The Revengers Tragedy: Introduction by R. A. Foakes Flashcards
The Spanish tragedy: when Horatio is hung…
‘What, will you murder me?’ A line echoed by Gertrude in Hamlet and Gtratiana in the Revengers Tragedy.
Conventions from the Revengers tragedy;
Including melancholy of the protagonist, his delay in taking revenge while he overcomes scruples and works himself up into an overwhelming passion. A sense of obsessiveness or even madness in his behaviour, and the masque or play within a play to bring about a denouement.
The Revengers Tragedy doesn’t have a ghost…
Which was conventional of revenge tragedies in this era. But instead has a skull as the momento mouri which drives the protagonist and is a grisly reminder of the revenge he must do.
‘Having power over ones self is greater than to have power over others, and so validate suicide is a kind of fulfilment.’
Such an influential idea that Hamlet and Horatio are attracted to suicide, although it clashed with a Christian emphasis on patience and the need to endure suffering in this life.
A fascination with Italy, as mythologised…
Also in the image of Machiavelli as a representative of archetypal villainy in a country devoted to the vendetta, provided a rich background and body of source materials for Jacobean drama.
In Italy, certain kinds of…
Revenge were sanctioned by law, especially in those cases involving adultery, seduction of a mans wife, or her betrayal of her husband; infidelity might be brutally punished when aristocratic honour was at stake. In England however, revenge was outlawed, for, as Francis Bacon put it in an essay on the topic, ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more mans nature runs to, the more out law to weed it out. For as the first wrong, it Sith but offend the law; but revenge of that wrong, it putteth the law out of office. ‘
To a certain extent, the Revengers tragedy can be seen as exposing…
and satirising the extravagances and corruptions of the court of James 1 and the city of London in the first decade of the seventeenth century.
Jonathan Dollimore would say…
The play articulates a crisis in the decay of a traditional social order in England. In the shift from feudalism to capitalism. It depicts a society stultified by the contradictions within it.
So far as revenge is concerned, our society,…
Like that of Jacobean London, is too faced; while the individuals urge to retaliate is natural, our social concern is to keep the instinct in check.
Revenge tragedies exploit moral…
Tension between the desire for justice and the urge for revenge by placing their protagonists by placing their protagonists in a situation in which they cannot obtain legal redress;(so when Vindice enters with the skull of his mistress Gloriana, who was poisoned by the duke, who is himself the judge(similarly in Hamlet, Claudius is now the King and therefore the law answers to him))
The duke can not be brought to justice for his crimes: ‘it well becomes that judge to nod at crimes/ That does commit greater himself and lives’ (II.iii,124-5)
The Revengers become less morally distinguishable from the villains.
In the nine years since Vindices beloveds murder, he has become contaminated with stored up obsession to revenge. He claims the moral high ground in attacking lust and luxury, but over the course of the play he is seen taking pleasure in torture and murder.
Critical response to the play…
Has been largely concerned with its morality. Some dwell on its ‘pervasive corruption’, and see in it a vicious society engaged in a squalid quest for power, wealth and sex. In an action that springs from ‘an obsessive loathing of the sexual sinfulness of men’. Some reading find little sense of moral purpose at the end, while other see Hippolito and Vindice dying ‘alertly courageously, and high spiritedly, so as to make of their deaths both a political and a moral action’.
An alternative reaction to the play… (Moral resolve)
Would note that it has clear moral structure, in which all the guilty, including Vindice and Hippolito are finally punished. So that Vindices cry ‘heaven is just’ (III.v.187), and the sound of thunder as the voice of heaven at IV.ii. 202 and at V.iii.41, and Antonio’s line ‘Just is the law above’ (V.iii.91) all confirm an appropriate sense of retribution on those who have done wrong; at the same time, Vindice’s ‘self abandonment to theatricality inherent in the revenger’s role’ causes a moral disorientation, since he behaves as if he was the moral spokesman in the action.
Women in the play… (Contrary to Hamlet)
Represent both Virtue in the play (as Castiza typifies chastity) and a source of corruption and contamination (‘ were’ not for gold and women there would be no damnation’ II.i.257-8)
A link with HAMLET may be seen…
But also marked a difference. Hamlet’s disgust with Gertrude is based entirely on past events; by contrast, the opening soliloquy of the Revengers tragedy is based entirely in the present moment, and it has been noted that ‘now’ is the most frequent adverb in the play. Opposing values and paradoxical attitudes simply exist in a context of urgent movement forward in time.
