Meaning and Mortality in Some Renaissance Revenge Plays

RICHARD W. HILLMAN Meaning and Mortality in Some Renaissance Revenge Plays Discussions of the revenge convention in English Renaissance drama have tended to emphasize ethical questions on the one hand, matters of structure and technique on the other. The psychological aspect of revenge has received relatively little attention. Revenge is generally understood as a straightforward response to injury, an attempt to alleviate pain by retaliating and, in most cases, righting a perceived wrong - 'wild justice: in Bacon's phrase. This injury need not be direct: it may involve a loved one or honour; it may even be imaginary. But it is commonly taken to constitute the revenger's sole motivation, although an inherently villainous disposition must often be relied upon to take up the slack. Such an understanding of revenge suffices for most plays of the period; it is consistent with the Senecan influence on the genre and with the popularity of revenge as a stage convention. But I should like to focus attention here on another dimension of motivation - a pattern of responses , traceable in a relatively small number of revengers, that illuminates the workings of the convention as certain playwrights employ it. According to this pattern the revenger perceives the injury he has suffered as rendering his existence meaningless; he then embraces the destruction of his enemies as a new source of meaning. This loss and recovery of meaning are accompanied by marked shifts in the revenger's attitude towards death: he is initially overwhelmed by a painful sense of his own mortality, while his successful revenge carries with it a feeling of power over death . Although this pattern is fully developed only in a very few plays, I believe that, once it is identified, elements of it may be recognized in several others, including, surprisingly, some works in which the revenge motif is treated perfunctorily and characterization is highly stylized or merely crude. This points to an aspect of the revenge convention possessing a purely theatrical momentum of its own. Yet I shall be arguing that several post-Elizabethan dramatists, especially Webster and Ford, adapt this treatment of revenge in speCialized ways which reflect continued understanding and acceptance of its psychological validity. It is not my purpose here to offer new interpretations of individual UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 1, FALL 1979 0042~0247/79I1ooo-o(X)]$o1.50/o © UNIVERSITY Of TORONTO PRESS 2 RICHARD W . HILLMAN plays; I shall often refer to widely appreciated features of the works discussed. Nor do I wish to propose a radical reassessment of the revenge tradition, but merely to point out that a particular way of presenting revenge may fairly lay claim to continuity within that tradition. If I am right, however, it would follow that at least the more sophisticated members of Renaissance audiences may have been prepared to take revenge for granted, not merely as a vehicle for sensational entertainment or even moral instruction, but as an instrument for probing the human psyche, such as it more openly and subtly becomes in the hands of Shakespeare. I It is noteworthy that the two most important early revenge plays, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Marlowe's TheJew of Malta , give close attention to the significance of revenge for the protagonist. The impulse to relieve the pain of an injury is indeed the key to this significance, but in both cases - and in contrast, for example, with the reflex response of Belimperia in TheSpanish Tragedy - relief depends on more than retribution and justice. For the pain of Hieronimo and Barabas pOintedly involves the deprivation of something which had constituted all reason for living - their meaning in life. Revenge is presented as offering a renewal of meaning through a new focus of self-definition. The Jew of Malta furnishes the plainer example. Barabas is neither a sympathetic figure nor a realistic psychological creation, but Marlowe takes pains to show us at least that such monsters are made, not born. At the beginning of the play he endows Barabas with a substantial, if rudimentary, humanity by depicting his wealth, not merely as a stereotypical obsession, but as the concrete expression of his being. Barabas's first soliloquies, even...