The Revenger's Tragedy and the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle

The Revenger's Tragedy and the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends. Timon ofAthens In order to define the central metaphor of The Revenger's Tragedy I have borrowed - rather shamelessly - a suggestive quotation from Shakespeare and an elementary notion of Aristotelian logic. The Shakespearean lines are spoken by Apemantus, the cynical baiter of humanity in Timon ofAthens. He finds Timon alone in the woods, cursing mankind, digging up earth and feeding on roots. The harshness of this environment is a grotesque result of the silken luxury which Timon took for granted in his days of prosperity. Timon has never known the fullness of human life, Apemantus observes, because his experience is limited by the constrasting poles of an either-or dilemma: like his more famous prototype, Timon has known only the treacherous world of 'robes and furred gowns' and the savage world of 'unaccommodated man.' The Aristotelian concept which describes this arbitrary state of affairs is frequently referred to as one of the laws of thought, and is commonly known as the principle of the excluded middle. It holds, briefly, that either a proposition (p) is true, or its opposite is true. (In logical notation, either p or -p.) By way of illustration, we may agree that either the statement 'Timon of Athens is a sick man' is true, or its direct contradiction is true. I have taken the liberty of calling this axiom the fallacy of the excluded middle, because - as Aristotle is fully aware - most pairs of contraries do have intermediates. Whole numbers must be either odd or even, but light-reflecting surfaces need not be either black or white, and human beings need not be either good or bad. The fallacy occurs whenever we expect the behaviour of human characters to approximate the behaviour of whole numbers. What all of this has to do with The Revenger's Tragedy will shortly be apparent. The moral universe of the play is, in large measure, an extended illustration of the principle (or fallacy) which I have tried to describe. Lussurioso makes the point with admirable terseness: 'the world's divided into knaves and fools' (n.ii.5).' If we make proper allowances for Lussurioso's idiosyncratic point of view, we will have to concede that he is right. The world of The Revenger's Tragedy is domiUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLVIII, NUMBER 1, FALL 1978 0042-° 247178/1100-0010 $01·50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1978 nated by knaves - that is, by characters who consistently follow selfish and perverse impulses. From the knave's point of view, those few characters who act on principle (Antonio's wife or Castiza) are simply too foolish to survive or prosper in a society of pragmatists. The same dichotomy applies if we adopt the opposite perspective, namely Castiza 's. The pure in heart will divide the world into saints and sinners, with the same great gulf between them. Making such radical and indeed necessary divisions has by now become a favourite critical preoccupation. L.G. Salingar argued long ago, in what I take to be still the best single essay on the play,2that The Revenger's Tragedy owes its schematic ethical structure to the morality play tradition. 'The Duke and his court are simply monstrous embodiments of Lust, Pride, and Greed: according to Salingar; Castiza represents the virtue that her name implies, and her brief lapse is no more than a conventional game of disguise. The Everyman figure is of course Vindice, who mediates to the audience the traditional opposition 'between life and death, between naturalvirtue and the effects of lust and greed' (pp 404- 5). The strength of Salingar's reading lies in the flexibility with which he applies his theory: to follow his argument is to become aware of the numerous complex ways in which Tourneur modifies, deepens, and at times undercuts the tradition he has chosen to make his own. Salingar's approach has defined the terms of reference for many subsequent interpretations of The Revenger's Tragedy. Two radically divergent critical essays may be cited to indicate the nature of the debate. 3...