Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy

One of the great influences on the early modern revenge play genre was the translation of the works of the Roman
playwright Seneca into English in the last half of the sixteenth century. Senecas tragedies concerned the heroic
figures of classical legend, and borrowed from such playwrights as Aeschylus, Euripedes and Sophocles. The
tragedies were filled with horrifying events such as cannibalism, incest, rape, and violent death. Revenge is also a
theme in many of Senecas plays: in Hippolytus, Theseus takes revenge on his son for the supposed rape of
Phaedra, while in Agamemnon, the ghost of Thyestes urges Aegisthus towards revenge. Revenge and violence are
associated with ghosts in several other Senecan plays. [1]
Another strong influence came from Italian literature, reinforced by a stereotype that was held in contemporary
England of Italians as vengeful, cunning and bloodthirsty. [2] Niccol Machiavelli (1469-1527) wrote The Prince, a
treatise on power, in the early years of the sixteenth century. The perceived amorality of the work led Machiavel to
be synonymous with villainy in the contemporary imagination. Innocent Gentillet wrote that in Machiavellis country,
vengeances, and enmities are perpetuall 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 himselfe to the
diuell; and so they seeke in slaying the bodie to damne the soule, if they could. [3] This detail recalls Hamlets refusal
to murder Claudius during prayer, lest the Kings soul go to heaven, [4] and to his emphasis on Rosencrantzs and
Guildensterns deaths being carried out immediately, with no shriving time.[5] 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. [6]
Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587-9) is one of the earliest plays built around blood-revenge to be
performed on the English stage.[7] It not only contains a ghost, but also a personified spirit of Revenge, giving the
play a framework that involves supernatural forces and the workings of fate. [8] This is set against the protagonists
struggles to achieve justice through their own actions. Hieronimos desire for vengeance is in a very real sense a
passion for justice. [9] The existence of evil and undeserved misfortune in the world drives him to exclaim O world!
no world, but mass of public wrongs,/ Confusd and filld with murder and misdeeds. [10] Here we find echoes of
something is rotten in the state of Denmark in Hamlet, (1.4.90) and Lears mad ravings about the evils of society
in King Lear. In The Spanish Tragedy, as inHamlet, an attempt is made to procure justice by means of a play-withina-play, but in The Spanish Tragedy the revenger takes part in the play and stabs the villain in the middle of the
performance.
Revenge plays in the style of Kyd include Shakespeares Titus Andronicus, perhaps the most grotesque and least
likeable of Shakespeares plays, and Hamlet. Marstons Antonios Revenge (1599) includes elements found
in Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy: the ghost, the play-within-a-play, delayed revenge, rape or threats to female
honour, and a bloody denouement, as well as the pretended foolishness of Antonio, which matches Hamlets feigned
madness. The Revengers Tragedy (attributed to Tourneur, c. 1606-7), is another play in this genre. [11] A central
element is the skull of a woman who has been poisoned. Carried about by the revenger, the skull prompts
meditations on the transience of life and the inevitability of death and corruption, which recall both medieval morality
drama and the philosophical musings of Hamlet. The revenger, Vindice, goes about disguised, which enables him to
act as a detached, satirical and didactic commentator in the folly and evil of the other characters, [12] again recalling
Hamlets similar ironic commentary under the disguise of madness.
In these plays, the revenger is a kind of hero, avenging cruel and undeserved death, yet is a killer in his turn. The
extent to which contemporary audiences would have sympathised with the avenger is debated by literary
critics. [13] In some plays, the revenger is not heroic at all, but utterly villainous: in The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand
comes to believe he has turned into a wolf, symbolising his savagery. Yet revenge could be a way to settle a
legitimate grievance. [14] Francis Bacon wrote that revenge triumphs over death, [15] a sentiment expressed by
Vindice in The Revengers Tragedy when he proclaims When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy
good, [16] suggesting that the justice of revenge outweighs the horror of tragedy. However, Bacon also wrote that in
taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a princes part to
pardon. [17] In revenge plays, the option of forgiveness is not taken, and even if justice is done and the revenger dies
to expiate his deeds, revenge plays close with a sense of futility, waste and loss.
Karen Kay

1. Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1959). Return to text
2. Bowers, pp. 48-52. Return to text
3. Bowers, p. 52, citing Innocent Gentillet, Discours sur les moyens de bien governer [...] contre Nicolas
Machiavel (1576), translated as A Discourse Upon the Meanes of Well Governing [...] by Simon Patericke (1577),
Part III, max. 6. Return to text
4. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (London:
Thomson Learning, 2006), 3.3.73-98, pp. 331-3. Return to text
5. Hamlet, 5.2.46-7, p. 436. Return to text
6. Bowers, pp. 53-61. Return to text
7. A Hamlet play written before Shakespeares version, possibly by Kyd, now lost, would have been another early
example of the genre. Return to text
8. Cf. Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallet, The Revengers Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 8. Return to text
9. Hallet and Hallet, p. 145. Return to text
10. Hallet and Hallet, p. 147, citing Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959),
3.3.3-4. Return to text
11. On plays in the style of Kyd, cf. Bowers, pp. 101-53. Return to text
12. Tourneur, Cyril, The Revengers Tragedy, ed. by Brian Gibbons, New Mermaids (London: Benn, 1967; Black,
1988), p. xv. Return to text
13. Cf. Bowers, pp. 3-40.Return to text
14. Cf. Hallett and Hallett, p. 6. Return to text
15.From Of Death, Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, ed. by Charles W. Eliot, The Harvard Classics (New
York: Collier, 1901-14), III, Part 1, online at http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/2.html Return to text
16. The Revengers Tragedy, 3.5.198, p. 64. Return to text
17. From Of Revenge, Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, ed. by Charles W. Eliot, The Harvard Classics (New
York: Collier, 1901-14), III, Part 1, online at http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/2.html Return to text

Characteristics of Elizabethan Drama

From Elizabethan Drama. Janet Spens. London: Metheun & Co.

Of the three types of plays recognized in the Shakespeare First Folio -Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies -- the last has been the most discussed
annnd is clearest in outline.

1. Tragedy must end in some tremendous catastrophe involving in

Elizabethan practice the death of the principal character.
2. The catastrophe must not be the result of mere accident, but must be
brought about by some essential trait in the character of the hero acting either
directly or through its effect on other persons.
3. The hero must nevertheless have in him something which outweighs his
defects and interests us in him so that we care for his fate more than for
anything else in the play. The problem then is, why should a picture of the
misfortunes of some one in whom we are thus interested afford us any
satisfaction? No final answer has yet been found. Aristotle said that the
spectacle by rousing in us pity and fear purges us of these emotions, and this
remains the best explanation. Just as a great calamity sweeps from our minds
the petty irritations of our common life, so the flood of esthetic emotion lifts us
above them.
In the drama of Marlowe the satisfaction appears to depend, not on the
excitement of the catastrophe, but on the assertion of the greatness of man's
spirit; and this seems to have been the theme also of Senecan tragedy. It will
be remembered that the first part of Tamburlaine ends, not in his death, but in
his triumph, and yet we feel that the peculiar note of tragedy has been struck.
We have the true tragic sense of liberation. Kyd also asserted the
independence of the spirit of man, if he is prepared to face pain and death.

It is really much more difficult than is always recognized to be sure what

constituted Shakespeare's view of the tragic satisfaction or even that he
believed in it. It is possibly true that Lear is a better man at the end of the play
than he was at the beginning, and that without his suffering he would not have
learned sympathy with his kind; but this does not apply either to Hamlet or to
Othello, and even in the case of King Lear it does not explain the aesthetic
appeal. That depends on something more profound.

The student, after getting the story of the tragedy quite clear, should
concentrate first on the character of the hero. Ask yourself whether his creator
considered him ideally perfect -- in which case the appeal probably lies in the
spectacle of a single human soul defying the universe; or flawed -- in which
case the defect will bring about the catastrophe. It is true that in the Revenge
Play type we have frequently the villain-hero, but the interest there depends
rather on his courage and independence of man and God than on his villainy.
This is particularly true of pre-Shakespearean plays. It is remarkable that the
post-Shakespearean drama was apt to combine plots involving unnatural
crimes and vicious passions with a somewhat shallow conventional morality.
History plays seem in Shakespeare's hands to represent the compromise of
life. They may end in catastrophe or in triumph, but the catastrophe is apt to
be undignified and the triumph won at a price. Again, we may say that in
the Histories Shakespeare is dealing with the nation as hero. The hero in this
case is immortal and his tale cannot be a true tragedy; while on the other
hand there can never be the true comedy feeling of an established and final
harmony. Apart from Shakespeare, Histories are almost entirely inspired by
patriotism, often of a rather rabid type.
There is the greatest variety in the section entitled "Comedy," and critics
generally distinguish sharply between Comedies and Romances in
Reconciliation plays. We are apt to expect a comedy to aim chiefly at making
us laugh, but, although there are extremely funny passages, it is clear that this
is not the main character of any but one or two early plays. The Romances are
four -- "Cymbeline," "Winter's Tale," "The Tempest," and the play not contained
in the First Folio -- "Pericles." "Cymbeline" [was] actually printed at the end of
the Tragedies for reasons which can only be conjectured. Romances are
always concerned with two generations, and cover the events of many years.
There is an element of the marvellous in them, and the emphasis on
repentance and forgiveness is very marked. But they are, indeed, the natural
development of the plays of the great period. "As You Like It" deals also with
two generations, with wrongs committed and then repentance, forgiveness
and restitution. In the earlier play the stress is laid on the actions and
emotions of the younger folk, while in the later plays the older generation is

most fully portrayed.

But before Shakespeare arrived at this conception of Comedy, he had tried
various types. In "The Comedy of Errors," founded on a translation of a Latin
comedy, he had produced an example of pure farce. The humour in a farce
generally consists of violent action provoked by misunderstanding of a gross
kind. There is an element of farce, therefore, in the "Taming of the Shrew,"
though the main appeal of the play is the stimulus of Petruchio's high spirits.
Probably the original conception of the "Merchant of Venice" was much the
same. A youthful Shakespeare was probably pleased with the outwitting of the
churlish old miser Shylock. It is the theme of youth and crabbed age. An older
Shakespeare must have revised it and seen the story more through the eyes
of Shylock and of Antonio, and the unity of the play has been destroyed.
"Love's Labour's Lost" and the "Midsummer Night's Dream" are probably both
Court Comedies, and have the superficiality of emotion which for whatever
reason was associated with Court Comedy. A graceful and fanciful working up
of the occasion for which the play was produced was the special character of
a Court play, and it has been conjectured that the "Midsummer Night's Dream"
was written for a noble marriage.
But the Shakespearean theory of Comedy went much deeper than this, and
has no classical exposition, Meredith's "Essay on Comedy" is quite
inapplicable. It may be suggested that his intent was to present a picture of an
harmonious society in which each person's individuality is fully developed and
yet is in perfect tune with all the others. At the beginning of the play there is
always an element of discord, which is resolved before the close. As in History
the hero of the play is rather Society as a whole than any person in it, and
because of this we get at the end a sense of "happiness ever after." In the last
plays we have generally an incorrectly reported death, and the discovery of
these mistakes gives a curious sense that "there's nothing serious in
mortality." All existence is seen as one great web of being, so that, although in
tragedy, Hamlet sickens at the thought:
"Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
May stop a wall to keep the wind away."

in "The Tempest" the same thought becomes:

"Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

How to cite this article:

Spens, Janet. Elizabethan Drama. London: Metheun & Co. 1922. Shakespeare Online. 19 Aug. 2009. <
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/playanalysis/tradegyvscomedy.html > .