Elizabethan Revenge Tragedies
By Elizabeth’s reign, the old idea that justice was the responsibility of the injured was gone. Finding and serving justice was a responsibility of the state and blood revenge had no legal place. All murder, including revenge killing, was tried under the same law. The sentences for a revenge murder were the same as a “regular” murder. In fact, revenge killing was considered one the worst crimes because the Bible expressly dictates that God disapproves of personal revenge.
On the other hand, however, there was a deeply rooted tradition of vengeance in Elizabethan times – there was particular sympathy for an heir avenging his father’s death. Private revenge among the nobles and gentlemen almost exclusively took the form of a duel. The use of poisons was more common among the common people and Elizabethan courtiers. This dilemma between legal and cultural practices is reflected in revenge tragedies that “depict revenge as neither unquestionably desirable nor easy to accomplish, and, once achieved, it brings destruction upon the revengers as well as their victims” (Griswold 91).
Revenge tragedies were very popular at the time. They depict the stories of English society as well as mirror the difficult decisions made every day. These stories were written in a time of religious turbulence (see essay about Elizabethans and Ghosts for a brief summary of religious change!). There was deep anxiety about where one was going after death.
Influences of the Revenge Tragedy:
Seneca
Seneca (3 B.C. -65 A.D) Was a Roman philosopher, dramatist and statesman. His tragedies, based on Greek models, provided one of the foremost influences on the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Written in an atmosphere of gloom, Seneca’s plays (concerning the great crimes of antiquity - Medea, Phaedra, Agememnon, Oedipus etc.) strongly emphasized blood revenge for murder or flagrant injury, or less serious revenge out of jealousy. His plays were filled with horrifying events such a cannibalism, incest, rape, and violent death. His rhetoric and bombast, and his stoicism, were important contributions to the Elizabethan form.
Some of the characteristics of Senecan tragedy inherited by Renaissance dramatists were:
· The revenge was personal, often taking on a religious sense
· The revenge could be prompted by a ghost
· The revenger was warned to conceal and dissemble revenge, lest his chance for vengeance be lost.
· Terrible punishment awaited an unnatural revenge.
· Innocent or deceived accomplices were sometimes used to help the revenge, but never to consummate it.
· Momentary hesitations could briefly halt the revenger.
· Seneca’s criminals were fully responsible: the will was all powerful and man had liberty of choice between good and evil.
· Death was a last refuge and expiation. Seneca sympathized with suicide when it saved honor or gave an escape from a life too full of pain, but felt it was more courageous to combat misfortune than to succumb without a struggle.
Italian Literature and Machiavelli
Elizabethan England viewed Italians as vengeful, cunning, and bloodthirsty. When Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) wrote The Prince, a treatise on power, around 1513, the perceived amorality of the text led “Machiavelli” to be synonymous with villainy. It was written that in Machiavelli’s country, “vengeances, and enmities are perpetual and irreconcilable”, and revenge gave “delectation, pleasure and contentment”; revengers will torment a victim, and may even “force him with hope of his life to give himself to the devil; and so they seek in slaying the body to damn the soul, if they could” (Gentillet). (Recall: Hamlet’s refusal to murder Claudius during prayer, lest the King’s soul go to heaven, and to his emphasis on Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s deaths being carried out immediately!!)
Other Italian works, like The Historie of Guicciardin Containing the Warres of Italie, translated by Geoffrey Fenton (1579), and novels such as those translated by Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques (1559-70) and into English by William Painter in his Palace of Pleasure (1567-8) contained gruesome tales of revenge and violence.
Thomas Kyd
Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (written 1586-89) is the foundation of Elizabethan Revenge tragedy. The play first popularized revenge as a tragic motive on the Elizabethan popular stage by using blood vengeance as the core of its dramatic action. In the character Lorenzo, it introduced the first Machiavellian villain in Elizabethan tragedy, and in the character Hieronomo, a new kind of tragic hero, a revenger hesitant on the brink of madness. Structure and style were Senecan, as were such things as the revengeful Ghost who opened the play, the chorus, and the epic reports. The questioning of what relationship there may be between the divine will, retaliatory violence, and the achieving of justice is a constant factor in the revenge tradition as represented by The Spanish Tragedy.
The Kydian revenge tragedy was fundamentally moral and philosophical in its treatment of the subject of revenge. The sacred duty of blood revenge lent a semi-religious tone to the plays. Revengers of blood undertook a difficult task hampered by every conceivable obstacle. Stretched on the rack of human emotions, they peered into the causes of their action and the great questions of life and death.
Titus Andronicus and Hamlet are in the Kydian tradition. Titus is very similar in construction to The Spanish Tragedy, although there are important variations in Shakespeare’s work:
· Blood revenge is given more adequate motivation
· The villain’s actions before the start of the protagonist’s revenge have increased importance and complexity
· There is greater complexity in the revenger’s madness
Hamlet became the apotheosis of the revenge tragedy. Giving the revenge theme a higher purpose, Shakespeare made the issue turn on the character of the revenger and thus gave ample scope for the philosophical consideration of life, death, and human endeavor.
Christopher Marlowe developed a second type of revenge tragedy during this period. The medieval conception of tragedy was a distinctly moral one-- in Marlowe’s plays, the interest centers on the personality of the hero, the struggle of a human soul against forces too great. Marlowe’s protagonists, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, the Jew of Malta, are Machiavellian, overriding the moral codes of their times to find the complete realization of their particular ideals. While revenge in Marlowe’s plays takes an active part in resolving the catastrophe, the protagonist is not a revenger of blood.
The Horror Tragedies
The early period of Kydian revenge tragedy came to an end with Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606). From 1607 to 1620, the villain holds the stage. Revenge has no advocates in this period. Elizabeth I had died in 1603 and James of Scotland succeeded, calling himself James I. There was a new tendency towards sensationalism and artificiality. Violence was portrayed for its own sake and lacked any intellectual or emotional penetration. The chief interest lay in the intrigues of the villains against the sympathetic person or against each other. And revenge was often for less serious grounds than murder. The sole contribution of these horror plays was an occasional moral that God in the catastrophe had punished vice. Representatives of this period were such plays as The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster and Middleton’s Women Beware Women.
By Elizabeth’s reign, the old idea that justice was the responsibility of the injured was gone. Finding and serving justice was a responsibility of the state and blood revenge had no legal place. All murder, including revenge killing, was tried under the same law. The sentences for a revenge murder were the same as a “regular” murder. In fact, revenge killing was considered one the worst crimes because the Bible expressly dictates that God disapproves of personal revenge.
On the other hand, however, there was a deeply rooted tradition of vengeance in Elizabethan times – there was particular sympathy for an heir avenging his father’s death. Private revenge among the nobles and gentlemen almost exclusively took the form of a duel. The use of poisons was more common among the common people and Elizabethan courtiers. This dilemma between legal and cultural practices is reflected in revenge tragedies that “depict revenge as neither unquestionably desirable nor easy to accomplish, and, once achieved, it brings destruction upon the revengers as well as their victims” (Griswold 91).
Revenge tragedies were very popular at the time. They depict the stories of English society as well as mirror the difficult decisions made every day. These stories were written in a time of religious turbulence (see essay about Elizabethans and Ghosts for a brief summary of religious change!). There was deep anxiety about where one was going after death.
Influences of the Revenge Tragedy:
Seneca
Seneca (3 B.C. -65 A.D) Was a Roman philosopher, dramatist and statesman. His tragedies, based on Greek models, provided one of the foremost influences on the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Written in an atmosphere of gloom, Seneca’s plays (concerning the great crimes of antiquity - Medea, Phaedra, Agememnon, Oedipus etc.) strongly emphasized blood revenge for murder or flagrant injury, or less serious revenge out of jealousy. His plays were filled with horrifying events such a cannibalism, incest, rape, and violent death. His rhetoric and bombast, and his stoicism, were important contributions to the Elizabethan form.
Some of the characteristics of Senecan tragedy inherited by Renaissance dramatists were:
· The revenge was personal, often taking on a religious sense
· The revenge could be prompted by a ghost
· The revenger was warned to conceal and dissemble revenge, lest his chance for vengeance be lost.
· Terrible punishment awaited an unnatural revenge.
· Innocent or deceived accomplices were sometimes used to help the revenge, but never to consummate it.
· Momentary hesitations could briefly halt the revenger.
· Seneca’s criminals were fully responsible: the will was all powerful and man had liberty of choice between good and evil.
· Death was a last refuge and expiation. Seneca sympathized with suicide when it saved honor or gave an escape from a life too full of pain, but felt it was more courageous to combat misfortune than to succumb without a struggle.
Italian Literature and Machiavelli
Elizabethan England viewed Italians as vengeful, cunning, and bloodthirsty. When Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) wrote The Prince, a treatise on power, around 1513, the perceived amorality of the text led “Machiavelli” to be synonymous with villainy. It was written that in Machiavelli’s country, “vengeances, and enmities are perpetual and irreconcilable”, and revenge gave “delectation, pleasure and contentment”; revengers will torment a victim, and may even “force him with hope of his life to give himself to the devil; and so they seek in slaying the body to damn the soul, if they could” (Gentillet). (Recall: Hamlet’s refusal to murder Claudius during prayer, lest the King’s soul go to heaven, and to his emphasis on Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s deaths being carried out immediately!!)
Other Italian works, like The Historie of Guicciardin Containing the Warres of Italie, translated by Geoffrey Fenton (1579), and novels such as those translated by Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques (1559-70) and into English by William Painter in his Palace of Pleasure (1567-8) contained gruesome tales of revenge and violence.
Thomas Kyd
Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (written 1586-89) is the foundation of Elizabethan Revenge tragedy. The play first popularized revenge as a tragic motive on the Elizabethan popular stage by using blood vengeance as the core of its dramatic action. In the character Lorenzo, it introduced the first Machiavellian villain in Elizabethan tragedy, and in the character Hieronomo, a new kind of tragic hero, a revenger hesitant on the brink of madness. Structure and style were Senecan, as were such things as the revengeful Ghost who opened the play, the chorus, and the epic reports. The questioning of what relationship there may be between the divine will, retaliatory violence, and the achieving of justice is a constant factor in the revenge tradition as represented by The Spanish Tragedy.
The Kydian revenge tragedy was fundamentally moral and philosophical in its treatment of the subject of revenge. The sacred duty of blood revenge lent a semi-religious tone to the plays. Revengers of blood undertook a difficult task hampered by every conceivable obstacle. Stretched on the rack of human emotions, they peered into the causes of their action and the great questions of life and death.
Titus Andronicus and Hamlet are in the Kydian tradition. Titus is very similar in construction to The Spanish Tragedy, although there are important variations in Shakespeare’s work:
· Blood revenge is given more adequate motivation
· The villain’s actions before the start of the protagonist’s revenge have increased importance and complexity
· There is greater complexity in the revenger’s madness
Hamlet became the apotheosis of the revenge tragedy. Giving the revenge theme a higher purpose, Shakespeare made the issue turn on the character of the revenger and thus gave ample scope for the philosophical consideration of life, death, and human endeavor.
Christopher Marlowe developed a second type of revenge tragedy during this period. The medieval conception of tragedy was a distinctly moral one-- in Marlowe’s plays, the interest centers on the personality of the hero, the struggle of a human soul against forces too great. Marlowe’s protagonists, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, the Jew of Malta, are Machiavellian, overriding the moral codes of their times to find the complete realization of their particular ideals. While revenge in Marlowe’s plays takes an active part in resolving the catastrophe, the protagonist is not a revenger of blood.
The Horror Tragedies
The early period of Kydian revenge tragedy came to an end with Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606). From 1607 to 1620, the villain holds the stage. Revenge has no advocates in this period. Elizabeth I had died in 1603 and James of Scotland succeeded, calling himself James I. There was a new tendency towards sensationalism and artificiality. Violence was portrayed for its own sake and lacked any intellectual or emotional penetration. The chief interest lay in the intrigues of the villains against the sympathetic person or against each other. And revenge was often for less serious grounds than murder. The sole contribution of these horror plays was an occasional moral that God in the catastrophe had punished vice. Representatives of this period were such plays as The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster and Middleton’s Women Beware Women.