Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly
How are we to imagine the violent scenes in revenge tragedies, for instance on the Spanish stage, and what might theatre goers have seen when the figure of Revenge appeared in 17th century German plays? Can the depictions by painters of the revenge of Philomela and Procne or the rape of Tamar by Amnon help us to visualise scenes of vengeance and retribution? Can the revenge arias of the opera seria give us an indication of how the emotion of vengefulness was conveyed vocally and how it overlapped with fury and madness?
Marco Prandoni
‘Daer de Wraeck den drempel dicht bezet’. The ‘Floris V-plays’ (1613-1628) and Vondel’s Gysbreght van Aemstel (1637) as a revisitation of revenge tragedy
It was P.C. Hooft who for the first time in 1613 staged a crucial episode of the history of Amsterdam and the County of Holland: the conspiracy which led around 1300 to Count Floris V’s assassination and its aftermath of revenge. The vicissitudes of medieval Amsterdam evoked variously the (still on-going) Revolt of the Provinces against the Spanish rule and their dramatization was meant as a contribution to topical political and constitutional discourse in the young Republic. Other playwrights (Suffridus Sixtinus, J.J. Colevelt) added other episodes and perspectives in the ensuing years. In 1637, Joost van den Vondel inaugurated the first stone theatre in Amsterdam by bringing on stage the culminating episode of the revenge on the conspirators: the siege and attack to Amsterdam.
In my presentation I will shortly discuss how these tragedies are partially encoded as ‘revenge plays’. I will mostly focus on Vondel’s play, which has been barely interpreted as such, despite its overt Senecan intertextuality and its allusions to both the Argive and the Theban mythic cycles. I will contend that this mythical framework, mediated by ancient and modern dramatic intertexts, is latently conjured up in the play and importantly contributes to the creation of meaning. However, its anthropological, religious, political, juridical, gendered assumptions are subverted in the end: when the circularity of mutual revenge is broken and overcome, there rises an utterly new perspective.
Isabel von Holt
When Revenge Speaks for/of Itself: Allegories of Revenge in the German Baroque Trauerspiel
Andreas Gryphius and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein are regarded as the masters of the German baroque Trauerspiel (mounrning play) of the 17th century. Although their plays are not considered “revenge tragedies” per definitionem, all of these texts deal with revenge in one way or the other while they present and negotiate religious, moral, legal, and political concepts in a highly artificial and formalized rhetorical construction.
Instead of centering on what is said about revenge in these plays, my contribution will examine what revenge has to say for and of itself. In Gryphius’ Carolus Stuardus (where revenge even closes the play and has the last word) and Papinian as well as Lohenstein’s Agrippina, Sophonisbe, and Ibrahim Sultan, revenge repeatedly takes the stage as an allegorical personification in the so-called “Reyen,” which are an integral part of the textuality of German baroque mourning plays. The Trauerspiele demonstrate what has been called an “emblematic structure” due to their two-fold organization as “Abhandlung” (act) and “Reyen” (a sort of choir, interlude), which represents a gesture of showing (in the “Abhandlung”) and interpreting (in the “Reyen”), often by means of a greater world order, a higher spiritual order in fact. When revenge speaks for and of itself, it evaluates the political, legal, moral, and religious conflicts at play, but most importantly, it stages itself and its undeniable power – at times as an instrument of the higher order in the spiritual (“geistig”) center of the dramatic text, at times as an affective force vying for the protagonist’s favor in the psychological (also “geistig”) center of the dramatic text. My contribution will therefore discuss the Christian (Protestant) discourse on revenge as well as its political and legal implications while exploring the dramatic representation of revenge as an allegory and its specific poetic and performative aspects.
Karoline Baumann
“I play the man I am”: Revenge and gender in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Coriolanus
This paper examines how gender roles are constructed and subverted in two of Shakespeare’s revenge plays in ways to which the generically ambiguous mythological figures of the Erinyes provide a foil. In classical ancient sources, revenge is often incited by women but typically performed by men; the goddesses of vengeance are nevertheless conceptualised as predominantly female. Their gender ambiguity is reflected in both early modern plays, where ‘masculine’ virtues like courage and determination get interrogated and de-naturalized, even distorted and tragically misunderstood as ruthlessness, brutality. When Lady Macbeth, after praying for the “spirits” to “unsex” her, becomes capable of the “direst cruelty” (1.5), she is characterised as more ‘masculine’ than hesitant Macbeth, who has his doubts and qualms – until a reversal takes place, and it is Macbeth who becomes ever more unscrupulous, while Lady Macbeth apparently performs revenge upon herself. Macbeth, too, when accepting the first part of the prophesy subscribes to the vindication contained in the second, thus becoming murderer and avenger at the same time. The bearded “wayward sisters” are the most visibly gender-bending creatures, hybrids of the underworld, Erinyes who at the same time act as Sibyls, inciting Macbeth’s crimes while simultaneously acting in the interest of the wronged parties. In Coriolanus, Volumnia, like Lady Macbeth prevented from exerting political power by her gender, creates an invincible killing machine, her son, who acts almost as an extension of her. Rather than accepting the destruction of Rome, she effectively has him killed by persuading Coriolanus to return, thus enabling revenge upon him, and becoming herself Rome’s saviour, a position he formerly held. Coriolanus’ provocative “I play the man I am” evokes Judith Butler’s description of the performative nature of gender identity as being constituted by the very expressions that appear as its effects, a performativity that these revenge plays allow their protagonists to explore.
Adam Hansen
Vision and Vengeance in The Changeling
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1622) is as acutely self-aware a revenge tragedy as Middleton’s earlier The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607). However, the later play is also remarkable for the ways in which it connects vengeance and vision. The world depicted in The Changeling is pervaded by imagery and strategies of sight. Moreover, reflecting its Jacobean context, this world is torn between scopophilia (a love of looking) and ocularophobia (a fear of seeing), not least because of how vision in the play both confirms and destabilises gender and social identities. Men try to control how women are seen, and what women see. Men also try to control what they and other men see, and men who fail to do this, or become obsessive about and lack control regarding what they see, fail as men. But vision is unreliable and dangerous, precisely because it becomes obsessive or uncontrolled, and open to abuse. Indeed, so pervasive are these images and strategies of vision, that women inhabiting this world recognise the power of how they see and are seen; because women assume this power, men want to control them all the more. The Changeling knowingly reworks tropes of the genre to disclose that, just as revenge is only partially effective in ensuring male homosocial bonds, so characters seeking vengeance against patriarchy and hierarchy use the imagery and strategies of sight to do so. In this world, women – like Beatrice – get revenge on men for their abjection by assuming the power to control others’ sight or how they are seen. In this world, people of lower status – like De Flores – get revenge on those of higher status by doing the same. Indeed, lower status women – like Diaphanta – do both simultaneously. This paper will explore how and why such characters do this, and what this tells us about staging ‘revenge tragedy’ in one of its later English incarnations.
Mohammadreza Hassanzadeh Javanian
Affective Dissonance and Lavinia’s Mutilation in Titus Andronicus
The rape and mutilation of Lavinia at the end of Act Two of Titus Andronicus mark one of the most violent scenes in one of Shakespeare’s most violent plays. A victim of a profoundly shocking bodily and psychic experience, Lavinia loses both her hands – a means to show the rapists – and her tongue – a means to talk about the rape. The horrible incident has prompted a substantial body of literary criticism on the play, with Lavinia as the silent centre of this scholarly interest. However, there are scarcely any references to affect and its significant implications in these studies. The present research seeks to employ the concept of affective dissonance, developed by Claire Hemmings and Sara Ahmed to argue that the discrepancy between Lavinia’s experience of being raped and the models of identity available to her through dominant patriarchal discourses create an affective dissonance for her. Since this dissonance can activate her desire to disturb social and political order and influence gender discourses, she is brutally mutilated by the rapists. This implies that at best power relations only allow her revenge to be taken by her father, himself a key member of the patriarchal system.
Merel Waeyaert
“I all”: Mythical Women and Juliane in Geeraardt Brandt’s De Veinzende Torquatus (The Feigning Torquatus)
In recent years, the study of early modern revenge tragedies has increasingly focussed on aspects of gender in the plays, by studying the female characters as well as the gendered terms which are used to describe the action. This essay explores the character of Juliane and the concept of gendered revenge in Geeraardt Brandt’s early modern Dutch The Feigning Torquatus (De Veinzende Torquatus, 1645), also known as the Dutch Hamlet. Juliane, Torquatus’s love interest, is raped by the tyrant Noron, and in the final act takes her revenge on him, afterwards killing herself. The play offers conflicting visions of female revenge, which the character models herself on and finally transcends. The first, referenced twice by Juliane, is the classical figure of Lucretia, whose suicide not only sparked her male relatives’ revenge on her rapist, but also led to the beginning of the Roman republic. In the early modern period, the myth of Lucretia provided a strengthening of patriarchal structures through the creation of an origin myth of the nation state, and, on a more individual level, the interiorisation of the blame of the rape. Juliane conforms to this image, as she ties her own violation to the honour of her male relatives, and repeatedly emphasizes her will to die as to cleanse herself. However, behind Juliane’s emulation of Lucretia looms a second example, never explicitly mentioned in reference to Juliane: that of female avengers like Medea and Bel-Impera. This example allows Juliane, when her male protectors fail, to momentarily take over the role of Torquatus – including the titular “feigning” – and exact her revenge on Noron. Finally, she becomes superhuman in her suicide: a divine bringer of peace to the nation.
Vanessa Lim
‘The Play’s the Thing’: Deliberating Revenge in Hamlet
One of the great critical questions of Hamlet scholarship—the eponymous character’s apparent delay in meting out his promised vengeance—was probably not on the minds of the play’s early audiences. Renaissance writers and their classical authorities uniformly stressed the importance of deliberation before action, particularly in a situation as morally complex as Hamlet’s. In turn, deliberation was a process closely related to the ars rhetorica, the classical art of rhetoric that formed the cornerstone of Renaissance intellectual culture. Techniques for evaluating the morality and utility of an act were codified in rhetorical handbooks, and could be employed to persuade or dissuade someone (or indeed, oneself) to a particular point of view.
My proposed paper situates the question of revenge in Hamlet against classical and Renaissance ideas of rhetorical deliberation, drawing not only on the rhetorical handbooks of Quintilian, Cicero, and others, but also on works of moral philosophy by Seneca, Montaigne, and more. It demonstrates how the moral and rhetorical conventions surrounding the passions, revenge, and deliberation serve as an important context for understanding not only many of Hamlet’s self-addressed speeches in the play, but also aspects of his characterisation (especially in contrast with Laertes, the play’s other avenging son).
A revenger’s state of mind, I argue, is something that Hamlet tries and fails to talk himself into. This is further complicated by the unstable moral character of the act. Revenge, Shakespeare shows us, may at once be just and unjust as circumstances shade over the morality of the deed with new colour. By constantly inflecting the morality of revenge in different ways as the play progresses, Shakespeare invites us to evaluate our own judgments of how various characters behave in their quest for vengeance. In (re)thinking revenge, Shakespeare suggests, the play’s the thing.
Nick Thompson
Titus Andronicus and the Potential for Madness in Seneca’s De Ira
Seneca holds that “virtue, being self-sufficient, never needs the help of vice” (1.ix.3). Indeed, within the Stoic worldview, vice poses a serious threat to virtue. I propose that Titus, as the “[p]atron of virtue” (1.1.65), characterizes the Stoic ideal and that Titus Andronicus dramatizes Seneca’s warning that “[n]ever will the wise man cease to be angry if once he begins” (2.ix.3). Titus enacts Seneca’s hypothesis that approximation to the Stoic ideal is a measure of the danger that anger poses to Stoic practitioners. Seneca concludes that “[i]f you expect the wise man to be as angry as the shamefulness of crimes compels, he must not be angry merely, but go mad” (2.ix.3). I argue both that if Titus is angry, he is mad, and that his madness, feigned or not, is indistinguishable in appearance from Seneca’s Stoic ideal.
Kornee van der Haven
Vengeance behind the Scenes: Neoclassical Theatre and the Internalisation of Revenge
In seventeenth-century revenge tragedies, the passions that are associated with ‘revenge’ are often considered as an ‘internal act’ that precedes the performance of revenge itself. The revenge is internally prepared through the passions, leading to a desire for revenge, with the ‘external act’ of revenge as the ultimate outcome of this process. The theme of revenge does not disappear from the stage with neoclassicism, but we can say that the representation of revenge is increasingly dominated by the aforementioned ‘internal action’, while the external action of the revenge takes place behind the scenes or is foiled for reasons of decorum. The question is how we should interpret this process of ‘internalisation’ in relationship with the ‘doctrine of the passions’ and its impact on neo-classicist theatre of the late 17th and early 18th century. In my paper I will discuss this process in relation to the spatial and social dimensions of the representations of vengeance on stage. On the basis of three neoclassical interpretations of revenge plays, I will investigate how ‘revenge’ is shifting more and more from a political-public arena to a more private-domestic context. I will look at Hoofman’s neoclassical interpretation of the Papinian story (Koningsberg 1723), made popular by Gryphius in the seventeenth century, and the ‘revenge tragedies’ of the popular Amsterdam playwright Claas Bruin (Epaminondas, 1723 and Coriolanus, 1720), in which the possibility of revenge develops at an internal level but remains unperformed in both tragedies on an external level.
David Manning
Thinking about the Moor’s Revenge
Abdelazer, or The Moor’s Revenge (1676/1695) — an adaption of Lust’s Dominion, or The Lascivious Queen attributed to Thomas Dekker et al. (c.1600, published 1657) — is Aphra Behn’s only tragedy and one of her least studied plays. Its most obvious value to literary studies is as “a kind of mirror to both Othello and Oroonoko” (J. G. MacDonald, 2014; Cf, S. Thomas, 1998); however, this leaves much for the historian to explore.
A gloss on the religio-political topicality of Abdelazer to Restoration Britain and its Empire opens up deeper questions about its position in the history of ideas. A tension in the play between revenging enslavement and avenging regicide resonates with that forged by the dichotomies of forsaken and righteous, puritan and royalist, individual and communal. The ethnic blackness of the vicious Moor, Abdelazer, and the virtuous Moor, Osmin, stands before the anachronism of racism to reflect the complexities of difference in the midst of politics bent on re-affirming loyalty through conflict unto death, as either vengeful punishment or transcendent sacrifice. Set against the waning of fatal martyrdom amongst the English Christians, this example of the genre of revenge tragedy appears both vital and fragile; yet it also provides a window onto to waxing of fatal martyrdom amongst indigenous and enslaved peoples converted to Christianity in the colonies. Taken together, these points complicate the thesis of Grégory Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (2019) and highlight some of the challenges to historiographical revisionism in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Yağmur Tatar
“Anger’s My Meat; I Sup upon Myself”: Carnivalesque Revenge in Coriolanus
In his thorough studies on Rabelais and the carnival, the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin repeatedly comes back to the outward carnivalesque aspects of Shakespeare’s drama and its “carnival sense of the world.” Turning the world upside down, suspending hierarchies, reversing roles through crownings and uncrownings, these carnivalesque aspects are portrayed and analyzed under scrutiny especially in Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies. At the heart of this idea of the carnival lies the complex but regenerative antinomies of life and death; a bold and bawdy celebration of grotesque bodies; the opposition between the carnival crowd of the plebians and the self-contained individualism of the nobles. It is precisely in this opposition that Caius Martius’s destructive passion to wreak vengeance upon his ungrateful city in Coriolanus echoes of the celebration of the festive carnivalesque and its striking connection to vengeance. With these points in mind, the present study aims to discover the carnivalesque aspects of revenge in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus through Bakhtin’s studies on the concept, and further point out to the grotesque characteristics of the act (and the intention) of taking revenge.
Caitlín Rankin-McCabe
Encountering the Spectre
‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’ Hamlet exclaims when he first encounters what appears to be his dead father. Although Hamlet’s first instinct is to recognise the vision’s supernatural orgin, he is yet uncertain whether it could either be an angel or a devil, a ‘spirit of health or goblin damned’? Whilst Hamlet addresses the possibility that this figure ‘May be the devil’ because ‘the devil hath power/ T’assume a pleasing shape’, Shakespeare’s use of the ‘questionable shape’ of the figure casts doubt on the figure’s uncertain body: asking us to revisit what the armoured figure may, in fact, be.
By contrast, Horatio’s first reaction upon seeing the ghost is to confirm the spirit’s likeness to the old King and describe how ‘It harrows [him] with fear and wonder’. Yet once he fails to communicate with the seemingly ‘dumb’ spirit, he and Marcellus strike at it. They may be unnerved by the ghost’s silence, but they may also be troubled by the serious connotations that seeing this kind of supernatural vision has for their own souls. Resorting to this ‘show of violence’, Marcellus and Horatio prove themselves to be inexperienced in dealing with supernatural visions: they are unable to fully comprehend the spirit’s form or purpose and are at once terrified and mesmerised by it.
By exploring the figure of the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Julius Caesar, the character Revenge in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and the awakening of old Andrugio in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, I will discuss why these non-, or once, human bodies become such an important dramatic device. The doubt that settles on these shadowy bodies forces the viewer to question their beliefs in the potential of the supernatural and the existance of the unseen worlds of Christian and classical afterlives.
Anne-Valérie Dulac
“An English tailor crazed i’th’brain”: The Fabric of Revenge in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi
Abstract: The significance of stage-hangings on the English early modern stage, and more specifically in Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi, has recently caught critical attention among specialists of material culture. Although the specific type of material used for the arras remains uncertain, its significance in Webster’s tragedy contributes to stressing the importance of fabric and cloth in the tailoring of revenge. Fashion and textile are so central to the play that the ‘Masque of Madmen’ even features a puzzling yet often ignored character, that of the ‘English tailor’. Following up on the idea that the masque as a dramatic form may be identified as “revenge murder machine” and a “distinctive feature of almost all revenge tragedies”, I would like to suggest that the masque offers a more general and material clue to the centrality of dress and clothing in Jacobean revenge tragedies. Focusing on The Duchess of Malfi, I will show how the play’s obsession with fabric echoes the Jacobean moralists’ alarm over changing fashions while showcasing Webster’s most ambiguous use of their dramatic puissance.
Anne G. Graham
The vengeance of God in early modern French tragedies
In my reflection on early modern revenge tragedy, I will move outside the traditional corpus of English drama to consider two biblical tragedies written by French authors, one a protestant and one a Catholic. Robert Garnier’s 1583 play Les Juifves tells the story of a ghastly and cruel revenge exacted by a tyrannical king upon a contrite people. While Garnier draws on Greco-Roman tragedy for inspiration, in particular with respect to the specific revenge acts of his anti-hero Nabochodonosor, the biblical context of the play complicates the notion of revenge. The violence done to the Hebrews by the Assyrian king is understood from the very beginning as being condoned or even facilitated by God, who is also angry with his people. In the Introduction to his critical edition of Les Juives, Michel Jeanneret argues that a terrible, jobian, question echoes throughout the play : Has God abandonned us?
This same question reverberates through the second play that I will consider : Théodore de Bèze’s 1550 tragedy Abraham sacrifiant. While the story of Abraham and Isaac might seem far from a revenge tragedy, in Beza’s dramatization, Abraham understands the angel’s order to sacrifice his son as a punishment from God, for what, he’s not sure. Abraham is eventually able to overcome his sense that God is acting in a cruel and arbitrary way and place his trust in him and is rewarded accordingly. However, my analysis will show that while both tragedies end with a prophecy of the arrival of the Christ and better times to come, they do not erase the terrible spectre of God’s vengeance that in one play is meted out against the Hebrews and in the other is only imagined by Abraham and his son.
Sarah Fengler
Justifying Revenge. Religion and Politics in Racine’s Athalie
In his last tragedy Athalie (1691), a commissioned work intended to edify Christian schoolgirls, the French tragedian Jean Racine tells the Old Testament story of the blasphemous usurper queen Athalie and her overthrow (2 Kings 11; 2 Chronicles 22–23). Initiated by the Jewish priest Joad, the dethronement of Athalie does not only lead to the restoration of the rightful political and religious order but also to Athalie’s death. As compared with the underlying Old Testament story, the present paper examines the relation between revenge and justice in Athalie and explores the personal, political, and religious arguments that Joad puts forward in justification of his scheme: As Athalie has come to power through a massacre herself and is a worshipper of the deity Baal, Joad claims that her rule has neither political nor religious legitimation. That her regime is shaped by religious tolerance, though, does not prevent him from arranging for her violent overthrow. Arguing that under the guise of religious justice, Joad himself strives for political power, the paper analyses the narratives of revenge presented in Athalie, sheds light on the corresponding religious and political justifications, and reveals the underlying power dynamics with regard to descent and gender. On this basis, the paper gives a new understanding of Racine’s tragedy itself as well as of its relation to seventeenth-century French tragédie classique and conventions of revenge tragedy at the time. The example of Athalie also illustrates to what extent the Christian purpose of a tragedy can prevent the introduction of concepts of revenge that potentially contradict Christian values. Furthermore, the paper explores how revenge narratives from the Old Testament are perceived in the Grand Siècle and modified in order to comply with the requirements of the tragédie classique.
Dinah Wouters
The Jesuit Monopoly on Revenge in Joseph Plays
The eventful life of the biblical patriarch Joseph, one of the most internationally widespread stories in early modern drama, provides many opportunities for the depiction of revenge. The episode with Potiphar’s wife, in particular, is a biblical analogue to the story of Phaedra, the theme of a revenge tragedy by Seneca. Yet the story of Joseph ends with forgiveness and the triumph of divine justice. Accordingly, despite the potential, Joseph plays until the beginning of the seventeenth century hardly concern themselves with the theme of revenge. Rather, they focus on justice, repentance, and forgiveness.
My paper will discuss how revenge becomes an important storyline in Joseph plays after 1600. Remarkably, the change takes place almost exclusively in Jesuit Latin school drama. My paper will show the various ways in which revenge enters the main plot and subplots of Jesuit Joseph plays. Although these dramas are more about spectacle and intrigue than about horror and gore, and although forgiveness and justice always prevail in the end, revenge becomes an alternative option. I will discuss the links with the genre of revenge tragedy, suggesting that the Jesuit plays introduce the possibility of revenge in order to represent Joseph’s forgiveness as a moral choice and a legal policy rather than the natural outcome of the story.