel. The darkness of the shot means that both the viewer and Castiza see only a hand thrusting forward (complete with tinkling sound effect), palm upwards, jewel sitting in the middle – we cannot see whose hand it is. Castiza’s first response, however, is not to the jewel – rather, she exclaims ‘who are you?’ In doing so, she

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draws attention to the threatening presence of a stranger in her house and her possible vulnerability, but equally quickly she confronts him, asking ‘[i]s this my mother’s jewel? . . . Then give it back’ while snatching at it, not waiting for Vindici to answer. The ensuing conversation wakes Hannah/Gratiana, who comes down the stairs frightened at what she might find, her fear and vulnerability augmented for the viewers by our realization that she is blind. Vindici reveals that he is sent from Lussurioso, referencing the Duke’s son’s passion for Castiza and broadly opening up notions of ingratiation. Immediately thereafter he places the jewel into Hannah/Gratiana’s hand, and as he does so the power of the object is underscored through a shimmering sound effect and her audible gasp (the sound effect working as an auditory version of Middleton’s ‘shine’). Hannah/Gratiana’s blindness functions here to draw our attention to the material power of the object; as Vindici places it in her right hand, she brings her left hand to also touch and caress it, her mouth parted slightly in excitement. For Hannah/Gratiana, the material qualities of the jewel, foregrounded in her touching and fondling, open the door to a negotiation of her daughter’s sexual value. Thus, Vindici suggests ‘[a]s for honour, I’d let a bit of that go too and never be seen in’t. I’d wink and let it go,’ and Castiza responds ‘[b]ut we would not. ’Tis so, mama?’ As Castiza looks to her mother to concur, the camera cuts to Hannah/Gratiana, who whispers ‘[n]o, we would not . . .’. But Margi Clarke directs her line at the jewel, drumming her fingers across its surface as she speaks, before throwing the jewel back at Vindici and concluding, ‘not for ruby’. Thus Cottrell Boyce’s script makes Clarke’s Hannah/ Gratiana as readily corruptible as she is in Middleton, but also implies that she is greedy and calculating. Different ideas about femininity come into play here, and material objects are central to the differentiation between the chaste Castiza and the corruptible Hannah/Gratiana. Indeed, Castiza herself sees the fashion in which her mother is bewitched by the materiality of objects. After Hannah/Gratiana rejects the jewel for merely being ruby, Vindici ups his offer, asking ‘can these persuade you

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to forget heaven?’ Pausing, he holds paper money in front of Hannah/Gratiana, and as she cannot see it, he places the money in her hands. As Hannah/Gratiana holds it, again fondling and caressing, Castiza angrily gets up, smacking the money from her mother’s hands; to break the material connection with the object is to reduce its effectiveness. Castiza’s following angry words are drowned out by the (off-­camera) laughing of Hannah/ Gratiana; despite Castiza’s physical action, the material qualities of the money produce a reaction that overwhelms any verbal argument. If Hannah/Gratiana is literally blinded here, then she is figuratively blinded by the material qualities of those objects. When Castiza and Vindice talk, Castiza refuses to engage with the jewel as material object, meaning that monetary gain remains an idea – not a material reality – and it is easily ‘beaten’ by Castiza’s vehement belief in female chastity. For Hannah/ Gratiana, as soon as monetary gain becomes a material reality, the idea of female chastity and honour becomes less powerful. But the material object is the point at which their ideological conflict is focused. The work done by the singularity of the jewel as object focuses our attention on those competing ideologies around chastity and on the sexual threats faced by women in the world of the film. The structuring function of the jewel underscores this, with the scene moving from Castiza asking ‘is this my mother’s jewel?’ to her mother demanding the jewel, the trajectory of the jewel making Castiza’s opening remark seem like a horrible fait accompli.

‘Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love’ Cox’s employment of the jewel as structuring device encourages us to follow the path of the jewel through the scene. Starting with Vindici, it is rejected by Castiza, then demanded by Gratiana, and that demand bears a greater significance through the implicit comparison to Castiza’s rejection. As well as

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returning us to Appadurai’s notion of ‘trajectories’, the path of an object is central to any consideration of the skull of Gloriana. In the first instance, considering the trajectory and history of the skull as object forces us to recognize that, as Sofer suggests, ‘no recognizable object arrives on stage innocent. Objects bring their own historical, cultural and ideological baggage on stage with them’.11 The skull is loaded with baggage, especially in the way Middleton’s text uses it. As such, the skull might gesture towards the memento mori tradition;12 towards the Catholic tradition of relics; towards Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the opening scene is a clear parody of Hamlet’s engagement with Yorick’s skull);13 or towards Elizabeth I, given that Gloriana is the name used to refer to Elizabeth in symbolic representations.14 Both Still and Cox play, to different extents, with these histories. Still’s production draws on the skull’s function as memento mori by juxtaposing it with Caravaggio’s St Jerome Writing, which hangs in Vindice’s house and is spotlighted as the audience enter the auditorium.15 Cox’s film draws on Hamlet through Eccleston’s manipulation of the skull and occasionally during the film he strikes that ‘typical’ Hamlet pose. Following ‘the things themselves’ on their ‘trajectories’ is also striking because productions or adaptations, like Still’s and Cox’s, which add extra textual material relating to Gloriana (or the skull itself) change the trajectory of the skull for the viewer. I turn now to consider the trajectories that Still and Cox construct for their skulls, and I will argue that in Still’s production the skull moves towards becoming Gloriana, whereas in Cox’s film the skull moves away from being associated with her. Further, I suggest that both these productions use the movement of the skull to consider the sexual violence faced by women in the world of the play. But first, I want briefly to consider the relationship between the skull and Gloriana in Middleton’s text. Sofer suggests that ‘Jacobean playwrights conveyed the skull’s oscillation between live subject and dead object’,16 and both Cox and Still play with the skull’s ability both to be Gloriana and also not to be her, questions which are implicit in Middleton’s text. In Vindice’s opening monologue he speaks

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directly to the skull and refers to it as ‘thou’ (1.1.14, 15) or ‘thee’ (1.1.31), the language drawing our attention to the split between Gloriana and the physical object. However, the ‘thou’ referred to is not simply Gloriana; the monologue sets up a complex interaction between the Gloriana that existed previously, the skull as it existed when Gloriana was alive, and the skull as it exists now. Vindice’s first line to the skull – ‘Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love’ (1.1.14) – demonstrates this; the skull exists now, but is a visual representation of the Gloriana that is now dead, thus it signifies doubly. This continues: [. . .] thou shell of death, Once the bright face of my betrothèd lady, When life and beauty naturally filled out These ragged imperfections. (1.1.15–18) Again the (grotesque) state the skull is in now conjures the image of how it was before. Its ugliness and its ‘imperfections’ actually show its beauty. References to ‘filling out’ and being ‘apparelled in thy flesh’ (1.1.31–3) also draw attention to the tension between the skull and the flesh of Gloriana. In doing so, the language points to an early modern conception of subjectivity, which, as Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass suggest, understands that ‘if the depths of the body [i.e. the skull] display only the workings of anonymous death, the surfaces of the body trace the insignia of identity’.17 This tension between the object and the woman it was continues in 3.5, in which the skull plays a vital role in killing the Duke. In this scene, the disguised Vindice and Hippolito provide a woman for the Duke to have sex with, but there is no woman, merely the skull. Here, Vindice suggests to Hippolito that I have not fashioned this only for show And useless property. No, it shall bear a part E’en in it own revenge. (3.5.100–2)

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The term ‘property’ plays on the theatrical context in which the skull is being used (its ‘performance’ as the woman and the ‘performance’ that Vindice and the ‘woman’ are offering the Duke).18 Here, Vindice appears to problematize an opposition between those objects that are defined by their appearance, or by their inaction, and those that act, which in turn plays on the femaleness of the skull as Vindice has so far constructed it. In 1.1, Vindice was careful to establish Gloriana’s beauty as ‘natural,’ describing it as ‘far beyond the artificial shine / Of any woman’s bought complexion’ (1.1.21–2). Here it is the disguise, the ‘false forms’ (3.5.97), that allow the skull to ‘act’. Vindice’s assertion that the skull is also involved in ‘it[s] own revenge’ suggests that the skull in the present is an ungendered ‘it’ who can take part in avenging the woman it used to be, and to do that it must be disguised as a sexually available woman. The irony here is created by the tension between the impenetrable Gloriana that the skull was and the unchaste woman the Duke is coming to meet. In Middleton’s text then, the skull is not referred to as Gloriana; it is separate from her and referred to as ‘thee’ or ‘it’. Furthermore, it is also anonymous enough to ‘become’ someone else for the Duke. This notion of ‘becoming’ is, as I have posited above, central to the ways in which the skull, as object, intersects with notions of gender in both Still and Cox’s versions of Middleton’s play. In Still’s National Theatre production, the use of extra-­ textual material ensured that to ‘bear a part / E’en in it[s] own revenge’ (3.5.102–3) meant, quite literally, that the skull became Gloriana after its revenge.19 Still’s production began by troubling any univocal equivalence between the skull and Gloriana, which it did through the fragmenting of the object via the use of set dressing and video projections. Here, the skull maintained something of its memento mori qualities, evinced by the juxtaposition between the skull as object and skull as image in the Caravaggio painting St Jerome Writing. But, to gesture further towards the plurality of the skull, the image and the object were augmented by video projection. Making use of the Olivier Theatre’s revolving stage, the extended opening

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sequence was designed to introduce us to the characters and the world of the play. The revolve was divided into three sections – Lussurioso’s rooms, the palace, and Gratiana’s house – and as the stage turned the audience witnessed the rape of Lady Antonio and then ‘[a]s V[indice]’s room rev[olves] round, he’s kneeling on chair watching film of Gloriana’s skull’.20 The striking video was not simply ‘of’ Gloriana – rather, the computer-­generated image began as a green tinged face (which was not clearly male or female), but as the audience watched the skin fell off the face, uncovering the skull. The mouth of the skull then opened to reveal a long pointed tongue, and both skull and tongue thrashed from side to side. The skull was then re-covered in flesh. It was an uneasy image; as Paul Taylor, writing in The Independent, remarked, ‘to reinforce the sense of morbid obsession, there’s also a computer-­generated image here of a female face that explodes to reveal the bony horror beneath’.21 Immediately after, the video skull itself fragmented, moving between human face and skull – the tongue foreshadowing the Duke’s later death by poisoning.22 The video and Caravaggio painting were the audience’s first engagement with the skull, thus the complicated relationship between the skull and Gloriana, discussed above, was foreshadowed here visually. If the text itself does not allow the skull simply to be Gloriana, then these visuals disrupted any such simple association even further. However, the shifting between the strange demonic skull and the recognizably human face emphasized that the viewer should not simply read any skull as Gloriana, but rather that we should see the multiplicity of skulls. Having been instructed on how to read the skull, the audience were then introduced to the ‘real thing’, which was packed away, wrapped in what looked like a wedding veil, in a box in a trunk. Vindice treated this carefully, often holding it cupped in two hands, cradling it and sometimes pressing it between the two inward facing palms at chest height (see Figure 1). Unlike Eccleston, however, Kinnear never quite held the skull in a typical Hamlet pose.23 As Kinnear delivered parts of Vindice’s opening monologue, he stood with his back to

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FIGURE 1.  Rory Kinnear as Vindice in the opening scene of The Revenger’s Tragedy, dir. Melly Still, National Theatre, 2008. © Johan Persson / ArenaPAL.

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Caravaggio’s St Jerome Writing and, in doing so, created a juxtaposition between skull as memento mori, as we find it in the painting, and skull as relic.24 But what is clear, and this is evident in Figure  1, is that the presence of the Caravaggio painting in many ways undermined the idea of the skull as Gloriana and rendered the stage image a masculine one. This idea was extended when Vindice, hearing Hippolito (Jamie Parker) outside the room, put the skull away and moved over to the painting, so when Hippolito asked ‘Still sighing o’er death’s visor?’ (1.1.49) he was referring to the painting, not to the skull of Gloriana. The action had two effects: firstly, it encouraged us to read the skull as multiple, troubling any univocal understanding of the skull as simply ‘being’ Gloriana. Secondly, the sequencing of these actions highlighted ‘the temporal dimension (how props move in linear stage time)’;25 the material skull was superseded by the image of the skull and the image of the skull in the Caravaggio painting might be understood as a masculine memento mori, given the similarity between the skull and the bald head of St Jerome. In Still’s production, the trajectory of the skull moved away from masculine imagery towards feminine, ultimately becoming Gloriana. But first it was disguised as a ‘country lady’ (3.5.133) to take part in the poisoning of the Duke by standing in for the prostitute that Vindice (as Piato) has promised. This disguise might be read as blurring the boundaries between Gloriana and Vindice because here Vindice’s costume for the skull was elaborate (see Figure  2), and the construction of the puppet meant that when Vindice claimed that the skull shall ‘bear a part / E’en in it[s] own revenge’ (3.5.102–3), he meant ‘part’ literally. If the skull played one part, Still’s puppet design meant Vindice played another. The puppet was formed of a body and one arm, the skull provided the face (it was covered with a lifelike mask) and Vindice provided the feet and other arm. As Figure 2 shows, Kinnear wore high heels which complemented the outfit of the puppet, while his right arm (invisible in Figure 2) was gloved in white satin, matching the puppet’s left arm. The scene was darkly lit and Vindice dressed in dark

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FIGURE 2.  Rory Kinnear with the ‘country lady’ (a puppet topped with the skull of Gloriana) in 3.5 of The Revenger’s Tragedy, dir. Melly Still, National Theatre, 2008. © Johan Persson / ArenaPAL.

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clothes, so when he approached the Duke the puppet was convincing. As Ken Bones’s Duke said ‘I must be bold with you’ (3.5.145), he wrestled the puppet to the ground, kissing her; as he did so Vindice let go of the puppet and ripped its mask off, allowing the Duke to kiss the poison. As the Duke writhed, poisoned on the floor, Vindice and Hippolito beat him and forced him to watch Spurio and the Duchess have sex. Throughout, Vindice was still wearing high heels and the glove, still bearing traces of Gloriana – even though those traces were also of the ‘country lady’ (3.5.133). Karin S. Coddon suggests that ‘the skull is gendered only because we are told so [. . .] Indeed, when Vindice, in Act 3, scene 5 enters “with the skull of his love dressed up in tires,” the skull’s gendering is clearly a contrivance’.26 If the skull becomes more feminine as it is dressed up, in Still’s production, that ‘contrivance’ worked on Vindice too. The most dramatic moment in the skull’s trajectory came after the murder of the Duke; here Still employed the revolving stage, again offsetting its movement with thumping dance music, in a parallel of the production’s opening moments. Here, however, we witnessed Vindice and Hippolito chasing the Duke and Spurio and the Duchess having sex. As the stage revolved, the skull graphic from the play’s opening sequence repeated, but now when the skull had flesh on it, it looked more human than it did in its first appearance. As Vindice and Hippolito stabbed the Duke, the puppet got up and moved towards Vindice (the puppet had been flung aside on Vindice’s line ‘my once-­betrothèd wife’ (3.5.164), but as the stage revolved the puppet had been replaced by a living actress). Here Vindice broke down crying, holding a hand towards her, but she backed slowly offstage. Having been avenged, Gloriana in Still’s production was reanimated, was re-­covered in skin, and was free to leave. This staging perhaps dramatized Sofer’s claim that: [i]n effect, she [Gloriana] out-­emblematizes the emblematizer, enduring Vindice’s hollow mouthings simply as a means of

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taking centre stage. Vindice may think he has transformed the skull into a ‘dreadful vizard’ (3.5.149), a mask of its former self, but Gloriana herself arrogates the shape of bashful ‘country lady’ for a lethally effective performance (3.5.132), using Vindice as her costumer, valet, and means of transportation to keep her fateful tryst with duke, literally melting him with a kiss.27 Here that arrogation led, via vengeance, to the skull very literally becoming a woman. Gloriana was murdered for refusing to sleep with the Duke; this murder robbed her of her subjectivity, leaving her equivocal skull. Here, revenge gave subjectivity back by making it material. This trajectory of becoming is not reproduced in Cox’s film – rather, Cox immediately and clearly aligns the skull with Gloriana, using visual cues in the present moments of the film’s narrative as well as flashbacks to firmly insist on aligning character and object. This direct employment of the skull’s past means that it functions much as Jonathan Gil Harris suggests objects function on the early modern stage: ‘objects do not simply acquire meaning by virtue of their present social contexts. Rather, the value a particular object assumes derives from the differential relation of its present context to its assumed or known past usages and its potential future usages’.28 Objects in Cox’s film undoubtedly signal the past and move us between times, producing a complicated temporal trajectory as they do so. Vindici’s first engagement with the skull produces the film’s first flashback (to Vindici and Gloriana’s wedding) and the film’s second flashback is produced when Hannah/Gratiana and Castiza light a candle in front of Vindici and Gloriana’s wedding cake topper. But while the flashbacks serve to reinforce the association between Gloriana and the skull, I argue here that in moving from past uses into future uses, the skull leaves behind that association with Gloriana and instead moves towards becoming associated with sexually wronged women more broadly, refusing the association between the skull and the masculine offered in

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Still’s production. Thus, the trajectory of the object moves the audience from an engagement with the specific details of one woman’s sexual murder to a broader engagement with the sexual abuse and violence directed towards women within the world of the film. Cox introduces the viewer to the skull almost as soon as the film begins. Vindici arrives in Liverpool and goes straight to the catacombs to see the skull. The skull is recognizably female; when Vindici takes it down from its position on a shelf, its long, red hair is striking, as is the disjuncture between the hair and the skull – the skull is black bone,29 whereas the hair is seemingly in good condition. Vindici places the skull in his lap, facing him, and in Frank Cottrell Boyce’s screenplay the first line Vindici speaks, ‘[t]hou sallow remnant of my poisoned love’, is directed at the skull, firmly casting it as Gloriana. Cottrell Boyce’s script uses ‘remnant’, rather than the ‘picture’ we find in Middleton, further tying the skull to Gloriana by insisting on a material link rather than just an abstract representation. The importance of Vindici’s reunion with the object, and the importance of the material, tactile qualities of that object, is increased when he presses his forehead to the skull. This action triggers a flashback and the film cuts to Vindici and Gloriana pressing their foreheads together on their wedding day, the red hair (unchanged by time) unequivocally linking the skull and the woman in the flashback sequence. The opening lines of Middleton’s text – ‘Duke, royal lecher . . .’ (1.1.1ff) – are directed at the corrupt court and its denizens, before moving to the skull fourteen lines later. Cox’s film, however, starts with the skull (establishing its feminine role within a heterosexual relationship) and then moves to revenge and the corrupt court, but when the narrative of this scene in the film makes that move to revenge, the film troubles the understanding of the skull as dead wife and object associated with the past. In flashback, we see Vindici and Gloriana toasting their wedding guests with champagne, but at that moment the flashback breaks and Vindici cries ‘No!’, flinging us bluntly into the present. His cries draw the attention

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of other mourners in the crypt, and in response to the stares of two old women, Vindici turns the skull into a ventriloquist’s puppet, performing a short ‘routine’ for the women. But this performance is not so simple. While ostensibly Vindici is speaking as a ventriloquist (Eccleston holds his mouth taut, teeth showing), the slight movements of his lips do not always match the words we can hear. In addition to this, the tone of the voice speaking the skull’s words is decidedly more feminine than the deep Liverpudlian brogue Eccleston employs. This effect is compounded as the ventriloquized dialogue progresses: skull

It’s true, old bones don’t lie. vindici

They do when they’re in the grave. skull

  When they’re at peace they do. But these old bones will   have no peace until they have revenge! Revenge!   Revenge! Revenge! Revenge! Revenge! Revenge! As the word ‘revenge’ is repeated, there are two voices audible – Vindici’s shrill ‘ventriloquist’s’ voice and the softer whispering sound of the skull. The skull then is not simply an object under Vindici’s control, rather it takes on a ‘life’ outside of him. As Gretchen Minton points out, ‘Vindice’s ventriloquist act with Gloriana’s skull also underlines the linguistic disjunction – the words that he speaks are his as well as hers.’30 During Vindici’s ventriloquist performance, Cox sets up an image that repeats throughout the film (Figure 3): Vindici and the skull, side by side, facing the camera with the two of them filling the screen. It is an image that implicitly compounds the insistence on them as couple and the skull as Gloriana. This image, and Vindici’s ventriloquizing, is restaged as Vindici reveals to Carlo/Hippolito (Andrew Schofield) and Castiza his plan for killing the Duke. Here, it is the side-­by-side image that causes Castiza (as opposed to Hippolito in Middleton’s text) to ask ‘Is this the form that living shone so bright?’ Having

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FIGURE 3.  Christopher Eccleston as Vindici, holding the skull of Gloriana in Revengers Tragedy, dir. Alex Cox, 2002. Screengrab by permission of Alex Cox.

been employed to get the Duke ‘a lady’, Cox’s Vindici creates a woman out of the skull and the body of a teddy bear, taken from the pile of teddy bears left in a show of public mourning for Antonio’s wife.31 This hybrid ‘lady’ is placed in a canopy bed and Castiza, who wears a wig matching Gloriana’s hair, further complicating the hybridity of the object, lures the Duke towards it. Here then, Cox creates a material link between the three women treated so poorly by the corrupt men of court: Gloriana, killed for refusing to sleep with the Duke; Antonio’s wife, who has committed suicide after being raped by the Duke’s son; and Castiza, whom Lussurioso attempts to corrupt and then threatens with rape, are all fused in this material object. As Pascale Aebischer notes, ‘[t]he single signifier of Gloriana’s skull, at this point, becomes a surrogate for the living Gloriana, for Castiza and Antonio’s Lady, who are all three united in avenging the sexual exploitation that has threatening and/or destroyed them’.32 Thus, as the skull proceeds through the film’s narrative, it becomes less associated with Gloriana and more widely indicative of the threat to female chastity within the dystopian world of the film. But it

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does this through the manipulation of the material object and through encouraging the audience to consider the relationship between the skull and Gloriana. In both Still’s National Theatre production and Cox’s film, objects function as material loci through, and around, which gendered arguments – about chastity and about sexual violence – are debated. While, like all props on stage, both the money/ jewel and the skull are working as visual symbols as well as objects, the tactility and materiality of these objects are central to the facilitation of these debates. In both productions, the actors’ performances focus the attention of the audience on the objects by emphasizing the tactility of said objects – the caressing of the jewel or jewellery, the gentle cradling of the skull. To emphasize tactility is to pose questions about chastity and/or sexual violence in a fashion that anchors those debates in the material (and often violent) world, not the abstract world of ideas and ideology. But these are also tactile objects in motion; their tactility and motion lead the audience to conclusions about chastity or sexual violence. Thus, in Still’s production Gratiana is rapt not just by money but by a single necklace, and her desire for material things (rather than, say, financial need) and the depth (and thus danger) of that weakness are signalled when the trajectory of one necklace is towards a multiplicity of ‘Versace baubles’. For Cox, the jewel, and the path of the jewel through the scene, focus the comparison between the chaste Castiza and corruptible Gratiana, because the specific jewel Gratiana demands is always the same specific jewel that Castiza has rejected. Thus both productions use the trajectory of objects to heighten our awareness of the danger Gratiana’s frivolous greed poses to chaste Castiza. That sense of danger, the threat of the sexually violent world the play’s women face, is present in both productions’ staging of the journey undertaken by the skull. For Still, vengeance makes the journey of the skull one of ‘recovery’ from sexual violence – the skull becomes the woman whose humanity was stripped by sexual crime, whereas for Cox the skull’s strong association with Gloriana unravels as revenge moves the skull

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into a grotesque, violent hybridity that suggests there is no respite from the sexual threat faced by women in this dystopian world. But, to return to Appadurai, in both Still’s production and Cox’s film we see that tactile and material ‘things-­inmotion’ are central to facilitating comment on the world the women of The Revenger’s Tragedy occupy.

Notes 1 Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 2. 2 Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy. Dir. Melly Still. National Theatre Company. National Theatre, London. From 27 May 2008. Revengers Tragedy (2002), dir. Alex Cox. Screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce. DVD. Fantoma, 2004. 3 Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, 2. 4 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and The Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63, 5. 5 Ibid., 5. 6 Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, 29. 7 The effectiveness of an object’s shine is marked later in the play when Vindice, pretending to be a disgruntled and impoverished law student, is given gold by Lussurioso and claims that he’s ‘[a]lmost struck blind’ by the ‘bright unusual shine’ of the gold (4.2.114, 115). 8 Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. M.P. Jackson, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 560. R.V. Holdsworth comments ‘[i]n II i editors fail to equip Vindice with the “gifts” with which Lussurioso promised to “furnish” him to assist Castiza’s seduction (I iii 148–9). More than a purse of money is involved, as Vindice offers “a thousand angels”, “treasure” and “jewels” (II i 86, 160, 192). As directors usually recognize, he should bring on a large chest’; R.V. Holdsworth, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy on the Stage (1989)’, in Three Jacobean

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Revenge Tragedies: The Revenger’s Tragedy, Woman Beware Women, The Changeling: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 105–20, 111. 9 Anon, ‘Revenge is Still a Tasty Dish in Tragedy’, The Evening Standard, 16 July 2008. Available online: http://www.standard. co.uk/goingout/theatre/revenge-­is-still-­a-tasty-­dish-in-­ tragedy-7408180.html (accessed 21 September 2015). 10 Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script changes the spelling of Vindice to Vindici, and I am following that here when referring to the character in Cox’s film. 11 Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, 17. 12 A reminder of the inevitability of death – a common representation in much early modern art (Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors [1533], for example) and emblem books, such as Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna. 13 For full discussion of the relationship between the use of the skull in Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy, see Scott McMillan, ‘Acting and Violence: The Revenger’s Tragedy and Its Departures from Hamlet’, SEL 24.2 (1984): 275–91. 14 See for example, Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Random House, 2003). 15 The production used the 1606 version of the painting (Borghese Gallery, Rome), not the 1607–8 version (St John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta). We might note that Caravaggio was working on the painting as Middleton was working on the play. 16 Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, xi. 17 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 250. 18 Karin S. Coddon offers a useful engagement with the skull’s role in the theatricality of the play in ‘ “For Show or Useless Property”: Necrophilia and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, ELH 61.1 (1994): 71–88. 19 The concurrently running Manchester Royal Exchange production included an opening sequence in which Vindice danced with a masked Gloriana. (Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy. Dir. Jonathan Moore. The Royal Exchange

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Theatre Company. The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. From 17 June 2008.) 20 The Revenger’s Tragedy, Olivier, 2008, RNT/SM/1/S71. 21 Paul Taylor, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy, Olivier, National Theatre, London’, The Independent, 5 June 2008. Available online: http:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/theatre-­dance/ reviews/the-­revengers-­tragedy-­olivier-national-­theatrelondon-841251.html (accessed 20 September 2015). I would argue though that the image of the face was not so easily identifiable as female as Taylor suggests. 22 See J.L. Simmons, ‘The Tongue and Its Office in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, PMLA 92.1 (1977): 56–68. 23 After playing Vindice, Kinnear then went on to play Hamlet in 2010. This temporal arrangement meant that Kinnear’s Hamlet bore a trace of Vindice, rather than the other way around. 24 While for the first half of the monologue Kinnear was stage right and lit only by a spotlight, on the line ‘O keep the day, hour, minute’ (1.1.41) he got up and moved centre-stage, the light of the spotlight illuminating the painting. 25 Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, 2. 26 Coddon, ‘For Show or Useful Property’, 76. 27 Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, 111–12. 28 Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 8–9. 29 See Pascale Aebischer for a fascinating discussion of meanings generated by the black bone in Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 127–9. 30 Gretchen E. Minton, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy in 2002: Alex Cox’s Punk Apocalypse’, in Apocalyptic Shakespeare: Essays on Visions of Chaos and Revelation in Recent Film Adaptations, eds Melissa Croteau and Carolyn Jess-Cooke (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009), 132–47, 136. 31 Cox mirrors the outpouring of public emotion following the death of Princess Diana. 32 Aebischer, Screening Early Modern Drama, 129.

10 Forced Modernity in The Revenger’s Tragedy Performances Kevin A. Quarmby In June 2008, two concurrent though independent British productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy, one in Manchester, the other in London, reintroduced twenty-­first-century mainstream theatre audiences to Middleton’s ‘ferociously dark’ play.1 Despite popular TV and film actors Stephen Tompkinson and Rory Kinnear appearing as their respective Vindices, both productions received some similarly negative critical responses. Such negativity focused primarily on the forced modernity of their respective concepts, with the plays’ directors – Jonathan Moore at Manchester’s Royal Exchange and Melly Still at London’s National Theatre – accused of overindulgent sensationalism and ‘in yer face’ theatrical shock tactics. Guardian reviewer Lyn Gardner, for example, writing about Manchester’s offering, took issue with the ‘buckets of blood and lust’, ‘extra sex’ and ‘howling wolves’ aural soundscape that evoked images of Wall Street rather than a fictive Renaissance Italian court.2 Rendering the production ‘so full of itself’ that Moore was charged with ‘murdering the play’,

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these effects confirmed, for Gardner, that Manchester’s The Revenger’s Tragedy represented little more than a ‘case of overkill’. London similarly experienced what Michael Billington described as Still’s ‘restlessly kaleidoscopic version’ of the play, ‘equipped with all manner of modern dance and visual symbolism that makes explicit what is apparent in the text’.3 This unambiguous kaleidoscope yet again guaranteed, in Billington’s opinion, ‘sensory overkill’. Whether in Manchester or London, audiences were exposed to ‘overkill’ productions replete with ‘orgiastic sex’ and excessive bloody violence, which ultimately led to the creative equivalent of theatrical manslaughter. The perceived shortcomings of the Manchester and London productions were ultimately blamed on directors unwilling to ‘trust the play’s singular mix of sardonic humour and horror’, or intent on highlighting the corrupt decadence of male authority figures in their socially dis-­eased modern contexts.4 Such presentist readings of The Revenger’s Tragedy were not surprising, however, given the recent economic banking crisis that had, since late 2007, triggered a recession and concern about society’s impending moral collapse. Revenge and uncontrolled violence were obvious keys for unlocking a Jacobean drama whose own moral imperative – retributive justice for those warped by predatory sexual and social power – seemed to pander to the nation’s fears. Charles Spencer, for example, while likening The Revenger’s Tragedy to work by contemporary ‘schlock-­horror merchants’ who claim their plays as ‘merely a reflection of a corrupt society’, bemoaned the violent extreme in both 2008 revivals, ‘at a time when knife crime’ was ‘causing such concern’.5 Similarly, Ben Brantley, blogging for the New York Times, described the London production’s ‘21st-century portrait of la dolce vita gone sour’, replete with ‘distastefully cosmetic’ and ‘splashy stage blood’, as likewise disturbing, not least after ‘reading on the tube to the South Bank about yet another knife killing of a London teenager’.6 Moral concern at the glorification of eroticized knife crime added to a

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general unease about the play’s topical presentation. As the subsequent 2011 youth ‘riots’ seemed to confirm, the ‘socio-­cultural context of life in post-­industrial, austerity Britain’, which particularly impacted ‘young people marginalised by “race” and class’, made such concerns seem even more prescient.7 In contrast to the 2008 overkill versions, a 2015 London fringe production of The Revenger’s Tragedy by Lazarus Theatre Company directed by Gavin Harrington-Odedra adopted a far less overt representation of sexual depravity and violence.8 While the productions that followed close on the heels of financial and social meltdown emphasized their topicality, the Lazarus staging consciously avoided the extremes of contemporary moralizing, despite its equally power-­dressed, business-­oriented design choices. Perhaps indicative of the emergence from economic recession and a collective ennui towards youth violence, the Lazarus production focused more on implied threat and its effect on characters that suffer from or glory in its vicious enactment. HarringtonOdedra justified his oblique portrayal of violence by referencing the early modern propensity for public displays of punishment as family entertainment.9 Blood and guts might sell plays far better than self-­righteous moralizing, but there seemed little reason to overemphasize such gore in a didactic quest for contemporary social commentary. Rather than invest the company’s energies in moralistic overkill, HarringtonOdedra created a production that did not ignore the ‘values’ of an early modern society ‘comfortable’ with its ‘visceral and literalistic’ violent extreme, but chose instead to prioritize the dramatic effectiveness of Middleton’s language.10 Topical overkill was replaced by stylized underkill. With its stylistic representation of violence, the 2015 Lazarus production unwittingly engaged, therefore, in a theatrical debate that began in the 1960s when Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Revenger’s Tragedy adopted an equally radical, glamorously abstract evocation of violent revenge.

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Vindice as Cold War avenger Prior to the 1960s, The Revenger’s Tragedy wallowed in theatrical obscurity. Suddenly, in 1965, the play’s ‘first professional revival’ since the early seventeenth century appeared at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, directed by Brian Shelton.11 Founded in 1951, Pitlochry can hardly be regarded a mainstream theatre – its isolated location in the Highlands of Scotland, eighty miles north of Glasgow and Edinburgh, guaranteed its predominantly local clientele – but its repertory choice signalled a more general appreciation for the play’s dramatic viability. While Shelton’s production went relatively unnoticed, the 1966 Nunn staging attracted far more attention, not least because of certain public disputes between the play’s young director and the RSC’s co-­founder (with Peter Hall) and Shakespeare traditionalist, John Barton. Apparently against Nunn’s wishes, Barton had ‘doctored the script (inserting 150 lines of his own verse)’ in an attempt to counter the ‘glossy look’ and ‘Brechtian neo-­realism’ of this decidedly non-­traditionalist RSC-newcomer’s creation.12 Because it was ‘produced on a shoestring’, and despite Ian Richardson in the lead role, Nunn’s ‘Brechtian’ revival was scheduled for only eight performances; the production’s success, however, guaranteed not only its Stratford revival and transfer to London, but also Nunn’s eventual promotion as RSC successor to Hall.13 That Nunn’s glossily stylized neo-­realistic production was undoubtedly Brechtian in its Epic Theatre conceit has long been recognized, despite the apparent conflict these disparate terms might suggest. David Barnett, for example, when describing Brecht’s ‘stylistic realism’ as the dramatist’s dissatisfaction with traditional naturalistic evocations of everyday life, explains how Brecht scornfully rejected ‘naturalism’ in performance for offering the ‘spectator no means of criticizing reality because reality is presented “as is”, as unchangeable’.14 By contrast, Brecht stressed his intention not ‘merely to copy’ the supposed ‘realism’ of everyday life, but instead to ‘stylize reality in order to

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understand it properly’.15 Nunn, it would appear, recognized the dialectic potential of Brechtian theatre and embraced it wholeheartedly for his production, much to the evident dismay of his RSC colleague. As we will see, Nunn’s application of Brechtian neo-­realism to a play that had, up until the 1960s, been deemed too unsavoury to stage, is significant for appreciating more recent overkill productions. Nunn’s re-­envisioning owed its subsequent notoriety and critical acclaim, therefore, not only to its ultra-­ modern James Bond and Batman comic-­book appeal, which highlighted the sinister secret agent violence at its core, but also to the underlying unsavouriness of its subject matter.16 As the Daily Telegraph reviewer Eric Shorter suggested at the time, the RSC had revived a play ‘which one is glad to get away from’.17 Shorter’s Guardian colleague Philip Hope-Wallace likewise focused on Nunn’s ‘chop-­licking, black and biting’ concept, while Daily Mail reviewer Peter Lewis seemed to relish the ‘menacingly cold and shiversome’ creation as refreshingly new.18 Although offensive to some in the RSC hierarchy, Nunn’s glamorous film-­noir interpretation, full of Cold War paranoia and licence-­to-kill excess, fed some appetites for less sanitized and archaized theatrical constructs, while also setting the tone for the topical social commentary of later ‘in yer face’ revivals of the play. The RSC revisited The Revenger’s Tragedy in 1987 with a production directed by Di Trevis. Inspired by the ‘mid-1980s cynical atmosphere and ostentatious new wealth’ in the City of London’s financial district, Trevis’s interpretation heralded the play’s newfound status in the repertoire as anti-­capitalist dialectic, in line with a Brechtian Epic Theatre world-­view.19 Thatcherite market economics set the trend for a production that denigrated rather than celebrated the ‘glossy’ existence of young upwardly mobile financiers and stock marketeers. Subsequently, though, the play seemed relegated to amateur theatric or student workshop stalwart, only occasionally surfacing in fringe/regional production houses in the UK and USA.

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Twenty-­first-century interest was mildly reignited by Alex Cox’s 2002 film version, which, as Suzanne Gossett argues, attacked Britain’s ‘Shakespearean establishment’ and the cult of celebrity.20 Claiming that his version was ‘a tight-­lipped, hard-­edged Noir thriller featuring a showdown between narrow-­eyed, desperate hombres’, Cox himself offered a decidedly movie-­oriented description that suggested influences as diverse as Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino.21 Nonetheless, Cox also explained his intention to ‘emphasize, in a filmic way, the absolute absence of change’ in society over the intervening 400 years: The injustices of the early 17th century are those of the early 21st. Corrupt and powerful forces oppress the poor and the meek. The poor rise up. They are suppressed. And a younger generation of poor, angrier and with access to weapons, rises up to take revenge. [. . .] The anachronisms weren’t a stunt: they were an inevitable consequence of the narrative.22 Significant in Cox’s appraisal of his own political intent is the implicit artistic expression of a Brechtian dialectical imperative that can be traced back to Nunn’s 1966 production. Indeed, even the film-­noir Dr Strangelove imagery of the 1960s finds expression in Cox’s film, especially in its closing moments, when a Sex Pistols-­inspired black-­and-white fade to a far younger portrait of Queen Elizabeth II is juxtaposed with the expanding mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, accompanied by the maniacal voiceover cries for ‘revenge, revenge, revenge’.23 The inevitability of political oppression, social dissent, and society’s ultimate destruction in a nuclear holocaust is offered as a visual imagining of the aftermath to Vindice’s failed assassination attempt, and his likely demise in a hail of bullets. Cox specifically defends his film’s oblique portrayal of violence when commenting that, in his opinion, Middleton’s play is ‘violent enough’:

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I don’t think super-­realistic violence is necessary here. Everything is so arch and weird to begin with. Emotional passions are already amped to the extreme.24 By acknowledging that Middleton had written a play ‘violent enough’ not to need additional overkill treatment, Cox implicitly condemns the mainstream theatrical ventures that would follow. Cox’s film was to have a profound impact on subsequent theatrical treatments of the play, his overt topicality and certain directorial additions inevitably regurgitated and reinterpreted on the stage. As this brief performance history demonstrates, The Revenger’s Tragedy has suffered prolonged periods of neglect, followed by sudden bursts of creative interest that seem motivated by contemporary concerns about political oppression, capitalist greed, or urban decay and unrest. Since Shelton’s and Nunn’s 1960s revivals, the play’s occasional appearances suggest Hegelian expediency on the part of theatre directors eager to find an early modern equivalent to any present-­day social malaise. This overt presentism arguably reaches its apotheosis, however, in the 2008 productions in Manchester and London.

Middleton’s ‘Drama for our Times’ Such is the power of early modern drama transferred to film that Cox’s self-­proclaimed ‘Noir thriller’ offers an easily accessible touchstone for subsequent stage productions. Nowhere was this influence more evident than in the 2008 Manchester and London productions. Aware of the unusual circumstances of these dual mainstream productions of a play that had, up until then, remained relatively dormant, the Guardian’s Gardner observed how ‘two pop[ped] up’ within a matter of days from each other, ‘like animated corpses on a mortuary slab’.25 As Gardner’s comment suggests, such duplications rarely happen. Indeed, British regional theatres

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make every effort not to mirror the capital’s (or each other’s) repertories, certainly during the same season, let alone the same week. Repertorial overlaps are understandably avoided for fear of unfavourable appraisal of one version, or disapproval of both. Although 210 road miles separate the two major production houses, the double offering of The Revenger’s Tragedy inevitably did invite critical comparison, with scholarly and commercial reviews appearing side by side in several publications. The obvious modernity of these productions guaranteed their perceived contemporaneity, as evidenced by David Benedict’s Variety comment about the twenty-­first-century ‘zeitgeist credentials’ of both versions.26 Global financial meltdown, youth knife violence, Cox’s film noir version, and Middleton’s newfound Oxford Middleton fame all influenced the 2008 productions.27 Indeed, Middleton’s promotion as timeless commentator on sexual mores is evident in Gary Taylor’s ‘Welcome to the modern world’ essay for the National production’s programme notes, a fitting introduction to a staging that, as Sasha Garwood was to comment, ‘bellows its status as a violent, sexualised, contemporary-­relevant, multimedia-­heavy, modern-­dress Drama for our Times’.28 Reminiscent of Benedict’s ‘zeitgeist’ remark, Garwood’s ‘Drama for our Times’ concern stemmed primarily from the London version’s expressed intent to consider itself a proto-­ feminist tract, an ‘unfortunate’ assertion since, as Garwood argued, ‘the text’s underlying misogyny [was] emphasized rather than downplayed by the production’s intensity’.29 The unfulfilled feminist potential of Still’s National production seemed especially disappointing since an additional programme essay by Celia R. Daileader hailed the play as ‘Middleton’s Vindication of Women’, while claiming that, ‘To be or not to be a great man’s “harlot”? for women, that is the question’.30 Taking issue with Daileader’s assertion that this was a ‘feminist Hamlet’, Garwood criticized Still’s overt topicality for stifling, rather than encouraging, feminist engagement.31 With its ‘misogynistic and vindictively

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condemnatory attitude to women, and the widespread irrational violence depicted onstage’, the National production bombarded its audience with aggressive sexual imagery.32 In consequence, Garwood opined, Still’s ‘emphasis on dramatic visual spectacle’ only sensationalized the production’s hypersexual appeal.33 In Daileader’s defence, her essay was most probably commissioned some considerable time before the National production entered rehearsals, and thus represents an ideal rather than observed critical commentary. Even so, irrational violence and salacious topicality irreparably damaged the play’s feminist potential. A less negative appraisal of the 2008 productions was offered by Regina Buccola, who contended that both the London and Manchester offerings successfully ‘underscored’ the fact that ‘[v]iolence against women – accomplished or contemplated – drives the vengeance’ of the play.34 To achieve this aim, the Manchester version even cast the same actor, Stephanie Brittain, to portray Castiza, Gloriana and Antonio’s raped wife, thus combining all three roles into an ‘Everywoman’ sexual victim ‘subject to misogynous brutality, and ultimately triumphant in vengeance for it’.35 The representation of these victims by one actor impacted, for instance, Castiza’s 4.4 confrontation with Gratiana, with Brittain’s Castiza adopting full ‘streetwalker attire’ (see Figure 4) to convince her mother that she was ready ‘To prostitute [her] breast to the Duke’s son’ (4.4.103).36 A directorial choice mirrored in the National’s London production, Castiza’s overt embodiment of ‘chastity and harlotry’ – not simply this chaste woman’s resigned acceptance, but her wholehearted embracement of the prostitute persona – seemed a deliberate move to shock contemporary audiences into moral indignation, especially at the need for women to ‘whore themselves to the amoral misogynists who surround them’.37 Unfortunately, as Buccola contends, Castiza’s sexualized appearance, presented with all the subtlety of a streetwalking wannabe porn star, guaranteed that audiences were ‘offered no middle ground’ in which to consider the underlying misogyny of the drama.38 Castiza’s

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FIGURE 4.  Stephanie Brittain as the sexualized Castiza embraces Eileen O’Brien as Gratiana at the Manchester Royal Exchange, dir. Jonathan Moore, 2008. Photograph by Jonathan Keenan.

costume and demeanour, devoid of ironic manipulation or resolve to ignite her mother’s conscience, represented little more than unsubtle social commentary on modern sex trade exploitation. When considered alongside the portrayal of onstage sexual aggression against the play’s young female victims, such binary good-­versus-evil proselytizing created a culture of eroticized violence in both productions that presented their women with less agency, not more. Regardless of one’s opinion about Castiza’s newly embraced streetwalker role, it remains impossible to ignore an overarching theatrical agenda for both 2008 productions: to make literal what is implied in the drama. In consequence, Gratiana (played by Eileen O’Brien in Manchester and Barbara Flynn in London) appeared nothing more than a weak-­willed, then penitent, maternal figure.39 Gratiana’s Royal Exchange portrayal in 4.4, where O’Brien prayed ‘a sort of benediction over her sons’ for their successful revenge, might evoke a ‘stage moment eerily

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suggestive of fundamentalist terrorists who pray first, then kill’.40 Nevertheless, other than as vacillating pander and/or fundamentalist fanatic, Gratiana seemed lost to critical view. A similar fate also befell the Duchess (Corinna Powlesland in Manchester and Adjoa Andoh in London), who likewise failed to attract critical consideration. In an interesting endnote comment, Buccola does fleetingly observe how the Duchess’s ‘incestuous affair with her husband’s bastard son is itself an act of vengeance’, making her the ‘lone female character’ who ‘acts on her own vengeful behalf’, but this vengefulness is only ‘in retaliation’ for the Duke’s refusal to pardon her youngest son.41 The Duchess’s subversive potential, articulated in an endnote afterthought, receives only passing attention not because of its irrelevance, however, but because of its directorially underplayed representation in either the National or Royal Exchange productions. With Castiza representing a powerfully eroticized symbol of human sex trafficking on the London and Manchester stages, the Duchess and Gratiana, unable to compete with the ultra-­modern depravity that surrounded them, were demoted to sub-­character ciphers for matronly lust or maternal gain. That Gratiana and the Duchess seemed inescapably imbued with stereotypical one-­dimensionality is confirmed by other critical responses to the 2008 versions. In her review for Shakespeare Bulletin, for example, Laura Grace Godwin commented on the discomforting audience laughter when Flynn’s Gratiana made ‘her easy shift from pander to protector’ in 4.4 of the National’s production.42 The mirth originated because, up until then, Flynn’s ‘venal’ Gratiana proved little more than a ‘fit counterpart for Lussurioso’, especially when exclaiming, ‘Ay, these are they’ (2.1.120) and grasping uncontrollably at the ‘gold chain offered in exchange for her daughter’s chastity’.43 Likewise, Godwin’s description of Andoh’s ‘feral Duchess’ confirms the ‘graphic and brutal’ portrayal demanded of a character whose unsuccessful plea to ‘pray be merciful’ for her son’s heinous ‘trespass’ (1.2.21–2) and subsequent simulated rear-­entry sexual encounter with Spurio

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in 3.5 ensured that she, too, was ‘held up for contempt’.44 Suspicious about these representations, Godwin concluded that, given ‘the subject and action’ of The Revenger’s Tragedy, it remained ‘difficult to argue that there are not feminist points to be made in a critical or theatrical interpretation’ of the play, points that Still’s London production ‘significantly failed’ to address.45 Godwin blamed this lost opportunity for feminist engagement on productions that staunchly maintained their ‘Vindice-­centric perspective’ without ever making an attempt ‘to question [Vindice’s] right or ability to judge men, women, or the value systems at work in his society’.46 By contrast, the small-­ scale 2015 Lazarus Theatre Company fringe production offered an alternative vision of revenge in which female characters could achieve far greater feminist prominence because not subsumed beneath the inherent misogyny of mainstream ‘Vindice-­centric’ hypersexual promotion and appeal.

Lazarus: The Revenger’s Tragedy resurrected The Audience enter to distant cello music, a gold gilt room and haze. The smell of old opulence permeates the room. One by one, actors enter the space from upstage, noting the audience, smiling, nodding. They know the audience are there. In their hands they are holding a masquerade mask, silk ribbon dangling from its extremities. A lone figure, without a mask, no tie, no jacket, takes centre stage and begins to introduce us to the characters. [. . .] A single violin screams, smoke billows onto the stage. Time runs backwards. The violin scream becomes the scream of a woman, being dragged to her rape. Another woman is being propositioned by a man. She says no. She dies. Vindici [sic] is powerless to stop any of it. He falls next to the woman. Caresses her. She disappears and all he is left with is her mask.47

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In March 2015, Lazarus presented its three-­week run of The Revenger’s Tragedy at the fifty-­seat Jack Studio Theatre in Lewisham, south east London, nestled within the Brockley Jack public house.48 Because the production was deemed of insufficient interest to warrant mainstream review status, records of its reception are limited to Peter Kirwan’s Bardathon blog and assorted WordPress amateur reviews.49 Close attention was paid to the unusual staging of the play, with its in-­the-round blocking, permanent onstage ensemble and swift ninety-­minute running time. Charlotte L. Rose, for example, considered the Jack Studio’s ‘classic black box space with a thrust stage’ ill-­suited to the play’s in-­the-round staging conceit.50 In addition, the production’s ‘minimalist design’ and lack of ‘distinguishing costumes’ added a level of audience confusion.51 Likewise, Kirwan described the central acting space, delineated by a bronzed gold lighting disc, as offering only ‘rudimentary spatial division’, while the costume ‘anonymity’ – ‘all suits and dark dresses in a generically “Jacobean” aesthetic’ – although ‘occasionally visually interesting’, ultimately led to a sense of artistic ‘emptiness’.52 Kirwan poured particular scorn on certain ‘obfuscating’ Lazarus performance choices, not least the radical, some might say provocative, decision to ignore Middleton’s ‘direct visual quotation from Hamlet’.53 In a directorial move destined to incur the wrath of Middletonians and Shakespeareans alike, Harrington-Odedra presented Vindice clutching not Gloriana’s skull, but a mask. For Kirwan, Lazarus’s failure to fulfil its Shakespearean duty by not including this iconic opening image was sufficient to muddy the play’s ‘waters from the start’.54 Confirming his awareness of the ‘parallels one can draw’ between The Revenger’s Tragedy and Hamlet, HarringtonOdedra later explained how Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Richard III were also allowed to ‘permeate’ cast conversations about the play, his comment suggesting a less rigid adherence to intertextual performance trends.55 Ultimately, Harrington-Odedra concedes, Lazarus ‘wanted Middleton’s narrative and characters to be in the foreground’:

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[The Revenger’s Tragedy], like most of the plays of the time, can never be understood in isolation, or in isolation from the society in which they were written or performed, but one can question whether an overabundance of cross play references and allusions can overcrowd the writing itself.56 The company’s Artistic Director, Ricky Dukes, nevertheless explained a far more pragmatic reason for the lack of this and other ‘direct visual quotations’. With a budget of less that £4,000, the Lazarus creatives were forced by necessity to invest more in inventive re-­envisionings of the play, with the absence of Gratiana’s skull symptomatic of further radical performance choices to come.57 Although the limited budget design and minimalist ‘Jacobean aesthetic’ continued to confuse some reviewers, their comments point to a theatrical concept that, as Harrington-Odedra defends, was intentional in its ‘stylistic approach’ and execution.58 Reminiscent of the tense Cold War paranoia evoked by Nunn’s 1960s version, Lazarus kept its actors on or around the central lighting disc acting space as silent observers, in full view of the audience. In line with the Brechtian imperative to ‘stylize reality in order to understand it properly’, Harrington-Odedra likewise directed the ensemble’s ‘collective movements’ and ‘silent frozen’ montages consciously to focus attention inward to the unfolding narrative.59 The formal choreography of these conspiratorial moments, whereby the audience became complicit accomplices in Vindice and Hippolito’s revenge, broke the mould of earlier literalistic productions. Repackaged for so intimate a venue, the Lazarus staging accentuated the underlying unease of such close, personal involvement, made more voyeuristic by the need to shift position for a better view.60 Indeed, Kirwan’s complaint about the play’s somewhat ‘anaemic approach to spectacle’ only confirms the forced-­ modernity expectation of a viewer seemingly saddened by the loss of the spectacular.

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The precision choreography of Harrington-Odedra’s direction also incorporated symbolic dancing and clapping to create what he terms ‘the reality of removed violence’.61 The graphic depiction of the rape of Antonio’s wife, for instance, which now appears de rigueur for any modern performance, although echoed in the Lazarus opening section stage direction, ‘scream of a woman, being dragged to her rape’, was not enacted in full view, but simply implied in a fleeting visual tableau.62 Similarly, the deaths of various characters were represented not literally, but theatrically by the ensemble’s increasingly rapid handclaps. These moments of percussive malice most notably occurred following Junior’s exclamation that he ‘die[s] for that which every woman loves’ (3.4.79); when accenting Vindice’s ‘head snap’ execution of the Duke (Tom Jobson) that fatally interrupts his dismayed response to the proof of his wife’s infidelity, ‘I cannot brook –’ (3.5.219); and accompanying the swift despatch of six actors at ‘The revengers dance’ conclusion (5.3.41SD).63 The symbolic association of death with handclapping ensured that the resulting slaughter remained implied rather than graphically portrayed. By insisting that The Revenger’s Tragedy maintain its removed violence aesthetic, Lazarus subverted the modernity of recent state subsidised theatre productions with their ‘splashy stage blood’ excess.64 As Harrington-Odedra and Dukes both realized, however, removed violence alone was insufficient to satisfy audiences that obviously craved some final purgative discharge, with Dukes wryly commenting that modern audiences, like their Jacobean counterparts, seem to ‘love bomb sites’.65 The decision was taken, therefore, both to foreshorten the final act and to stage some final onstage violence as a shocking counterpoint to what had gone before. Immediately following Ambitioso’s exit after exclaiming ‘I’ll see fair play: drop one and there lies t’other’ (5.1.187), the Lazarus action leaps to 5.3. With their script announcing ‘The Masquerade Ball’ where the original text states ‘The revengers dance’ (5.3.41 SD), the

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subsequent stage direction describes the aftermath of this swift transition: The lights start coming up on the company dressed in masks at a masquerade ball. Enter Vindici and Hippolito. The Revengers dance. At the end, they kill everyone in the room.66 Surrounded by intertwined dead bodies, Vindice (Lewis Davidson) confronted Lussurioso (Liam Steward-George) and announced, ‘Now thou’lt not prate on’t, ’twas Vindice murdered thee!’ (5.3.77–8). At this, Vindice grappled Lussurioso to the ground. As Lussurioso gasped and writhed in his murderer’s grip, Vindice ironically demanded of his victim, ‘Tell nobody’ (5.3.80). Explaining the genesis of this graphic onstage killing in a play that, up until then, remained decidedly unrealistic in its staged violence, Harrington-Odedra confirmed a collective desire to see Lussurioso’s eventual ‘come-­ uppance’.67 By way of shocking counter to the play’s prior dramatic imagery, this ‘in yer face’ murderous moment acknowledged an expediency in giving a departing audience its cathartic release. Stylized and removed violence proved a predominant factor in a fringe production that consciously implicated its audience in the play’s murderous outcome, while also offering a cathartic ‘release’ for those anticipating Vindice’s successful revenge. An altogether unanticipated metaphorical ‘release’ also occurred, however, for certain female characters in the play. This unexpected side-­effect was evident with the Duchess and Gratiana, who, having virtually disappeared in the 2008 productions through the sexually exploitative upstaging by the younger female characters, found their characters developing in surprisingly expressive ways. With regard to the Duchess, for example, Harrington-Odedra noted the company’s realisation that she ‘says exactly how she’s feeling’, especially when exclaiming her passion for her husband’s illegitimate son, Spurio (played by Joe Mott):68

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duchess

And here comes he whom my heart points unto, His bastard son, but my love’s true-­begot. (1.2.109–10) The Duchess’s matter-­of-fact sentiment – ‘there’s the man I love’ – is, Harrington-Odedra argues, ‘delivered without any moralistic self-­judgement’, thus allowing the audience freedom to consider the justification of her actions.69 Expanding later on this observation, Harrington-Odedra confirmed that he ‘looked at previous productions’, especially the Royal Exchange and National versions, but felt that the ‘semiotics and representations of greed, lust and other moral corruptions’ – those overkill elements so denigrated by the popular press – ‘diverted attention away’ from Middleton’s actual play: We see the Duchess being slighted by the Duke, then immediately are given access to her feelings of hurt, betrayal and surprise, and then she takes us through her plan to exact revenge. We wanted these moments and opportunities to allow the fallible human aspects to shine through and not be hidden or overshadowed.70 In the Lazarus production, the fallibility of the Duchess achieved even greater symbolic significance since her role, played by the actor Paula James, was doubled with Vindice’s mother, the oft-­slighted Gratiana (Figure 5). The doubling of the Duchess/Gratiana characters had an immediate and considered impact on their development as sympathetic victims of misogyny on a near-­industrial scale. Unlike the tripling of the younger ‘victims’ in the 2008 productions, with their reinforcement of patriarchal norms and salacious commodification of the prostituted body, the Lazarus decision to allow one actor to portray the two more senior female roles elevated the status and feminist potential of both women. Regarding Gratiana’s newfound visibility, Harrington-Odedra described the long rehearsal discussions

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FIGURE 5.  Paula James as Gratiana praying fervently for forgiveness in Lazarus Theatre Company’s London fringe production, dir. Gavin Harrington-Odedra, 2015. Photograph by Adam Trigg.

about this mother’s difficult choices for her daughter. Gratiana was recognized as ‘someone who is desperate or has no other option, and sees no other way to survive in the difficult situation [in which] she finds herself and her children’: What would you do if you were at the end of any money that was left to you by your deceased husband, and you couldn’t work to support yourself and your children? We wanted the audience to sympathise with her because she truly saw her mistake and regretted her actions.71 With the director’s ‘conscious effort to question and address the violence against women in the play, and readdress the representation of women’ in the twenty-­first century, Lazarus unwittingly responded to Godwin’s 2008 feminist concerns.72 As Godwin noted at the time:

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While it may be difficult to find sympathy for a mother who attempts to pander her daughter, it is certainly arguable that a feminist reading of The Revenger’s Tragedy could find sympathy for Gratiana, whose observations about her husband’s lack of financial prowess might, for example, be seen as shrewdness, rather than stupidity.73 Godwin’s call for a sympathetic ‘feminist reading’ echoes Brian Gibbons’s 1960s editorial comment about Gratiana’s ‘female frailty’, a ‘dramatic role so stereotyped that it discourages recognition of her individual circumstances’, even though, as ‘a widow, these might well be supposed to include financial insecurity’.74 Nevertheless, such sympathy for the woman’s insecure plight did manifest in a fringe London production, albeit only when its director decided not to moralize stereotypically about Gratiana’s actions, but to ask the question: ‘Why would a mother do that?’75 By allowing the audience to consider whether social opportunity or social climbing are sufficient justifications for a mother to commodify her daughter, rather than preaching with patriarchal outrage or ‘partly’ defending her ‘susceptibility’, Lazarus offered its antidote to the indignation Gratiana’s actions traditionally evoke. Perhaps indicative of the complicit guilt implied by the audience’s uncomfortable voyeurism, or possibly because of the removal of equally voyeuristic sexual imagery, Lazarus seemingly did ‘find sympathy’ for Gratiana, which in turn elevated her status to pragmatic victim of economic circumstance, rather than archetype female villain. This moment of doubt about Gratiana’s maternal motivation, whereby she might truly believe, as she says, that her daughter would be foolhardy to ‘Deny advancement, treasure, the Duke’s son’ (2.1.155), ensured that the Lazarus production embraced the feminist potential of sexual exploitation, not as sensationally topical, but as a timeless moral dilemma. In addition, by highlighting the Duchess’s justifiable deceit and marital vengefulness, Lazarus refocused audience attention on those women who had, up until then, disappeared from performative

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view. The small-­scale Lazarus Theatre company, recognizing the commercial viability of its re-­presentation of sexual and physical violence, offered a radical new reading of the play. Freed from zeitgeist moralizing and forced modernity posturing, Lazarus invited a reappraisal of the play’s problematic older female characters that supported rather than thwarted the feminist potential at its core. State-subsidised, twenty-­firstcentury mainstream UK productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy, which dwelt on the play’s topical sensationalism, invariably elided this same feminist potential through their unwittingly misogynist reliance on sexually exploitative overkill excess.

Notes 1 National Theatre, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy – Trailer’, 27 May 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dvQcgLpxYE (accessed 3 May 2016). 2 Lyn Gardner, ‘Review The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Guardian, 3 June 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/jun/03/theatre1 (accessed 29 April 2016). 3 Michael Billington, ‘Review The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Guardian, 6 June 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/jun/06/ theatre1 (accessed 29 April 2016). 4 Gardner, ‘Revenger’s’. 5 Charles Spencer, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy: The Enduring Appeal of Nastiness and Perversity’, The Telegraph, 6 June 2008, http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/charles-­spencer/3553709/ The-Revengers-Tragedy-­the-enduring-­appeal-of-­nastiness-and-­ perversity.html (accessed 26 April 2016). 6 Ben Brantley, ‘London Theater Journal: A Bloody, Yet Heartless Revenger’s Tragedy’, ArtsBeat Blog, New York Times, 5 July 2008, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/london-­ theater-journal-­a-bloody-­if-heartless-­revengers-­tragedy-­at-the-­ national/?_r=0 (accessed 26 April 2016). 7 Charlie Cooper, ‘Understanding the English “Riots” of 2011: “Mindless Criminality” or Youth “Mekin Histri” in Austerity

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Britain?’, Youth and Policy 109 (2012): 1–26 (1), http://www. youthandpolicy.org/wp-­content/uploads/2013/04/cooper_ riots_2011.pdf (accessed 26 April 2016). 8 Ricky Dukes, ‘Lazarus Theatre Company: Classic Theatre Reimagined’, 2016, http://www.lazarustheatrecompany.com/ about-­us (accessed 29 April 2016). 9 Gavin Harrington-Odedra, interview with author, 27 May 2015. 10 Harrington-Odedra, interview, 2015. 11 Brian Gibbons, ed., The Revenger’s Tragedy, New Mermaids (London: Bloomsbury, 2008; orig. London: Ernest Benn, 1967), xxviii. 12 Samantha Ellis, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy, October 1966’, Guardian, 14 May 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2003/may/14/rsc.theatre (accessed 29 April 2016). 13 Ellis, ‘Revenger’s 1966’. 14 David Barnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 105. 15 Ibid. 16 Ellis, ‘Revenger’s 1966’. 17 Eric Shorter, Daily Telegraph, 1966, quoted in Ellis, ‘Revenger’s 1966’. 18 Philip Hope-Wallace, Guardian, 1966, and Peter Lewis, Daily Mail, 1966, quoted in Ellis, ‘Revenger’s 1966’. 19 Gibbons, The Revenger’s Tragedy, xxxii. See Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre [1949]’, in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), 179–205, 193. 20 Suzanne Gossett, ed., Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 343. See also Chapter 9. 21 Alex Cox, ‘Directing: Revengers Tragedy’, 2013, http://www. alexcox.com/dir_revengerstragedy.htm (accessed 29 April 2016). 22 Ibid. 23 Alex Cox, dir., Revengers Tragedy, 2002, Microcinema International, DVD. 24 Cox, ‘Directing’.

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25 Gardner, ‘Revenger’s’. 26 David Benedict, ‘Review The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Variety, June 2008, http://variety.com/2008/legit/reviews/the-­revenger-stragedy-2-1200521899/ (accessed 29 April 2016). 27 Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, eds, Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 28 Sasha Garwood, ‘Review of Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (directed by Melly Still) at the National Theatre, London, June–August 2008’, Shakespeare 4.4 (2008): 441–4, 441. 29 Ibid., 441. 30 Celia R. Daileader, Middleton’s Vindication of Women, Programme Note, The Revenger’s Tragedy, National Theatre, London (2008), 14–17. 31 Garwood, ‘Review’, 442. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 444. 34 Regina Buccola, ‘Giving Revenger’s its Due’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, eds Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 502–17, 515. 35 Buccola, ‘Giving Revenger’s its Due’, 517. 36 Ibid., 516. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 504. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 517 n.18. 42 Laura Grace Godwin, ‘Revenge Backwards, and In Heels: Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy England, Summer 2008’, Shakespeare Bulletin 26.4 (2008): 115–31, 129. 43 Ibid., 128. See the discussion of this moment in Chapter 9. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 129. 46 Ibid.

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47 Lazarus Theatre Company, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy, Final Edited Script’ (first performed 3 March 2015), adapted and directed by Gavin Harrington-Odedra, kindly supplied to the author by Lazarus Artistic Director, Ricky Dukes. 48 Jack Studio Theatre, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy by Lazarus Theatre Company’, 2015, http://www.brockleyjack.co.uk/portfolio/ revengers-tragedy/ (accessed 29 April 2016). 49 Peter Kirwan, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy (Lazarus Theatre Company)’, Bardathon, 23 March 2015, https://blogs. nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2015/03/23/the-­revengers-tragedy-­ lazarus-theatre-­company-the-­brockley-jack-­studio-theatre/ (accessed 29 April 2016). 50 Charlotte L. Rose, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Jack Studio Theatre Review’, Everything-Theatre, 2015, http://everything-­ theatre.co.uk/2015/03/the-­revengers-tragedy-­the-jack-­studiotheatre-­review.html (accessed 29 April 2016). 51 Rose, Everything-Theatre. 52 Kirwan, Bardathon. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Gavin Harrington-Odedra, email message to author, 26 January 2016. 56 Harrington-Odedra, email, 2016. 57 Ricky Dukes, private interview with author, 27 May 2015. 58 Harrington-Odedra, interview, 2015. 59 Barnett, 105; Rose, Everything-Theatre. 60 Kirwan, Bardathon. 61 Harrington-Odedra, interview, 2015. 62 Lazarus, Revenger’s Script; see Buccola, ‘Giving Revenger’s its Due’, 506 n.8. 63 Dukes, interview, 2015. 64 Brantley, ArtsBeat. 65 Dukes, interview, 2015. 66 Lazarus, Revenger’s Script. 67 Harrington-Odedra, interview, 2015.

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68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Harrington-Odedra, email, 2016. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Godwin, ‘Revenge Backwards’, 129. 74 Gibbons, The Revenger’s Tragedy, xxiii. 75 Harrington-Odedra, interview, 2015.

Afterword: Doing Battle on Behalf of a Skull Linda Woodbridge The essays in this collection register many instances of discordia concors in The Revenger’s Tragedy. Or maybe just discordia. Katherine Gillen is troubled by Vindice’s hybrid nature: ‘A combination of English Puritan and conniving Italian, Vindice revels in the theatricality, sexual depravity, and violence he claims to abhor’ (p. 127). The play’s trenchant sexual satire clashes with what appears to be its prurient salacity: as Eric Vivier notes, ‘The satirist who denounces sin reveals his own fascination with that sin, reveals his own extensive (and therefore problematic) knowledge of that sin, and ultimately associates himself with it’ and ‘by drawing attention to concealed sin, the satirist may do as much to instruct his audience in that sin as he does to dissuade them from it’ (pp. 40–1). The play idealizes Gloriana, her name evoking the grand old days of the virgin queen; and characters venerate the (nameless) wife of Antonio (‘that religious lady’, ‘that general-­honest lady’ (1.1.111,

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1.2.46), whose ‘name has spread such a fair wing / Over all Italy that, if our tongues / Were sparing toward [her rape], judgement itself / Would be condemned and suffer in men’s thoughts’ (1.2.56–9). But such esteem clashes disjunctively with the play’s pervasive misogyny: ‘Women are apt, you know, to take false money’; ‘Were’t not for gold and women there would be no damnation’ (1.1.104, 2.1.250). Kevin Quarmby’s essay is strong on the contradictions with regard to women, and Katherine Graham provides a lively account of the female characters in two productions slavering over delectable jewels – stage business which certainly has warrant in the text. Vindice’s strident moralizing, connected by Heather Hirschfeld and Eric Vivier with Middleton’s own Calvinist background, collides resoundingly with the play’s irreverent, often scurrilous comedy. Lucy Munro also sees Calvinism, in the play’s gesturing towards the belief that blasphemous swearing pointed to a reprobate condition; but she notes that ‘swearing also enables Middleton to articulate the ambivalent response to extra-­judicial vengeance that was becoming characteristic of revenge tragedy’ (p. 137). There are generic disjunctions too, between the conventions of revenge tragedy and those of city comedy or of the morality play: Vivier notes that ‘the humour of the play – its verbal jokes, its comic misunderstandings, its bawdy double entendres – as well as its interest in wit and tricks make the play seem as much like a city comedy as a revenge tragedy’ (p. 40), while Erin Kelly calls the play ‘a revenge tragedy that is also a morality play. By blending these two types of drama, Middleton calls attention to the generic conventions of both even as he holds his audience in suspense about which will predominate’ (p. 28). Are these internal contradictions, these fault-­lines, these fractures, intentional or accidental? If accidental, how could an accomplished dramatist such as Middleton not have recognized them and fixed them? If intentional, what dramatic and artistic purpose do they serve? In some cases, I’d plump for non-­intentionality: it’s easy to imagine a satirist, bent on hammering sexual power abuse, or denouncing pervasive lasciviousness that saps society’s manly

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resolve, finding his Christian vehemence unexpectedly tipping over into lip-­licking salacity. Maybe he wouldn’t even notice it had happened. Maybe, were it pointed out to him, he wouldn’t agree it was there. Or the misogyny issue: I can believe that Middleton, steeped in the various misogynies and male-­ supremacist notions so typical of his era, would hardly have noticed Vindice’s casual misogynist proverbs (‘Wives are but made to go to bed and feed’ [1.1.132]), or his unexamined male presumption in imposing standards of chastity on every female he encounters. It might seem contradictory to us that a Vindice who makes misogynistic remarks is clearly cast as a hero with whom we are meant to empathize (partly because he is avenging a wronged woman), but whether this much bothered Middleton is open to question. Did he create this contradiction to provoke future generations to ponder deep questions of gender? To undercut the whole genre of revenge tragedy? To prod us into reconsidering the definition of tragic hero? That the busy, prolific Middleton never gave it a thought seems to me fairly plausible. We academics often have a compulsion to attribute a highly-­sophisticated intentionality to writers we revere. As Alfred Harbage once put it in an essay on Shakespeare entitled ‘The Myth of Perfection’, we assume that ‘because the plays are excellent, they are excellent in every way – in a word that they are perfect’.1 We don’t need to deny that The Revenger’s Tragedy is a stunning play to concede that some of its internal contradictions were possibly unintentional. Similar internal contradictions have bedeviled readings of Shakespeare’s Henry V for generations. Some of that play’s dialogue, choruses and action point to Henry as a great national hero and the play as a jingoistic celebration of international war, while other aspects of the play suggest that Henry is a scheming Machiavellian and the whole invasion of France a diversion, distracting the populace from the illegitimacy of Henry’s Lancastrian dynasty. Norman Rabkin famously compared Henry V to ‘Gestaltist’ drawings like those of M.C. Escher, in which the eye may read a pattern as either rabbits or ducks; the play’s ‘ultimate power is precisely the fact

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that it points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us’.2 Joel Altman, in The Tudor Play of Mind, argues that the rhetorical, dialectical education given students in sixteenth-­ century England provided them with constant practice in debating both sides of any issue, predisposing them to regard any action from more than one point of view.3 Are the internal contradictions of The Revenger’s Tragedy an artefact of such ‘both sides’ thinking? If so, it doesn’t resolve the ‘intentionality’ question: Middleton could be deliberately using disjunction to provoke complex, multi-­faceted thinking in his audience, or Janus-­faced thinking could simply have been so ingrained in him as a child of his culture that he wrote disjunctively without even noticing. Some of the dissonances are probably intentional. Like Emerson, Middleton contains multitudes. At this remove, we’ll never be able to gauge accurately exactly what Middleton intended to do. (Even with our contemporaries, it’s impossible to do that with any precision.) As Jonathan Culler once encapsulated the problem, ‘Meaning is context-­bound, but context is boundless’.4 Just as one can increase the number of sides in a regular polygon infinitely without ever creating a circle, one can add immensely to our knowledge of Middleton and his era without ever being sure what he intended; however, we can come closer and closer to that circle of certainty. Let me suggest a few ways we might approach the dissonances of The Revenger’s Tragedy. In the interest of brevity, I will focus on the kind of discordia that seems to me most troublesome in the play – the disconnect between serious moralizing and irreverent eruptions of the comic. On the one hand, as Vivier notes, the play abounds in ‘very serious references to heaven, hell and the wages of sin’, in common with ‘nearly all satirists of the 1590s and early 1600s’ (pp. 44, 52), several of whom were serious enough about denouncing sin that they took holy orders. On the other hand, as Vivier also notes, the play abounds in ‘dark humour and irreverence’ (p. 44).

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Here are a few examples that leap out for me. Lussurioso first hires Vindice (disguised) to pander to his own sister, then to murder his (disguised) self. He jestingly refers to the skull of his supposedly dearest love as ‘the bony lady’ (3.5.121). Unlovely members of the Duke’s reconstituted family rejoice in the monikers Lussurioso, Spurio, Ambitioso, Supervacuo and Junior. Hearing Lussurioso utter monstrous lies, Vindice employs the ‘deaf heaven’ trope common in revenge tragedy since time immemorial: ‘Has not heaven an ear? / Is all the lightning wasted? [. . . .] O, thou almighty patience! ’Tis my wonder / That such a fellow, impudent and wicked, / Should not be cloven as he stood, / Or with a secret wind burst open. / Is there no thunder left, or is’t kept up / In stock for heavier vengeance?’ (4.2.158–9, 193–8). At this moment, a thunder-­clap is heard, and Vindice delightedly crows, ‘There it goes!’ – the effect onstage is almost always comic. In Act 3 the poisoned Duke is forced to watch his wife copulating with his bastard, and in the play’s final scene two separate troupes of four masked murderers dance in; we watch a choreographed mass stabbing, too ritualized and too excessive not to seem funny. Snarling insults and horrific events evoke bathetic responses: Duchess: ‘He called his father villain, and me strumpet, / A word that I abhor to file my lips with’ (2.3.24–5). Ambitioso: ‘That was not so well done, brother’ (26). Spurio, told of his father’s death, cries in anguish, ‘Old Dad dead?’ (5.1.116). When the Duke’s corpse is discovered in vassal’s attire, lips eaten away by poison and tongue mutilated, a nobleman mildly reports, ‘Your father’s accidentally departed’ (5.1.141). Nobles vie to out-­flatter each other by wishing the new Duke longer and longer life: threescore years, then fourscore, then fivescore (5.3.30–4); we can’t help laughing when the new Duke actually gets about thirty more seconds of life. The play’s dark joking goes beyond merely existing side-­ by-side with lethal events: the joking is often about the lethal events (‘Old Dad dead?’, ‘accidentally departed’, and so forth). How do we account for the play’s dizzying shifts in tone, its inappropriateness of tone to subject matter?

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We could approach this issue through various different theoretical frames. We could view it through a lens of literary history and the history of genres. Erin Kelly, in this volume, usefully parses the play’s morality play features, including allegorical names, sententious moralizing, the sudden downfall of ‘those who think themselves at the height of their powers’, the resemblance of Vindice to vice figures in morality plays: he is ‘highly theatrical, entertaining and morally ambiguous; he speaks directly to the audience, encourages bad behaviour by others, stage manages mischief and gleefully gloats over the suffering of others’ (p. 29). Irreverent humour was a standard feature of morality plays. During his deepest anguish, when Everyman is facing death alone and one after another of his friends declines to accompany him into that undiscovered country, one friend begs off on grounds of a sore toe – no doubt the actor went hobbling off with a histrionic flourish of podiatric pain, to the appreciative chuckles of the play’s late-­ medieval audience. Medieval audiences clearly had a high threshold of discomfort when it came to eruptions of humour at what seem to be dead-­serious moments: the same Herod who decreed the massacre of all male infants in the land occasioned roars of derisive laughter when, foiled in his attempt to eradicate the baby Jesus, he jumped down from the pageant wagon and ranted up and down the streets of Wakefield or York. In another medieval mystery play, Jehovah was employing Noah to spare the human race and all other living animals from a watery extinction – a pretty serious matter; but when Mrs Noah baulked on the gang-­plank, preferring a tipple with her gossips to sailing away in a water-­ borne zoo, and when she gave her husband a box on the ear, it really tickled the medieval funny bone. Devils in mystery plays were typically comic, perhaps on the theory that laughing at an evil enemy deprives him of dignity, and hence of some of his power. Continuities between medieval and Tudor drama have long been recognized – the great mystery cycles continued in a vigorous tradition until they were outlawed during Elizabeth’s reign, and the Vice figure from morality plays has long been

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identified as contributing to the DNA of such Renaissance dramatic characters as Iago and Richard III. Tensions between serious moral issues and irreverent laughter in The Revenger’s Tragedy come into better focus when viewed through this lens. Another generic lens is that of satire, discussed in this volume by Eric Vivier. The era’s satiric tradition was robust, so provocative that in 1599 the nation’s bishops decreed a mass burning of existing satires (including some of Middleton’s), and an ecclesiastical ban on further verse satire. This genre had its own internal tensions: a long tradition of Juvenalian and Horatian satire, familiar from school curricula, was rendered more inflammatory by injections of the very sort of Christian moral ire that prompted bishops to ban satires. Renaissance satire has an acid tone, perfectly suiting the morbid rage of Vindice: to him, death is a ‘terror to fat folks, / To have their costly three-­piled flesh worn off’ (1.1.45–6). He works himself up to a moralistic (voyeuristic?) passion when imagining sexual misdeeds: Now ’tis full sea abed over the world, There’s juggling of all sides. Some that were maids E’en at sunset are now perhaps i’th’ toll-­book. This woman in immodest thin apparel Lets in her friend by water. Here a dame, Cunning, nails leather hinges to a door To avoid proclamation. Now cuckolds are A-coining, apace, apace, apace, apace, And careful sisters spin that thread i’th’ night That does maintain them and their bawds i’th’ day. (2.2.133–42) Ian McAdam writes of the ‘bitterness of the humour and the nightmarish quality of the action,’ which point to authorial seriousness about the ‘cultural pathology’ of ‘the world Middleton depicts’ (p. 85). But again, the play’s comic tone tends to undercut any Christian-­tinged moral indignation: consider the sprightly self-­congratulation of Vindice and

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Hippolito: ‘I do applaud thy constant vengeance, / The quaintness of thy malice’ (3.5.108–9); ‘Oh good deceit, he quits him with like terms!’ (5.1.103); ‘Brother, how happy is our vengeance [. . .] Why, it hits / Past the apprehension of indifferent wits’ (5.1.134–6); ‘We may be bold / To speak it now. ’Twas somewhat witty-­carried, / Though we say it. ’Twas we two murdered him’ (5.3.96–8). The posture of the Renaissance satirist is of a lasher of society’s vices; Vindice sometimes adopts such a stance, but at other times preens himself as a witty jokester. Here another genre raises its head – as Vivier notes, the aroma of city comedy also wafts through the play. Like satire, city comedy is a genre of ‘nowadays’ – life in the city, nowadays, is corrupt, immoral, cynical, materialistic, and utterly worldly. Where satire proper is able to maintain a fairly even tone of moral indignation, rage, and furious ranting about this, city comedy’s denunciations of London wickedness are often indistinguishable from celebrations of London sophistication. Juvenalian or Horatian satire and Christian moralization are old, old traditions; but rapid urbanization of the sort that gave rise to city comedy was new. Vindice’s satiric rage against society’s vices might easily draw upon the incandescent fury of puritanism, congenial in some ways with Middleton’s Calvinist heritage, but inimical to stage plays and hence satirizable in itself, as we see, for example, in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, a quintessential city comedy, which satirizes both city vices and puritans as the opponents of city vices. McAdam suggests that the ‘disconcerting simultaneity of the comic and tragic expression’ in The Revenger’s Tragedy ‘may be linked to the coincidence of [Middleton’s] astonishing gifts as a satirist with his apparent commitment to a religious ideology’ (p. 86). To understand the baffling mix of tones in The Revenger’s Tragedy requires a supple mastery of some very complex tonal shifts in Jacobean culture. Another lens: is the whole play a literary parody? In this volume, Hirschfeld, Clare and McAdam view the play as what Hirschfeld calls a ‘sustained parody of Hamlet’ (p. 63), while

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for Munro, an intertextual relationship with Hamlet appears in both Hamlet’s and Vindice’s swearing on their swords and using the oath ‘ ’sblood’ (p. 136). Certainly, a play that opens with its morose (but often blackly comic) protagonist brooding over a skull can reasonably be suspected of parodying Hamlet, which was first onstage half a decade before The Revenger’s Tragedy. But does the play parody Hamlet directly, or does it parody a whole genre, perhaps revenge tragedy, perhaps the morality play? For Clare, who sees in it a parody of revenge tragedy, ‘part of the pleasure in watching The Revenger’s Tragedy would have been bound up with deconstructing a new play in the genre’, enjoying ‘its self-­conscious allusions, in-­ jokes and playful treatment of familiar conventions’ (p. 161). If so, what is the purpose of such parodies? Do genres exhausted by over-­familiarity tend naturally to tip over into parody? (This happened with the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, where the blazon’s rosy cheeks and grey eyes ultimately deteriorated into parodic grey cheeks and red eyes, and mistresses’ eyes became nothing like the sun.) John Mason’s Mulleases the Turk, another revenge tragedy, first staged just after The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607–8), also abounds in preposterous and seemingly parodic incident. Competitive plotting by rival avengers animates this chess-­like play with its moves and counter-­moves. Two phony vengeance-­craving ghosts keep scaring other characters (and each other) into headlong flight. A fleeing ‘spruce’ lecher, happily named Bordello, encounters a group of chatting bawds and inquires politely, ‘Ladies, did you not see a spirit pass this way?’ They reply, ‘Thou see’st we are feeding the flesh, man! What, dost thou talk of the spirit?’ (1.2.126, 3.2.28–30).5 When Borgias, startled by a bogus ghost, falls from a great height, the disguised Ferrara tosses the supposed corpse over his shoulder, and the feigning Borgias whips Ferrara’s dagger from his belt and slays him. Posing as a ghost, Borgias strangles the other ghost impersonator with her own hair. But when he wafts into a hostage-­taking still feigning ghosthood, Mulleases kills him to prove that ghosts do not exist.

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Were such genre parodies just for fun? Nothing wrong with fun. Is The Revenger’s Tragedy fun? Or did parodies exist as a more serious way of reforming stage writing, purging it of the hackneyed, the over-­used, the boring? Did parody offer a dramatist a tool for demonstrating his own superior sophistication? If a whole play is parody, does that undermine any serious satire or moral commentary the play contains? Wouldn’t pervasive parody send up the very moral stance of a protagonist? And would that mean that Middleton didn’t really care about sexual depravity or materialistic addiction to gold or power abuse or corruption in the judicial system? Or would it mean merely that, whether he cared about all this or not, at the moment of composing The Revenger’s Tragedy he was really more interested in sending up Shakespeare or demonstrating that revenge tragedy had reached the end of its useful theatrical life? Most of these lenses through which we might view The Revenger’s Tragedy depend on some knowledge of the play’s historical, literary and theatrical contexts. In trying to make sense of this difficult play, it helps quite a bit to know at least something about Gloriana the virgin queen, about the conventions of Renaissance literary misogyny, about revenge tragedy, about Calvinism and puritanism, about satire and morality play and city comedy, about Middleton’s biography and writing habits, about contemporary dramatists against whom he competed, about the Jacobean sense of humour and what kinds of things struck Jacobeans as funny, about the medieval Vice figure and the ways he mutated into Renaissance dramatic figures, about literary parody, about the life-­cycle of literary genres. It helps to know about the other plays onstage at nearly the same time, as Karen Marsalek sheds light on the exchange-­of-heads gag in The Revenger’s Tragedy by reminding us that Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, with its grotesque head exchange, was staged just one year earlier by the same theatre company. In approaching a play full of oaths and full of dismemberments, it is useful to know, as Lucy Munro insightfully teases out for us, that Jacobeans connected

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blasphemous oaths with the dismemberment of Christ. The present volume contributes very helpfully by filling in a number of such contexts for us. What troubles me is wondering how many audience members at a modern production of the play are likely to read this volume before they attend. How many people, finally, are educationally equipped to profit from this volume? The problem, to be blunt, is that we don’t teach this period in our schools any more. For all but a few Renaissance scholars, knowledge of English Renaissance literature has been reduced to whatever they know about Shakespeare. And however much we resent Shakespeare’s sole possession of the Renaissance curriculum or worry that bardolatry perpetuates the often-­intolerant mindsets that attended its birth, we should be grateful that the cult of Shakespeare gives us at least a small foot in the door of secondary and post-­secondary education. Luckily, The Revenger’s Tragedy has that clear intertextual relationship with Hamlet, and everybody knows Hamlet. (Or used to know Hamlet.) The theatre does a little better than the school system – as Kevin Quarmby shows, modern productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy have been able to count on audiences catching allusions to Hamlet, Richard III and The Spanish Tragedy. But even so, how many modern audiences will have seen Mulleases the Turk? How many modern theatregoers or readers have any notion of the sweep of the revenge play tradition? How many will know that the revenge play genre includes not only Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, but that it extends back to the ancient Greeks and that in the English Renaissance alone, it includes at least fifty other extant plays? No wonder two of the productions Quarmby discusses were accused of suffering from a surfeit of modernizing – how else can directors feel sure of connecting with a modern audience? Even with the best of programme notes, to try to understand The Revenger’s Tragedy or other non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays is to confront the consequences of Shakespeare’s having become a stand-­ alone writer for most modern readers and audiences.

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Our only hope of understanding or appreciating Middleton’s wildly dissonant play is to steep ourselves in the contexts that produced it, and to do that we must not only attend to the well-­researched essays in a volume like this one, but help to create a wider intellectual community in which to debate, discuss and enjoy plays like Middleton’s. We must not only struggle to retain ‘contemporaries’ courses alongside Shakespeare courses in our colleges and universities, but also become advocates for the restoration of more Renaissance literature at the lower levels of our school systems. Students who have had good experiences with Renaissance writers in high school are more likely to pursue them in college; and what about those who never have a chance to attend college? Shouldn’t they too be able to wander the corridors of long-­ago literature, have some experience of The Past, before they leave high school? Now is the ideal time for us to press for inclusion of more Renaissance writers in classrooms. Only a few years ago, there was little hope of introducing a play by Middleton, Marlowe, Kyd or Jonson in a high school class, along with Shakespeare plays, if only because most school systems could not afford to provide the text books. Now students can download Renaissance plays online. It’s true that many of these lack vocabulary glosses and other notes essential for a high school student to be able to follow the text; but who better to remedy that situation than ourselves? Why not bend our philanthropic urges in an editorial direction, by helping to provide good texts, free, to high school students, so that they can enjoy these plays so long rendered inaccessible by neglect? Hamlet merely meditates on the skull he holds in his hand, but Vindice puts the nine-­year-­old skull of Gloriana to work, clothes her, makes her live again. We scholars hold in our hands the 400-year-old skull of The Revenger’s Tragedy. If we harbour a wistful longing that Middleton and other lively Renaissance dramatists could live again in our culture, let us write about them, but also advocate for them. Renaissance literature has tumbled a long way down in our educational

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system, but let us not resign ourselves to the Slough of Despond. Let us fight!

Notes 1 Alfred Harbage, ‘The Myth of Perfection’, in Conceptions of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 31. 2 Norman Rabkin, ‘Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V’, Shakespeare Quarterly 28.3 (1977): 279. 3 Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 4 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 123. 5 John Mason, Mulleases the Turk, ed. Fernand Lagarde (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1979).

Index

Aasand, Hardin L., 200 n.10 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, 6, 141–3, 155 n.2, 157 n.21 Adamson, Sylvia, 83 n.53 Aebischer, Pascale, 199 n.2, 226, 230 n.29 Alexander, Gavin, 83 n.53 Alleyn, Edward, 81 n.36 Almond, Philip, 78 n.6 Altman, Joel, 258, 267 n.3 Anderson, Thomas, 58 n.17 Andoh, Adjoa, 241 Appadurai, Arjun, 208, 215, 228, 228 nn.4–5 Archer, Ian W., 59 n.27 Aristotle, 57 n.5 Bacon, Francis, 46–7, 52, 58 n.9, 163, 181 n.8 Bale, John Three Laws, 24 Bardsley, Sandy, 149, 155 n.6, 158 n.29 Barish, Jonas, 58 n.17 Barnett, David, 234, 251 nn.14– 15, 253 n.59 Barton, John, 234 Bawcutt, N.W., 59 n.27 Beadle, Richard, 35 n.8 Behrndt, Synne K., 180 n.4 Benedict, David, 238, 252 n.26 Benson, Larry D., 155 n.7

Bernstein, Alan, 72, 78 n.5, 79 n.15, 82 n.40 Beveridge, Henry, 60 nn.34–9 Bevington, David, 26, 37 n.21, 182 n.16 Billington, Michael, 230, 250 n.3 Bloom, Harold, 86 Bones, Ken, 222 Borromeo, 106 n.4 Bowers, Fredson, 58 n.17 Boyce, Frank Cottrell, 154, 213, 224, 228 n.2, 229 n.10 Brantley, Ben, 232, 250 n.6, 253 n.64 Brecht, Bertolt, 234–6, 244, 251 n.19 Briggs, Julia, 202 n.24 Brittain, Stephanie, 239, 240 Broude, Ronald, 38 n.34 Bruster, Douglas, 36 n.16 Buccola, Regina, 184, 200 n.6, 202 n.23, 239, 241, 252 nn.34–41, 253 n.62 Budra, Paul, 37 n.28 Burbage, Richard, 162, 181 n.6 Burrow, Colin, 106 n.4 Butler, Martin, 182 n.16 Cain, Tom, 182 nn.16–17 Calderwood, James, 79 n.15 Calvin, John, 53, 54, 60 nn.34–9, 80 n.21, 95, 96, 105

270

Index

Calvinism, 2, 3, 4, 7, 12, 52–4, 59 n.27, 60 n.32, 67, 80 nn.21–2, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 96, 100, 105, 106, 107–8 nn.17–19, 137, 138, 140, 147–9, 153, 155 n.4, 157 n.26, 158 n.28, 256, 262, 264 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 215, 217, 218, 220, 229 n.15 Casey, John, 75, 82 nn.42 and 46 Castle of Perseverance, The, 17, 19, 21–3, 201 n.18 Chakravorty, Swapan, 57 n.7 Chambers, E.K., 36 n.20 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 138, 155 n.7 Chettle, Henry Kind Hart’s Dream, 71, 81 n.36 Tragedy of Hoffman, The, 160, 165, 181 n.9, 201 n.16 Clare, Janet, 7–8, 9, 11, 12, 180 n.3, 263 Clarke, Margi, 212, 213 Clarke, Samuel, 156 n.11 Coddon, Karin S., 132 n.25, 222, 229 n.18, 230 n.26 Coleman, Antony, 37–8 n.29 Collinson, Patrick, 106 n.4 Condon, James J., 181 n.11 Contention Between Liberality and Prodigality, The, 27 Cooper, Charlie, 250 n.7 Cooper, Lane, 57 n.5 Corrigan, Brian Jay, 35 n.4

Cox, Alex Revengers Tragedy, 9, 154, 201 nn.17 and 19, 208, 210–17, 223–8, 228 nn.2 and 8, 229 nn.13 and 18–19, 230 nn.20, 22, and 30, 236–7, 238, 251 nn.11–12, 21, and 23 Croteau, Melissa, 230 n.30 Culler, Jonathan, 258, 267 n.4 Cummings, Brian, 141, 155 n.2, 157 n.20 Czerny, Robert, 82 n.48 Daileader, Celia R., 36 n.14, 238–9, 252 n.30 Dante Alighieri, 68, 82 n.42 Davenport, Arnold, 58 n.12 Davidson, Lewis, 246 Dawson, Anthony B., 104–5, 109 n.40 Dekker, Thomas, 52, 81 n.38, 200 n.8 Knight’s Conjuring, 81 n.38 Satiromastix, 48 Whore of Babylon, The, 27 Dent, Arthur Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, The, 140, 156 nn.14 and 16, 157 n.25 Desens, Marliss C., 202 n.25 Dessen, Alan C., 27, 35 n.7, 36 n.16, 37 nn.22 and 26–7, 199 n.4, 202 n.25 Diehl, Huston, 88, 107 n.9 Disobedient Child, The, 25, 26 Dodsley, Robert, 36 n.20 Dollimore, Jonathan, 11–12, 14 n.4, 18, 34 n.3, 51,

Index

52, 54, 59 nn.26 and 28, 80 n.25, 85, 91, 106 n.1, 108 n.20, 178, 182 Donaldson, Ian, 182 n.16 Donne, John, 52 Douglas, Mary, 119, 131 n.15 Downame, John, 140, 157 n.17 Dr Strangelove, 236 Dukes, Ricky, 244, 245, 251 n.8, 253 nn.47, 57, 63, and 65 Dusinberre, Juliet, 58 n.11 Eccles, Mark, 58 n.17, 204 n.40 Eccleston, Christopher, 210, 215, 218, 225, 226 Edward VI, 19 Ekeblad, Inga-Stina, 57 n.6 Eliot, T.S., 61, 78 n.3, 86 Elizabeth I, 24, 45, 93, 99, 100, 115, 116, 118, 119, 123, 131 nn.12 and 14, 156 n.12, 215, 229 n.14, 260 Elizabeth II, 236 Ellis, Samantha, 251 nn.12–13 and 16 Ellis-Fermor, Una, 83 n.61 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 101, 108 n.36 Escher, M.C., 257 Escolme, Bridget, 203 n.31 Ettenhuber, Katrin, 83 n.53 Everyman, 19, 22–3, 201 n.18 Fahey, Maria Franziska, 82 n.51 Falconer, Rachel, 62, 78 n.7, 82 n.39

271

Farnham, Willard, 35 n.5 Feerick, Jean, 114, 130 n.1, 131 n.10 Finin, Kathryn R., 132 n.25 Fisher, Will, 203 n.37 Fletcher, Alan, 35 n.8 Florio, John, 20, 36 n.13 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 115, 131 n.5 Flynn, Barbara, 210–11, 240, 241 Foakes, R.A., 78 n.4, 179, 182 n.21, 203–4 n.39 Ford, John, 161 Forest-Hill, Lynn, 155 n.6 Fowler, H.W., 83 n.55 Fraser, Russel A., 38 n.30 Fredson, Bowers, 58 n.17 Freud, Sigmund, 87, 91, 106 n.5 Frost, David L., 109 n.41 Frye, Roland Mushat, 65, 79 n.17, 199 n.1 Frye, Susan, 131 n.14 Fulwell, Ulpian Like Will to Like, 26 Gardner, Lyn, 231–2, 237, 250 nn.2 and 4, 252 n.25 Garwood, Sasha, 238, 239, 252 nn.28 and 31–3 Gazzard, Hugh, 155 n.2, 156 n.9, 157 nn.21 and 23 Gibbons, Brian, 94, 96, 108 n.27, 152, 158 n.33, 195, 203 nn.32 and 34, 249, 251 nn.11 and 19, 254 n.74 Gibson, Abraham, 149–50, 158 n.30

272

Index

Gillen, Katherine, 5–6, 12, 255 Godwin, Laura Grace, 241–2, 248–9, 252 n.42, 254 n.73 Goff, Jacques Le, 79 n.10 Goldberg, Dena, 88, 107 n.9 Gordon, Bruce, 78 n.8 Gossett, Suzanne, 59 n.27, 131 n.13, 236, 251 n.20 Gottlieb, Christine M., 124, 132 n.24, 188, 198–9, 201 n.17, 204 n.46 Graham, Katherine, 9, 11, 12, 13, 256 Grantley, Darryll, 36 n.12 Gray, Jonathan, 56 n.2 Greenblatt, Stephen, 64, 77 n.2, 79 nn.10–11, 92–3, 106 n.4, 108 n.23 Greene, Robert, 50 Black Booke’s Messenger, The, 42 Newes Out of Heaven and Hell, 71, 81 n.36 Grosart, Alexander, 58 n.10 Groves, Beatrice, 154 n.1, 155 nn.2 and 4 Guilpin, Everard, 47 Gunpowder Plot, 27, 157 n.24, 174 Gurr, Andrew, 160, 180 n.2 Guy-Bray, Stephen, 81 n.35 Haber, Judith Deborah, 59 n.19 Hadfield, Andrew, 93, 100–1, 108 nn.25 and 36 Hall, Joseph, 52 Hall, Kim, 131 n.4, 132 n.17 Hall, Peter, 234

Hamilton, A.C., 107 n.15 Hammond, Antony, 37–8 n.29 Hampton-Reeves, Stuart, 203 n.31 Hand, Molly, 71, 81 n.34 Happe, Peter, 29, 37 n.29 Harbage, Alfred, 180 n.1, 257, 267 n.1 Harmon, A.M., 80 n.23 Harrington-Odedra, Gavin, 233, 243–8, 251 nn.9–10, 253 nn.47, 55–6, 58, 61, and 67, 254 nn.68–72 and 75 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 223, 230 n.28 Harvey, Gabriel, 47, 58 n.10 Hawes, Stephen Conversion of Swearers, The, 149, 158 n.29 Heinemann, Margot, 59 n.27 Heller, Herbert Jack, 53, 59 n.27, 60 n.33, 155 n.4, 157 n.26 Henley, Trish Thomas, 36 n.14, 200 n.6, 202 n.23, 252 n.34 Henry, Carla, 212 Henry VIII, 19 Henslowe, Philip, 203 n.39 Herbert, Philip, 156 n.12 Heywood, Thomas Rape of Lucrece, The, 7, 171, 181 n.15 Hirrel, Michael J., 203 n.28, 204 n.43 Hirschfeld, Heather, 2, 4, 5, 11, 12, 57 n.6, 58 n.17, 91–2, 108 n.21, 256, 262 Hoenselaars, A.J., 133 n.30

Index

Holaday, Allan, 181 n.15 Holbein, Hans, 229 n.12 Holdsworth, Roger V., 13 n.2, 48, 53, 57 n.6, 58 nn.15 and 17, 59 n.27, 80 n.26, 107 n.17, 153, 155 n.4, 157–8 n.26, 228 n.8 Holiday, Barten Technogamia, or The Marriage of the Arts, 28 Holland, Peter, 35 n.9 Homer, 68 Honigman, E.A.J., 204 n.44 Hope-Wallace, Philip, 235, 251 n.18 Hughes, Geoffrey, 155 n.2 Hunter, G.K., 87, 106 n.6, 107 n.19 Hutson, Lorna, 70, 80 n.24, 81 n.31 Ingeland, Thomas Disobedient Child, The, 25, 26 Izzard, Eddie, 212 Jackson, MacDonald P., 13–14 n.2, 14 n.3, 57 n.6, 157 n.24, 181 n.7, 193, 199 n.5, 201 n.18, 228 n.8 Jacobson, Daniel, 74, 76, 83 n.74 James, Paula, 247–8 James I, 6, 71, 101, 115, 128 Jed, Stephanie H., 121, 125, 126, 131 n.16, 132 nn.19 and 26 Jenkins, Harold, 181 n.9 Jess-Cooke, Carolyn, 230 n.30

273

Jobson, Tom, 245 Johnson, Mark, 82 n.49 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 216, 229 n.17 Jones, Jeffrey P., 56 n.2 Jones, Robert C., 57 n.6 Jonson, Ben, 47, 51, 88, 105, 266 Devil is an Ass, The, 27, 37 n.25 Sejanus, 7, 174, 178, 182 Volpone, 37 n.26, 157 n.24 Jowett, John, 157 n.21, 184, 196, 200 n.7, 202 n.24, 203 nn.30 and 36 Kaufmann, R.J., 34 n.1 Keenan, Jonathan, 240 Kelly, Erin E., 2–3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 256, 260 Kendall, R.T., 80 n.21 Kernan, Alvin, 40, 43, 56 n.1, 57 n.6 Kerrigan, John, 155 n.2 Kettnich, Karen, 81 n.35 Kimbrough, R., 58 n.17 King, Helen, 132 n.18 King, Pamela, 19, 24, 35 nn.8 and 10, 36 n.19 King’s Men, 8, 181 n.6, 184–5, 189, 194, 197–8, 200 nn.23–4 Kinnear, Rory, 202 n.23, 210, 218–21, 230 nn.23–4, 231 Kirwan, Peter, 243, 244, 253 nn.49, 52–4, and 60 Knapp, Robert, 38 n.33 Knowles, L., 58 n.17

274

Index

Kyd, Thomas, 266 Solomon and Perseda, 201 n.18 Spanish Tragedy, The, 29, 76, 159, 243 Lagarde, Fernand, 267 n.5 Lake, David, 13 n.2 Lake, Peter, 60 n.30 Lakoff, George, 82 n.49 Lavagnino, John, 13–14 nn.2–3, 36 nn.17–18, 57 n.6, 58 nn.14 and 16, 80 n.20, 81 nn.33 and 37, 106 n.2, 108 n.37, 132 n.20, 157 n.24, 184, 199 n.5, 203 n.30, 228 n.8, 252 n.27 Leishman, J.B., 56 n.3 Leone, Sergio, 236 Levin, Carole, 58 n.17 Lewis, Peter, 235, 251 n.18 Lin, Erika T., 193, 203 n.27 Little, Arthur L., 121–2, 132 n.21 Long, Zakariah, 64, 77 n.2, 79 n.13 Lopez, Jeremy, 194, 196, 197, 203 n.29, 204 n.42 Lucien, 68, 71, 80 nn.23–4 Luckhurst, Mary, 180 n.4 Luxon, Thomas H., 105, 109 n.42 Lyndsay, Sir David Satire of the Three Estates, 25 Maguire, Laurie, 184, 201 n.15 Mann, Jenny C., 83 n.52 Mankind, 17, 19, 26

Marlowe, Christopher, 86–8, 91, 105, 266 Doctor Faustus, 37 n.26, 67, 80 n.22, 87, 107 n.7 Tamburlaine, 71, 87, 107 n.19 Marprelate, Martin, 46, 52, 58 n.10 Marrapodi, Michele, 130 n.3, 131 n.13, 133 n.30 Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, The, 27 Marsalek, Karen, 8, 9, 11, 12, 264 Marshall, Peter, 72–3, 78 n.8, 79 n.14, 82 nn.43–5 and 47 Marston, John, 3, 47, 52 Antonio’s Revenge, 76, 159 Scourge of Villainy, 42 Mary, Queen of Scots, 38 n.33, 101 Mason, John Mulleases the Turk, 263, 265, 267 n.5 McAdam, Ian, 2, 4–5, 11, 67, 261, 262 McEnery, Tony, 155 n.2 McKerrow, Ronald, 56 n.4 McMillan, Scott, 59 n.18, 229 n.13 Mehl, Dieter, 198, 204 n.44 Mentz, Steven, 81 n.35 Mercer, Peter, 57 n.6 Meriton, George, 156 n.11 Middleton, Thomas Black Book, The, 2–4, 23, 36 n.17,41–2, 48, 50, 58 n.16, 59 n.23, 71–2, 81 nn.33 and 37

Index

Changeling, The, 2, 13– 14 n.2, 41, 91, 104, 148 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A, 3, 41, 102, 108, 262 Father Hubburd’s Tales, 42 Game at Chess, A, 3, 23, 41 Ghost of Lucrece, The, 2, 6, 23, 36 n.18, 121, 132 n.20, 171 Microcynicon: Six Snarling Satyres, 2–3, 41–2, 48, 50–1, 58 n.14, 59 n.24 Phoenix, The, 36 n.16 Plato’s Cap, 42 Timon of Athens, 157 n.24, 198, 200 n.6 Two Gates of Salvation, The, 90, 105, 107 n.16 Women Beware Women, 13–14 n.2, 80 n.26, 104 Milton, John, 68 Minton, Gretchen E., 13 n.1, 225, 230 n.30 Mohr, Melissa, 155 n.2 Monks, Aiofe, 199 n.3 Moore, Jonathan, 229 n.19, 231, 240 Moreira, Isabel, 79 n.9 Mott, Joe, 246 Mulholland, Paul, 107 n.16 Mullaney, Steven, 35 n.5, 57 n.7, 80 n.25, 98–9, 100, 108 nn.30 and 35, 131 n.12 Munro, Lucy, 6–7, 9, 12, 37 n.24, 256, 263, 264 Murray, P.B., 13 n.2 Nashe, Thomas, 56 n.4, 80 n.24, 81 n.27

275

Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, 52 Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell, 4, 42–3, 44, 48, 68, 70–1, 81 n.28 Neill, Michael, 57 nn.6–7, 79 n. 10, 117, 131 nn.8 and 11 New Custom, 25 Nicholl, Charles, 81 nn.27 and 29 Nicol, David, 67, 79 n.19 Norland, Howard, 38 n.32 Nunn, Trevor, 10, 233, 234–5, 236, 237, 244 O’Brien, Eileen, 240 Oliphant, E.H.C., 13 n.2 Orgel, Stephen, 35 n.9 Ornstein, Robert, 34 n.2 Panek, Jennifer, 35 n.4 Parker, Jamie, 220 Parker, Patricia, 74, 83 n.54 Parr, Anthony, 37 n.25 Pathomachia, or The Battle of Affections, 28 Patrides, C.A., 83 n.58 Peacham, Henry, 229 n.12 Perkins, William, 138, 155 n.5, 156 nn.14–15 Direction for the Government of the Tongue According to God’s Word, A, 87, 139–40, 143, 148, 156 nn.10 and 13 Persson, Johan, 219, 221 Peter, John, 34 n.2, 57 n.6

276

Index

Pickering, John Horestes, 32–4, 38 n.31 Pinciss, G.M., 107 n.7 Pitcher, John, 181 n.8 Pollard, Tanya, 89, 107 n.13, 131 n.13 Pong-Linton, Joan, 81 n.35 Poole, Kristen, 64, 77–8 n.2, 79 nn.12 and 14 Potter, Robert, 19, 35 nn.6 and 11, 36 n.15, 37 n.26 Powell, Walter, 140, 156 n.11, 157 n.18 Powlesland, Corinna, 241 Preston, Thomas Cambises, 29, 38 n.30 Price, G.R., 13 n.2 Pride of Life, The, 19, 201 n.18 Puttenham, George, 74, 82 n.50 Quarmby, Kevin, 9–11, 13, 231, 256, 265 Rabkin, Norman, 38 n.30, 257, 267 n.2 Raymond, Joad, 60 n.30 Rebhorn, Wayne A., 82 n.50 Redford, John Play of Wit and Science, The, 25 Redmond, James, 59 n.26 Respublica, 25 Rhodes, Neil, 53, 60 n.29 Richardson, Ian, 234 Rickert, R.T., 203–4 n.39 Ricks, Christopher, 158 n.27 Ricoeur, Paul, 82 n.48 Rist, Thomas, 190, 201 n.21 Robertson, Karen, 58 n.17

Roddenberry, Gene, 34 Rose, Charlotte L., 243, 253 n.50 Rubin, Miri, 82 n.40 Rutter, Carol Chillington, 194, 203 n.31, 204 n.45 Salingar, L.G., 17, 34 n.1, 80 n.26, 181 n.12 Sanders, Leslie, 49, 51, 59 nn.20 and 25 Satire of the Three Estates, 25 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 106 n.4, 180 n.1 Schofield, Andrew, 225 Schwartz, Robert, 181 n.10 Selimus, 193 Seneca the Younger Thyestes, 169, 181 n.13 Shakespeare, John, 85, 106 n.4 Shakespeare, William As You Like It, 47, 58 n.11 Cymbeline, 193 Hamlet, 4–5, 7–8, 11, 21, 29, 31, 33, 62–7, 76, 79 n.16, 86, 92–4, 99–101, 108 n.34,136, 159, 161–4, 168–8, 171, 173, 180 n.5, 181 n.6, 183–90, 198, 199 nn.1 and 4–5, 200 nn.8–9, 215, 218, 229 n.13, 238, 243, 262–3, 265–6 Henry V, 257 King Lear, 157 n.24, 178 Measure for Measure, 8, 184, 194–8, 200 nn.6–7, 203 nn.30 and 36–7, 204 n.40, 264

Index

Othello, 141 Rape of Lucrece, The, 171 Richard III, 26, 37 n.23, 141, 165, 243, 261, 265 Timon of Athens, 157 n.24, 198, 200 n.6 Titus Andronicus, 29, 116, 131 n.7, 141, 169, 171, 265 Twelfth Night, 197 Shand, G.B., 36 nn.17–18, 58 n.16, 59 n.23, 81 nn.31 and 37, 132 n.20 Shelton, Brian, 234, 237 Shepard, Alexandra, 89, 107 n.12 Shepherd, Simon, 86, 106 n.3 Sher, Anthony, 182 n.20 Shirley, Frances A., 137, 155 n.3, 156 nn.9 and 12 Shorter, Eric, 235, 251 n.17 Sidney, Philip, 52 Siemon, James R., 37 n.23 Simkin, Stevie, 59 n.26 Simmons, J.L., 57 n.6, 60 n.31, 230 n.22 Simmons, Walter, 82 n.40 Sir Thomas More, The Book of, 27, 203 n.37 Skelton, John Magnificence, 24 Smellknave, Simon Fearful and Lamentable Effects of Two Dangerous Comets, 42 Smith, Emma, 57, 107 n.13, 184, 201 n.15 Smith, Peter, 58

277

Sofer, Andrew, 151, 158 n.31, 185–6, 191, 200 nn.8 and 11, 201 n.22, 207–8, 210, 215, 222, 228 nn.1, 3, and 6, 229 nn.11 and 16, 230 nn.25 and 27 Solberg, Emma Maggie, 36 n.29 Spencer, Charles, 232, 250 n.5 Spenser, Edmund, 52, 68 Faerie Queene, The, 90, 107 n.15 Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberd’s Tale, 42 Spinrad, Phoebe, 201 n.18 St Jerome, 215, 217, 220 St Paul, 95 Stachniewski, John, 53, 59 n.27, 60 n.32, 80 n.22, 91, 107 n.17 Stallybrass, Peter, 57–8 n.8, 132 n.29, 216, 229 n.17 Star Wars: A New Hope, 34 Steane, J.B., 81 n.28 Steiner, George, 62–3, 76, 78 n.5 Steward-George, Liam, 246 Still, Melly, 9, 207, 210–12, 215, 217, 219–22, 224, 227–8, 228 n.2, 231–2, 238–9, 242, 252 n. 28 Strachey, James, 106 n.5 Streete, Adrian, 88, 95, 107 n.10, 108 nn.19 and 29 Strong, Roy, 229 n.14 Stubbes, Philip, 139, 141, 148, 156 n.11, 157 n.19 Sugg, Richard, 201 n.16 Sullivan, Garrett, 57 n.6, 107 n.13

278

Index

Tarantino, Quentin, 236 Tarlton, Richard, 81 n.36 Taylor, Gary, 13–14 nn.2–3, 36 nn.14 and 17–18, 57 n.6, 58 nn.14 and 16, 80 n.20, 81 nn.33 and 37, 86–7, 93–4, 106 n.2, 107 n.8, 108 nn.24, 26, 28, 34, and 37, 132 n.20, 142, 157 nn.21–2 and 24, 184, 199 n.5, 200 nn.6–7, 202 n.23, 203 n.30, 228 n.5, 238, 252 nn.27 and 34 Taylor, Neil, 79 n.16, 108 n.34, 180 n.5, 200 n.9 Taylor, Paul, 218, 230 n.21 Tchaikovsky, Andre, 199 n.3 Tempera, Mariangela, 131 n.13 Thompson, Ann, 79 n.16, 108 n.34, 180 n.5, 200 n.9 Thompson, Ayanna, 116, 131 n.7 Thompson, Ethan, 56 n.2 Thomson, Leslie, 199 n.4 Tomkins, Thomas Lingua, 28 Tompkinson, Stephen, 231 Toscano, Margaret, 79 n.9 Tourneur, Cyril Atheist’s Tragedy, The, 17, 78 n.4, 198 Trevis, Di, 235 Trial of Treasure, The, 25 Trigg, Adam, 248 Turner, Cathy, 180 n.4 Turner, William, 156 n.11 Tyacke, Nicholas, 91, 107

Udall, Nicholas Respublica, 25 Vickers, Brian, 58 n.9 Virgil, 68, 76 Vitkus, Daniel, 132 n.23 Vivier, Eric, 2–4, 7, 11–12, 39, 255–6, 258, 261–2 Wager, William Enough is as Good as a Feast, 25 Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art, The, 25 Walker, D.P., 78 n.6 Wall, Wendy, 58 n.14 Walsh, Brian, 154 n.1 Walsham, Alexandra, 60 n.30 Wapull, George Tide Tarrieth No Man, The, 25 Ward, Richard, 156 n.11 Watling, E.F., 181 n.13 Webster, John Duchess of Malfi, The, 88 White Devil, The, 161 Weever, John Whipping of the Satyre, 47, 50, 58 nn.12–13 Weimann, Robert, 165, 181 n.10 Wever, Robert Lusty Juventus, 25 Whigham, Frank, 82 n.50 Willett, John, 251 n.19 Williamson, Elizabeth, 199 n.3 Wilson, Robert Three Ladies of London, The, 27

Index

Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, 27 Wisdom, 19, 20 Wit and Science, 25 Woodbridge, Linda, 10–11, 12, 77 n.1, 108 n.37

279

Woodes, Nathaniel Conflict of Conscience, 24 Woods, Gillian, 138, 156 n.8 Younge, Richard, 156 n.11 Youth, 25