The Revenger as Dramatist: A Study of the Character-as-Dramatist in The Revenger's Tragedy

The Revenger as Dramatist: A Study ofthe Character-as-Dramatist in The Revenger's Tragedy LILLIAN WILDS Studies of The Revenger s Tragedy have traditionally clustered about two areas: the authorship controversy x and the Morality aspects of the play. The first is not relevant to this paper and the second only tangentially so. While acknowledging the general Morality background of the play (particularly as the themes of vanitas and memento mon lend themselves to certain dramatic effects—the Parade of Sins, the Dance of Death, and meditations on the skull), the prime concern here is to refute the charge that inevitably goes along with a strict morality interpretation, the charge that all the characters are flat personified abstractions which have no dramatic function outside the doctrinal scheme.2 A careful focus on the characterization of the Lillian Wilds teaches at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her book Shakespeare's Character-Dramatists was published by the Salzburg University Press in 1975. 1 The problem seems insoluble unless the computers come up with an ironclad proof. As the situation stands now the critics are about evenly divided for and against Tourneur's authorship. Of recent critics, Samuel Schoenbaum in Middleton's Tragedies (New York, 1955) does a perceptive explication of the play but gives it to Middleton, as does R. H. Barker in Thomas Middleton (New York, 1958). The latest full-scale study, that of Peter B. Murray, denies the play to Tourneur in favor of an "anonymous" author in A Study of Cyril Tourneur (Philadelphia, London, Bombay, and Karachi, 1964) pp. 144-257. Among the pro-Tourneur critics are: Harold Jenkins, "Cyril Tourneur," RES, XVII (1941) 21-36; U. M. Ellis-Fermor, "The Imagery of The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragédie" MLR, XLVIII (1953), 129-138; and Inga-Stina Ekebdad [Ewebank], "On the Authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy," English Studies, XLI (1960), 225-240, and "An Approach to Tourneur's Imagery," MLR, LIV (1959), 487-498. ' See particularly L. G. Salingar's "The Revenger's Tragedy and The Morality Tradition,'* Elizabethan Drama, ed. R. J. Kaufmann (New York, 1961), pp. 209-10; originally printed in Scrutiny, VI (March, 1938); and Schoenbaum who finds Vindice "unreal: a fiercely energetic incarnation of the spirit of revenge" (p. 23). ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW113 protagonist Vindice shows that, far from being a one-dimensional personification of Revenge, he is a character with a certain depth, in fact, a character with the consciousness of a dramatist who constantly dramatizes himself -and other characters and whose own personality undergoes a change under the influence of the roles he plays. This approach also illuminates the self-dramatizing tendencies of some of the other characters, and reveals the dramatic devices (the dumb shows and masques) that Tourneur has used as structural elements of the play. Until Fredson Bowers wrote Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton ) in 1940, few commentators had much sympathy for Vindice as a character or felt that he was genuinely motivated in his desire for revenge. C. V. Boyer, writing in 1914,3 was typical, seeing Vindice as a hero who "takes no hold on our sympathies" (p. 148). He felt that Tourneur failed to justify Vindice's crimes in the eyes of the spectators, that even though the desire for revenge came from "a natural desire for retaliation" the "retaliation in this particular case is abhorrent" (p. 150), his reasons being: the hero's cause for vengeance has grown cold with fifteen years' waiting [obviously a misreading of the play]; ... he is not bowed down by sorrow; ... no religious motive . . . urges him on; ... he is not moved by love or duty, but altogether by hatred; and finally, his revenge is unjustifiable because it is so very malicious. (p. 150) Bowers, writing twenty-six years later, defends Vindice's motivation: Vindici's wrongs as first portrayed to his audience are as real as any hero revenger's. His betrothed has been poisoned after she had repulsed the duke's lustful advances. Owing to the seriousness of the Elizabethan betrothal, Vindici is seeking revenge for the murder of a woman who was, in effect, his wife. To supplement this central motive Tourneur adds the...