Winterset: A Modern Revenge Tragedy

WINTERSET: A MODERN REVENGE TRAGEDY MAXWELL ANDERSON'S recognition of Elizabethan England and the drama of that period needs little emphasis; to him the Age of Eliz· abeth was one of the "few mountain peaks of achievement," sharing this distinction with the Periclean Age and the Italian Renaissance.l As a critic, especially in Off Broadway, a collection of critical essays, his major points of reference were the dassics; and he consistently used the Elizabethans, especially Marlowe and Shakespeare, as touch· stones of greatness. And just as Elizabethan drama was a criteria for his critical opinions, so was the Elizabethan scene an influence on much of his creative writing: for the return to poetic form in W interset ; for his following the Elizabethan practice of using the past to reflect universal concepts, as Joan at Lorraine deals with the character of heroism and The Masque of Kings with the idealist in revolutionary movements; and for the subject matter of the Tudor trilogyAnne at A Thousand Days, Mary at Scotland, and Elizabeth the Queen. Anderson's dramatic fundamentals were derived from the Greek and Elizabethan classics, and Winterset is a result of an application of some of these classical fundamentals to a modern play. It is the purpose of this paper to show that Maxwell Anderson's Winterset is a modern revenge tragedy with every characteristic of the classical revenge tragedy except the revenge conclusion. I wish to show that of all the revenge tragedies, Winterset is most like Hamlet , but the character of this Hamlet, the protagonist Mio, is allowed by the mores of modern society to follow a course of love instead of hate and blood revenge. The customs and mores have changed since Hamlet, and it is no longer required that a man seek his own vengeance ; the state does it for him. The theater is governed by the customs of the time, and Anderson recognizes this in "The Essence of Tragedy." For the audience will always insist that the alteration in the hero be for the better-or for what it believes to be better. As audiences change, the standards of good and evil change, with the centuries. One thing is certain: that an audience watching a play will go along with it only when the leading character 1 Maxwell Anderson, "Whatever Hope We Have," OU Broadway: Essays About the Theatre (New York: William Sloan Assoc., Inc., 1947), p. 41. 185 186 MODERN DRAMA September responds in the end to what it considers a higher moral impulse than moved him at the beginning of the story, though the audience will of course define morality as it pleases and in the terms of its own day. It may be that there is no absolute up or down in this world, but the race believes that there is, and will not hear of any denial.2 Today the "higher moral impulse" precludes the revenge violence that brought the classical revenge tragedy to such cataclysmic conclusions . Let us now examine Winterset in some detail in order to note its revenge-tragedy characteristics and its similarity to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Both plays have as the central problem the revenge of a son for a father. Mio is much like Hamlet; his father is killed and his mother is dishonored. In this case, however, the father, Bartholomeo Romagna was electrocuted in the 19~O'S after being wrongly convicted of murder by a biased judge and jury who were prejudiced against him because he was a confessed anarchist.s Mio's mother was dishonored not by an incestuous marriage but by being unceremoniously interred after dying in the poor house. Like Hamlet, Mio feels that there was shady business behind his father's death, but desires proof. Unlike Hamlet, Mio does not want blood revenge but revenge in the form of public acquittal of his father. He feels that he has lost his place in society, that the event has "popped in" between himself and society and has left him an outcast. Therefore, he must regain his rightful place by disclosing his father's murderers. A ghost crying for vengeance is characteristic of the revenge tragedy . Romagna's ghost lacks the corporeality...