English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality, and: Women and Revenge in Shakespeare: Gender, Genre, and Ethics (review)

How does one do justice to such a fine book on revenge? Linda Woodbridge’s Early Modern Revenge Drama marshals an impressive array of evidence in order to reconsider the cultural import of vengeance on the early modern stage. Despite its title and a cover illustration depicting a scene from Titus Andronicus, this study does not confine itself to revenge tragedies alone but examines the uses of revenge, across dramatic genres, from mid-Tudor plays to those produced during the Interregnum. The virtue of this lucid and engaging book lies in its attention to not only a wider collection of plays but also the myriad early modern discourses centered on the issue of fairness that animate the fraught reciprocal exchanges that occur onstage.

Divided into four main sections,¹ Woodbridge’s critique begins with two chapters laying out the study’s conceptual frame. In this first part, Woodbridge notes she will eschew the habit of “viewing revenge through a lens of individual psychology” (6) to focus instead on dramatists’ exploration of issues of fairness. Woodbridge contends revenge plays “reveal widespread resentment of systemic unfairness—economic, political, and social—as the Renaissance witnessed severe disproportion between crime and punishment, between labor and its rewards” (7). These forms of “systemic unfairness” govern the book’s remaining divisions. Part 2, Woodbridge explains, takes up the “economic unfairness and related legal unfairness . . . reflected in revenge plays’ pervasive economic language” (10); part 3 centers on the “political unfairness” that becomes more visible when we put “tyrant-slaying revenge plays into conversation with resistance theory” (16); and part 4 figures revenge as a response to “social unfairness,” “as redress for the disempowered” (18–19). Noting the popularity of revenge (and its absence in the catalogues of antitheatrical grievance), the second chapter clears ground for the critique that follows by recounting revenge drama’s positive reception in early modern England and reaffirming its capacity to do “real cultural work” (48).

The three chapters comprising part 2 consider the nexus between revenge and money, reading the former as a response to economic unfairness. After observing how revengers exhibit “the methodical minds of accountants” (61) as they balance their ledgers through violence, the third chapter situates revenge plays in the immediate environs of Southwark, “a bookkeeping neighborhood” (63); in the “mathemania” that so gripped the era (67); and in the “balance-of-trade theory” debated by Malynes, Misselden, and Mun (81). Such connections with bookkeeping, the fourth chapter argues, emerge “partly because the imperative to avenge a relative was a debt, analogous to money owed” (84). Drawing on analysis of England’s growing culture of credit and a (notably witty) review of politeness theory, Woodbridge here examines The Merchant of Venice to uncover structural affinities between revenge and “debt-recovery litigation” (103). The fifth chapter recuperates the economic component of judicial matters. “Getting justice,” Woodbridge reminds us, “depends on the fortune of birth,” and pervasive injustice, symptomatic of the “vagaries of life in a protocapitalist marketplace,” “made audiences receptive” to revenge drama (126).

Part 3 devotes three chapters to setting revenge in the context of early modern resistance theory. Chapter 6 brilliantly reads “the ten Senecan plays translated 1559–67” (130) as intimately connected to Tudor resistance writing. Wood-bridge half-jokingly observes that “except under duress, few read [these plays] now” (130), but her analysis does more than draw attention to much-neglected texts; it also superbly restores their political potency. Deftly recounting the travails of religious dissidents, Woodbridge convincingly argues that “opposition to religious persecution united an otherwise diverse company of Catholic and Protestant academics” in a shared project of writing resistance through translations deeply invested in the deposition of tyrants (138). The seventh chapter returns to more familiar fare—“England’s golden age of...