English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality

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Author: Linda Woodbridge

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E ngl ish R e v e nge Dr a m a

Vengeance permeates English Renaissance dramaÂ€– for example, it crops up in all but two of Shakespeare’s plays. This book explores why a supposedly forgiving Christian culture should have relished such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays. A clue lies in the plays’ passion for fairness, a preoccupation suggesting widespread resentment of systemic unfairnessÂ€ – legal, economic, political, and social. Revengers’ precise equivalentsÂ€ – the father of two beheaded sons obliges his enemy to eat her two sons’ headsÂ€– are vigilante versions of Elizabethan law, where penalties suit the crimes:Â€thieves’ hands were cut off, scolds’ tongues bridled. The revengers’ language of “paying” hints at the operation of revenge in the service of economic redress. Revenge makes contact with resistance theory, justifying the overthrow of tyrants, and some revengers challenge the fundamental inequity of social class. Woodbridge demonstrates how, for all their sensationalism, their macabre comedy and outlandish gore, Renaissance revenge plays do some serious cultural work. l i n da w o odbr i d g e is Weiss Chair in the Humanities and Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. She has published widely on the subjects of English Renaissance literature, women in literature, folklore, and revenge. Her books include Women and the English Renaissance:Â€ Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (1984), Shakespeare:Â€A Selective Bibliography of Criticism (1988), The Scythe of Saturn:Â€ Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (1994), and Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (2001).

E ngl ish R e v e nge Dr a m a : Money, Resistance, Equality L i n da Wo odbr i d ge Pennsylvania State University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521884594 © Linda Woodbridge 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN 13

978 0 511 90987 0

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN 13

978 0 521 88459 4

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

If I should stay, I’ d just be in the way. If I should stay, I’ d just be in the way. So I’m gonna stay right here and I’m gonna make you pay. Gaye Adegbalola, Saffire –The Uppity Blues Women, “Bitch with a Bad Attitude”

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments English revenge plays discussed in this book Standard MLA abbreviations for Shakespeare’s plays Note on the text

page ix x xi xiv xvi

Pa r t I R a m pa n t r e v e ng e

1

1 Getting what one deserves

3

2 Can two wrongs ever make a right? Some theory

22

Pa r t II E c onom ic u n fa i r n e s s:Â€r e v e ng e a n d mon e y

59

3 Balancing the books:Â€revenge, commercial mathematics, and the balance of trade

61

4 Payback time:Â€reward, retaliation, and the deluge of debt

84

5 The goddess with the scalesÂ€– and the blindfold

106

Pa r t III P ol i t ic a l u n fa i r n e s s: Â€r e v e ng e a n d r e s i s ta nc e

1 27

6 “A special inward commandment”:Â€the mid sixteenth century

129

7 Resistance in the golden age of revenge plays

167

8 Revenge and regicide:Â€the Civil War era

189

vii

viii

Contents

Pa r t IV S o c i a l u n fa i r n e s s: Â€ v e ng e a nc e a n d e qua l i t y

2 23

â•‡ 9â•… Revenge and class warfare

225

10â•… Quantification revisited:Â€revenge and social equality

254

Conclusion Bibliography Index

271 277 311

Figures

3.1â•‡Detail of broadsheet advertisement for Humphrey Baker’s reckoning school, 1590. 3.2â•‡A military camp laid out by principles of geometry. From Arithmetical Military Treatise, named Stratioticos, by Leonard and Thomas Digges, 1579. 3.3â•‡Device for converting measurements. From The Merchant’s Map of Commerce, by Lewes Roberts, 1638.

ix

page 64 66 72

Acknowledgments

A long-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library at the Â�beginning of this project (2001–2) and a Guggenheim fellowship at the end (2008–9) provided two crucial years free of other duties in which to think and write. I am very grateful. I also thank the Josephine Berry Weiss Chair in the Humanities Endowment for financial support, and I thank Jo and Bill Weiss personally for their friendship and encouragement. Thanks also are due to the English Department at the Pennsylvania State University for providing research assistance every year. I remember with pleasure a lively graduate seminar on Renaissance Revenge Plays in spring, 2006. The students in the seminar taught me a lot, not leastÂ€ – through their laughter and obvious enjoyment of the playsÂ€– that revenge drama is serious and hilarious at the same time. Portions of this book have previously appeared in Renaissance Drama, in my edited book Money and the Age of Shakespeare, and in Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, edited by Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir. I am grateful to Gaye Adegbalola for permission to quote from her song “Bitch with a Bad Attitude.” Thanks to my mother, Conne Taylor, and my husband, Roland Anderson, for their patience and support. And a salute to my daughters, Dana and Rachel, who, in addition to their successful careers as speech pathologist and as college English instructor respectively, managed to produce four grandchildren for me in less time than it took me to proÂ� duce this one book. I know that they are bringing up their children to value literature, to respect the power of knowledge and of thought, andÂ€– like all good mothersÂ€– to understand that revenge is very, very wrong.

x

Standard MLA abbreviations for Shakespeare’s plays

Ado Ant AWW AYL Cor Cym Err Ham 1H4 2H4 H5 1H6 2H6 3H6 H8 JC Jn LLL Lr Mac MM MND MV Oth Per R2 R3 Rom Shr TGV

Much Ado about Nothing Antony and Cleopatra All’s Well that Ends Well As You Like It Coriolanus Cymbeline The Comedy of Errors Hamlet Henry IV, Part 1 Henry IV, Part 2 Henry V Henry VI, Part 1 Henry VI, Part 2 Henry VI, Part 3 Henry VIII Julius Caesar King John Love’s Labor’s Lost King Lear Macbeth Measure for Measure A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Merchant of Venice Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo and Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Two Gentlemen of Verona xiv

Standard MLA abbreviations Tim Tit Tmp TN TNK Tro Wiv WT

Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus The Tempest Twelfth Night The Two Noble Kinsmen Troilus and Cressida The Merry Wives of Windsor The Winter’s Tale

xv

Note on the text

All references to Shakespeare in this book are to the Norton Shakespeare; however, I use the more familiar titles for the Henry VI plays. Unless otherwise designated with a Q, all quotations from Shakespeare’s King Lear are from the Folio. Except for quotations from Edmund Spenser, all spelling has been modernized. Unless otherwise stated, all italics for emphasis in the book are mine. Unless otherwise stated, biblical citations are to the King James Version (KJV). Dates for the first acting of the plays follow Alfred Harbage’s Annals of English Drama 975–1700, 3rd edition.

xvi

Pa r t I

Rampant revenge

Ch apter 1

Getting what one deserves

Men and women of our century tend to endow the people of ancient Athens with moral concerns almost identical with our own, imposing qualities we like best in ourselves upon Greeks unable to resist. Anne Pippin Burnett

We should recall that Drake named the sea vessel he led against the Armada not Forgiveness or The Turned Cheek but The Revenge.

Harry Keyishian

Our refined modern sensibilities recoil from blood revengeÂ€ – a primitive, sub-literary motif. Revenge plays we regard as the primordial slime from which Shakespearean tragedy emerged. Evolving exquisitely, it transcended sensationalist forebears:Â€ “The revenge play before and outside Shakespeare can be a mechanical, shallow and violent form … Hamlet is incomparably more” (Everett 21).1 Nevertheless, both Hamlet and Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, are sensational revenge plays. The civil wars in his eight-play history cycle are a vendetta between two families. In comedy, Shylock thirsts for revenge and Malvolio storms out of Twelfth Night vowing to “be revenged on the whole pack of you!” All but two of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven or thirty-eight plays mention revenge.2 England’s public theater sucked in revenge with its mother’s milk:Â€ Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy was “one of the first extant plays to be written for adult players and performed on the public stage” (Erne 96). Renaissance drama gave us a vengeful annihilation of Spain’s ruling family; a Jew taking revenge on the whole island of Malta; an avenger More examples:Â€ “Compared to The Spanish Tragedy and Antonio’s Revenge, Hamlet exhibits a greater understanding and refinement”; “in Hamlet, we find everything transmuted. A finer imagination is at work” (Halletts 34, 182). “Shakespeare’s plays show a deeper penetration into the nature of the ethical dilemma involved in revenge … than do the plays of his contemporaries” (Prosser 94). 2 Thirty-eight, counting The Two Noble Kinsmen. The two plays that don’t mention revenge are The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labor’s Lost. The Sonnets and The Rape of Lucrece also mention revenge. 1

3

4

Rampant revenge

torturing a victim while making him watch his wife copulate with a lover; a king tied to his bed, who thinks his mistress is inventing new erotic sports, until she vengefully stabs him; an empress avenging her husband by poisoning his assassin’s bay wreath. Avengers wield daggers, rapiers, axes, arrows, searing crowns, penknives. Poison is infused into books, flowers, wreaths, smoke, handkerchiefs, and the cosmetics of a corpse being wooed by a necrophiliac. The sheer number of revenge plots attests to the theme’s popularityÂ€– authors wouldn’t have kept writing or companies staging such plays unless audiences flocked to them.3 Where most plays enjoyed but a single theatrical run, ten revenge plays had three or more runsÂ€ – two of them among the era’s top three or four most-performed plays (The Jew of Malta with twenty runs, The Spanish Tragedy with fifteen).4 Where most plays were printed only once (or never), twenty revenge plays saw two or more editions.5 Cultural traces of these plays are all over the period’s writings. Lukas Erne reports many parodies of The Spanish Tragedy (52), and Claude Dudrap finds it quoted in fifty-nine plays, 1591–1642 (ii:Â€168). Poetry and a tragedy by the schoolmaster Nathanael Richards are shot through with plagiarisms from The Revenger’s Tragedy (see A. Bradford). This aficionado of revenge tragedy also wrote commendatory poems for the 1657 edition of Women Beware Women, recalling how the audience thrilled to its “plots, poisons, mischiefs,” its “hell-bred malice”:Â€“Never came tragedy off with more applause” (ll. 3, 9, 12), and for The Rebellion, where he salivates to find that “plots meet with counter-plots, revenge, and blood.” The age’s premier dramatic genre, tragedy, was identified with revenge. As the allegorical figure Comedy sardonically notes, Tragedy “stabs, hangs, impoisons, smothers, cutteth throats,” employs a howling “Chorus” and a “whining ghost,” crying “Vindicta! Revenge, revenge!” (Warning for Fair Women [anon.] The authors, as “middle-class professionals,” were “concerned with attracting a large popular audience to the commercial theaters. They were not subsidized to any significant extent by patronage, nor did they have private means. They had to ascertain and cater to their audience’s theatrical tastes” (Griswold 66). 4 Based on Yoshiko Kawachi’s performance calendar. The Spanish Tragedy count includes Henslowe’s references to “Jeronimo.” Other revenge plays on the pre-1642 most-performed list are Othello (nine runs); Hamlet, Cupid’s Revenge, and the anonymous Caesar and Pompey (six runs each); The Maid’s Tragedy and 1 Henry VI (five runs each); and Antonio’s Revenge and The Merchant of Venice (three runs each). 5 The Spanish Tragedy (nine editions); Hamlet and The Maid’s Tragedy (eight editions each); The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet (six editions each); 2 and 3 Henry VI (five editions each); Titus Andronicus, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, and Cupid’s Revenge (three editions each); The Atheist’s Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Antonio’s Revenge, Revenge for Honor, the anonymous Caesar and Pompey, 1 Henry VI, Thomas Lord Cromwell, Muleasses the Turk, and The Duke of Milan (two editions each). 3


5

Ind. 51–57).6 One hundred and twenty English Renaissance plays use the word “revenge” or its derivatives ten times or more; Antonio’s Revenge uses it fifty-five times, The Spanish Tragedy sixty times. A. H. Thorndike in 1902 and Fredson Bowers in 1940 isolated revenge tragedy as a genre (see Broude 41). The Halletts’ chapter “Delimiting the Genre” warns that only “finely tuned critical judgments” can determine whether a work is “part of the genre” (280). Eleanor Prosser polices genre boundaries, and Peter Mercer, disqualifying plays that fail to question the morality of revenge, declares even Hamlet “not a revenge tragedy” (246). Isolating revenge tragedy as a genre has helped obscure the prevalence of revenge across many genres. I will speak more of revenge plays, downplaying the genre issue. To the Halletts’ pigeon-holing rhetorical question, “What is to be gained by defining revenge tragedy so broadly that it cuts across well-established genre borders to herd together a mass of plays having very little in common?” (265–6), I reply that much is to be gained by transgressing such boundaries. I will be generously inclusive because my quarry is not genre definition but the cultural work that literary revenge performs. Why did revenge permeate this drama? England was not a feud culture like Scotland, or Friuli in Italy.7 Why did a Christian nation relish vengeful and (often) religiously skeptical plays? (While I give different answers from those of Prosser and other religiously oriented writers, the question they raise is crucial:Â€what is a substantial body of revenge drama doing in a Christian society?) Why, in a monarchy, did stage avengers assassinate kings? Why did a hierarchical nation relish scenes of commoners killing dukes? What cultural work did revenge perform? A clue lies in plays’ interest in fairness and just deserts. The anonymous Liberty and Prodigality, 1601, counted on government officials to restore a square deal: Some men deserve, and yet do want [i.e., lack] their due Some men again, on small deserts do sue. It therefore standeth princes’ officers in hand, The state of every man rightly to understand, The reference might specifically be to Locrine, one of whose two ghosts howls, “Revenge, revenge for blood!”, pursuing a victim with “Vindicta! Vindicta!” (3.5.112, 125), or to George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar, which features “Three ghosts crying Vindicta” (2.1.8 s.d.). 7 As Bowers noted, “In spite of the preoccupation of the age with the subject of private revenge, not many narrations of Elizabethan revenges ending in murder have come down to us, with the exception of … duels” (Elizabethan 23). In contrast to “peripheral regions of Europe in which feuding was common, places such as highland Scotland, Iceland, or Corsica,” in medieval England “royal justice stamped out blood feuds earlier than in any other kingdom” (Muir 275). 6

6

Rampant revenge That so by balance of equality, Each man may have his hire accordingly.

(3.6.33–38)

That many plays harp on fairness suggests that audiences felt they were not fairly treated. In The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, a ghost believes in justice:Â€“All the joints and nerves sustaining nature / As well may break, and yet the world abide, / As any one good unrewarded die, / Or any one ill [i.e., evil] ’scape his penalty” (5.1.29–32). When his faith proves naïve, he organizes revenge. In revenge plays, a resort to private retaliation is a vote of no confidence in official bodies charged with providing fair treatment. Dramatic revenge mimics Tudor law, where “condign” penalties suited crimesÂ€ – thieves’ hands were cut off, scolds’ tongues bridled.8 Trying to administer a condign revenge, Othello smothers Desdemona in the “bed she hath contaminated” (4.1.197–8). When Titus Andronicus’ son avenges him, rhyme and alliteration stress equivalence:Â€“Can the son’s eye behold his father bleed? / There’s meed for meed, death for a deadly deed” (5.3.64–65). Many yearn for just deserts. Lear finds it unfair that he gave his daughters “all” and they don’t love him. Petrarchist love lyrics rest on the (sadly fallacious) belief that one can attain love by deserving it. Wyatt accuses a woman who doesn’t love him of “undeservèd cruelty!” (Blage mss. 4); “disdain me not without desert,” one lover cries (Court of Venus 5). Arthur Marotti argues that “marriage for love was a metaphor for advancement by merit rather than by birth or influence. But … in neither love nor politics did this system obtain” (416). Playgoers deplored unfairness. What impressed the seer Simon Forman in one play was the unfair execution of a seer, simply for telling the truth (Chambers ii:Â€340). A Love’s Labor’s Lost playgoer grumbled that an excellent servant is “as slenderly rewarded” as one “of no merit” (Markham Sig. iv). Asking readers, “Hast thou of thy country well deserved? and art thou of thy labor evil requited?”, Thomas Heywood recommends identifying with staged Roman heroes Marcellus and Scipio, unfairly exiled (Apology Sig. g). Unfairness was like the weather:Â€ everyone talked about it. But revenge plays did something about it. Many revengers are disempowered people, unjustly treated, who step up and take control. Such figures suffer “malice, injustice, treachery, grief, unstable values, and deprivations of power or status. Through revenge they attempt … to restore their integrityÂ€– their sense of psychic wholeness” (Keyishian 2). But rather than viewing revenge through a lens of individual psychology,9 I suggest that the fairness fixation and relish For a discussion of condign punishment, see Jorgensen 32–39. â•‡ Charles and Elaine Hallett’s book on revenge also focuses mainly on the hero’s psychology.

8

9


7

of vigilantism reveal widespread resentment of systemic unfairnessÂ€ – economic, political, and socialÂ€– as the Renaissance witnessed severe disproportion between crime and punishment, between labor and its rewards. E l i z a be t h a n a n d J ac obe a n S o ci e t y: Â€ t h e De fau lt on Fa i r Pa y m e n t Four violations of fair payment fuel revenge plays:Â€ unrewarded merit, unmerited reward, unpunished guilt, and undeserved punishment. Despite the Byzantine scheming and outlandish gore that make these plays hard to discuss with a straight face, they tackle serious contemporary issues. Although Italian and Spanish settings displace vengeful intrigue into the papistical Mediterranean, the plays stage, in kaleidoscopic refraction, some very Elizabethan concerns.10 Unrewarded merit The heroic military service of Titus Andronicus goes unappreciated by the Saturninus administration; Hieronimo’s public service is ignored as he seeks justice for his son’s murder. In The Tragedy of Hoffman a soldier, after fighting thirty battles, “for his merits … was nam’d / A prescript outlaw for a little debt” and forced to become a pirate (1.1.161–4). The neglected soldier, a recurrent figure in plays,11 had a basis in reality:Â€many Elizabethan soldiers were demobilized without pensions, disability compensation, or even full wages. Many people felt under-rewarded economically:Â€through the sixteenth century, wages stagnated or fell while prices rose, and inflation was desperate. Tudor wage and price controls had minimal effect.12 Monetarist solutions also fizzled:Â€ after Elizabeth revalued the debased coinage, prices remained high. The pound sterling’s value fluctuated Ancient settings were another self-protective ployÂ€– Hamlet’s medieval Denmark, Valentinian’s ancient Rome. Remote time and place were standard covers for comment on contemporary affairs, in many literary genres:Â€ as Spenser confessed in the letter to Raleigh prefixed to The Faerie Queene, “I chose the history of King Arthur as … furthest from the danger of envy and suspicion of present times.” 11 Shakespeare’s general Alcibiades muses bitterly, “I have kept back their foes / While they have told [i.e., counted] their money and let out / Their coin upon large interestÂ€– I myself, / Rich only in large hurts … / Is this the balsam that the usuring senate / Pours into captains’ wounds? Banishment!” (Tim 3.6.104–9). See also Montford in Chettle and Day’s Blind Beggar of Bednal Green and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi. 12 “Grain prices rose, and not just occasionally as a result of bad harvests, but quite generally and extending over many generations … Wages did not keep up … At the beginning of the seventeenth century weavers and carpenters earned twice as much as at the beginning of the sixteenth century, while the price for food had almost tripled” (Jütte 29). On wage and price controls, 10

8

Rampant revenge

ruinously on the global market. A 1564 Royal Commission Report wrongly assumed that “bankers ruled the exchange”; in fact bankers were “ruled by the forces operating on the money market” (De Roover, Gresham 185). Sir Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Commonweal recognized the dependence of domestic prices on foreign tradeÂ€– the English couldn’t compel foreign suppliers to lower prices:Â€“We may not set the price of things at our pleasure but follow the price of the universal market of the world” (86). In a global market, economic problems exceeded the reach of national governments. During a serious recession in 1622, Gerard de Malynes, an advocate of currency regulation, listed thirty-five “defective means and remedies … tried these 350 years” (Lex 76)Â€– an average of one defective remedy per decade. Three hundred and fifty years of failed regulation overwhelmed his optimism about his own remedies. And the laissez-faire belief of his ideological opposite, Edward MisseldenÂ€– that no one could control markets or currency valueÂ€– played into public fear of government economic impotence. Revengers with their artful decapitations were among many craving fair payment, control over their own fortunes. For all their fanciful poisonings and picturesque Italianate villains, revenge plays obliquely respond to inflation and failed economic regulation. Unmerited reward Viluppo in The Spanish Tragedy is rewarded for perjury and Tamora in Titus Andronicus promoted from vanquished enemy to Roman empress on slim qualifications. Elizabethans hated usurers, resenting their alleged profit without honest labor. Venture capitalists and global traders dodged charges of undeserved windfall profits by trumpeting their arduous toil.13 Elizabeth’s granting of monopolies was resented as unmerited reward (enriching monopolists) and unrewarded merit (wage-earners’ buying power eroded by high prices on monopolized items). Stuart kings’ opulent gifts to favorites fueled public discontent over unmerited reward,14 as did more accessible targets such as the “undeserving poor.” see Palliser 130–60. Muldrew summarizes, “Despite all the effort which went into framing and enforcing the ‘massive’ statute of artificers, in which wages were to be legally determined and set by local justices of the peace,” such regulation ended as “the least important factor in determining wage rates” (49). 13 Leinwand 111, 115, 138. Exposing oneself to risk was also a sign that one deserved profits:Â€“Just as the law depended upon evidence of risk to distinguish a lawful lender from a usurer, so an adventurer’s bona fide consisted in his willingness to put himself at ‘fortune’s hazard’” (111). 14 Robert Harding documents complaints about “systematic neglect of merit, status, or services in making appointments and awards” (47). See also Elliot/Brockliss, and Peck.


9

Unpunished guilt In revenge plays, murderers and rapists threaten to go scot freeÂ€– Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius in Titus Andronicus, Balthazar and Lorenzo in The Spanish Tragedy. In real life, many malefactors did go free. Rape, a common crime, was seldom successfully prosecuted (see Bashar, “Rape,” Cockburn). The literate were exempted from prosecution by benefit of clergy. And judges could be bribed. “Royal justice failed to gain public confidence,” Ronald Broude notes, because it was unable “consistently to safeguard life and property” and because its “integrity was often suspect” (45). Revenge sometimes seemed the judicial system’s evil twin (see Chapter 4), and some plays vilify the “wild justice” of revenge in a sleight of hand that keeps institutional justice pure. G. K. Hunter’s “revenge on the Elizabethan stage … is a perverted form of justice” (Dramatic Identities 185) elides the Tudor tendency to see justice itself as perverted.15 Undeserved punishment Titus’ sons, framed for murder, are hustled off to execution. Hoffman indicts the legal system that condemned his father:Â€“Wretches sentenced never find defense,” even if “guiltless” (1.1.222–3). The Tudors enacted harsh penalties for petty crimes. Execution levels were much higher than in the eighteenth century:Â€convicted Elizabethan felons “stood a one in four or five chance of being executed … under Queen Anne, the chances On bribery:Â€ William Wentworth advised his son, “Though your cause be never so just … yet must you … procure [the judge’s] good opinion by discretion and gifts” (17). On judicial corruption:

15

Many offenses (for example, rape and murder) traditionally regarded as torts (wrongs involving only the offender and victim) were made into felonies (offenses in which the king was concerned). The fact that the crown received fees for cases tried in its courts, and that the goods of convicted felons were escheated to the crown provided strong inducements for often impecunious sovereigns to enlarge the number of offenses which their courts were competent to try. However, the potential for judicial profits thus created compromised the integrity of royal justice in the eyes of many. (Broude 45–46) Both The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus employ the image of a just Astraea, often identified with Queen Elizabeth, absenting herself from earth (see Bate 280). Bate argues that “the necessity to revenge reveals the inadequacy of the law; the formalization of revenge in performance acts as a substitution for the law” (278). And rage at the legal system reached a high pitch of intensity during the radical mid seventeenth century in England, when “calls for reform arose from a deep hatred for lawyers and a deep dissatisfaction with the present state of the law. There were those against Star Chamber, which was abolished; there were those against the ‘norman yoke’ of common law; many voices were raised against Chancery; the practice of law was seen as elitist, esoteric, and biased” (Fortier 160).

10

Rampant revenge

were more like one in ten” (Sharpe 93). Felony, consisting “overwhelmingly of property offensesÂ€– larceny, burglary, housebreaking, highway robbery, robbery and pickpocketing,” was a capital offense (79). Many opposed such harshness. A Parliamentarian decried as “oversharp and bloody” a law stipulating execution for a third vagrancy conviction (Leonard 69). In Utopia, More protested disproportion between crime and punishment:Â€that English thieves are “executed everywhere,” as many as twenty at a time “hanged on a single gallows,” his Hythlodaye finds against “the public good. The penalty is too harsh … Simple theft is not so great a crime that it ought to cost a man his head” (9). Thomas Starkey deplored that “for every little theft a man is … hanged without mercy or pity,” even if stealing “for necessity” (114). He denounced corrupt judges, with “little regard” for “true administration of justice. Lucre and affection ruleth all”; defendants have no worries “if the judge be their friend” (86). John Ponet wanly hoped that judges would impose sentences “not greater or less than the fault deserveth, and that they punish not the innocent or small offender … and let the mighty and great thief escape” (8). Imprisonment for debt was keenly resented as a penalty only for ill fortune (Leinwand 75). Juries sometimes “found offenders not guilty” to avoid “unjust capital punishment for crimes such as theft” (Fortier 81–82). Ec onom ic a n d L e g a l U n fa i r n e ss Part I of this book deals with economic unfairness and related legal unfairness, reflected in revenge plays’ pervasive economic language. Elizabethans applied monetary terms to both reward and punishment. To pay was either to reward or to punish/be punished.16 “Let good Antonio look he keep his day, / Or he shall pay for this” (MV 2.8.25–26). In Women Beware Women, a woman has “paid well” for a lover:Â€ “He kept a quean or two with her own money, / That robbed her of her plate, and cut her throat” (2.2.164–5Â€ – here “paid” means both cash to a gigolo and a cut throat). A victim could “pay” or be paid. “Paid” or “paid home” anticipated our “paid back”:Â€“Thou art now paid home / For all thy counseling in knavery” (Hoffman 5.3.2462–3). When Antony marries, Cleopatra feels Caesar’s revenge:Â€ “In praising Antony, I have dispraised Caesar… I am paid for’t And “reward” meant both “recompense” for a service or merit and “retribution for evil-doing; requital, punishment.” “Retaliate” meant “requite, repay in kind” for both “injury” and “kindness.” From re- plus the Latin tālis or “such-like,” retaliation was condign payment (OED). In the revenge play The Bastard, revenge is retaliation (5.4.139), and a grateful character vows to “retaliate thy just deserts” (2.3.281).

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11

now” (Ant 2.5.108–10). In Falstaff’s whoppers, injury is payment:Â€“Two I am sure I have paid”; “seven of the eleven I paid”Â€– ironic for one who has paid tavern bills only “three or four times” (1H4 2.5.176, 201–2; 3.3.15). Reward is not an addition, like a pay hike, and punishment a subtraction, like a salary decrement:Â€for Elizabethans, punishment too was an addition, a throughthe-looking-glass payment, a negative salary. “The wages of sin is death,” the Bible put it (Romans 5:Â€18). Pain, like money, was a payment. An unfair exchange sparks Titus’ revenge. He judges the exchange of his hand for his sons’ lives, though “dear,” an “easy price”; but the messenger’s unlovely burden of heads and hand exposes the deal as a trick:Â€“Ill art thou repaid / For that good hand” (3.1.233–4). Violation of fair payment sparks revenge, whose idiom is monetary:Â€ heaven will not “suffer murder unrepaid ” (Spanish Tragedy 3.13.3). Vindice demands, “whoe’er knewÂ€/ Murder unpaid?” (Revenger’s Tragedy 1.1.42–43). When Ithimore snarls, “Pay me my wages,” Barabas menaces, “I’ll pay thee with a vengeance” (Jew of Malta 3.4.118–19). Avengers’ economic idiom is often one of debt repaymentÂ€– “For this I owe you” (Ado 5.4.52). In Chapter 4 I will inscribe the preoccupation with revenge within what Craig Muldrew calls a “culture of credit”Â€– widespread indebtedness. Stage revengers often encounter a corrupt legal system:Â€“God’s justice could be slow, his earthly representatives corrupt, the machinery of state out of order, so that flagrant wrongs went unpunished” (A. Burnett 21). Titus’ sons, tried for murder, are not allowed to testify.17 Judges fear public loss of faith in the judiciary:Â€ if they acquit the rapist of one virtuous victim, “judgment itself / [Will] be condemned and suffer in men’s thoughts” (Revenger’s Tragedy 1.2.58–59). The English translator of a Senecan revenge play added a passage indicting the judiciary:Â€“The subtle science of the law, / The statutes of our land, /… / Thou dost not understand. / The judges be malicious men” (Agamemnon Sig. [c6]v). “The law’s delay” (Ham 3.1.74) also frustrated justice:Â€“If the legal mechanisms of the state … ordained to take retribution … grind exceedingly slowly … a lifetime could pass without the proper redress of the grievance” (FrenchÂ€31). Unlike the judiciary, revengers demand evidence:Â€Hamlet performs the mousetrap experiment and, for Hieronimo, Pedringano’s letter corroborates Bel-Imperia’s accusations (Spanish Tragedy 3.7.50–52). Revengers delay partly to seek evidence. Often decried as mere dithering, such delay can lend an air of rational judiciousness. The aversion to rash haste is something revengers share with the Deity:Â€“Heaven hath ever been to vengeance slow” (Bellany/McRae Niv2, 12). Affecting saintly patience, King James, answering a libel, claimed that “slow I am revenge to take” (Bellany/McRae Nvi1, 169). The Halletts hold that delay indicates qualms about the morality of revenge (84–85). Confessing that “the evidence offers little support for a claim that the delay calls attention to the promptings of conscience” (88), they fall back on subconscious motivation.

17

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Rampant revenge

However, plays’ judicial arrangements look distinctly odd compared with the highly developed Tudor legal system, with its assizes and quarter sessions. Citizens of that litigious society routinely spent decades in lawsuits; country folk went up to London for the legal term to shop and to sue people, national pastimes that England bequeathed to her American colonies. But revenge plays often have no judiciaries at all. A duke or king summarily metes out justiceÂ€– or injustice; the occasional judge is usually under a duke’s thumb. Trials are always mockeries, courts always kangaroo. A duchess vows revenge for the duke’s failure to pardon her rapist son:Â€one word would have freed him and “made him walk / With a bold foot upon the thorny law” (Revenger’s Tragedy 1.2.103–4). In Titus, mention of proof astounds the emperor:Â€“If it be proved? You see it is apparent”; “the murderers” must “not speak a wordÂ€– the guilt is plain” (2.3.292, 300–1). Alexandro in The Spanish Tragedy is similarly condemned without due process. Such legal scenes, at a fantastic remove from real trials, are a metaphor for unfairness in general. And while legal inequity did disturb Elizabethans, I place more weight on economic malaise as a fomenter of revenge plays. We could classify unrewarded merit and unmerited reward as economic issues, unpunished guilt and undeserved punishment as legal issues, but all four rest on an economic substratum:Â€it was the rich whose guilt went unpunished, the poor who were harshly penalized. Malefactors “unwhipped of justice” are the elite:Â€“Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; / Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; / Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it” (Lr 4.5.154–7). But “legal” did tinge “economic” in that wages and prices still evoked a language of justice. People still spoke of “the just price” at a historical moment when moral coloration was bleaching out of money. T h e Fa i r Wag e a n d t h e J us t Pr ic e M e e t t h e F r e e -w h e e l i ng M a r k e t The Renaissance inherited the medieval and classical notion of a “just price” (Noonan 82–84). Supply and demand, understood since classical antiquity, did not alone determine it. Malynes, like many writers, takes for granted that commodities are expensive or cheap “according to plenty or scarcity of the things” (Canker 10), but buyers and sellers haggled in a Â�narrow range around a base price (communis aestimatio) reflecting community norms articulated by market officials, who based “a public


13

estimate of the common price for basic commodities such as grain” on discussion with market participants. Prices “were listed in the mayor’s court books every market day” to give buyers and sellers an “idea of the conditions of the market” and “to act as a mean around which bargaining could take place” (Muldrew 45). During the Black Death in 1349, local authorities tried to “impose ‘reasonable’ prices on butchers, fishmongers, innkeepers, brewers, bakers, poulterers, and other food-sellers … Wardens were appointed to see that no one sold his grain above the just price” (Britnell 4–5). When in 1593 the Brewers’ Company lobbied against the mayor’s reducing the price of beer, the Privy Council declared the reduction fair, given a recent fall in the price of malt (Dean 342)Â€– hardly unfettered free enterprise. Such actions reflected faith in a just price:Â€terms like “truth” and “justice” recur in discussions of price-setting. In commodity transactions both parties agree on a price, reflecting “a certain equality in the value of things, permuted by a true reason grounded upon the commodious use of thingsÂ€… equality is … a mutual voluntary estimation of things made in good order and truth, wherein inequality is not admitted or known. And the seller is to sell his wares according to the common estimation” (Malynes, Lex 44).18 Two pricing modes are at work here:Â€(1) the “common estimation”Â€– a price set by market authorities; and (2) a metaphysical concept of “true reason,” of “good order and truth.” “Equality” means a price fair for sellers, affordable for buyers. “Commodious use” anticipates the later “use value” as opposed to “exchange value”Â€– a buyer will use the purchase rather than resell it for profit. References to truth and fairness abound:Â€rarely is a price purely what the market will bear. Writers stress community standards of value, underwritten by absolute standards of fairness, sometimes Christian:Â€“Nature requireth to have things done by conscience, and would that bargaining should be builded upon justice, whereby an upright dealing and a charitable love is uttered amongst all men” (T. Wilson 75). The anonymous Godly Treatise Concerning the Lawful Use of Riches stipulates: Let the seller name the goodness of his ware truly … without dissimulation; and let the buyer give his due price, that a proportion may be observed between the price and the ware … Every price agreed upon between the buyer and seller, is not a due or lawful price, but that which is either appointed by indifferent and wise men in authority, or paid according to the common estimation. (Sig. f7v) 18

Elsewhere, Malynes compares barter, money, and exchange to Plato’s tripartite soul. Exchange, like “spirit,” “direct[s] and control[s] (by just proportions) the prices and values of commodities and moneys” (59)Â€– another sign that a spiritual aura still surrounded the “just price.” See J.Â€Anderson.

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Rampant revenge

Here are four ways to arrive at a price:Â€(1) price-setting by impartial “men in authority”; (2) “the common estimation”Â€ – what we call “the going rate,” but with more community agency; (3) a haggled price (“agreed upon between the buyer and seller”); and (4) the “true” price (reflecting the “goodness” of wares “truly”; the “due or lawful price”). To this writer, the first three are but imperfect mortal approximations of a Platonic “true” price, inhering mystically in a commodity, like a figure pre-existing in a sculptor’s marble. On the principle that everyone deserves necessities at affordable prices, price regulation covered “basic necessities, such as wheat, bread, meat, wine and beer” (De Roover, “Concept” 425). Price-setting solely by an amoral market was strenuously resisted: If a man driven by a desperate need to feed his family wants to sell wheat and the market price of wheat is 100, he is entitled to sell at 100; his need is not to be exploited by a buyer seeking a bargain. If a man needs a common medicine to save his life and its usual price is 10, then 10,000 cannot be asked of him on the ground that it is worth that much to him. (Noonan 88)

Across Europe, especially during crop failures, government regulation discouraged hoarding and market-cornering (De Roover, “Concept” 429).19 And yet prices rose, and wages stagnated. Steve Rappaport estimates that earning power declined by 29 percent during the 1500s (150); other historians claim up to 60 percent. In 1550 John Mason dismissed a regulation of cheese and butter prices, having seen many “such ordinances; and ever the end is dearth” (Palliser 317). Runaway prices eroded faith in the community’s ability to reach a “common estimation,” in government ability to regulate prices, in the very existence of a “just price.” One got not what one deserved but what a capricious market decreed. The question “What is fair?” was becoming absurd. Thomas Milles cherished “lawful exchange,” with a “stable and constant price given to money by public authority,” shuddering at “fallible exchange,” the value of money determined by “the instable affection of covetous merchants” (11). “Covetous” is moral and religious:Â€economic life should conform to Christian principles. But “constant” and “instable” have a Petrarchan tinge. Sonneteers wanted a “constant” lady; but sonnet mistresses were notorious for “instable affection.” Hovering over the passage are other fickle spectres:Â€Lady Luck and Dame Fortune. Milles Complicating the issue, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice trades not in necessities but in “luxury goods, the consumption of which is governed not by physical need but by psychological values like social prestige, so that there can be no question of a Just Price” (Auden 74).

19


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waxes allegorical:Â€ “The fair lady Merchandising Exchange enticed and allured the Merchant Adventurers of England” (19). This fair lady looks like a forerunner of the eighteenth-century figures Dame Trade and Lady Credit who represented speculation in money markets, harnessing women’s stereotypic attractiveness and fickleness to depict market unpredictability (see Mulcaire). European thinkers recognized that “exchange rates were inherently unstable and sensitive to changes in market conditions”; Luca Pacioli rated them “as uncertain and unpredictable as the weather”; but “in England the prevailing doctrine was … that the exchange rates were manipulated by a few wicked private bankers who undervalued English money” (De Roover, Gresham 175–8). Such attitudes resembled the belief that witches could control the weather and evinced a wish for controlÂ€– even evil controlÂ€– in a roller-coaster economy. Seeking to exculpate merchant bankers and exchange traders, Misselden argued that controlling the exchange was as impossible as regulating domestic pricesÂ€– hardly a reassuring defense. Governments failed to ensure fair prices, just as revenge-play kings are blamedÂ€ – in broadly painted, often exaggerated strokesÂ€ – for failing to establish communities that are fair to all their members. From The Spanish Tragedy’s king to Titus Andronicus’ emperor to Claudius in Hamlet, authority figures fail to foster a just society. The Renaissance conflation of the goddesses Justitia and Fortuna (see Chapter 5) suggests suspicion that justice was being replaced by the luck of the draw, the just price by what the market would bear. Revengers combated not only human foes but contingency, personified as Fortune, indifferent to deserving. The market was like plague, unrespectful of personal deserving. In Dekker’sâ•¯1603,â•¯Theâ•¯Wonderfulâ•¯Year,â•¯justiceâ•¯collapses:â•¯aâ•¯Goodâ•¯Samaritan who helps a plague victim himself contracts plague; an adulterer lives. And the market was like the weather, which had ruined harvests in 1586, 1587, and 1594–7. The market, the plague, the weatherÂ€ – like Calvin’s GodÂ€– bestowed painful experiences of arbitrariness. How could anyone obtain just deserts? No wonder Elizabethans were receptive to vigilante control over circumstance. Revenge plays are responding to economic frustration, and bookkeeping language peppers them. Calibrating revenge to an offense is an accounting skill, and if revenge seemed Italianate, so did a new arrival in EnglandÂ€– Venetian bookkeeping. Revenge plays arose in an age whose great mathematical achievements were algebraic equations and doubleentry bookkeeping, both balanced binary systems. And bilateral symmetry typifies the plays. Titus Andronicus features, on each side of its

16

Rampant revenge

vendetta, two decapitations and the deaths of six major characters; five of The Spanish Tragedy’s characters go to Hades, five to Elysium. Revengers design retaliations equivalent in kind (one stabbing avenges another) and sometimes pay lip service to equal magnitude.20 But more typically, revenges exceed the original offense in quantity or intensity, in accord with Seneca’s scelera non ulcisceris / Nisi vincis:Â€“Thou never dost enough revenge the wrong / Except thou pass [i.e., surpass it]” (Thyestes, Heywood translation 34). Excess is a kind of interest. Although revengers claim to want balanced books, they really want a credit on their side of the ledger, just as governments promoting import/export equilibrium really wanted a trade imbalance in their own favor. Mary Poovey argues that, even in literal accountancy, the balanced ledger was a fiction; and so was the revenger’s ideal of balanced books. Just as merchants sought not debit/credit parity but a profit, revengers sought not a tie game but victory. The mental ledger provided a yardstick for measuring triumph.21 P ol i t ic a l U n fa i r n e ss Most revenge-play rulers preside over unjust societies; many are outright tyrants. Tudor plays brim with abusive autocrats, and Jacobean tragedy focuses on violent crimes “committed by the figure authorized to prosecute and punish them” (Allman 34). Part II of this book, on political unfairness, puts tyrant-slaying revenge plays into conversation with resistance theory, justifying overthrow of tyrants. Students of revenge customarily note that the Tudors were against it:Â€“All the voices of Church and State inveighed against revenge” (Prosser xi). Consolidating dynastic power after that arch-vendetta the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors strove to squelch feuding between over-mighty subjects, and stifling revenge was a crucial plank in this platform (see Broude 47). But did playgoers oppose revenge as Tudor monarchs did? “Fitness” is qualitative, proportionality quantitative. But within proportionality, what comprises “equal” is highly subjectiveÂ€ – whether a sliced-out human heart is equivalent to antisemitic remarks depends on one’s point of view. As Christopher Boehm reports of Montenegran tribal feuding, “Each clan tended to overperceive insults that it had received and to underperceive the insults that had been suffered by its enemy” (113). Revenge proportionality is an issue in modern films, as when, in the 1992 Unforgiven, prostitutes demand death for one who has disfigured a prostitute’s face. Sometimes early modern revenge equivalents strike modern sensibilities as bizarre, as when (in revenge on Cleopatra) Antony has Caesar’s messenger whipped and then offers to let Caesar whip his bondman “to quit [i.e., requite] me” (Ant 3.13.153). But even such strange proxies reveal the high value assigned to exact equivalency. 21 In this devotion to retaliatory victory, revenge plays join other competitive genres such as encomia, where “the momentum of praise demands an ‘outdoing’” (Bady 20). 20


17

Why do those who long ago recognized Tillyard’s Elizabethan world picture as establishment ideology still think Elizabethans abhorred revenge because the establishment told them to? Condemning revenge was an ideological move, promoting a state monopoly of violence.22 Subjects could and did resist such moves. Yes, the government ordered homilies of obedience read in every parish, and preachers abominated revenge. But doesn’t this suggest congregational attraction to revenge? Why preach against what parishioners already abhorred? We have mostly got beyond Tillyard’s belief in passive acceptance of sermons; but one still hears that Elizabethans loathed revenge because it was denounced from the pulpit. Ample evidence attests that they resisted propaganda from the state church, and revenge plays’ huge popularity is part of that evidence. That bastion of legitimate authority, the Law, sought decorum:Â€ penalties should fit crimes. John Woolton enunciates the principle of condign punishment:Â€“It is fit that they should be afflicted with those things wherein they have offended” (Sig. l2–l2v). Henry de Bracton said a rapist should “be punished in the parts in which he offended. Let him thus lose his eyes which gave him sight of the maiden’s beauty” and lose the testicles which “excited his hot lust” (ii:Â€414–15).23 One evildoer was executed “before his own house, wherein he had … perpetrated all his enormous crimes” (Reynolds 259). Shakespeare mentions “condign punishment” (2H6 3.1.130), and God practiced it:Â€an archbishop, trying to silence God’s ministers, “had his tongue so swollen that it stopped his own mouth” (Beard 46). Resistance theorist John Ponet enlists the condign Genesis 9:Â€ 6 to sanction tyrannicide:Â€ “He that sheddeth the blood of man, his blood shall be shed by man” (7). And revengers mete out penalties fitting crimes, provocatively appropriating state justice. Just as medieval clergy disliked poetry’s “religion of love” diction (e.g., sacrifices on the altar of beauty) as erotic love blasphemously rivaling Bacon, who held revenge “illegal,” showing “contempt for the law” (L. Anderson 15), was a lawyer and judge. Similarly, much writing on Elizabethans’ alleged aversion to revenge appears to emanate from politically conservative positions. Prosser, for example, considers resistance a crime or the sin of disobedience. It does not enter her mind that anyone might have resisted the establishment on principle or enjoyed “bad” heroes as an outlet from stultifying respectability. Audiences, she holds, seek “a norm for emulation” (16). In Foucauldian terms, she subsumes dissidence under delinquenceÂ€– yes, audiences enjoyed revenge, but a “high rate of alcoholism … does not indicate that the average man approves of drunkenness” (24). 23 In Revenge for Honor, a man demands that his wife’s alleged rapist be blinded:Â€the “eyes that led him to unlawful objects, / ’Tis fit should suffer for’t a lasting blindness” (4.1.80–81). Condign revenge still appears in Hollywood westerns. In The Jack Bull, 1999, a man “unfairly deprived of what is rightfully his and … rendered powerless to do anything about it by a corrupt legal system” burns down the stable of a man who abused his horses (French 37). 22

18

Rampant revenge

Christianity, so, to Renaissance jurists, revenge plays’ condign retaliations might have seemed impudent trespasses on the judiciary. An anti-Chief Justice, sprightly Vindice tricks the duke, who has poisoned a woman for resisting his lust, into lecherously kissing her skull anointed with poison:Â€“This very skull, / Whose mistress the duke poisoned with this drug, / … shall be revenged / In the like strain and kiss his lips to death” (3.5.100–4). Acting “in the like strain”Â€– giving “satisfaction suited to their wrongs” (Chapman, Bussy d’Ambois 2.1.158)Â€– was essential. Hamlet kills Claudius unshriven, as Claudius killed his father, and forces poison into Claudius’ mouth as Claudius forced poison into his father’s ear. The need to get it exactly right contributes to the revenger’s delay. (Hamlet won’t kill Claudius at prayer, lest he fail to die unshriven.) Maximus plots to rape the wife of his own wife’s rapist (Valentinian 3.1.327). In Antonio’s Revenge, Piero kills a man’s son and his own son is killed; “as he had prevented the marriage of Antonio and Mellida, so his own marriage will be disrupted” (Halletts 175). The words “fit” and “fitting” abound:Â€“Revenge should have proportion. / By sly deceit he acted every wrong; / By deceit I would have him entrapped; / Then the revenge were fit, just, and square” (Hoffman 5.1.2200–3). A queen finds a time “most fitting for revenge” on her husband’s mistress (T. Heywood, 2 Edward IV p. 128). “I’ll fit you” (as in The Spanish Tragedy 4.1.70 or The Bastard 4.4.232) meant “I’ll get even with you” or “give you what fits what you did.” The plays’ finely calibrated retaliations mimic justice, claiming a rival legitimacy. S o ci a l U n fa i r n e ss A speaker in Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue ascribes political resistance to social inequality:Â€“Where virtue is not rewarded worthily, then it rebelleth sturdily” (166). Primogeniture should be abolished. Yes, it underpins the nobility:Â€“If the lands in every great family were distributed equally betwixt the brethren,” soon “the head families would decay” (106–7). But why prolong a system in which vicious or uneducated heirs can inherit power and land? (109). He also opposes hereditary monarchy. And social status was growing more fluid, meritocracy making inroads against the hereditary elite. The era saw class wars (see Chapter 9); but as James Scott notes, peasant rebellions are usually “crushed unceremoniously”Â€ – it is “more important to understand … the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups:Â€foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage” (Weapons of the Weak


19

xvi). I would add revenge. One of its modes, the curse, works magically, incorporeally. Most Greek curses and Latin maledicta were “motivated by revenge” (L. Watson 6). Aimed socially upward, the curse is a weapon of the weak:Â€only when she loses political power does Queen Margaret begin cursing. Revenge plays pulsate with curses. Part III of this book deals with revenge as redress for the disempowered,24 whether well-born but dispossessed (Titus, Hamlet) or of lower status with high-born enemies (Hieronimo, Vindice). Shylock, Barabas, and Margaret are cruel and violent, but plays stress the disempowerment that turns them vengeful. A radical subset of revenge plays challenges that bedrock inequity, social casteÂ€ – an avenger’s inferior status blocks justice. Hieronimo and Vindice kill dukes in revenge for the death of commoners. Gordon Braden calls revenge “the aristocratic right of private justice” (Renaissance Tragedy 114); Elizabethans knew the glamorous Italian aristocratic revenge code from such authors as Count Romei. Given the aristocratic credentials of honor vengeance, its appropriation by commoners is a leveling move. Focusing on a subset of plays, including 2 Henry VI, The Spanish Tragedy, Othello, The Jew of Malta, The Atheist’s Tragedy, The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, The Duke of Milan, and Women Beware Women, I situate their vengeful status-consciousness in the context of radical leveling movements. Revengers find something deeply wrong with society, far beyond one villain’s evil. “The time is out of joint,” says Hamlet (1.5.189). Faced with but one villain, Marston’s Antonio delivers a “homily on human corruption” (Mercer 90).25 I suggest that revenge plays appealed to audiences’ own feeling of deep societal wrongness. The villain embodied all that kept them from getting what they deserved. As A. Burnett notes, “The Renaissance avenger, unlike Atreus, is weaker than his enemies” (24). Jonathan Dollimore calls the action of revenge plays “a strategy of survival resorted to by the alienated and dispossessed” (29). Allman’s view of femininity as the master discourse of powerlessness, her assumption that all the powerless are feminized, is ill-supported. But all resent the privileged. Vindice’s idea of death as a “terror to fat folks, / To have their costly three-piled flesh worn off” (Revenger’s Tragedy 1.1.45–46) suggests that death, awaiting all, “bears with particular heaviness on the rich”; this invites “satisfaction at the fate that Death has in store for a fiercely resented social class” (Mercer 95). 25 Marston also wrote The Malcontent, and arguably the malcontent figure featured in several revenge plays embodies the resentments of systemic unfairness I am discussing. Danny Campbell intriguingly casts Milton’s Satan as a dramatic malcontent figure, viewing Paradise Lost as a revenge tragedy (177–99). Wendy Griswold situates revenge plays among modern cultural forces:Â€tracking the precarious survival onstage of a handful of Renaissance revenge plays over four centuries (recently in the iron lung of subsidized theaters), she ascribes the upsurge of revivals on the post-1955 London stage to contemporary conditions:Â€a “series of economic crisesÂ€… the 24

20

Rampant revenge F r e qu e n t ly As k e d Qu e s t ions

First, why do I focus on drama? Painter’s 1566 fiction anthology The Palace of Pleasure includes eighteen revenge tales; the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry database lists some 2,800 uses of “revenge” and its derivatives in nondramatic poetry, 1603–60. Occasionally I discuss nondramatic revenges. But mostly I focus on drama, for practical reasonsÂ€– revenge figures so widely as to require limits. Drama is the most prominent genre (some fifty English revenge plays in the period) in which revenge figures. Second, what do I mean by some key terms? Why the homely Old English “fairness” rather than the Latinate “equity”? “Fairness” meant “equitableness, fair dealing, honesty, impartiality” (OED). But “equity” had meant “what is fair and right” since Chaucer’s day. “Equity,” though, stems from æquusÂ€– equalÂ€– and I argue that a concept of fairness as equality developed only gradually. Also, “equity” risks confusion with the jurisprudential term. Like revenge, jurisprudential equity was “recourse to general principles of justice (the naturalis æquitas of Roman jurists)” when “the law did not provide adequate remedy” (OED).26 But equity decisions, accumulating as precedents, lead to “an organized system of rules” as “definite and rigid” as those of law (OED), effacing the more fluid extralegality analogous to revenge. And Chancery, equity’s high court, was a royal institution, out of step with revengers’ anti-establishment stance. Hence “fairness.” As for “revenge,” I try to preserve its multiple nuances. Broude warns against anachronistically limiting it to “extralegal retaliation”:Â€ it could mean “punishment meted out by the commonweal.” Magistrates were called “common revengers” and the punishment they assigned was “public vengeance” (38, 41). The Middle Ages, Broude holds, didn’t distinguish between private and state revenge; Elizabethans did, but called both “revenge.” (We apply “revenge” to private and “justice” to public retribution.) Broude doesn’t explore the implications of applying “revenge” to private, public, and divine retribution. Stretching one word over disparate widespread persistence of poverty and inequality,” loss of confidence in “the welfare state and Britain’s international role”Â€ – even the Profumo scandal with its Jacobean whiff of a sexually decadent court (166–7). Such a culturally embedded reading is in tune with my approach. 26 Wide interest in equity underlines the era’s concern with fairness. This was a: dynamic time for thinking about equity:Â€Protestantism and vernacular translations of the Bible gave equity a renewed importance as a religious idea … humanism reexamined Greek and Roman ideas … the conflict between courts of common law and Chancery triggered an ongoing discourse about the nature of law and equity … the civil war gave a new prominence to equity as a term of radical liberty. (Fortier 1)


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phenomena usually signals a failure, or refusal, to distinguish sharply between them. That God, the Chief Justice, and the man who kills his wife’s lover were all “revengers” may imply queasiness about the violence of God and the Chief Justice, or a claim to divine or official prerogative for private avengers, or both. “Vindication,” from Latin vindictio, meant defense or punishment; “vindicate” meant “punish,” “avenge,” “rescue” (OED) or “ liberate from oppression” (see Chapter 7). “Vindictive” meant “vengeful” butÂ€ – often spelled “vindicative”Â€ – could mean “persuasive in clearing one’s name.” Vindicta mihi was famous as the divine “vengeance is mine”; but vindicta was also the root of Italian vendetta. Those dispensing retribution sometimes reserved for themselves “vindication,” with its cerebral aura of truthdemonstration, applying the more thoroughly naturalized “revenge” to their foes. Official justice tends to commandeer “vindication,” sniffing at private “revenge.” But it is dangerous to distinguish sharply among such slippery terms. The runaway popularity of Renaissance revenge tales was overdetermined by a constellation of cultural forces which modernity’s historical telescopes have only begun to bring into focus.27 Let us further explore this terrain, those complex cultural urges that could prompt even a “sweet prince” to wish to “drink hot blood” and “with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love, / … Sweep to my revenge.”28 Equity’s extra-legality imparts a moral slipperiness like that of revenge:Â€ it is “outside the law, opposed to the law, or … inside the law, its life, spirit and intention” (4). Equity evoked terms also applied to revenge:Â€it “renders everyone what is due by seeing that ‘a proportionable satisfaction be made,’ or a ‘quid pro quo’” (6). 27 One force recently explored is religious, “the wholesale displacement of the dead from their familiar place … by the Protestant abolition of purgatory” and prayers for the dead (Neill, Issues 46). Staged avenging of the dead, several have argued, offers an outlet for the blocked impulse to aid them by prayer. “The revenger, that berserk memorialist,” was “a fantasy response to the sense of despairing impotence produced by the Protestant displacement of the dead” (246). Robert Watson, also believing that “revenge-tragedy serves partly as a displacement of prayers for the dead,” asserts further that revenge stories sustain the precious delusion “that revenge can symbolically restore us to life by defeating the agency of our death, conveniently localized in a villain” (75). Ghosts offered “fame-hungry Elizabethans” the fantasy that “the dead return to this world” (77–78). “Revenge,” he concludes, “seeks to undo death” (89). See also Rist 17–25. 28 Ham 5.2.302; 3.2.360; 1.5.29–31.

Ch apter 2

Can two wrongs ever make a right? Some theory

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God … And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood? Revelation 6:Â€9–10

How bad can vengeance and retributive punishment be when performing them does not sully the hands of God? Peter A. French

Jesus Christ is exceeding severe, and just as well as merciful.

T. Collier, 1648

Before proceeding to the resentment of unfairness that I think fueled the Renaissance passion for revenge plays, let me address some misconceptions about the cultural role of revenge in this era. Did revenge make Elizabethans miserable? Jonathan Gil Harris writes of the “physiological damage it was believed to cause the avenger”; it was “a major cause of melancholy” (101). To physiologists, Graham Holderness says, revenge was “psychologically and physically damaging,” an “obsessive passion, which produced symptomatic ill-health and nervous disorders” (51). Its “ravages,” says Prosser, include “deterioration of the mind” (8). Bacon indeed held that “a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green” (17).1 But in Senecan tragedy, the frustration of vengeful longings “leaves a person incomplete, as if he were maimed,”2 and revenge brings “a deep pleasure that Seneca’s Medea calls voluptas” (A. Burnett 1–2). And in Renaissance drama, too, revenge is often therapeutic:Â€“Revenge / Must ease and cease my wrongful injuries”; Even today, “the psychiatric profession generally categorizes vindictiveness as a neurosis” or even a psychosis (Jacoby 156). Bacon’s essay, however, is highly ambivalent about revenge (see Griswold 97–98). 2 As Peter French describes it, this is a “state of not acting on legitimate resentment, holding it inside, letting it fester, until it poisons the victim” (60). 1

22

Can two wrongs ever make a right?

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“revenge shall ease my ling’ring grief” (Locrine 3.2.81–82, 3.3.34); “Grief softens the mind, / And makes it fearful and degenerate; / Think, therefore, on revenge, and cease to weep” (2H6 4.4.1–3). To Hieronimo, identifying his son’s killer would bring “ease of grief, / For in revenge my heart would find relief” (2.5.40–41). Richard Crookback responds to his father’s death, “Tears … for babesÂ€ – blows and revenge for me!” (3H6 2.1.85–86). In Caesar’s Revenge, the goddess Revenge “brings quiet to perplexed souls” (3.5.14). Macduff, mourning his murdered family, is advised, “Be comforted. / Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge / To cure this deadly grief” (Mac 4.3.214–16). All these speak of revenge as modern crime victims’ relatives speak of “closure” through a murderer’s execution.3 Keyishian is a rare critic who recognizes how beneficial to mental health a good revenge can be, “in some psychological sense undoing the original harm” (3).4 But many claim that revenge plays end in futility:Â€Vindice’s “nature is warped and all moral principle blunted in him by his pitiless quest for vengeance”; in most revenge plays, revenge “degenerates into stark vindictiveness and brutalizes the avenger” (P.Â€Simpson 171, 176). I find little warrant for such a view. Even avengers who must die delight in revenge.5 Hieronimo congratulates himself, “I do applaud what I have acted”; “My heart is satisfied” (Spanish Tragedy, Fifth Addition 46, 4.4.129). Margaret exults, “I am hungry for revenge, / And now I cloy me with beholding it” (R3 4.4.61–62). Lucius and Marcus publicly justify Titus’ “reveng[ing] / These wrongs unspeakable” (Tit 5.3.124–5). Marcus offers a mass Andronici suicide if Romans condemn the revenge; instead, Romans choose Lucius as emperor. Vindice finds vengeance worth dying for:Â€ “Are we not revenged? Is there one enemy left alive? … We Surveying modern crime victims’ careful references to “justice” rather than revenge, Susan Jacoby explores “the cultural convention that makes it unacceptable to acknowledge any form of vengeance as a motivation” (2), despite “the popularity of revenge as a theme in modern mass entertainment” (7). She challenges the “assumption that revenge and justice are mutually exclusive” (3), drily noting that the euphemism “retribution” is in truth “virtually synonymous with ‘revenge’” (4). She declares stoutly that “vindictiveness, not deterrence, is the most important factor in the unslaked public demand for executions” (280). 4 He maintains that the “orthodoxy” holding that good people recoil from revenge “does not accurately describe the experience of most viewers and readers,” who identify intensely with protagonists who “take the law into their own hands when normal channelsÂ€ – providence or the lawÂ€– prove inadequate” (5). Similarly, Jacoby notes, “Fictional heroes are always undone by jealousy but they are occasionally restored to sanity … through revenge” (15). 5 French notes that in many cultures a revenger’s death “is the price of vengeance” (9) and considered fully worth it. The anti-tyrannical avenger of The Double Marriage is willing to die for his country:Â€“If our virtues / May buoy our country up, and set her shining / In her first state; our fair revenges taken, / We have our noble ends, or else our ashes” (4.4.73–76). 3

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have enough” (Revenger’s Tragedy 5.3.107–8, 123). Caesar’s ghost finds his “revengeful thirst” slaked (Caesar’s Revenge 5.1.408). One avenger waxes nationalistic:Â€ “I rejoice that a Spaniard out-went an Italian in revenge” (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore 5.6.146–7). Bosola exults, “My revenge is perfect” (Duchess of Malfi 5.5.62). Hippolito cries “I applaud / This thy revenge” (Women Beware Women 5.1.172–3). Even scruple-ridden Clermont, as five ghosts he has avenged caper around their murderer’s corpse, feels satisfied:Â€the ghosts “with joy thus celebrate / This our revenge!” (Revenge of Bussy 5.5.122–3). Goffe’s Orestes, notably unremorseful for matricide, proclaims he is “satisfied, now hath revenge perfection” (4.8.135). In Antonio’s Revenge, a thrilled revenger dances and “whirl[s] about the air; / Methinks I am all soul, all heart, all spirit, / Now murder shall receive his ample merit” (5.5.15–17). A ghost smiles, “Here will I sit, spectator of revenge,Â€/ And glad my ghost in anguish of my foe”; “Now my soul shall sleep in rest. / Sons that revenge their fathers’ blood, are blessed” (5.5.22–23, 81–82). A senator publicly thanks avengers:Â€“Blessed be you all, and may your honors live / Religiously held sacred, even forever”; Antonio is proclaimed “another Hercules” for “ridding huge pollution from our State” (5.6.10–13).6 Little angst about revenge is on display here. Those who regard revenge as self-destructive prefer to see avengers stamped out; but contrary to popular opinion,7 they do not always die. In Antonio’s Revenge the whole revenge coalition survives. Valentinian’s avenger persuades Romans that assassinating the emperor “is justice” (5.8.107). Hoffman remains standing at the end of his play. In The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, no one suggests punishing Govianus for killing the Tyrant, and Anne Lancashire therefore disqualifies it as a revenge tragedy (37). One The Halletts are outraged by this play’s triumphal ending. “The demise of the revenger is required … because the revenger, having exceeded the limitations of human prerogative, must pay for his presumption,” but these revengers “go off cleansed and purged”; right-thinking audiences must “demand that Marston adhere to the convention”; “the last act of Antonio’s Revenge does not work”; “in not condemning his revenger, Marston ironically condemned his play” (180). Other critics fulminate similarly (see Peter 224, H. Wood i:Â€xxxv, Wharton 367–8, Prosser 57–62, Mercer 89). Many argue that the play must be a parody (e.g., Foakes 235, Ayres 359–74). Marston couldn’t seriously have granted approval to revengers! Some readers of classical revenge drama, too, worry when an avenger survives. That Sophocles’ Electra “ends in success” is “distressing to those who think that revenge tragedy must always condemn its own violence” (A. Burnett 138). That Euripides’ Medea gets away with revenge bothers those with a “moralistic desire to find Medea repellant, and punished ” (Kerrigan, Revenge 98). 7 Charles and Elaine Hallett hold that “moral law requires that the man who is guilty of murder must render up his own life in atonement” (98); “once the revenger has acted, his death is inevitable” (158). Braden agrees:Â€“In Spain and France the avenger may die accomplishing his goal, but does not have to, and very often does not. Part of what makes English revenge tragedy … so conspicuously tragic and often exorbitantly bloodthirsty is the almost ironclad rule by which even the most defensible exercise of private justice recoils upon its agent” (Renaissance Tragedy 201). 6


25

way to prove that revengers always die is to eject from the genre the plays whose revengers don’t. To many, an avenger’s death proves that dramatists found revenge unchristian. (“They die because the avenger can never really be right,” because murder violates “a higher law” [Levin 322]).8 But avengers are often martyrs, to be vindicated in the hereafter. Angels are to sing Hamlet’s soul to rest (5.2.303); Hieronimo will see Elysium (4.5.23). Those who die fighting tyranny invite the analogy that resistance theorists drew between political dissidents and Christian martyrs.9 Christopher Goodman, surveying Christian history, praised “innumerable martyrs who chose to die rather than to obey” (32). John Ponet celebrated martyred Protestants. John Bale helped “equip the Church of England with a new martyrology,” sanctifying the death of “the blessed martyr of Christ, Sir John Oldcastle” (Skinner ii:Â€ 48). Foxe’s best-selling Acts and Monuments amasses an imposing history of martyrdom as Protestant dissidence, including the politically rebellious Oldcastle, Jan Hus, and Jan Zizka (i:Â€ 726–851). Reading martyr stories, “simple people” are “better prepared” for similar conflicts (Foxe, “Utility of this Story” i:Â€2–3). Robert Parsons inspired English Catholic resistance by graphic descriptions of tortured priests. To some readers, to die like a criminal is to forfeit sympathy. Hieronimo ends as “a criminal in custody … interrogated by the authorities” (Braden, Renaissance Tragedy 213). But martyrs were executed like criminals; and for Christians, the savior “was a condemned criminalÂ€… unjustly executed by magistrates” (T. Freeman, “Imitatio” 34, 39). And objections against a view of dying revengers as martyrs on grounds that revenge plays are sexually sensationalistic must come to terms with the sexual sensation latent in martyr texts (see Marshall 109–18). Jonas Barish sees triumph in Vindice and Hippolito’s deaths:Â€ they have “salvaged their family honor, bolstered the virtue of the weakest member of it, and purified the state of its most malignant elements. In their own minds they have earned the right to die. Death … is an act of affirmation … They march cheerfully off to their end … glad to pay with their lives for the good they have accomplished” (“True and False” 153–4). But he is greatly in the minority; most consider these deaths evidence that revenge is wicked. 9 Already in the Middle Ages, “political leaders who met violent ends resisting authority were popularly venerated as martyrs” (T. Freeman, “Introduction” 7; cf. S. Walker 7, Piroyansky). After a Tudor resurgence of political martyrdom, fueled by prosecution of religious deviance as treason, by the late seventeenth century “unambiguously political figures were honored, without hesitation, as martyrs” (T. Freeman, “Introduction” 31). Politicizing martyrdom “valorized political dissent,” giving “sanctity to those who would otherwise be vilified as rebels and traitors” (T.Â€Freeman, “Imitatio” 69). Freeman’s definition of the political martyr as “the innocent victim of those in authority” (“Introduction” 8) fits many revengers. And the concept of martyrdom was theatrical, necessitating spectators; “scaffold … meant both the executioner’s platform and the playhouse stage” (Barish, Antitheatrical 166). 8

26

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That revenge tragedy emotionally validates its martyrdoms is clear from how exceptionalÂ€– and despicableÂ€– are revengers who scheme to save their lives. Govianus places his victim’s body against a door about to be broken down by shock troops, making the death appear accidental (Second Maiden’s Tragedy). In Valentinian, the same Maximus who craves a “safe revenge” also plots to murder his best friend to cover up his own deeds, seeks career advancement through his wife’s rape, and cavalierly dismisses her death:Â€“She is a woman and her loss the less.”10 Sleazy Maximus forfeits the role of avenger:Â€the noble revenge devolves upon another character. Such atypical cowardice and sniveling self-regard throws into high relief the courage and conviction of the many avengers who risk their lives to defy tyranny. Some seek safety only to buy time. Hieronimo desires to work “closely and safely” (3.13.26) only because “if I hang or kill my self … / Who will revenge Horatio’s murder?” (3.12.17–18). Caropia in Revenge for Honor at first frets about her own safety but immediately explains that she wouldn’t take pains to preserve her life “were it not with fuller, / More noble bravery, to take revenge” (4.2.138–9). As the clergyman William Sedgwick wrote, self-preservation is the “basest principle of nature”; “to act for oneself in any kind is evil and unchristian; but to act for self-safety is so mean and poor a thing as it must needs produce most vile and absurd actions.” Of all emotions it is “the unworthiest, a deep pit; and causes black, horrid, and foul things” (Justice 36, 32).11 T wo R e v e ng e S c e n a r io s Revengers typically die satisfied. Satisfaction differs, however, in two kinds of revenge play. In one kind (Spanish Tragedy, Titus, Revenger’s Tragedy), an aggrieved David retaliates against a tyrannical Goliath. The other features a vendetta. Caesar’s Revenge treats Roman civil wars as a vendetta, an absolutist monarchy party (Caesar, Antony, Cicero) against a republican freedom party (Pompey, Brutus, Cassius, Cato). Shakespeare’s first tetralogy stages reciprocal retaliation between factions of roughly equal power. In early scenes of 3 Henry VI, clan members urge on their 3.3.23; 5.3.38–39; 3.3.36. It is true that Collier, who disagreed with Sedgwick most of the time, defended the impulse to self-preservation as “seated by God himself in the law of nature,” pointing out that “Christ often departed from one place to another, for self-preservation” (19, 24). But he was advising Civil War revolutionaries to preserve themselves and the country by not setting King Charles at large in 1648Â€– exactly the strategic self-preservation in which Hieronimo temporarily engages in order to gain time to achieve revenge.

10 11


27

leadersÂ€– a true vendetta scenario.12 Individual-grievance plays with political assassinations offer a strong, mission-accomplished closure. It is the spiraling chaos of vendetta plays that often strikes modern readers as futile violence. The weak closure of many Shakespearean histories abets a sense of nothing’s having been achieved, of a possibly endless chain of retaliations.13 Here modern readers indict the revenge ethic for perpetuating violence. But even vendetta plays valorize revenge: r ic h a r d Ah, Warwick, why hast thou withdrawn thyself? Thy brother’s blood the thirsty earth hath drunk, Broached with the steely point of Clifford’s lance. And in the very pangs of death he cried … “Warwick, revengeÂ€– brother, revenge my death!”… wa r w ic k Here, on my knee, I vow to God above I’ll never pause again, never stand still, Till either death hath closed these eyes of mine Or fortune given me measure of revenge.

(3H6 2.3.14–32)

The Yorkist and the Lancastrian relish vengeance:Â€ “’Twas you that killed young Rutland, was it not?,” Richard demands; Clifford crows, “Ay, and old York, and yet not satisfied” (3H6 2.2.98–99). They come to blows: r ic h a r d Now, Clifford, I have singled thee alone. Suppose this arm is for the Duke of York, And this for Rutland, both bound to revenge, Wert thou environed with a brazen wall. c l i f f or d Now, Richard, I am with thee here alone. This is the hand that stabbed thy father York, And this the hand that slew thy brother Rutland, And here’s the heart that triumphs in their death G. K. Hunter’s term “victim tragedy” (English Drama 69) partly corresponds to my Â�“individual-grievance” revenge tragedy. An aggrieved avenger sometimes joins a kind of revenge coalition:Â€“Groupings are formed which involve the family and friends of both the tyrant and the revenger … Two opposed parties are brought into being” (J. Lever 19), just as in “the old German concept of faida,” the duty to avenge “fell on the closest blood relative of a victim” (Muir 68–69). Such coalitions resemble a vendetta, except that a vendetta’s origins are often lost, while in individual-grievance plays the two sides coalesce before our eyes. 13 Titus Andronicus features a chain reaction of blood demanding blood (called “talionic” after the lex talionis). Tamora takes revenge on Titus’ sons because he directs them to sacrifice her son. But seeds of revenge have been sown before the play opens:Â€Titus sacrifices Tamora’s son because her sons killed other sons of his in battleÂ€– a potentially infinite regress of compensatory killings. Jean-Pierre Guépin notes, “Sacrifice is always dangerous, because … every killing sets law of talion into motion:Â€the killer must be killed” (xii). But Titus’ “individual-grievance” structure trumps the talionic chain’s potential infinitude, creating a strong closure in which Andronici demolish tyrants and villains. 12

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Rampant revenge And cheers these hands that slew thy sire and brother To execute the like upon thyselfÂ€– And so, have at thee!

(3H6 2.4.1–11)

The thought of revenge stirs a warrior’s fighting spirit, plumes up his competitive instincts, and spurs him to manly exploits, as many fierce flytings attest: wa r w ic k We are those which chased you from the field, And slew your fathers … nor t h u m be r l a n d Yes, Warwick, I remember it to my grief, And … thou and thy house shall rue it. w e s t mor e l a n d [to York] Plantagenet, of thee, and these thy sons, Thy kinsmen, and thy friends, I’ll have more lives Than drops of blood were in my father’s veins. c l i f f or d [to Warwick] Urge it no more, lest that, instead of words, I send thee, Warwick, such a messenger As shall revenge his death before I stir.

(3H6 1.1.90–100)

Are these men dejected over the futility of violence? Revenge is obligatory and deeply satisfying, a test of family loyalty and manly virtù. Or womanly virtù. Margaret grows from horrid foreigner to heroic leader of the Lancastrian clan. To treat male revengers as fascinating, morally ambiguous heroes and female revengers as simple villainesses is merely sexist. Margaret’s heroic vengeance gives shape to Richard III, that capstone of Shakespeare’s eight-play history cycle. While she has power, Margaret leads armies. When she loses it, she begins a career of potent cursing, obviating the theatrical avenger’s arsenal of poisoned skulls, trap doors, and envenomed rapiers: g r a y Now Margaret’s curse is fall’n upon our heads, For standing by when Richard stabbed her son. r i v e r s Then cursed she Hastings; then cursed she Buckingham; Then cursed she Richard. O remember, God, To hear her prayer for them as now for us.

(R3 3.3.14–18)

Fallen Queen Elizabeth begs some of Margaret’s vengeful power:Â€“O thou, well skilled in curses … / Teach me how to curse mine enemies” (4.4.116–17). A ringing closure concludes the tetralogy. The vendetta ends, not in pacific reconciliations or a recognition that feuding is counterÂ�productive, but in violent, satisfying revenge. The two sides reconcile when their chief women unite, not to make peace but to curse and vow


29

revenge, not on each other but on Richard, who has violated the vendetta code by attacking his own family. They focus curses of frightening intensity on him, like a burning glass’s concentrated beam of igniting heat. C h r i s t i a ns ag a i ns t R e v e ng e ? Fredson Bowers held that Goffe’s Orestes dies to sway the audience “against applause for vengeance” (Elizabethan 189). Prosser maintained that to Elizabethans “revenge was a reprehensible blasphemy” and that Hamlet’s ghost is clearly flagged as demonic because “it comes to command revenge,” contrary to Christian doctrine. “Hamlet’s implicit duty,” she concluded, “is not to kill Claudius”; he “should not take revenge” (6, 133, xii, 213).14 The Halletts stated that “Christian dogma” tells a man “clearly that he should not revenge himself, that revenge is evil. He must practice the Christian virtue of patience. The injunction is unequivocal”; “revenge … is a damnable act” (121, 215). More recently, Lukas Erne has argued that a revenger’s death invites audience disapproval of revenge as unchristian; up to Act 3, scene 11 of The Spanish Tragedy Hieronimo is “sane and intent on public justice”; thereafter he seeks “extralegal revenge and com[es] across as … ‘lunatic’” (110). Insanity causes revenge and ends in Hieronimo’s death, “a pattern that affirms rather than questions a Christian view of providence” (111). He dies not because that is what happens to tragic heroes, but because Kyd wanted to impress on his audience the dire consequences of not leaving vengeance to God. Such reasoning dates at least to Lily Bess Campbell, 1931 (“condemnation of revenge in the ethical teaching of Shakespeare’s England” was “logically posited” on the biblical “vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” [35]) and Bowers, 1940 (“With the word of God so expressly forbidding private revenge, it was only natural to believe damnation awaited those who disobeyed” [Elizabethan 13]). Campbell’s “logical” and Bowers’ “natural” might be translated “ideological”; and indeed, most of their evidence is pure Church of England. Drawing on Anglican sermons, Bowers quoted “the chief argument against revenge” from Thomas Becon, “although it was the staple of every other moralist:Â€‘To desire to be revenged, when all vengeance pertaineth 14

Prosser also argues that the ghost is demonic because it cannot bear daylight, because contemporary theology did not allow for spirits to return from purgatory (she simply brushes off a folk tradition of wandering spirits), and because the ghost is anyway more embittered than we would expect of a partially purged soul; but his vengefulness is Exhibit A. This part of her argument is circular:Â€we know the ghost is a demon because he demands vengeance; and we know vengeance is wicked because it emanates from a demon.

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to God, as he saith, “Vengeance is mine, and I will reward” … this to do ye are forbidden’” (Elizabethan 13). He cites Daniel Tuvil:Â€ “Jerusalem is new erected … there is now no thirsting for revenge. The law of retribution is disannuled … An eye no longer for an eye; a tooth no longer for a tooth” (Sig. kii–kiiv; Elizabethan 13).15 Theater audiences simply accepted this:Â€“From the very first, revenge in Elizabethan tragedy” met with the “disapproval of the audience” (Elizabethan 184). No evidence supports his confident generalizations on this unanimous audience.16 Such hyper-Christian playgoers, grimly orthodox and incessantly moralizing, never empathized with that knave, the avenger:Â€Hieronimo’s revenge “alienated the audience to the point where it looked upon him as a villain,” an “un-English Machiavellian maniac”;17 other revenge plays illustrate the doom of all “who for their own evil ends harbor vengeance” (Bowers, Elizabethan 185). Goffe’s Orestes, “justifying his revenge,” is “an impudent and callous villain” (188). The Duke of Milan’s author “did not intend the spectators to sympathize with Francisco’s vengeance”Â€– and authorial control over audience response is absolute, but for a few “dupes of the revenge code”; “thoughtful spectators” know better (194, 198).18 Audiences “could not accept a murderer as a hero no matter how just his motive” (185).19 Conceding that “almost all” her evidence is from “the frankly didactic works of preachers and Christian humanists,” Prosser pallidly reasons, “To what extent their exhortations met agreement among the common people can never be known beyond doubt. It does, however, seem indicative that the conventional ideas permeated all types of literature” (21). Mercer looks with jaundiced eye on Prosser’s “notion of an audience ethically alert to the point of panic” (21), protesting that she “wildly exaggerates the power of doctrine on the minds of men” (136). Arguably, audiences were as free to respond to plays as Protestant laymen were free to read the Bible in their own way. Joel Altman maintains that Renaissance plays “daringly place[d] the burden of judgement and moral interpretation on the audience” (394). 16 Similarly, Prosser confidently asserts of the audience, “once [Marlowe’s Barabas] embarks on his campaign of Machiavellian villainy, all sympathy vanishes”; Shakespeare “could assume that his audience held a common body of attitudes about the morality of revenge” (37, 157). As Charles Whitney notes, “the dominant form of study of early modern dramatic response over the last sixty years” imagines an audience “addressed collectively and responding uniformly” (3), taking little account of responses differing by individual, class, ethnicity, age, gender, occupation, education, or theatrical experience. Even Renaissance antitheatricalists, however, recognized diversity within audiences. John Rainolds took an opponent to task for “bold avouching things you are not sure of” (149), namely “that all the spectators must needs be moved thus or thus” (113). For every man in the audience who wished himself “as chaste as Hippolytus” in Seneca’s play, others surely wished to be approached by a seductress as Hippolytus was (110–11). His opponent avers that all audience members would hate “the revenge of Atreus”; Rainolds is not at all sure about that (111). 17 Against Bowers’ intemperate views, Ratliff argues that “Kyd did not consider Hieronimo a villain” (113), noting the final epithet applied to him, “good Hieronimo” (4.5.11), and his afterlife in Elysium. 18 But as Edward Pechter notes, “There are no guarantees that performers and theatrical audiences will stay within the enclosure of (an assumed) original intent. If writing is an ‘essential drifting … cut off from all absolute responsibility’ (Derrida 316), how much more so is theatrical writing?” (118). 19 In a rare demurral from the consensus, Robert Ornstein finds “not one great tragedy of the period in which the ethical attitude towards blood revenge is a central moral issue.” In Hamlet, 15


31

Again, why do we still embrace the thinking of the Tillyard/Bowers era in the arena of revenge? Michael Levin finds Bel-Imperia and Hieronimo “nearly as guilty … as the villains upon whom they are avenged. BelImperia questions the morality of personal vengeance no more than her brother, and possesses no more conscience” (321).20 Henry E. Jacobs, who insists that “personal blood vengeance” comprises “rebellion against the power structures of Renaissance society,” hastens to deny that revenge tragedies are radical:Â€they are “designed to reinforce the … status quo,” rejecting revenge “as a massively disruptive crime against order and society” (49). Written in the wake of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Jacobs’ essay illustrates why the new historicism, although it demolished simplistic Tillyardian law-and-order views about Elizabethan belief structures, proved unable to help us get beyond such thinking with regard to revenge:Â€ Greenblatt’s insistence that power always contains subversionÂ€ – and generates subversion precisely in order to contain itÂ€– has been a major stumbling-block to the recognition of radical writing in this period. Gordon Braden, a sensitive reader who acknowledges that “Christian patience is only rarely given a strong voice within the revenge plays”21 and that The Spanish Tragedy’s “moral rhetoric” is “overwhelmingly on the side of revenge,” still agrees with Bowers and Prosser that “the vengeance to which the hero descends is no longer morally superior to what is being avenged” and says that audiences accepted “moral orthodoxy” (Renaissance Tragedy 203). Noting that only one protagonist opposes revenge (Charlemont in The Atheist’s Tragedy), he holds that “the actions of all English avengers are implicitly measured against such a standard” (203).22 Should we measure all avengers against one anomalous attitude? Is it credible that between 1588 and 1607, righteous public-theater audiences hissed in moral outrage “the greatest revenge play of the age, the question is simply ignored … Only very briefly and in only three plays (Antonio’s Revenge, The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, and The Atheist’s Tragedy) do major playwrights question the rightness of revenge” (23). 20 Ornstein is typical in pronouncing Vindice and Hippolito “hardly distinguishable from the men they slaughter” (87), in line with the common belief that revenge reduces one to the level of one’s enemy. Barish stoutly opposed this belief, declaring that “to equate” Vindice and Hippolito with the “degenerates of the ducal court” is “prim and moralistic,” that “the brothers remain sharply distinguishable from their enemies, right up to the very end”; he contrasts their family solidarity with the “snake pit” of the ducal family (“True and False” 143). However, his argument has hardly dented the common belief. 21 Prosser’s explanation of the absence of anti-revenge sentiment from most plays is that it went without saying:Â€“The issue was settled. Revenge was a sin against God, a defiance of the State” (72). 22 This play also features a rare forbearing ghost, who counsels, “Return to France, for thy old father’s dead / And thou by murder disinherited. / Attend with patience the success of things, / But leave revenge unto the King of kings” (2.6.19–22). The Halletts, stunned when revengers are applauded in Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, take refuge in The Atheist’s Tragedy as “a useful corrective to Marston” (33). Prosser considers it the culmination of the genre (70). Dollimore,

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through The Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Antonio’s Revenge, Hoffman, and The Revenger’s TragedyÂ€– several of them wildly popularÂ€ – breathing a collective sigh of relief when in 1609 The Atheist’s Tragedy provided a Christian standard for a hero’s behavior? By notable gyrations, critics explain away apparently sympathetic avengers. Hunter argues that Hieronimo administers divine justice, not human revenge:Â€this puppet is “instrument rather than agent” (“Ironies” 102).23 Or critics declare joy in revenge to be ironic, the dramatist lurking in the shadows, smiling ruefully at the futility of it all. Classicists too, if a text seems to praise vindictiveness, “discover ‘irony’.” Usually, at the end of an Attic vengeance play a principal whom we would call a criminal has triumphed over a victim whom he or she has attacked by trickery and who is now, if not dead, at least maimed or grotesquely disempowered. The critic in search of modern “goodness” and moral didacticism finds this dramatic achievement radically distasteful and goes to work to show that, though it is represented as success, the central action is somehow dispraised by the poet who staged it. (A. Burnett xiii–xv)24

When Orestes splits Aegisthus’ spine with a cleaver and a chorus of maidens “fall into raptures” at his death-convulsions, moderns “are nauseated and sure that Euripides meant them to be so” (A. Burnett 235). But were public-theater audiences basically congregations? Revenge plays’ popularity in a deeply Christian era provides a severe test for the new historicist view of ideology’s death grip on the psyche. It suggests that audiences can resist ideology, or park it at the theater door and accept a play’s terms. In forty years of teaching these plays to undergraduates who often identify themselves as Christians, I have yet to encounter a single one who hopes Hamlet will forgive Claudius rather than kill him, or Hieronimo be reconciled to Lorenzo rather than stab him. The plays, students think, prompt us to desire vengeance. I think they are right. The theory that plays discourage revenge does not stand up to theatrical or classroom experience. however, argues that its ending “hilariously parodies the … dramatic convention whereby divine punishment is not only done but seen to be done” (88–89). 23 Of course, supernatural forces do prompt revengers to action. But Griswold exaggerates only mildly in generalizing that, in Seneca, “human actors are … agents of the ghosts and gods, who are carrying out their own feuds and rivalries through the manipulation of men and women,” while Renaissance “revenge tragedy horrors are human, not divine, in inspiration” (87). In any case, what I object to is modern critics’ insistence that audiences denied revengers free will as a precondition to sympathizing with them. 24 Later, though, Burnett does to Renaissance revenge tragedy what she complains about critics doing to the Greeks:Â€she reads effusions of joy in revenge as obviously ironic, given Christian aversion to revenge.


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Revengers scorn forgiveness:Â€what they want from heaven is fairness. And insofar as we hear from heaven at all in the plays, it promotes revenge. Hieronimo cries, “All the saints do sit soliciting / For vengeance on those cursèd murderers” (Spanish Tragedy 4.1.33–34). Thunder and lightning are theatrical shorthand for heaven’s angry voice demanding retribution. As Hoffman “strikes ope a curtain,” theatrically revealing his father’s body, “thunder and lightning” boom; he berates himself, “See the powers of heaven in apparitions / … That I thus tardy am to do an act / Which justice and a father’s death excites” (1.1.8–17). Castabella cries, “O patient Heav’n, why dost thou not express / Thy wrath in thunderbolts? … How can earth endure / The burden of this wickedness without / An earthquake, or the angry face of Heaven / Be not enflamed with lightning?” (Atheist’s Tragedy 4.3.161–8). Vindice demands, “Has not heaven an ear? / Is all the lightning wasted? … Oh thou almighty patience, ’tis my wonder / That such a fellow, impudent and wicked, / Should not be cloven as he stood, / … / Is there no thunder left, or is’t kept up / In stock for heavier vengeance?” Immediately thunder sounds and he delightedly crows, “There it goes!” (Revenger’s Tragedy 4.2.158–9, 193–8).25 Like much in this parodic play, thunder-on-cue is grotesquely comic, but the point remains:Â€heaven favors revenge. In Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat, heaven hurls lightning at a villainÂ€– a sign, Bowers thinks, “that all revenge should be left to God” (Elizabethan 197). But heaven doesn’t demand a monopoly on vengeance:Â€when Vindice finally achieves it, thunder booms approval and he smiles, “Mark, thunder! Dost know thy cue, thou big-voiced crier? / …Â€/ When thunder claps heaven likes the tragedy” (5.3.42–48).26 Such statements of heaven’s pleasure in revenge literary critics routinely ascribe to revengers’ madness, in presuming to speak for God. Hieronimo “is deceiving himself” in claiming that heaven approves of his actions; revenge has driven him mad. “At the height of the madness, the revenger believes he acts as a divinely appointed agent” (Halletts 28, 79). Antonio and the ghost “assume a religious sanction to which they have no right” (Ayres 370). But critics themselves are remarkably ready to speak for God. The Halletts recoil in shock when the ghost in Antonio’s Revenge “ask[s] us to believe that the performance we are about to witness is sponsored 25

Robert Miola tracks the Senecan pedigree of this “wasted lightning” trope (15–16). Only literary critics and villains disbelieve in thunder as heaven’s call for vengeance:Â€the atheist D’Amville’s self-congratulation on a clever murder is interrupted by thunder and lightning, which startles his accomplice. “Dost start at thunder?” D’Amville scoffs, “’Tis a mere effect of Nature, / An exhalation hot and dry, involved / Within a watery vapor i’the middle / Region of the air” (Atheist’s Tragedy 2.4.139–44).

26

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Rampant revenge

by a just Heaven” (177), assuring us that revenge ghosts are “opposed by a higher power, one which prohibits the very actions which the ghost requires” (22). “Not that Heaven applauds the revenger’s excess,” they insistÂ€– “far from it” (218); and of Vindice’s feeling “that Heaven applauds his deeds,” they are able to report on heaven’s behalf, “he is wrong” (234).27 A poem prefacing Studley’s translation of Seneca’s Agamemnon reconciles human and divine revenge:Â€ “By talion law / Here blood did blood require; / And now Thyest hath that revenge / That he did long desire,” which teaches “the providence of God.” From early in Tudor drama, human agency had encroached on divine prerogative:Â€in Skelton’s Magnificence (1515), Redress “inherit[s] the justice-giving role that traditionally belonged to God in the early morality drama” (Dietrich 102). Hamlet’s Ghost forbids revenge on Gertrude (“leave her to heaven”) but demands revenge on Claudius, acknowledging divine and human revenge.28 For dramatists, “vengeance is mine” need not mean “exclusively mine.” Some Christians did claim exclusivity:Â€ cleric William Sedgwick growled, “’Tis strange work, to be instruments of His vengeance”; “why will you take it out of God’s hand? Doth not God know how to do it?” (Justice Sig. a3v, 20). But for the equally pious T. Collier, humans were God’s agents:Â€“The day of the Lord God of hosts” is “a day of vengeance, that he may avenge him of his adversaries:Â€and the sword shall devour,” be “made drunk with their blood” (Jeremiah 46:Â€ 10). And Jehovah has always used men as “instruments,” his “battle ax” (Collier 5). Such reasoning leaves no contradiction between Hieronimo’s recalling the biblical injunctionÂ€– “Vindicta mihi! / Ay, heaven will be revenged of every ill”Â€– and his volunteering for action:Â€“I will revenge his death!” (3.13.1–2, 20). Despite plays’ fervent devotion to revenge, Christian moralists who opposed the theater did not list vengefulness among their objections. It gets no mention in Gosson’s three antitheatrical tracts, Rainolds’ Overthrow of Stage-Plays, or I. G.’s Refutation of the Apology for Actors. The godly I. G. faults plays for lies, oaths, blasphemies, “railing, reviling, backbiting, quipping, taunts, and evil speaking” (52–53), “whoredom and uncleanness” (63), “haughtiness, arrogancy, ambition, pride, injury, anger, They are as privy to authorial as to divine intention:Â€Shakespeare “did not wish to identify the Ghost’s justice with Heaven’s”; “the emotional effect of this concluding action upon the audience is not what Marston sought” (Halletts 185, 175). 28 In a self-preserving twist on the “leave her to heaven” trope, The Bastard ’s Mariana, caught in a sexual betrayal, piously counsels, “O! rob not Heavens / Of their prerogatives; let them revenge” (3.3.52–53). 27


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wrath, envy, hatred, contention, war, murder, cruelty, rapine, incest, rovings, depredations, piracies, spoils, robberies, rebellions, treasons, killing, hewing, stabbing, dagger-drawing, fighting, butchery, treachery, villainy, etc.” (55–56)Â€ – but not for revenge. The godly William Prynne, whose Histriomastix denounces nearly every conceivable element of plays, mentions revenge only twice in 1,006 pages. For the devout, a duke being stabbed, or Hamlet threatening to drink hot blood, was notably less shocking than a cross-dressed boy actor. Even if audiences were determined to frown upon ungodliness, deciding what to frown on cannot have been easy:Â€ the Bible is deeply conflicted about revenge. The New Testament (“recompense to no man evil for evilÂ€… Avenge not yourselves” [Romans 12:Â€17, 19]) contradicts the Old (“Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound” [Exodus 21:Â€23–25]; a murderer shall be turned over to “the avenger of blood, that he may die. Thine eye shall not pity him” [Deuteronomy 19:Â€12–13]).29 Bishop Joseph Hall saw human avengers as divine agents:Â€ “God strikes some immediately from Heaven with his own arm … others he buffets with their own hands; some by the revenging sword of an enemy … God strikes in all:Â€his hand moves in theirs” (6:Â€20).30 Among the most quoted of all psalms, Psalm 137 ended “O daughter of Babylon … happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us … that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stone” (see Hamlin 251–4). If New Testament forgiveness now prevailed, you wouldn’t know it from the era’s religious wars. Protestant and Catholic reigns alternated in England like Lancastrians and Yorkists in the Wars of the Roses. “Christianity” must have been experienced not as a counsel of forgiveness, as our revenge theorists suggest, but as itself a vendetta. Critics depicting revenge as unchristian routinely amputate the “Judaeo” from “JudaeoChristian,” erasing vengeful Jehovah in favor of generous Jesus, “a Being who has always counseled turning the other cheek” (Halletts 177). Hamlet’s ghost’s “command violates Christian teaching” (Prosser 136). Jacoby warns against a simple binary, noting restraints of vengeance in the Old Testament and ratifications of vengefulness in the New (79–91); but many modern writers simplistically dismiss revenge as irreligious. 30 Puritan William Perkins imagined a moderation in revenge, a “private equity” between “extremes, neither bearing all things nor revenging everything” (Epieikeia 492). Catholic theologians, too, defended revenge:Â€in Summa Theologiae Aquinas went “farther than any other Christian thinker in justifying lawful vengeance, which he called a special virtue and a form of charity”; virtuous Thomist vengeance observed “due measure … with regard to all the circumstances” (Muir 69). Again, note the resemblance to equity. Folklore could view even Jesus as a vengeful trickster hero. Christopher Bond writes of the medieval theological tradition, preserved in Renaissance folklore, of Christ as a trickster, paying Satan back for the Fall by emptying his kingdom during the harrowing of hell. 29

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If revenge was out of step with Christ’s teaching, so was Tudor jurisprudence:Â€Christian forgiveness should have hamstrung condign punishment. And Protestant faith and grace undermined merit-based reward:Â€salvation was God’s gift to sinners, who really deserved to toast in the everlasting bonfire.31 The most philosophical revenge play turns Christian thinking against the very idea of just deserts:Â€“Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?” (Ham 2.2.508–9). And yet Hamlet takes revenge, as Tudor judges sentenced harshly. A jagged faultline cuts across a culture whose legal system is built on condign punishment and whose state religion sanctions unconditional forgiveness. A taste for revenge was not the only anomaly. The foremost resistance writers justifying political violence (see Part III) were exiled clergy. Ponet, a bishop, Goodman, a clergyman, and Knox, founder of Presbyterianism, all urged the assassination of Mary Tudor. Romans 13:Â€1–2Â€– “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers:Â€For … the powers that be are ordained of God … They that resist, shall receive to themselves damnation”Â€ – they reinterpreted to declare political resistance godly and mandatory. Rescripting “be subject unto the higher powers” to mean “obey higher powers if they are godly” also weakened the following verse’s injunction to respect political authority’s monopoly of vengeance (a ruler “is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” [Romans 13:Â€4]) and qualified the nearby command “Avenge not yourselves … Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:Â€19). These writers often saw resistance as revenge. When we call Elizabethans Christians, we might recall how radical and violent the era’s Christians could be. The alleged Christian abhorrence of revenge proves, on closer inspection, a chimera. And even audience members who did disapprove of revenge were capable of suspending disapproval and accepting a play’s terms. To say that Christian audiences flatly disallowed revenge does not bear scrutiny. R e v e ng e r s ag a i ns t C h r i s t i a n i t y ? Judaeo-Christian thinking on revenge was complex and bewildering. But might avengers not only have exploited loopholes in Christian belief, but actively resisted Christian dogma? Hamlet’s “ghost’s demands contradict The stubborn persistence with which revenge tragedies cling to the works-oriented notion of fair payment works well with their frequent setting in Catholic countries.

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the orthodox teachings of Holy Writ,” the Halletts indignantly note (185).32 Well, precisely. Calvinist-leaning Anglicanism must itself have occasioned resentment of unfairness. Reformation suspension of workaday laws of deserving eerily resembled capitalism, which dissolved the “just price” in the solvent of the market. Forgiveness was kind; but was it fair? Revenge plays’ popularity suggests that Christian forgiveness hadn’t wholly won the hearts and minds of the people. And Calvinist election uncoupled reward and punishment from desertÂ€ – the evil might be elect, the good damned.33 Seeking fairness, followers of Socinus denied original sin, vicarious atonement, and predestination. Socinianism was debated across Europe. The English translation of Socinus’ catechism was dedicated to King James, who had it burned. Radical Christians, like revengers, quested after fairness. If tragedy “gnaws at the certainties of faith” (Mercer 6), revenge plays often voice religious skepticism. Maynard Mack famously accused Hamlet of playing God, but by default, that was an avenger’s job. Plays stage a vacancy of divine as well as governmental justice. “I will repay, saith the Lord”; but what if He defaults? As Jacoby notes, the famous verse “is as much a pledge of divine action as a prohibition of human retribution” (5)Â€– a pledge not always honored, the Renaissance couldn’t help noticing. In a late-medieval Orestes story, Lydgate asks God, “Why wilt thou not of equity and right / Punish and chastise so horrible a thing [a king’s murder]?” (1046–50). But he hastily backs down:Â€eventually God will “justly venge with due recompense” (iii:Â€1142–3). Renaissance dramatists weren’t so sure. Peele’s David and Bethsabe obliquely explores this issue through God’s surrogate, King David, who prohibits his son Absalom from avenging the rape of his sister by another brother:Â€“Revenge not thou this sin; / Leave it to me, and I will chasten him” (394–5). When David neglects and even forgets about this pledge, Absalom kills the offender, whereupon “Elizabethan orthodoxy unanimously condemned private revenge,” notes Prosser, and “our average Elizabethan could not have failed to hear the voice of the Establishment” (3, 5). She implies that such a one would leap to obey the voice. 33 Natalie Davis notes that Calvin disrupted the gift-reciprocity system by making salvation God’s free gift, yet disallowing human reciprocity in the form of any kind of service that would gratify God. The Church of England’s 39 Articles state that God “deliver[s] from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen” (Article 17, “Of Predestination and Election”). Allen Jayne shows that predestination was pervasive in orthodox Judaeo-Christian theology, Catholic and ProtestantÂ€– “Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Loyola, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin all believed in it” (16) in a complex variety of forms. We might compare predestination to modern genetic predisposition, which discouragingly appears to trump merit:Â€one’s genes can sometimes override any amount of healthy diet and workouts at the gym. 32

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David moralizes, “to God alone belongs revenge” (906), and has to be taught by a parable that Absalom’s vengeanceÂ€– compensating for a vacuum of official revengeÂ€– should be pardoned. The story’s biblical original in 2 Samuel says nothing of the morality of revenge:Â€this is completely Peele’s elaboration. “Why do the wicked prosper?”, that old question, hints that God has fallen down on the job. After naïve belief in justice suffers harsh jolts, revengers step into His vacant shoes. Although Isabella believes “the heavens are just; murder cannot be hid” (Spanish Tragedy 2.5.57), heaven launches no initiative. Philip Edwards notes, “It doesn’t matter whom Hieronimo believes in or whom he calls on. No one is listening … The gods of Kyd’s play are supremely unconcerned with justice” (“Thrusting” 121–2). Hieronimo cries, “O sacred heavens! if this unhallowed deed,Â€/ If this inhuman and barbarous … murder … / Shall unrevealed and unrevengèd pass, / How should we term your dealings to be just, / If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?” (3.2.5–11).34 To a duchess in The Cardinal, unavenged crime “take[s] off our faith” in earthly and divine authority; “if here / Such innocence must bleed and you [the king] look on, / Poor men, that call you gods on earth, will doubt / To obey your laws … / As fearing if such monstrous sins go on, / The saints will not be safe in heaven” (3.2.106–11). In Cynthia’s Revenge, the villain himself turns religious skeptic:Â€“Gods, who revenge our close iniquity / And search the recluse corners of each soul, / Why do the gods forbear to punish me, / Who am as wicked as a man may be?”; he concludes that humans are “governed by the gods no more than sheep” (3.3.15–18, 64). Greek tragedy asks “how the gods can permit such evil occurrences” (Miola 10); but Hunter contends that Christianity replaced Furies with God, “not the abrogator of rational order, but its guarantor” (Dramatic Identities 185). In revenge plays, however, “that guarantee has disturbingly lapsed” (Mercer 5). Attila Kiss argues that although God should guarantee “true meaning, order, and justice,” in The Spanish Tragedy His absence is “conspicuous” (43).35 Katherine Maus sees divine justice as besmirched from the play’s opening, where gods argue about whether Andrea should be lodged for eternity among lovers or soldiers:Â€“It seems unlikely that remedies for … inequities will be forthcoming from the bumbling divine bureaucrats … graveled as they are by the elementary challenge Don Andrea’s case presents to the infernal classification scheme” (97). 35 The Halletts startlingly maintain that revengers’ “multiple murders … differentiate the workings of this primitive justice from divine justice, the former avenging like a tornado wiping a swath across the affected area and the latter generally directing its aim more specifically at the guilty” (96). Such religious myopia is exactly what revenge plays challenge. Not for nothing are tornadoes called “acts of God.” 34


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This deus absconditus gives revengers little help beyond thunderclaps. Macduff demands on behalf of murder victims, “Did heaven look on, / And would not take their part?” (Mac 4.3.225–6). A queen pleads in vain, “Wilt thou, O God, fly from such gentle lambs / And throw them in the entrails of the wolf? / When didst thou sleep, when such a deed was done? (R3 4.4.22–24). Gloucester believes no foe can harm him, “So long as I am loyal, true, and crimeless”; Henry is confident:Â€ “Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just” (2H6 2.4.64; 3.2.233). And Mahomet in Alaham intones, “Good angels still [i.e., always] protect the innocent” (1.2.165). All are murdered. Mellida believes that “Heaven permits not taintless blood be spilt” (Antonio’s Revenge 4.3.26) in a play where a child is dismembered. Unjustly imprisoned Charlemont wrestles with his faith:Â€ “Heaven, thy goodness doth command / Our punishments, but yet no further than / The measure of our sins. How should they else / Be just?” Writhing in theological angst, he claims “our afflictions do exceed our crimes” and agonizes “O my afflicted soul, how torment swells / Thy apprehension with profane conceit / Against the sacred justice of my God!” (Atheist’s Tragedy 3.3.1–14). Thunder, finally, wasn’t enough. Tragedies brim with unmerited suffering, accounts beyond settling. “I have not deserved this,” cries Desdemona; “a guiltless death I die” (Oth 4.1.236; 5.2.132); Lear is “more sinned against than sinning” (3.2.59). Although tragic heroes initiate a fatal chain of events, the punishment nearly always exceeds the fault. Are Lear’s arrogance and impercipience capital offenses? Does he deserve to be abandoned by his children and die miserably, for these shortcomings? Do Cleopatra or the Duchess of Malfi deserve death for being strong-willed and loving sex, wine, and apricots? And what of the minor figures swept to doomÂ€– do Paris in Romeo and Juliet, Roderigo in Othello, Lady Macduff, Iras, Mamillius deserve death? Some mainstream tragedies had revenge tragedies as sequels, as if authors couldn’t bear to leave injustice unavenged.36 Sidney’s Apology for Poetry advocates poetic justice, to help literature instill virtue as real lifeÂ€ – eminently non-fairÂ€ – cannot. And we often strain to make tragedies fair:Â€Desdemona is an undutiful daughter and rather flirty with Cassio, Othello brags about his exploits, Romeo and Juliet are impatient and oversexed, Coriolanus snooty about plebeians, the 36

Examples of such pairs include Chapman’s two Bussy plays, possibly The Spanish Tragedy (see Erne 37–42), and possibly Hoffman as a sequel to The Danish Tragedy noted by Henslowe. The Halletts argue that plays make revengers violent so that we will accept their deaths, which would otherwise seem unjust:Â€ “The sense that man was a victim of wanton gods would be so overwhelming as to be unbearable” (97). But tragedies regularly stage such victimization of innocents:Â€this is what tragedy is.

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Duchess of Malfi a glutton for apricotsÂ€– all deserve death. Such reactions to these disturbing plays are understandable, like the reaction of Job’s “comforters” to his tribulations:Â€ “Who ever perished, being innocent?”; “If thou wert pure and upright, surely now [God] would … make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous” (Job 4:Â€7; 8:Â€6). You must have done something to deserve this. Reading tragedy this way, we mistake for the Book of Leviticus what works more like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We over-emphasize the Tragic Flaw, neglecting the ubiquity of chance, accident, and bad luck in tragedy, hoping to find the hero guilty of something serious enough to merit his misery and to preserve our sense of fair play. Pure randomness confounds even our post-Darwinian age; and four centuries of capitalism haven’t dimmed the wish for merit to be rewarded, wickedness punished. As condign revenge mimicked the legal system, claiming a rival legitimacy, a revenger’s “satisfaction” rivals atonement for sin. “Satisfied” revengers co-opt a religious vocabulary made familiar by controversy:Â€Catholic priests “imposed satisfaction,” stipulating compensatory punishment; Protestants held that Christ’s death made satisfaction for all. Hieronimo’s “my heart is satisfied” and Goffe’s Orestes’ “Now am I satisfied, now hath revenge perfection” employ charged terms. “Satisfied” did not mean simply “contented, pleased, gratified” until the nineteenth century (OED); in the Renaissance it was often theological.37 Forcing a foe to make satisfaction, a revenger usurps the role of a priest or of God. R e v e ng e , Ph i l o s oph y, H u m a n i s m Like the Judaeo-Christian, the philosophic tradition on revenge was mixed. To Plato’s Protagoras, vengeance “is senseless and bestial because it looks backward to strike at a past deed” (A. Burnett 7). Similarly in Bacon’s essay on revenge, it is foolish to “labor in past matters” (16).38 But to Aristotle, “pleasure follows all experience of anger from the hope of getting retaliation” (Rhetoric 116); one must only be “angry at the right “Satisfaction” was also familiar in debt repayment, from the fifteenth century onwards, while meanings connected with Christ’s atonement date mainly to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (OED). Many contexts (for example, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”) reveal a deep connection between financial and theological meanings. See Chapter 4. 38 A related modern argument against revenge, that one must “move on,” since revenge cannot restore the dead to life, can occasionally be found in Renaissance plays. For example, the title figure of The Cardinal argues that revenge would make sense only “if Columbo’s death could make Alvarez / Live” (4.2.249–50). Significantly, though, this sentiment emanates from a villain; the vengeful heroine denounces it as tyranny. 37


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things and with the right people” (Nicomachean Ethics 96).39 Stoicism was conflicted:Â€one must respond to tyranny with indifference, and angerÂ€– fundamental to revengeÂ€ – is dangerous (Braden, Renaissance Tragedy 17, 22). But Seneca, although opposing anger in De Ira, wrote revenge plays bursting with tyranny and furious rages. “Stoicism and Senecan drama … generally run on separate tracks” (70). The Renaissance often found Senecan dispassion inhuman, punning on Stoic/stock (Miola 63). Clermont in The Revenge of Bussy finally achieves revenge despite his disabling Stoicism. Italians saw revenge as compatible with civic humanism (H. Baron i:Â€132–57), expressing honor and manliness. Failure to avenge “guaranteed shame, a social calamity” as “disastrous” as impurity in a woman. One “best avoided shame and preserved honor by answering anger with anger, insult with insult, injury with injury, death with death.” The easiest way to lose respect was “to fail to avenge an injury” (Muir xxvi, 255). The drama rejoices in public-spirited revenge. Men in Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece vow “a most just revenge” (2468, 2514). In Bussy d’Ambois, “manly slaughter” is not “willful murder” but “a spice of justice” that “exceeds all positive law.” The king opposes vigilantism by anyone “that thinks him wrong’d,” lest many “vaunt themselves / Law-menders and suppliers, though mere butchers.” But he is assured, “Justice will soon distinguish murderous minds / From just revengers” (2.1.150–69). Attitudes toward revenge drew on conflicting and internally inconsistent traditionsÂ€– Judaeo-Christianity, classical philosophy and drama, humanism, the aristocratic code. Montaigne expressed the perplexity of colliding discourses:Â€ “By the law and right of arms he that putteth up an injury shall be degraded of honor and nobility; and he that revengeth himself of it, shall by the civil law incur a capital punishment” (52). Navigating these treacherous waters, dramatists often take care to situate avengers as victims of unprovoked violence. Unlike other tragic heroes, an avenger “has not created the situation in which he finds himself” As A. Burnett shows, “Greek myths and legends expressed the idea that all order was founded on vengeance” (33). Avengers Harmodius and Aristogeiton founded Athens’ civic institutions (56). In Athens,

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revenge was far from being a crime that men had to abjure if they were to enter a regulated community. It was not the opposite of order, as we tend to think, but order itself in its original and vital form, the community’s power to punish being only a borrowed version of each man’s ingrained right to retaliate. Certainly there was a superstructure of civic law, but this ancient and aristocratic duty was at its base. (64) An Aeschylean chorus explains, “The sword of vengeance, sharply thrust home … props justice at its foundation” (64).

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(Gardner 41). But once victims turn vengeful, do they forfeit sympathy, as many assert? Some do become monsters of cruelty. But even if audiences condemn vengefulness, they are led to recognize it as a victim’s response. The term “revenge”Â€– as against the medieval “venge”Â€– harbors a sense of reciprocity. Antonio’s Revenge features two mirroring revengers:Â€Harris details the uncanny similarity of revenger and villain (103). Has revenge reduced Antonio to his foe’s level? These slippery plays offer our sympathies no easy repose:Â€the mirroring could point up a distinction between bad revenger and good. Piero invites no audience sympathy. His attack is unprovoked, his motives slim; and he slanders his daughter. Antonio, whose cause is just, is marked as the good revenger despite killing a child. He and his revenge team survive, remorseless, satisfied, and applauded by others. We don’t know how audiences greeted this morally ambiguous play. All revenge plays inhabit a liminal zone of conflicting cultural mores. An “act of injustice on behalf of justice,” revenge “deconstructs the antithesis” between right and wrong (Belsey 115). But as French observes, “The major moral saving grace of retributive hatred is that the retributive hater not only desires to injure, even kill, the target, but … also desires to restore the moral balance in the community” (110).40 M a dn e ss a n d L aug h t e r But are revenge plays serious responses to cultural issues? Many charge that madness deprives revengers of moral authority, tainting revenge as irrational and obsessive;41 that persistent black comedy undermines seriousness; that the plays’ morbidity is neurotic, their lurid sensationalism decadent; and that grudge-bearing diminishes our sympathy for revengers. Let me respond to each of these charges. Refreshingly, French stands up for vengefulness, declining to worry much:

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about good people occasionally responding with hostility to evildoers in a disproportionate manner to the harm they suffered. We should worry about good people, anesthetized by moral insensitivity [or] moral cowardice … not taking responsive actions and bearing their wrongful losses stoically, brimming over with Christian forgiveness … The fact that most of us have so readily turned [retribution] over to impersonal, procedurally structured technologies should not be exhibited as one of our great moral accomplishments. (111) He holds that a basic “tenet of morality is that wrongdoing requires a hostile response” (112). For example, “Vengeance … involves moving from sanity to madness”; “the act of revenge can only be undertaken in a state of madness”; “the overthrow of the reason by the passion of revenge”; “madness is in essence an obsession” (Halletts 9, 27, 62, 73).

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Relatively few avengers go mad. The motif has been overemphasized because the few who do (Orestes, Hieronimo, Hamlet) are famous.42 A few obscure avengersÂ€– like Baron’s MirzaÂ€– go mad; and the madness of minor figures comprises collateral damage:Â€Hamlet’s Ophelia, Hoffman’s Lucibell, Pandulpho in Antonio’s Revenge. Critics have expanded the group by finding something mad in the act of feigning madness, and by identifying vengefulness itself with mental unbalance.43 An air of obsession does lurk about many avengers. The very rationality of some seems mad:Â€calmly balancing the payback ledger as limbs are lopped and tongues nailed down is no sign of normality. (Primly promising “I’ll manage / With a discreet severity my vengeance” [3.1.297–8], Mura in Revenge for Honor then coolly demands that his foe’s eyes be gouged out.) But the incongruity that gives these bloodthirsty, passionate souls the tidy minds of accountants rings psychologically true:Â€ it is precisely a fair, orderly, balanced mind that is maddened by the unfairness, disorder, and imbalance inflicted on him, and that responds with a mad bookkeeper’s parody of order. Madness need not rob a revenge of legitimacy. Its intensity maps the extremity of the provocation. Madness also embodies the insane lack of fit between merit and reward. Hieronimo’s mind is unhinged by the murder of deserving Horatio and his killer’s immunity. Madness makes visual the breakdown of moral order. Generalizations as facile as those about “Christian” attitudes typify modern pronouncements about avengers’ madness. In fact, Renaissance thinking about madness was complex and paradoxical. Leontes prefers a hallucination to sanity:Â€“No settled senses of the world can match / The pleasure of that madness” (WT 5.3.72–73). This reason-venerating age was intrigued by the possibility that madness could afford insight. Lear learns more in one night of madness than in eighty years of sanity. In a closely contemporary revenge play, Vindice observes, “We’re all mad people, and they / Whom we think are, are not” (Revenger’s Tragedy 3.5.80–81). In light of such paradoxes, can we insist that the madness of some avengers invalidates revenge? In the latter two cases it is famously difficult to distinguish actual from feigned madness. And in the earliest surviving quarto of The Spanish Tragedy (1592), Hieronimo is not very mad:Â€extended mad scenes were all “additions” to the 1602 quarto, probably by Jonson. Hieronimo talks crazily in 3.11 (possibly feigned madness), but all references to his being “distract” are efforts by Lorenzo, his son’s murderer, to discredit his accusations, and the play’s subtitle, “Hieronimo’s Mad Again,” made famous by T. S. Eliot’s allusion in “The Wasteland,” does not appear until the 1615 quarto, twenty-one years after Kyd’s death. Feigned madness occurs as a plot element as late as The Cardinal, the last revenge play acted before the theaters were closed. 43 “The brutal act committed by the revenger is what distinguishes the act of revenge from the act of justice and makes void all of the protagonist’s claims to sanity”; “the truth is that the kind of justice a revenger effects is a ‘mad’ justice” (Halletts 82, 175). 42

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At least two revenge figuresÂ€ – Titus Andronicus and Marston’s PandulphoÂ€– erupt into mad laughter in grief for a murdered loved one. Titus responds to his sons’ execution, his daughter’s rape and mutilation, and the amputation of his hand with “Ha, ha, ha!” When his brother demands, “Why dost thou laugh? It fits not with this hour,” he explains that sorrow would blind him with tears, “Then which way shall I find Revenge’s cave?” (3.1.263–4, 269). In Blake’s proverb, “Excess of sorrow laughs.”44 Revenge-play humor, “savagely jokey” (Brooke 66), responds to an absurd world. The plays comprise a proto-Theater of the Absurd. Revenge-play laughter is often morbid. Hamlet calls his dead sire “old mole” (1.5.164), andÂ€– apt image of comic morbidityÂ€– clutches a jester’s skull, with its lipless grin. Barabas chortles at a practical jokeÂ€– tricking two men into killing each other (“Brave sport!” laughs his confederate [Jew of Malta 3.1.32]). A villain in The Cardinal, feigning remorse for poisoning a duchess, offers an antidote; after she gulps it, he smilingly reveals that the antidote was the real poison. Pedringano is tricked into boasting of a reprieve at the moment he is hanged (Spanish Tragedy). Berinthia laughs, “my soul / Ravish thyself with laughter,” upon vengefully poisoning her sister (Maid’s Revenge 5.3.12–13). The plague-spawned cult of death in the fourteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, with its memento mori and dance of death, inspired black comedy.45 Non-revenge tragedies too echo with laughter. Macbeth abounds in dark one-liners (“’Twas a rough night,” “The table’s full,” “Thou wast born of woman”),46 and its equivocating triple prophecy is a demonic practical joke. Nicholas Brooke, tracing “horrid laughter” in many tragedies, denies that Jacobean tragedy is an “amazing decadence from an imaginary condition of ‘serious’ tragedy”; he believes that this condition “never existed in English” (7). Michael Hattaway views many of Marlowe’s most serious scenes as “within the conventions of clownery”:Â€ clowns parody Faustus; Tamburlaine’s seizing Cosroe’s crown is “a pretty jest,” and “there is something of Groucho Marx in his most serious moments” (“Christopher Marlowe” 200). If “Opposites of laughter and tears easily and bewilderingly transpose into each other … At funerals, after weeping at the grave, we become edgily jokey at the baked-meats … Tragedy deals in extreme emotions … and because they are extreme, they are all liable to turn over into laughter” (Brooke 3). In The Rebellion, Giovanno and Philippa both break into mad laughter, which however is not limited to revenge plays:Â€when the heroine of Leonard Willan’s tragedy Orgula laughs “Ha ha ha ha” upon murdering the Lord Protector in a case of mistaken identity, Gratianus reports, “She’s evidently mad” (75). 45 Schoenbaum notes that the dance of death was represented in the church at Stratford-uponAvon (“The Revenger’s Tragedy” 203). 46 2.3.57; 3.4.45; 5.7.12. 44


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macabre comedy undermines revenge plays, much of Renaissance tragedy is open to the same objection. Popular genres tend to tip over into parody. The Revenger’s Tragedy seems parodic. After the poisoned duke is forced to watch his wife copulating with his bastard, two separate troupes of four masked murderers dance in; we watch a choreographed mass stabbing. Unlovely members of the duke’s reconstituted family rejoice in the monikers Lussurioso, Spurio, Ambitioso, Supervacuo, and Junior. Snarling insults and horrific events evoke bathetic responses:Â€ duchess:Â€ “He called his father villain; and me strumpet, / A word that I abhor to ’file my lips with.” ambitioso:Â€ “That was not so well done, brother” (2.3.24–26). Spurio, told of his father’s death, cries in anguish, “Old dad dead?” (5.1.116). When the duke’s corpse is discovered in vassal’s attire, lips eaten away by poison and tongue nailed down, a nobleman mildly reports, “Your father’s accidentally departed” (5.1.141).47 Mulleases the Turk also abounds in preposterous incident, with so many revenge agendas we can’t keep track of motives. Competitive plotting by rival avengers animates this chess-like play with its moves and counter-moves. Two phony vengeance-craving ghosts keep scaring other characters (and each other) into headlong flight. The fleeing “spruce” lecher Bordello, running into a group of chatting bawds, inquires politely, “Ladies, did you not see a spirit pass this way?” They reply, “Thou see’st we are feeding the flesh, man! What, dost thou talk of the spirit?” (1.2.126; 3.2.28–30). When Borgias, startled by a bogus ghost, falls from a great height, the disguised Ferrara tosses the supposed corpse over his shoulder, and the feigning Borgias whips Ferrara’s dagger from his belt and slays him. Posing as a ghost, Borgias strangles the other ghost impersonator with her own hair. But when he wafts into a hostage-taking still feigning ghosthood, Mulleases kills him to prove that ghosts do not exist. In 1607, when these two uproarious plays were staged, revenge tragedy was sliding toward parody, each play more comically over-the-top than the last. Chaucer’s pilgrims apply a revenge idiom to rival tale-spinners:Â€the Miller tells a parodic tale to “quite” [i.e., requite or pay back] the Knight’s tale (3119). Similarly, revenge dramatists competed in outrageous parody, as revengers compete to out-plot each other. (“Oh good deceit, he quits him with like terms!” [Revenger’s Tragedy 5.1.103].) The revenger’s delight in outwitting foes imparts a sprightly comic tone. Hoffman plans to “meditate, / And boast in the revenges I have 47

Prosser considers the playwright “obviously a man of deplorable taste if not of sick mind” (64). The play’s grotesque action fits beautifully into a dystopic, science-fiction milieu in Cox’s film version.

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wrought,” to “sing a hymn unto the fates / Composed of laughing interjections.” But his sidekick smirks, “Fox, you’ll be taken; hunter, you are fallen / Into the pit you digg’d; I laughed to see / How I out-strip the prince of villainy.”48 Hippolito rejoices, “How happy is our vengeance!” and Vindice capers with malice:Â€ “Why, it hits / Past the apprehension of indifferent wits.” Sheer delight exposes him:Â€ he crows, “’Twas somewhat witty-carried, / Though we say it. ’Twas we two murdered him” (Revenger’s Tragedy 5.1.135–6, 5.3.97–98).49 Gaspar brags that his foes are “all o’er-reached by one poor bastard’s wit.” MarianaÂ€– who always carries stab-wound balsam (an essential traveler’s aid in this play)Â€– gloats, “Women / May sometimes overreach the archest villains. / Gaspar, I’ll fit you” (Bastard 4.4.230–2). As corpses accumulate, Gaspar greets a woman threading her way through the carnage with a cheery “welcome home!” (5.4.174) and remarks of one toppling body, “More objects still of ruin? This will be / A bloody puppet play!” (5.4.167–8).50 Mulleases’ title figure fills the stage with laughter:Â€“I’ll bear this body hence:Â€ha ha ha! / O now methinks I gin out-reach myself, / Now like some huge Colossus could I strut” (4.1.137–9). The fake corpse Borgias also guffaws:Â€stabbing the duke who carries him, he chuckles, “Ha ha ha, you’ll bear me to my bed, / Then in your chamber laugh that I am dead!” The indignant duke demands, “Livest thou, damned villain?” and Borgias chuckles, “I live, and laugh (vile slave) to see thy fall” (4.1.345–6). As he lies dying, Mulleases is still laughing:Â€upon his irrepressible “Ha ha, ha!” Borgias cries “Grin’st, hellish antic?” Mulleases confirms that even were his liver gnawed by vultures, “I would still laugh / To see thee like a falling pine tree reel” (5.3.118–27). The medieval Vice, among the revenger’s ancestors, was still a laughing mischief-maker in Tudor drama. Braden thinks the avenger’s similarity to the medieval Vice “implies a severe moral stand on revenge” (Renaissance Tragedy 202; cf. Prosser 64). But Robert Weimann argues for audience complicity with the Vice (152–3, 258)Â€– why not with revengers too?51 Hoffman 2.3.732–3; 3.1.1091–2; 5.2.2292–4. Audiences might have responded to the revenger’s diabolical and comic ingenuity as readers responded to rogue literature’s “malign ingenuity” (J. G. Turner 130). Chapter 1 of my Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature approaches rogue literature as a subspecies of the Tudor jest book, with a paradoxically serious social agendaÂ€– not unlike the comical but serious revenge play. 50 “An accumulation of bodies builds up towards mirth sooner or later … one body may be sad, but four is ridiculous” (Brooke 63). 51 The children’s magazine Highlights for Children for many years featured moralizing cartoons in which a good boy helped his mother tidy up while a bad boy swept the dirt under the carpet. Having spoken with many former subscribers to this upright publication, I conclude that 48

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Revenge tragedy shares much with comedy. Intrigue breeds laughter, Kerrigan notes (Revenge 203), and Linda Anderson calls revenge “a particularly appropriate theme for comedy,” which “works against the dignity of tragedy” (18). Her assumption that comic moments in tragedy were unintentional, ineptly undermining tragic effect, ignores the modus operandi of satireÂ€– surely a jesting satirist can be as effective a political voice as a serious moralist. Asking whether two genres (satiric and tragic) clash in Hamlet’s wise-cracking character, Donald Hedrick notes Renaissance interest in Diogenes and Alexander and proposes satirist truth-seekers as politically necessary. As satirist and revenger, Hamlet exposes truth, and insofar as satire is revenge, “Hamlet does not delay revenging because he is never not revenging” (71). Also comedic are revenge plays’ happy (if gruesome) endings. (Indeed, Antonio’s Revenge is sequel to a romantic comedy.) Like Shakespearean romantic figures, revengers often form coalitions. Revenge tragedy’s grotesquerie springs partly from its generic liminality:Â€tragic in its violence, horror, and tyranny, comic in its jests, restoration of order, and the happiness (or at least satisfaction) of its heroes. Valuing comic elements in revenge tragedy, however, courts prejudices against comedy. In genre hierarchies such as Sidney’s in An Apology for Poetry, comedy always languished several rungs lower than tragedy;52 and at least since Matthew Arnold’s “high seriousness,” equivocation on “serious” has harmed comedy. If “serious literature” means both excellent and non-comic literature, the comic becomes non-excellent. But why? Even if comedy is pure entertainment, need we denigrate pleasure? To prefer sobriety and moral seriousness to pleasure is a belated puritanism.53 generations of small readers gleefully identified with Goofus, aghast at the priggish Gallant. The same might have held for the Vice. 52 This reflects in part the genres’ differing class valence, with higher-caste characters populating tragedy. As Sir Richard Baker put it in 1662, “Tragedies are the gentry … of plays … comediesÂ€… are but the commonalty of plays” (25). 53 The word “moral” rings through the (largely humorless) work of those appalled by revenge plays:Â€ “Elizabethan moralists condemned revenge as illegal, blasphemous, irrational, unnaturalÂ€… unhealthy” and “thoroughly un-English” (Prosser 10). If we sympathize with a revenger, “we must not make the error of equating sympathy with moral approval”; he is not guided by “any principle to which the Elizabethan audience could grant its moral approval”; Claudius’ “revenge should have no bounds” cannot “possibly express Shakespeare’s considered moral judgment,” and we cannot accept his words or Laertes’ actions “as moral guides to the play” (Prosser 34, 71, 216–17). The rather quaint assumption is that Elizabethans attended revenge plays in pursuit of moral guidanceÂ€– or should have. Revenge plays have taken a beating during heavily moralizing periods of critical history, such as some decades of the eighteenth century, the Victorian age, and (oddly) the 1960sÂ€– a decade much given to moral views of literature and denunciations of revenge.

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Even funny, irreverent, joyously gruesome, camp plays can be excellent literature. And funny or not, they did real cultural work, expressing real resentments, animosities, aspirationsÂ€– a serious contribution that needn’t surpass their value as entertainment. S e ns at ion a l i s m Clustering suspiciously around a fin de siècle, revenge plays are often decried as decadent for their lurid sensationalism. Heroes bite out their tongues; a countess cries herself blind; the wicked plummet through trap doors, inhale poisoned smoke, are shot by cupids, hanged onstage, seared to death with burning crowns. Mutilations, decapitations, and amputations splatter the stage with gore.54 Tamora’s corpse is left to be devoured by animals. Sexual sensationalism includes sadistic rape,55 incest, necrophilia. Can these outrageous plays, what Peter Mercer calls a “pornography of horror” (34), perform serious cultural work? Over-the-top sensationalism often seems comic, camp. Intentionally funny revenge plays can exorcize frustration and resentment through therapeutic revenge and laughter. But intentionality is tricky. Did Shakespeare intend Titus Andronicus to be funny? Laughable excess can also signal immature writing. Titus, Shakespeare’s most sensational tragedy, was also his firstÂ€– a man in his twenties penned lines like “O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none” (3.2.29–30). And how much atrocity would have seemed excessive? Italian despots committed “atrocities … which make the inventions of the Jacobeans rather pedestrian” (J. Lever 19–20). Milan’s dictator fed a pack of dogs on human flesh, training them to “hunt down and savage his political prisoners”; his successor kept a ruler in a cageÂ€– like Marlowe’s Bajazet, he “beat his brains out against the bars”; a clan leader was torn limb from limb in revenge (20). In such a world, would theatrical mutilations have seemed comically excessive? Audiences at camp films might laugh at gory amputations, but the Renaissance took martyrdom seriously. The godly showed courage under And we can hardly blame the gore on a gladiator-relishing Roman bloodthirstiness, via revenge plays’ Senecan sources:Â€“In the nine complete plays traditionally attributed to Seneca there occur thirty violent deaths, or 3.33 per play”; in the sixteen Renaissance revenge plays Griswold discusses there occur “112 violent deaths, seven per play” (Griswold 86). 55 In The Rebellion, banditti prepare to gang-rape a maiden against a tree (“each man shall have his turn” [4.1.75]); meanwhile, the aged bandit chief winds his dagger around her hair and sticks it in the ground to secure her while he downs an aphrodisiac. In the nick of time, she is rescued by a laughing madman. 54


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torture or practiced self-mutilation. Bale’s and Foxe’s Protestant martyrologies delivered gore to an eager public. When, as Bishop Hooper burned at the stake, “he was black in the mouth, and his tongue swollen, that he could not speak … he knocked his breast with his hands, until one of his arms fell off, and then knocked still with the other, what time the fat, water, and blood dropped out at his fingers’ ends” (Foxe iii:Â€156; a woodcut captures the moment). Another martyr tried to wipe his face with a hand as its “sinews shrunk, and the fat dropped away” (iii:Â€220). Revenge plays’ amputations and tortures are no more sensationalistic than this.56 Indeed, Lavinia’s amputations provoke the question “who hath martyred thee?” (Tit 3.1.81; cf. 3.1.107, 3.2.36). To resistance writers, martyrs were quintessential defiers of tyranny. Deploying the discourse of martyrdom in a formal defense of womankind, Daniel Tuvil praises a woman who carried in her lap a rapist’s severed head, a virgin who tore out her eyeballs and presented them to a man tempted by their beauty, a widow who fended off suitors by sealing her vagina with fire, a mother who killed her daughters to preserve them from rape. Lancashire connects the revenge play The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, in which a woman avoids rape by suicide, with the tradition of virgin martyrs (26).57 Does “shoddy sensationalism” (Prosser 54) preclude serious authorial commitment?58 Susan Zimmerman holds that revenge plays “foregrounded an … outrageous sensationalism that would seem to preclude serious symbolic import. Such taboo subjects as incest, patricide and necrophilia were … exaggerated to such a degree as to seem almost to trivialize the horrific subject matter” (12–13). But must the seriously committed be sober and decent? Modern guardians of morality distinguish sensationalism from “redeeming social value,” but for the Renaissance, Of Renaissance depictions of death more generally, “it is easy to be seduced by their surface grotesquerie into diagnosing a morbid sensationalism indulged for its own sake,” when “artists were struggling to express … the almost inconceivable horror of death’s undifferentiating blankness” (Neill, Issues 14). 57 And martyrdoms could spawn talionic chains of retribution:Â€ the martyrdoms of Protestants Cranmer, Ridley, Hooper, Ferrar, and Northumberland were “described as just retribution” for the martyrdoms of Catholics Fisher and More (Wizeman 168–9); “the Protestant Reformation and the associated religious wars and rebellions provided strong motivations for revenge-taking” (French 30). 58 Nowadays, as in the Renaissance, a sizeable non-moralizing audience relishes revenge:Â€witness such films as Kill Bill or V for Vendetta, or an online vengeance bookstore marketing books on getting even with ex-wives, landlords, bureaucrats, irritating local businesses, or international conglomerates (www.undercoverpress.com). One available title is How to Get Even with Anybody, Anytime. But modern horror films, for all their sensationalism, have elicited intellectual criticism that takes seriously the cultural work they perform. See, for example, Clover, Sconce, Prince, P. Hutchings. 56

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the sensational could redeem. Lavinia’s rape and mutilation save Rome. Paul Jorgensen argues for a “serious purpose” in Renaissance sensationalism beyond “thrills” (15). From accounts of crime, witchcraft, and martyrdom, he concludes that sensational works “were valued primarily, or at least ostensibly, for their moral purpose” (18). And the plays’ transgressive sexuality evokes a culture of libertine non-conformity:Â€“Just as ‘queering’ now denotes a brilliant, energizing, critical distortion of received truth,” so the sexually sensational connoted “zest, salty wit, forbidden inventiveness, a worldly … intelligence incapable of being duped by established morality” (J. G. Turner 40).59 Does grudge-bearing diminish avengers? Did Plato rightly regard revenge as “bestial because it looks backward to strike at a past deed” (A.Â€ Burnett 7)? While Aristotle concedes that grudge-bearing does not denote “greatness of soul,” he “still accepts proportionate reciprocation:Â€‘for men demand that they shall be able to requite evil with evilÂ€– if they cannot, they feel they are in the position of slaves’” (Kerrigan, Revenge 51). Muir sees grudge as a vital cultural force, “one of the wellsprings from which historical consciousness flows … In preliterate feuding societies, various mnemonic devices kept alive the awareness of past slayings that required revenge” (209). (An “ancient grudge” fuels Romeo and Juliet’s vendetta [Prologue 3].) Friulian revenge narrative “sustained vendetta obligations” in legends “retold over generations.” Revenge provided “the crucial means by which individuals, especially males, formed their identities in imitation of heroic predecessors and in opposition to hereditary enemies” (Muir xxvii–xxviii). Grudge hatches history. T h e at r ic a l i t y a n d M e tat h e at r ic a l i t y Revenge plays are flamboyantly stagy, rejoicing in metatheatrics and plays within plays. The Spanish king applauds Hieronimo’s playÂ€ – “Bravely done!”Â€– before he and the viceroy realize that in this play their sons have been slain before their eyes (4.4.68).60 In The Revenger’s Tragedy’s coronation masque, actors kill the duke and others. In Women Beware Women’s wedding masque, avengers pursue assorted agendas:Â€ Isabella kills Livia Arguing that racy subject matter can express serious social frustration, Dennis R. Hall ascribes Hustler’s popularity to its being an “agent of working-class consciousness” and “class conflict” (152–3). 60 Half a century later, The Spanish Tragedy itself became the inset play in The Rebellion, which quotes verbatim its opening lines by Andrea’s ghost and goes on to kill off characters during the performance of the play-within-a-play. 59


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with poisoned smoke, but not before Livia throws lethal flaming gold over her with the immortal cry “take that!” (5.1.154). Guardiano dies falling through a trap door; stage cupids transfix Hippolito with poisoned arrows; and the duke, grumbling that the action doesn’t follow the script, is poisoned by an actor playing Ganymede. Actors in inset plays are conscripted into plays authored by revengers. Directing his own play liberates a revenger from the dismal role of actor in a play directed by powers beyond his control. “Like playwright and actor, the revenger fashions himself” (Allman 59). One reason metatheatricality is so prominent is that revenge itself is mimetic:Â€ “Every revenge is an imitation of action with action, and consequently very much like the staging of a play. The avenger needs an audience” (A. Burnett 3). “When B takes an eye for an eye, he emulates Aristotle’s dramatist by imitating A’s action” (Kerrigan, Revenge 17). Does imitating evil make one evil? Pace Exodus 21, Harris sees such imitation as demonic:Â€“Seeking ‘an eye for an eye,’ the revenger unwittingly engaged in a demonic imitation, a participation in the very sinful behavior which s/he nominally opposed” (101).61 But revenge has ancient roots; Harris’ Christian terms (“demonic,” “sinful”) fail to engage with its ancient satisfactions, its paradoxical cleansing by blood. As blood sacrifice seeks to subdue violence by the “application of violence” (Girard 20), so revenge seeks justice by mimicking injustice. “Dedicated to restoring the past,” it aims to “de-create a former tainted deed” (A. Burnett 119). Like sacrifice, it attempts “to remedy evil with evil, or to wash away murder with murder” (Guépin xii). The paradoxical need not be nonsensical; in magical thinking, bloodshed can cure bloodshed. The principle of homeopathyÂ€– like cures likeÂ€– underpinned ancient medical practice and “ran deep in Greek culture” (Kerrigan, Revenge 45; cf. Parker 16). Homeopathic curesÂ€– “splashing blood on bloody hands cancels blood” (Kerrigan 45)Â€– are analogous to condign punishment (penalty fits crime) and to revenges suiting crimes. Ancient Greek texts sometimes applied to revenge killings a purificatory language of “wiping out blood with blood” (Parker 373). And revenge plays evince “a desire to shed blood on the polluted spot, to wipe the stain out of Desdemona’s sheets by murdering her in the adulterous bed” (Kerrigan, Revenge 46). A rare dissenter, Barish holds that revengers “are no more to be lumped with their victims than Hamlet is to be lumped with Claudius because in the process of combating Claudius’s wrongs he too dips his hands in blood. There are taints and taints; there is corruption and corruption” (“True and False” 154).

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Rampant revenge A T e s t C a s e :Â€Or e s t e s L i v e s H a ppi ly E v e r A f t e r

Revenge’s ancient heritage raises another issue. Was its ubiquity really a clue to historical conditions, or only an epiphenomenon of the classical revival? Did revenge merely ride into Renaissance culture as a stowaway in classical material? Europe’s longest-running revenge plot, the Orestes story and the cluster of tales about the house of Atreus, provides a cultural litmus test through posing a tricky question:Â€is vengeance on your father’s killer justifiable if she happens to be your mother? For the Greeks, these stories formed a cycle of human misery:Â€Atreus’ revenge on Thyestes; Aegisthus’ on Atreus’ family; Clytemnestra’s on Agamemnon; Orestes’ and Electra’s on Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. The curse on the house of Atreus epitomizes the malign destiny haunting Greek myth. This family is always already plagued with revenge and cannibalismÂ€– Aegisthus helps murder Agamemnon, whose father Atreus caused his brother Thyestes (Aegisthus’ father) to devour his own children. But that was revenge for Thyestes’ cuckolding Atreus; and further back in this dysfunctional family, Tantalus fed his son’s flesh to the gods. Greeks stage humans enmeshed in fatal circumstance. In Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers and Sophocles’ Electra, Orestes and Electra achieve revenge by patience and guile. But it brings more misery:Â€in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Euripides’ Orestes, Furies pursue Orestes after his matricide. As for the morality of revenge, Apollo is in favor of matricide, the Furies are against it, and (in the Eumenides) Athena is of two minds and convenes a jury to decide. Its deliberations end in a draw. Unlike Jehovah, Greek gods are no transcendent source of moral authority. For Greeks, to argue was to live, and this tale’s conflicting moral imperatives (avenge one’s father; show filial devotion to one’s mother) provided excellent matter for debate. When Roman Seneca took up the tale in Thyestes and Agamemnon, he saw not Mycenae or Athens but a nation, Greece. Regarding the doom of Atreus’ house as a virtual fall of Greece, in Agamemnon he keeps the captive Cassandra alive (in Greek tragedies she dies) to gloat on behalf of Troy. This later appealed to Renaissance nationalists:Â€ in 1566 John Studley translated with verve Cassandra’s gleeful summary of Greek disasters.62 Agamemnon “entrapped was by trait’rous train, and whoredom of his wife, / And by a gift received of her deprived of his life” Goffe’s Tragedy of Orestes also gives Cassandra a Greece-versus-Troy speech:Â€“O ye dead Trojans, leap within your graves, / … The Grecians are revenged upon themselves!” (2.1.1–4).

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(5.3.74–80), thus balancing books on a national scale, Greek and Trojan fatal gifts echoing each other:Â€the “trait’rous train,” Clytemnestra’s gift of a garment in which she entangles Agamemnon to stab him, echoes the Trojan horse.63 In Seneca the late-Roman goddess Fortuna causes Agamemnon’s fall, suddenly turning her wheel. This differs crucially from Greek hubris. In Aeschylus, conspicuous deeds provoke divine envy:Â€ “The black Furies stalking the man fortunate beyond all right / … drop him to darkness …Â€ / The vaunt of high glory / Is bitterness; for God’s thunderbolts / Crash on the towering mountains. / Let me attain no envied wealth, / Let me not plunder cities” (Agamemnon 461–72 Lattimore translation). Fortune is more arbitrary than hubris:Â€Zeus hurls thunderbolts because of greatness, but Fortuna strikes arbitrarily. In the Renaissance, her wheel suited the sense that a capricious marketplace logic governs life. Studley identifies Agamemnon’s theme as “the unstability of Fortune”; when she has advanced someone “to the highest … suddenly she turning her wheel, doth let him fall” (Sig. [a3]v). Medieval authors sculpted these Greek tales to suit their own preoccupations.64 They changed Aegisthus’ social class, demoting him to low degree, thus magnifying the heinousness of his adultery with the queen, mitigating Orestes’ matricide, and erasing Aegisthus’ revenge agenda as Thyestes’ son. Lifted out of the Atreus cycle, Orestes’ story became the last chapter of the Trojan War. As the Middle Ages effaced the sense of fate looming over generations of a family, the tale felt distinctly less Greek. And medieval tellers removed the oppressive helplessness of Orestes, who now briskly raises an army and mounts a siege. To this unreflecting, brutal avenger, guile is unnecessary. In a fresh touch of horror, Orestes has his mother haled naked before him, hands bound behind her, hacks off her breasts and throws them “in the cart way” (Gower ii:Â€2073–4),65 and has Aegisthus carted through town before hanging him “on a fork” (Caxton’s LeFever). Such symmetries typify the tale through history. In the northern dialect of the Gest Historial of the Destruction of Troy, Orestes wants “to deire for the dethe of his dere fader” (12950). The second word of this alliterative line is a homonym of its penultimate word, creating an equivalence between deire, “injure,” and dere (“dear”), balancing an injurious act of vengeance against the father’s dearness. 64 Medieval retellings include Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troy, 1175–85 (via a translation by Guido delle Colonne); the anonymous Gest Historial of the Destruction of Troy; Raoul LeFever’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy; John Lydgate’s Troy Book; and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. 65 This revenge seems condign, alluding to her status as his mother and (through breasts’ erotic significance) possibly also to her adultery. 63

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Medieval versions end in Orestes marrying Hermione, Electra marrying his friend Pylades, and Orestes slaying his rival Pyrrhus in revenge for his earlier abducting Hermione. We are left feeling that revenge is satisfying, killing one’s mother no impediment to romance and happiness. Revenge is sanctioned by God, now a transcendent source of moral authority and guarantor of fairness. Lydgate wrote (slipping from the Greek cosmos into a monotheistic universe): It is required of equity and right, Of thilke [i.e., this same] Judge that is most of might And equally holdeth his balance, On death conspired for to do vengeance … For murder wrought will have his equal meed [i.e., reward] And his guerdon [i.e., recompense], as he hath deserved … And for the murder of Agamemnon, The might[y] Lord, which is most sovereign God, Made him minister of the same blood, Young Horestes, full of high prowess, To execute his doom [i.e., judgment] of righteousness.

(1467–85)

The reckoning is final, with no foreboding sense of a talionic chain extending across generations. Although familiar with Orestes’ torment by Furies, medieval storytellers performed a neat surgical cut:Â€they changed the chronology so that his madness precedes the matricide and is thus exculpatory rather than punitive. The Gest Hystoriale makes his revenge almost unpremeditated:Â€killing “in his wode ire” (insane wrath) and “full rad” (very hastily) (ll. 13022, 13049), he is “not guilty by reason of insanity.” Also, medieval authors altered depression to rage. Across history, Orestes’ symptoms resemble bipolar disorder. Greek Orestes is depressed:Â€as Euripides’ Orestes opens, he is virtually in a fetal position, slipping in and out of madness, pursued by Furies invisible to others. Medieval Orestes is manic. In Confessio Amantis, organized around the deadly sins, he exemplifies Wrath. The Middle Ages did not condone matricide, and medieval bystanders still debate morality, like Apollo and Athena:Â€“Some said he did well enough, / And some said he did amiss; / Divers opinion there is” (Gower ii:Â€2112–14). But all in all, medieval Orestes gets away with it. Greek Clytemnestra and Aegisthus enjoy no meaningful relationship:Â€ in Aeschylus they converse only briefly; Aegisthus interacts more with the Chorus than with Clytemnestra. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have them killed separately, without conversingÂ€ – Euripides


55

denies Aegisthus a speaking part. Seneca gives them an extended but hardly intimate conversation:Â€like Macbeths in reverse, she admits to cold feet, and he urges her to kill the king. Despite the courtly love castÂ€– older husband off at war, young wife at homeÂ€– Aegisthus’ social demotion may have precluded viewing the affair romantically. The Renaissance, however, developed this unpromising couple.66 In Heywood’s 2 Iron Age, they discuss the murder and how to escape vengeance. Clytemnestra vows to “die upon his bosom” (5.1). In Goffe’s Orestes, Aegisthus recalls “the sweet pleasures” of their sheets (1.2.9). In a long scene, they steel themselves for murder. To her Lady Macbeth-like resolve to “turn man” and “to the hate / Which women bear … add a manly strength,” Aegisthus fondly replies, “Spoke like Aegisthus’ love” (1.4.14–15, 26). They keep up a running dialogue during the murder (“Wound him, Aegisthus, kill him not at once” [1.4.38]) and get sexual kicks from itÂ€– to her it is a “nuptial night” (1.4.84). He caresses her with hands red with her husband’s blood. In slaughter’s tender aftermath, the sun rises on the pair billing and cooing:Â€“Fair morning to my queen … my love! / How likes my sweet her change of bedfellow?” (2.2.1–2). In Greek drama, they never bothered feigning innocence, but these two make a pact to lie about the murder. The most startling recreation of the pair is in Pickering’s Horestes:Â€they sing a duet to the tune of “King Solomon,” celebrating Paris and Helen’s adultery in courtly-love terms and situating themselves in the “famous lover” tradition. “As joyful as the warlike god is Venus to behold,” warbles Aegisthus, “So is my heart replete with joy … / Oh lady dear, in that I do possess my heart’s delight” (602–4). These fully realized characters, in their passion, folie à deux, scheming, and mutual manipulation, darkly parody (like the Macbeths) the happily married. The ideal of companionate marriage, set forth in sermons and domestic handbooks, penetrated even revenge plays. Among the Greeks, only Euripides stages the weddings of Orestes and Pylades, and his happy ending, imposed on a bleak plot by a deus ex machina, seems so transparently absurd as to mock the very wish for happy endings. In medieval retellings, the marriages are a mere league of amity. But in the Renaissance, love blossomed. Thomas Peend includes Orestes and Hermione among famous lovers, alongside Hero and Leander (p. 100). Heywood begins 2 Iron Age with their espousal. Even in an ancient, gore-soaked revenge plot, Renaissance poets passed up no chance to compose love lyrics. â•‡ Renaissance plays also restored Aegisthus as Thyestes’ son.

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Aeschylus’ Pylades helps Orestes commit murder, and in Euripides he offers (Horatio-like) to commit suicide, but the friendship then lay dormant until Lydgate likened the two to David and Jonathan. In the Renaissance, Orestes and Pylades flowered into exemplars of male friendship. In 2 Iron Age, Orestes makes a match between Pylades and Electra, to dovetail with his own romance, and ultimately Pylades dies at his side. In Goffe’s Orestes, the dramatis personae calls the two “dear friends” twice, and there is a lengthy amicitia scene (1.3). Pylades’ watchful loyalty saves Orestes from madness. At play’s end, they “fall down dead, embracing each other” (5.7.51 s.d.). Poems often abstracted the friendship from its native revenge plot.67 Murder and amputated breasts are discreetly absent from humanistic paeans to male friendship. The upbeat Renaissance Orestes rejoices in revenge:Â€ “Achilles’ son at last was slain; Orestes had his joy” (Fenne Sig. ff v). He kills the malefactors, ascends the throne, gets the girl, triumphs over a sexual rival, has a loyal friend. Though sometimes pursued by a post-matricidal Fury, he is mostly mad during revenge, and it is rage, not depression.68 He is exonerated on grounds of insanity:Â€ “Some excuse for this Orestes had:Â€/ Mad men exemption have, and he was mad” (Brathwait 119). And even in rage, he smiles. In A Poor Knight his Palace of Private Pleasures, Orestes, “a raging knight,” “smiled, whenas the rest did cry”; he smiled especially “when all the rest were slain,” delighted to have “paid” them (Sig. biiv). Classical Orestes was miserable. Horace demanded decorum in poetic character:Â€Medea must be fierce, Ino sad, “Orestes never glad” (Sig. a3v). Queen Elizabeth translated this as “mourning Orestes” (50). But the Renaissance refused to depict him as “never glad.” Goffe’s Orestes is quite glad:Â€ after matricide he exults, “Now am I satisfied, now hath revenge perfection” (4.8.145). If he becomes a subject of tragedies, “Why, that will make me swell with greater pride, / To think my name shall drop in lines of blood / From some great poet’s quills, who well shall paint / How bravely I revenged my father’s death, / That is the thing I wished, and ’tis my glory, / I shall be matter for so brave a story” (5.1.56–61). When others insist that he has transgressed in killing his mother, Orestes perfunctorily See:Â€William Averell’s Charles and Julia, Sig. hi; Pallingenius’ The Zodiac of Life, Sig. l–lv); the poem on faithful friendship annexed to Matthew Grove’s Pelops and Hippodamia, 13–19; the anonymous First Book of the Preservation of King Henry the VII, Sig. i3v; George Turberville’s Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets 97; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene iv.x.27.4. 68 The motif is most common in nondramatic works, e.g., Heywood’s Troia Brittanica, p. 408, ll. 823–6; Gamble’s Airs and Dialogues with its ditty on Orestes’ roaring madness to be sung to a lute or bass viol; Adamson’s Muses’ Threnody 7; Corbett’s The Times’ Whistle:Â€Or A New Dance of Seven Satyrs, p. 26. 67


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becomes “furens,” then falls asleep; Pylades sings sad songs, and Orestes awakes with wits recovered (5.5). Orestes is strikingly joyful in Christopher Wase’s royalist translation of Sophocles’ Electra (see Chapter 8), where heaven rewards him “by length of days, and happiness of government; for he lived ninety years, and reigned seventy.” Renaissance Orestes both gets mad and gets even. Greek and Roman Atreus plays seldom restore order; most offer weak closure. Seneca’s Agamemnon ends with murderers in control, Electra immured in a dungeon. Euripides’ Electra and Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers end with Orestes beset by Furies; Aeschylus’ chorus laments the cannibalism, regicide, and matricide:Â€“Where / Is the end? Where shall the fury of fate / … be done with?” (ll. 1074–6). But medieval and Renaissance versions mostly impose strong closure and successful revenge. Orestes sets the world to rights, even if he must die. At the end of 2 Iron Age, everybody dies:Â€A confused scuffle, in which Orestes kills Pyrrhus; Pyrrhus, Orestes; Cethus wounds Pylades, Diomed, Menelaus, Ulysses, Thersites, etc. All fall dead … Cethus riseth up from the dead bodies and speaks (5.1. s.d). Presently, Synon also rises up, and he and Cethus kill each other. Helen of Troy enters, feels remorse for having caused all this trouble, and strangles herself. Mass death ends the talionic chain. The Renaissance plays scrupulously bestow just deserts. In a scene Jasper Heywood added to Seneca’s Thyestes, guilt-ridden Thyestes begs, “Let torments all of hell / Now fall upon this hateful head that hath deserved them well!” (23–24). Authors often quantify deserts. Translating Agamemnon, Studley imagined measurable amounts of bloodÂ€ – pints, perhaps? Clytemnestra is assured that Agamemnon “shall pay thee so much blood again / As shed he hath” (Sig. cv). Seneca’s text reads simply sanguinem reddet tibi (ll. 235–6), “give back blood to you”:Â€ it was the Renaissance translator who implied a measuring cup. Horestes harps on just deserts. Horestes will never feel joy until Aegisthus “hath for his desert / Received due punishment” (1–2). He tells soldiers not to kill his mother:Â€only he can take revenge; “otherwise my father’s death revengement doth crave” (30). When his mother repents, Orestes quantifies:Â€ one moment’s remorse is not “a recompense for killing of thy mate” (31). Horestes rejects a plea for mercy:Â€“As thou hast deserved so I shall thy fact [i.e., deed] requite” (33). Horestes rewards good action and avenges bad:Â€“He that shall … deserve ought well of thee, / Suffer him not for to depart, till well reward he be” (20). An allegorical Fame gives just deserts:Â€“As each man bends himself, so I report his fame in deed. / If ill, then ill, through iron trump his fame does straight proceed; / If good, then good, through golden trump I blow

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his lively fame” (36–37). In Goffe’s Orestes, Agamemnon’s death “deserves revenge” (1.6.28), and Clytemnestra stabs him once for each of his extramarital affairs. Aegisthus’ “soul grows glad; / Had not he grieved thus, I had lost revenge” (1.6.35–36). When a sorceress offers to stick pins in wax images of his foes, Orestes’ internal calculator sums up:Â€“Tush, this is too little” (3.6.102). He stabs victims repeatedly, letting them die slowlyÂ€– just what they did to Agamemnon. Clytemnestra dies confessing, “My conscience tells me, I deserve no less” (4.8.127–8). Tyndarus rebukes him for taking twice as much revenge as necessary:Â€one person “with one’s death again should be repaid.” Orestes arithmetically responds, “Had I desired but one, / I should have thought I had desired none. / Why, methinks, I should too have killed thee, / The number is too little yet of three” (5.1.40–44). He wishes he could kill a hundred:Â€ “One death’s too little to revenge a king” (4.8.109–10). Goffe’s arithmetic of revenge belongs to a world where revengers can’t rely on authority figures to ensure justice. “Arm yourselves all, you all potent gods, / You which we term just ministers of Heaven … / Dost thou sleep, Jove?” (1.5.36–44). Just deserts require vigilantism. In Orestes plays, like many Renaissance revenge plays, a hero frustrated by unpunished wrong takes justice into his own hands. Against great odds he succeeds, and although he may die, he sets the world right. No endless cycle of vengeance looms. He has balanced the books. The historical longevity of revenge plots, then, need not deter us from exploring cultural pressures on Renaissance revenge. Each age sculpted these materials to fit its own preoccupations, emphasizing doom, the gods, fortune’s fickleness, romance, madness, the evils of adultery, the joys of companionate marriage, or male friendship, as interests and ideologies waxed and waned.

Pa r t I I

Economic unfairness: revenge and money

Ch apter 3

Balancing the books: revenge, commercial mathematics, and the balance of trade

Blessed fates I thank you:Â€I shall die revenged.

Mulleases the Turk

The celebrated stage direction Enter a messenger, with two heads and a hand in Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, flags an elaborate scheme of repayment. When Titus’ sons are beheaded, he obliges the queen to eat her sons’ heads, baked in a pie. The numeric equivalency (each parent taunted with two sons’ severed heads) underscores the principle of fair payment:Â€ this is exactly what the foe deserves.1 Society was preoccupied with just deserts, and balancing the books were bloodthirsty revengers with the methodical minds of accountants, whose ledgers register not pounds and pence but amputated body parts. Decapitational parity echoes overall bilateral symmetry. Markus Marti notes, “The score is 6 to 6”:Â€ major figures killed are, “in Titus’ camp:Â€Mutius, Bassianus, Quintus, Martius, Lavinia and Titus himself; on Tamora’s side:Â€Alarbus, Demetrius, Chiron, Saturninus, Tamora herself, and Aaron [about to die].” Similarly, five of The Spanish Tragedy’s dead are bound for Elysium (Andrea, Horatio, Isabella, Bel-Imperia, Hieronimo) and five for Hades (Don Cyprian, Lorenzo, Balthazar, Serberine, Pedringano). Kyd’s tally-keeper omits Villuppo, who would have unbalanced the Elysium/Hades ledger. In Shakespeare’s history plays, revengers’ mental accounts of heirs killed on each side of the vendetta resemble the tallies of injuries and retaliations that cemented family solidarity in Friuli, where vendetta was “a medium of collective memory, a way of structuring clan history around deeds of infamy and of valor” (Muir 90). Some tallies resembled the merchant books (libri di famiglia) of family firms, recording “a daughter’s dowry, the record of purchases and sales, births and deaths in the familyÂ€… debits Such artistry points toward the aesthetic equivalent of condign punishment:Â€decorum, among the cherished artistic principles of the age.

1

61

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Economic unfairness:Â€revenge and money

and credits, the creation and dissolution of business partnerships” (Jed 79, 99). Muir links such books with revenge narratives:Â€“As a Florentine merchant might keep a ricordanzaÂ€– a ‘memory book’ designed to inform his sons about the family business, marriage connections, and political alliances … so did Friulian aristocrats write down accounts of their relations with their blood enemies” (209). Shakespearean feuders keep such records orally. At the end of 3 Henry VI, the head Yorkist enters the enemy dead in his “credit” column:Â€“Three dukes of Somerset … / Two Cliffords, as the father and the son; / And two Northumberlands … / The two brave bears, Warwick and Montague” (5.7.5–10). This habit of entering foes in a mental ledger may reflect accounting masters’ custom of personifying debit and credit columns as actual persons (Jackson 295–302). Revengers often use accounting terms. Hoffman awaits a time “when I have summed up my account of death, / And robbed those fathers of their lives and joy, / That robbed me of my joy, my father’s life” (2.3.729–31). The businessman hero who opens The Jew of Malta doing accounts later shifts to figurative bookkeeping:Â€ “The account is made, for Lodowick dies” (2.3.243). Eugenia, aerating her faithless lover’s corpse with a bodkin, has made “his blood repay / Both principal and interest of my tears!” (Bastard 5.4.151–2).2 Revenge tallies resemble a ledger’s running balanceÂ€ – what accountants now call a snapshot. An operating company’s books are never closed with a “final balance”:Â€at any given moment, debts will be outstanding. And a vendetta is never complete while some are alive on both sides. The claim to have balanced the books rings hollow in vendetta-type plays; but individual-grievance plays often achieve a credible closure. Like algebra, which discovers an unknown quantity, revengers bring crimes to light. Algebraic equations and other balanced systems fascinated the RenaissanceÂ€ – evenly matched armies drawn up in squares, a healthy body’s humoral balance, accounting ledgers. Equations, a great achievement of Italian mathematics, fired the public imagination.3 And ItaliansÂ€ – virtuosos of vendettaÂ€ – also invented double-entry bookkeeping; Luca Pacioli’s pioneering treatise appeared in English just a generation before revenge tragedy’s heyday. “Fit”Â€– to take revenge perfectly “suited to theÂ€… circumstances”Â€– in accounting meant “balance the books” (OED). Revenge plays register mutilations and murders as debits and credits. Bacon’s “On Revenge” also uses a bookkeeping conceit:Â€“Let a man take heed the revenge be such as there is no law to punish; else, a man’s enemy is still beforehand, and it is two for one” (17). 3 Nicolò Tartaglia was challenged by another mathematician to an equation-solving contestÂ€– the loser was to treat the winner to thirty feasts (Ore 6–35). 2

Balancing the books

63

T h e Acc ou n t i ng M e n ta l i t y Ta k e s Hol d Antitheatrical writers harped on the brothels in BanksideÂ€ – also home to the Globe, the Rose, and the Swan. You would pass brothels on land owned by the Bishops of Winchester if, instead of hailing a water taxi, you walked south over London Bridge to the theater district in Southwark. You’d turn right at St. Mary’s OverieÂ€– nothing gynecological, despite the church’s proximity to brothels:Â€“Overie” meant “over the river.” A short stroll would bring you to the Globe. But if you turned left after crossing the bridge, along Barnes Street beside the river, past St. Olave’s church by Battle Bridge (over a little waterway joining the Thames), you would find a house where John Mellis taught double-entry bookkeeping, perhaps for as long as forty-six years. Besides its theatrical and venereal blandishments, Southwark was a bookkeeping neighborhood. In 1588Â€ – about when The Spanish Tragedy and The Jew of Malta were at Bankside theatersÂ€ – Mellis, from his Southwark reckoning school, reissued Hugh Oldcastle’s translation of Pacioli’s treatise on double-entry.4 In 1561 St. Olave’s Grammar School was among the first to include accounting in its curriculum (F. Watson 304). Strolling theater-goers could have seen bills advertising reckoning schools. In 1574 Humphrey BakerÂ€– author of an arithmetic bookÂ€– fulminated against foreigners who “extolled themselves” as having “attained such knowledge and perfection in arithmetic as no Englishman the like”! Worse, they have “painted the corners and posts in every place within this city with their peevish bills,” promising to “teach the sum of that science.”5 Presently Baker himself founded a school and plastered corners and posts with his own bills. His 1590 broadsheet (see Figure 3.1) promises expertise in double-entry and international currency exchange. If plays bore signs of residency in a brothel neighborhood, as moralists charged, they also bore signs of residency in a bookkeeping neighborhood. In Shakespeare, even crown princes spout commercial lingo: “Percy is but my factor … / To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf; / And I will call him to so strict account / That he shall render every glory up … / Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart” (1H4 3.2.147–52). In the preface, Mellis notes that Oldcastle, when he made his translation in 1543, “taught arithmetic and this book in Saint Olave’s parish in Mark Lane”Â€– another Saint Olave’s, across the river. 5 Prologue to the reader, in Baker’s Wellspring of Sciences, 1574 edition. Although this oft-reprinted book carried forward its prologue from one edition to the next, the reference to foreigners with their advertisements seems to date to 1574. 4

Figure 3.1 Detail of broadsheet advertisement for Humphrey Baker’s reckoning school, 1590.

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65

Sonnet 4 uses the double-entry term “sum of sums” (Bady 23) and advises a man to prepare for an “audit.” Sonnet 134 speaks of mortgages, bond guarantees, interest on debts. Many sonnets figure procreative sex as usury. Olivia inventories her beauty:Â€“Item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin …” (TN 1.5.216–18). Even the improvident Falstaff notes down, “Item:Â€a capon. 2 s. 2 d; Item:Â€sauce. 4 d; Item:Â€sack, two gallons. 5 s. 8 d” (1H4 2.5.488–90).6 If even a digester of so much sack per capon keeps itemized accounts, here is a bookkeeping culture indeed! And accounting language, sprinkled through the drama,7 is central in revenge plays. Hamlet senior faces the great Auditor with “no reck’ning made, but sent to [his] account / With all [his] imperfections on [his] head” (1.5.78–79); and Hamlet, working to send Claudius to hell, ponders:Â€“How his audit stands, who knows save heaven?” (3.3.82). A ledger’s columnsÂ€– our debit and creditÂ€– Tudors called debitor and creditor.8 Mellis’ manual is How to Keep Books of Accounts after the Order of Debitor and Creditor, James Peele’s, How to Keep a Perfect Reckoning after the … Account of Debitor and Creditor. Shakespeare, a tradesman’s son, knew these terms. Iago sneers at Cassio as “debitor and creditor” (1.1.30), endowing this dashing aristocrat with the soul of a clerk; he denigrates him as a “counter-caster,” alluding to reckoning by counters, the older system that double-entry was replacing.9 Double-entry was called “reckoning by pen” as opposed to counters along lines indicating tens, fifties, hundreds. Cymbeline also mentions both systems. Sentenced to death, Posthumus faces a divine “audit,” a “heavy reckoning” (5.5.121, 250). A hangman’s rope arithmetically “sums up thousands”. It is a ledger:Â€“You have no true debitor and creditor but it:Â€/ Your neck, sir, is pen, book, and counters” (5.5.258–61). Debitor, creditor, pen, and book belonged to the new accounting, counters to the old. Iago dubs Cassio “a great arithmetician” (1.1.18), a word first used in Recorde’s algebra text The Whetstone of Wit, 1557; the Diggeses use it in a 1571 text on geometry and military strategy. If arithmetic’s primary use was commercial, another central use was military. In a problem in the The word “item” in inventories was a commercial innovation during Shakespeare’s lifetime (OED). 7 See Cynthia Lewis’ examples. 8 In Jost Amman’s woodcut allegorizing commerce, the two pans of a set of scales are labeled “Debitor” and “Creditor”Â€– ledger columns. Each pan holds an accounting ledger. (See Yamey 115–18.) 9 Shakespeare credibly endows Iago, a Venetian, with accounting terms. The English called double-entry bookkeeping, devised by Venetian merchants, the Venetian system. 6

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Figure 3.2 A military camp laid out by principles of geometry.

Diggeses’ Arithmetical Military Treatise, 8,500 soldiers are to be placed so that “every soldier in front stand three foot distant from other, and every rank from other seven foot”; to deploy these in “the greatest battle that may be to make the ground square … how many in a rank and how many ranks in that battle?” (55). The answer uses algebra:Â€x represents soldiers per rank. Manuals arranged battle formations and camps in geometric designs, especially squares (see Figure 3.2). The Diggeses are just the sort of authors Iago thinks Cassio pores over, in lieu of field experience.10 St. Olave’s parish went in for bookkeeping partly because its populace were “aliens or strangers, and poor people” housed in “small tenements” (Stow 154; cf. Luu 121, Pettegree 82).11 St. Olave’s Grammar School authorities wrote in 1571 a “great number of poor people in our parish … are not able to keep their children at grammar,” i.e., in the classics-oriented grammar school. The poor learned “to write, read, and cast accounts,” and Antony levels a similar charge against Octavius’ “lieutenantry” (Ant 3.11.35–40). A testament to crowded conditions, a recently discovered weekly plague bill for 1592 shows one or two deaths each in most of London 35 parishes; but of the 183 deaths, 43 were in St. Olave’s (H. Berry).

10 11

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were then apprenticed (F. Watson 304). Latin and Greek and university were for young gents, accounting and apprenticeship for common folk. Charterhouse pupils learned “to cipher and cast an account, especially those … less capable of learning, and fittest to be put to trades” (O’Day 62); “less capable” meant lower-class. Before 1600 grammar schools sniffed at mathematics as tainted by association with Trade. (Except for geometry, which was useful militarily, or for surveying one’s lands.) I have elsewhere surveyed the spread of reckoning schools and explosion of English mathematical publishing, especially after the Armada attack (Money 3–7). Late 1580s and 1590s mathemania coincided exactly with the era of revenge plays. Sixteenth-century new math saw a shift from Roman to arabic numerals and to double-entry rather than abacus or counters. And where Aristotle’s physics “always relates force to force, distance to distance or time to time,” the Renaissance began treating unlikes in the same operation:Â€ “Quantities like weight, force, and distance are related in the same expression”; one of Tartaglia’s statics problems requires “the multiplication and division of feet and pounds in the same expression” (Hadden 63–64). Velocity is “a truly modern” concept; neither simply time nor simply distance, it involves “comparison of unlike quantities” (63).12 Hadden ascribes this breakthrough to commerce:Â€ in commodity exchange, things are “compared, equalized and made commensurable” by money (45). From late medieval times, long-distance trade necessitated exchange of currencies, then highly regional (86)Â€– a “ducat” was a duke’s coinage. Arithmetic books brimmed with currency conversion tables. Converting unlikes to one scale was commercially urgent. Within London alone, the yard was “the common measure for cloth of woolen, and silk,” the ell for linen, and “the goad for friezes, cottons” (Roberts 37). Many currencies circulated; a bookkeeper’s first job was to “convert each item … to the monetary unit in which his accounts were kept” (R.Â€BrownÂ€112). The new math enabled advances in astronomy, navigation, and other areas. The brilliant mathematician Girolamo Cardano visited England in 1552, staying with the humanist Sir John Cheke (Stoner xii). Prefaces to arithmetic books featured encomia to mathematics in lofty humanist terms. Recorde’s opens with a paean to the glory of Numbers. Pacioli’s double-entry treatise was part of his magnum opus Summa de Arithmetica, The Renaissance word for such mathematical miscegenation was “alligation,” the “arithmetical method of solving questions concerning the mixing of articles of different qualities or values” (OED). Dee mentions it, and the term occurs in Recorde’s best-selling mathematics text, The Ground of Arts (1542).

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Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita, espousing a mystical faith in harmonious proportion. His De divina proportione studied proportion underlying architecture, military engineering, music, cartography, law, grammar, poetry, painting, and perspective (Yamey 12). Against market uncertainties and fears spawned by an out-of-control economy, balancing figures in columns provided a sense of control. Pacioli feared that without systematic accounts, a merchant “would have no peace of mind and would be much troubled. Without order, there is trouble” (Yamey 30). “So unpredictable were the conditions of trade” that “a company’s public books constituted the only place where a merchant could even seem to be in control,” writes Mary Poovey (59).13 Accountants asserted control over circumstance by balancing columns of figures, revengers by balancing columns of corpses. C omm e rci a l M at h e m at ic s a n d Li t e r at u r e Commercial thinking is fundamental to this literature. From the revenge play The Merchant of Venice through Jacobean city comedy, dramatic plots were increasingly money-oriented. Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside opens in a goldsmith’s shop; a gentleman brings in a gold chain and haggles over its worth. Characters in Jonson’s Epicoene, Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, and many other plays scheme over inheritances. Other monetary plot motifs are imprisonment for debt, beggary, prostitution, courtship of wealthy widows, manipulation of wardship for financial gain, luring of customers by a pretty shopkeeper’s wife as a newfangled prostitution, aristocrats gambling away their lands, extravagant consumerism. More traditional villains, lustful or ambitious, were fading:Â€the new ogres were usurers. Plays are shot through with numbers. What is large is measurably large; what is multitudinous is countable. Falstaff’s girth is indexed in his garment’s 22 yards of material (2H4 1.2.38); his circumference is 2 yards (Wiv 1.3.36–37). Sexual appetite is quantified:Â€once unfaithful, a wife “spreads and mounts then like arithmetic, / One, ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, / Proves in time sutler to an army royal” (Middleton/Rowley, Changeling 2.2.62–64). Plays tot up huge numbers of soldiers. Among the largest musters is 3,000,000 infantry, 500,000 horsemen, and 100,000 chariots (Greene, James IV, 1st dumb show 7–11). Marlowe relished big She thinks that control was illusory. To James Aho, double-entry’s purpose “was largely rhetorical … to justify an activity about which there existed in medieval Christian Europe a considerable suspicion:Â€namely, commerce itself ” (22).

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numbers, often multiples of a thousand, recalling the “numeration” section that began every arithmetic book:Â€ “a thousand grisly ghosts,” a “thousand battering rams,” “more wealth, / Than twenty thousand Indias can afford,” “ten thousand Cupids,” “a thousand villainies,” “ten thousand Janissaries,” a “thousand mangled carcasses,” “a thousand desperate maladies,” “tormented with ten thousand hells”; “face that launched a thousand ships”; “clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,” “let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, / A hundred thousand, and at last be saved.” Marlowe’s King’s School, Canterbury, like other grammar schools, taught no mathematics (Woodruff 117); but the skills necessary to creating such hyperboles were taught everywhere:Â€ by 1587 even Clement’s book for petty-school teachers included numeration and account-casting. In Puttenham’s rhetoric manual, one example of hyperbole involves large numbers (160). In George Peele’s Edward I the king takes up a collection for maimed soldiers. As noblemen vie in giving, the king reckons:Â€“Let me see now if my arithmetic will serve to total the particulars”; he rounds the total of 9,999 up to ₤10,000. The queen then contributes modestly by adding only a “poor cipher in agrum” (1.154–5, 171–2)Â€ – “agrum” being “algorism,” the Arabic, decimal numeration system. But she puts the cipher in the right-hand column, changing the total to ₤100,000 (1.179–81). Arithmetic books’ numeration sections drilled into students the power-of-ten potency of zeroÂ€– hardly “nothing.”14 No wonder Peele knew his algorism:Â€his father was James Peele, author of the first native English double-entry manual and financial officer of the commercially oriented Christ’s Hospital, where George was a pupil for nine years (Horne 24–25). What looks elementary now was still a little hard thenÂ€ – Recorde’s numeration chart reverses two columns. But numeration was in the air.15 Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy was printed in the mathemaniacal year 1589, by Richard Field, printer of many arithmetic books; its second book (whose opening sentence mentions “the mathematical sciences” [53]) deals with meter, line and stanza length, and quantitative verse, and prints poems in geometric figures. The tendency to regard poetry as a matter of number dates to this era:Â€ the OED’s earliest example of “numbers” The prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V associates the Globe Theater’s round shape with all-powerful zero, which may “attest in little place a million” (12–16). 15 Medieval writers had been fond of numbers:Â€ “the seven most beautiful things,” seven ways of atoning for sin, five points of love, the five joys of the Virgin (Curtius 510–14); however, they usually dealt in small numbers, infrequently organized in multiples of ten, let alone in hundreds of thousands or millions. In medieval texts, the word “thousands” is most often invoked in tallies of fighting men. 14

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to mean metrical feetÂ€– hence, versesÂ€– is in Love’s Labor’s Lost. Hamlet confesses, “I am ill at these numbers. I have not art to reckon my groans” (2.2.120–1). Pope complained in 1711 that “most by numbers judge a poet’s song.” This is where it started. The uncountable gets counted:Â€ “many thousand cares” (Chettle, Downfall 1855); “of many thousand kisses, the poor last” (Ant 4.16.21); “you are a thousand times a properer man / Than she a woman” (AYL 3.5.52–53). Faustus “puts a price” on his priceless soul (Hawkes 102). Peele, an accountant’s son, treats love like a math problem:Â€“Dear was my uncle, dearer was my son, / And ten times dearer was my noble father” (Edward I 1.59–60). (Question:Â€ How much dearer was the father? Let x equal the uncle’s dearness.) And he tots up griefs:Â€“inward fury of a thousand griefs”; “burden of ten thousand griefs” (David and Bethsabe 337, 1831). Cares, love, grief don’t come in thousands. And what true lover would count kisses? Business arithmetic lit the way to this “computational fallacy” (Bady 17), and given numbers’ commercial resonance, quantifying feelings was a step toward commodifying people.16 Marc Shell notes the “commensurability … of men and money” in The Merchant of Venice (48). Portia is “nothing undervalued to Cato’s daughter” (1.1.165–6):Â€her value is calculable. Musing on “the full sum of me,” she quantifies herself:Â€“For you / I would be trebled twenty times myself, / A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich, / That only to stand high in your account / I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends, / Exceed account” (3.2.152–7). In another revenge play set in a bookkeeping Venice, Iago commodifies himself:Â€“I know my price” (Oth 1.1.11). Revengers’ achievement of a quantifiable balanceÂ€– two severed heads for two severed headsÂ€ – while assuaging the smart of unfairness, also quantified people and body parts. Revenge commodification distantly echoed Teutonic wergeld, an early substitute of cash payment for blood revenge. Other cash equivalents for human life, tribute and ransom, occur alongside revenge in The Spanish Tragedy, where Andrea, perhaps with a privilege accorded to ghosts, rejects the Portuguese cash tribute and, like the voice of an archaic culture, demands his killer’s blood. Lists of amounts payable for injuries, resembling those in Anglo-Saxon law codes, Sir William Petty would soon develop “a method of quantifying and commodifying the ‘value of a man’” (Poovey 110). Following Marx and Borkenau, Hadden ascribes this “calculability” to “exchange relations and their attendant forms of account and calculation” (22). Labor was valued on the same scale as bread or shoes. What rendered the unlike comparable and the unmeasurable measurable was money, and habits instilled by keeping track of it (Hadden xv–xvi). As Eric Spencer writes, money equates those supposedly “incompatible fruits” apples and oranges, and also “symphonies and sausages … purses and persons” (144).

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recur in Renaissance duels:Â€judges “determined the number and character of the wounds inflicted on each duelist … ranking each injury by a precise scale”; they “appraised the loss of an eye over a tooth, the right eye over the left, a foot over a hand” (Muir 258). Similar lists occurred in insurance tables (see L. Wilson 17–22). Meting out revenges precisely calibrated to an offense has a faint aura of financial transaction. Revenge, originally coded aristocratic, becomes bookkeeperish. Revengers sought a balance sheet “well rectified” (Mellis, Sig. [c7]), reducing pain and injury to measurable units. Borkenau argues that such quantification ultimately produced “the mathematical-mechanistic world-view” voiced starkly by Descartes, “a tendency to express all events by means of a set of linear equations” (Hadden xi). Revengers commit the goriest acts in a spirit of philosophical detachment, pausing to admire their ingenuity. Hippolito admires Vindice’s precision in administering exactly what the duke deserves:Â€ “I do applaud thy constant vengeance, / The quaintness of thy malice” (Revenger’s Tragedy 3.5.108–9). The result is often comic:Â€as Bergson observed, laughter results from an eruption of the mechanical. T r ipl e -Dig i t L ov e i n M at u r e S h a k e spe a r e a n T r ag e di e s Lear measures daughterly loveÂ€ – perhaps using a conversion device like that in Figure 3.3. Applying a compass to points on lines AB and AG, he might find (say) that 950 measures of Goneril-love equaled 900 of Reganlove. He could assign scores, say 5.7 to Goneril and 5.4 to Regan, as in teaching evaluations, or Olympic figure-skating. Their respective love ratings will determine their land grantsÂ€– Lear must have consulted geometers and surveyors.17 And even using Benese’s Book of Measuring of Land, or Leigh’s Most Profitable and Commendable Science of Surveying, this would be complex arithmetic. The linear love measure must be converted to two-dimensional land measurements (three-dimensional, if there are mountains). What’s the going conversion rate for acres into love-units? Geometers must also factor in opulence weightings for various counties. This was a touchy taskÂ€– surveyors were hated, scapegoated for the ills of land enclosure, reviled as heartless measurers and commodifiers. The figure Geometry in Recorde’s Pathway to Knowledge is defensive:Â€“Surveyors have cause to make much of me. / And so have all lords, that lands do possess. / But tenants I fear will like me the less. / Yet do I not wrong but measure all truly, / And yield the full right to every man justly. / Proportion geometrical hath no man oppressed” (Sig. ŧ1v). See also Sullivan 41–42.

17

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Figure 3.3 A device for converting measurements.

Luckily for the royal mathematicians, Lear has plugged in predetermined love quantities. This kingdom need not await Descartes to experience a quantitative-mechanistic world. Unlike quantities are here treated in the same operation, opulent land scaled against non-opulent, love converted to acres. Goneril and Regan are used to their father’s equations:Â€you give me so much love, I give you so many material goods. (“I gave you all,” he marvels, when love is not remitted [2.2.415].) And as Lisa Hopkins shows, Gloucester and even Kent

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correlate love with land (32–33).18 Cordelia alone objects to reducing love to exchangeable amounts:Â€she provocatively enters a zero in the equation where Lear expects a love figure of at least six digits.19 But even she speaks arithmeticallyÂ€ – in fractions, yet:Â€ her husband will carry “half my love with him, half my care and duty” (1.1.100). Loving Lear “according to my bond, no more nor less” (1.1.91) suggests an amount of love. Here she sounds not unlike Shylock. And this commodifying play throbs with vengeance:Â€“If it be true, all vengeance comes too short / Which can pursue th’offender”; “Vengeance, plague, death, confusion!”; “All the stored vengeances of heaven fall / On her ingrateful top!”; “you unnatural hags, / I will have such revenges on you”; the king’s injuries “will be revenged home”; “I will have my revenge ere I depart his house”; “the revenges we are bound to take upon your traitorous father”; “the wingèd vengeance overtake such children”; “I live / … / To revenge thine eyes.”20 Much water has flowed under the bridge by the time Lear and Cordelia meet again. (The new math could have measured it in gallons per second.) Lear has learned some tough arithmetic lessons. Asked to “disquantity” his train, he reaches an apex of love-quantification, telling Goneril that the fifty knights Goneril let him keep convert to twice the love of Regan, who let him keep twenty-five (2.2.425–6).21 A brutal series of subtractions then reduces his retainers to zero. He has been through mathematical purgatory by the time he awakes in Cordelia’s arms; yet he is still comparing her with her sisters, and she is still answering with zeroes. “I know you do not love me,” he reasons; “for your sisters / Have …done me wrong. / You have some cause; they have not.” She replies with two zeroes:Â€“No cause, no cause” (4.6.66–68). Cordelia comes out ahead this time:Â€the sisters’ causeless wronging, subtracted from their zero quantity of love, puts them into minus numbers. Her tactful “no cause” adds something in the “love” column; and, like her initial “nothing,” refuses quantification. She could have quantifiedÂ€– wasn’t it more wrong of her sisters to shut Lear out in a storm than for her to boycott a love contest? But how can wrong She also shrewdly points out that critics “approach the play in the very spirit of calculation which they … condemn in its characters” (36), assuming that two plots are twice as good as one. Jan Kott makes a tally:Â€“Of the twelve major characters half are just and good; the other half, unjust and bad”; Dympna Callaghan calculates that in the play “evil women outnumber good.” Number-crunching, Hopkins concludes, is “deeply engrained” in criticism of the play (Hopkins 36–37). 19 The Fool knows what zeroes are about. (Did he try a reckoning school before settling on a jester’s career?) His “now thou art an O without a figure” (1.4.158) shows familiarity with zero’s power. 20 2.1.87–88, 2.2.260, 2.2.327–8, 2.2.444–5, 3.3.10–11, 3.5.1, 3.7.6, 3.7.64, 4.2.62–64. 21 Barbara Fisher considers this disquantitying scene “the most elegant model in literature of a dramatic episode structured by a mathematical calculus” (34). 18

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be measured, any more than love? This time she doesn’t measure. Lear’s learning process is legendary; but Cordelia learns something too. Strikingly similar to Lear’s “Tell me, my daughters … / Which of you … doth love us most” (1.1.46–49) is Cleopatra’s opener:Â€“If it be love indeed, tell me how much” (1.1.14).22 Antony, like Cordelia, refuses to play an offensively bookkeeperish quantification game:Â€“There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned” (1.1.15). A reckoning school isn’t the place for love between an Egyptian queen and a Roman triumvir. Yet an arithmetic term springs to his lips as he receives news from Rome:Â€“Grates me. The sum” (1.1.19). Shakespeare’s characters decry quantification, but the repressed keeps returning. His greatest revenge hero “loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, / Make up my sum” (Ham 5.1.254–6). It was a bookkeeping age. On the horizon, capitalism loomed. And in the near distance, the groundlings of St. Olave’s parish passed Mellis’ reckoning school as they walked along Barnes Street to the Globe. Bi l at e r a l S y mm e t r y G oe s G l ob a l :Â€ B a l a nc e of T r a de The term “balance of trade”Â€– equilibrium between imports and exportsÂ€– was early Jacobean, but the concept had been minted in time to contribute to revenge plays’ balance mania.23 It flickered even in the Middle Ages and flourished under Tudor nationalism, international trade, and preoccupation with binary systems in equilibrium. “Balance of trade” was borrowed from accounting. A “balance” was a ledger abstract showing “total of the debits … equal to that of the credits. Double-entry bookkeeping rests on the fundamental principle that each business transactionÂ€… involves the exchange of a ‘good’ or service for another good or service at an equal value”; economists took over this “principle of equality” and “applied itÂ€… to foreign trade” (De Roover, Gresham 251). As Misselden wrote, a merchant assessing his company’s health collects “all his wares, and monies, and debts” as if in a scale. If in this “balance of trade” losses exceed gains, “he must either gain more, or spend less” (Circle 130). A king should do the same:Â€if “foreign commodities do exceed the native, either he must increase the native, or lessen the foreign, or else look for nothing else but the decay of trade … the loss of his revenue and impoverishing On quantification in the two plays, see Hawkes. The concept appears, for example, in Smith’s Discourse of the Commonweal, c. 1549; in a memorandum to Queen Elizabeth in 1559 (see Einzig 142); in the Report of the Royal Commission on Exchanges in 1564, and in Malynes’ Canker of England’s Common Wealth, 1601.

22 23

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of his people” (131). From the microcosm of the accounting ledger, then, developed the macrocosm of national economic policy. Although such theorists valorized a system in balance, Andrea Finkelstein observes that they really wanted “a permanent imbalance in which exports exceeded imports … No one who understood bookkeeping would think that the equality of debits and credits of the trial balance was the ultimate end of the system” (90–91). Similarly, revengers paid lip service to retaliation equaling the offense, but really desired inequality, outdoing an enemy:Â€“B’s injury of A will tend to be larger than A’s of B if it is to seem equal (especially in B’s eyes) to his own” (Kerrigan, Revenge 134). Again, as Seneca put it, “scelera non ulcisceris / Nisi vincis.” Plays of the balance-of-trade era rejoice in symmetry. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s opening alerts us that characters will move in sets of four:Â€Vindice, himself one of a family of four, views a “royal lecher,” his “impious” son, his bastard, and his devilish duchessÂ€– “four ex’llent characters!” (1.1.1–5). Later, four dancing revengers kill four miscreants; then four more murderous masquers dance in and start stabbing. In Mulleases the Turk, two heads of state compete for a woman and later huff out revenger’s soliloquies; two plotting Machiavellians deliver villains’ rants; two women are thought dead; two phony ghosts scare each other; two men with ulterior motives woo women who loathe them. But the apogee of balanced revenges occurs in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. When Prince Edward, Queen Elizabeth’s son, is murdered, Queen Margaret relishes the symmetry, right down to the names, since her own son Edward was murdered in the previous play:Â€ “Plantagenet doth quit [i.e., pay back] Plantagenet; / Edward for Edward pays a dying debt” (R3 4.4.20–21). I am hungry for revenge, And now I cloy me with beholding it. Thy Edward, he is dead, that killed my Edward; Thy other Edward dead, to quite [i.e., requite] my Edward; Young York, he is but boot, because both they Matched not the high perfection of my loss; Thy Clarence, he is dead, that stabbed my Edward.

(4.4.61–67)

The Lancastrians, she gloats, are ahead. The death of Lancastrian Edward exactly balances that of the two Yorkist princes, one being “but boot,” or added to even the score, although in her eyes two Yorkists don’t quite add up to one Lancastrian:Â€“Both they / Matched not … my loss.” Clarence’s death puts Lancastrians aheadÂ€ – a little shifty, since he was killed by a fellow Yorkist; but as she omits some Lancastrian murders of

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Yorkists (Rutland, the duke of York), Lancastrians do appear ahead; and the Yorkists are yet to lose Richard III. But never an enthusiastic wife, she omits the murdered head Lancastrian, her husband Henry. Margaret has no monopoly on creative accounting:Â€ head Yorkist Edward IV compiles an even more selective ledger. Ignoring Yorkist debits, he tallies only Lancastrian dead; and even so, he omits Prince Edward, as if his belt has run out of notch space:Â€“Three dukes of Somerset …/ Two Cliffords … / And two Northumberlands … / … Warwick and Montague” (5.7.5–10). These recurrent lists eventually become absurd: qu e e n m a rg a r e t I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him; I had a husband, till a Richard killed him. [To Elizabeth] Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him; Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him. duc h e s s of yor k I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him; I had a Rutland too, thou holpst to kill him. qu e e n m a rg a r e t Thou hadst a Clarence too, and Richard killed him. (R3 4.4.40–46)

Such tallies resemble a running balance sheet, the national revenge tally recalling the balance of trade. In one state-of-the-Lancastrian-dynasty address, Henry VI sums up:Â€ “He slew thy fatherÂ€ – / And thine, Lord CliffordÂ€– and you both have vowed revenge / On him, his sons, his favorites, and his friends” (3H6 1.1.54–56). Even minor figures are bent on evening the score:Â€an apprentice wants to “be even with” his master; a pirate lost an eye in boarding a ship, “and therefore to revenge it, shalt thou die” (2H6 1.3.203–4; 4.1.27). As human feelings drop away, the ledger alone governs action. Spying his father’s body, Young Clifford commits to revenge:Â€“At this sight / My heart is turned to stone … / York not our old men spares; / No more will I their babes” (2H6 5.3.49–52). A whole play later, Clifford hardens his heart against a Yorkist child: ru t l a n d Sweet Clifford, hear me speak before I die. I am too mean a subject for thy wrath. Be thou revenged on men, and let me live. c l i f f or d In vain thou speak’st, poor boy. My father’s blood Hath stopped the passage where thy words should enter … Had I thy brethren here, their lives and thine Were not revenge sufficient for me. NoÂ€– if I digged up thy forefathers’ graves, And hung their rotten coffins up in chains, It could not slake mine ire nor ease my heart.

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The sight of any of the house of York Is as a fury to torment my soul. And till I root out their accursèd line, And leave not one alive, I live in hell … ru t l a n d I never did thee harmÂ€– why wilt thou slay me? c l i f f or d Thy father hath. ru t l a n d But ’twas ere I was born. Thou hast one sonÂ€– for his sake pity me, Lest in revenge thereof, sith God is just, He be as miserably slain as I … When I give occasion of offence, Then let me die, for now thou hast no cause. c l i f f or d No cause? Thy father slew my father, therefore die. [He stabs him.] (3H6 1.3.19–47)

When Clifford falls into Yorkist hands, he expects to suffer the downward sword-stroke, that “downright payment,” that killed his father (3H6 1.4.33). Even when transfixed with an arrow, he keeps tallying the score:Â€“York and Richard, Warwick and the restÂ€– / I stabbed your fathers’ bosoms” (3H6 2.6.29–30). Everyone in these plays is alert to symmetry, exact reciprocity. A Yorkist suggests installing dead Clifford’s head on the gates of York, replacing the duke of York’s head, impaled there by Clifford. In a classic formula of reciprocity which gave Shakespeare a play title, he explains, “Measure for measure must be answerèd” (2.6.55). Shakespeare’s history cycle is as symmetrical as a Renaissance palace, the two tetralogies each containing one Richard play and three Henry plays, one play of English/French wars and three of English civil wars. Equally balanced factions, Lancastrians and Yorkists, are united in the last play. Intricate balances call forth parallel scenes. In 1 Henry VI, Lancastrian King Henry enrages allies by breaking a suitable engagement to make an impetuous love match; in 3 Henry VI, Yorkist King Edward enrages allies by abrogating a betrothal to a princess to make an impetuous love match. In 3 Henry VI, the fugitive King Henry is apprehended in a garden; in 2 Henry VI, the fugitive Jack Cade is apprehended in a garden; both trespassers bemoan their ruined fortunes in mournful soliloquies. In Richard III, Clarence’s dream-visitation by ghosts parallels Richard’s visitation by ghosts; and citizens compare the vulnerable child Edward V to Henry VI, “crowned… at nine months old” (2.3.17). In 3 Henry VI, Margaret makes York stand on a molehill; later, Henry VI soliloquizes on a molehill about a battle, which comprises a microcosm of the tetralogy’s symmetries:Â€“Now sways [the battle] this way like a mighty sea / Forced by the tide to combat with the wind, / Now sways it that way like the

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selfsame sea / Forced to retire by fury of the wind … / Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast, / Yet neither conqueror nor conquerèd. / So is the equal poise of this fell war” (3H6 2.5.5–13). In one balanced scene, King Louis of France receives simultaneous delegations from the two sides. First, Louis seats ousted Lancastrian Queen Margaret and her son next to him and makes sympathetic noises. When Warwick enters, however, as emissary for the new Yorkist regime, Louis descends to greet him and Margaret nervously stands up. She protests Warwick’s proposal that Edward IV marry Louis’ sister Bona, and Lancastrian and Yorkist squabble, hurling insults and genealogies, while the French royal family observe like Henry upon a molehill. After Louis ejects Margaret from the dais and cozies up to Warwick, power suddenly boomerangs back to the Lancastrians:Â€tidings of Edward’s marriage arriveÂ€– the deal with Bona is off. This alienates the French royalty and Warwick changes sides on the spot, seething with unrewarded merit. He vows, “I will revenge his wrong to Lady Bona / And replant Henry” (3.3.197–8). The scene ends with his symmetrical threats:Â€“I was the chief that raised him to the crown, / And I’ll be chief to bring him down again. / Not that I pity Henry’s misery, / But seek revenge on Edward’s mockery” (3.3.262–5).24 Echoic language underscores the astounding symmetry of a son who has killed his father and a father who has killed his son: f i r s t s ol di e r How will my mother for a father’s death Take on with me, and ne’er be satisfied! s e c on d s ol di e r How will my wife for slaughter of my son Shed seas of tears, and ne’er be satisfied! k i ng h e n r y How will the country for these woeful chances Misthink the King, and not be satisfied! f i r s t s ol di e r Was ever son so rued a father’s death? s e c on d s ol di e r Was ever father so bemoaned his son? k i ng h e n r y Was ever king so grieved for subjects’ woe?

(3H6 2.5.103–11)

The revenger’s word “satisfied” stresses that revenge is unavailable in this situation. The plays’ stilted binaries, a hallmark of apprentice writing, also suit the tetralogy’s structure:Â€evenly matched clans alternate in a pendulum of power. One of the era’s favorite rhetorical figures, antithesis, expresses symmetrically a clash of oppositesÂ€– a paradoxical order in disorder. Clarence’s daughter curses Elizabeth, “Our fatherless distress was left unmoaned; / Your widow-dolor likewise be unwept” (R3 2.2.64–65). 24

In traditional feuding theory, “failed or ambiguous marriage alliances could cause animosities that resulted in vendetta violence, just as the end of a vendetta was often signaled by a marriage arranged between former enemies” (Muir 85; see also Black-Michaud 228).

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Clifford upbraids the king, “Ambitious York did level at thy crown, / Thou smiling while he knit his angry brows. / He, but a duke, would have his son a king, / And raise his issue like a loving sire; / Thou, being a king, blest with a goodly son, / Didst yield consent to disinherit him, / Which argued thee a most unloving father” (3H6 2.2.19–25). Buckingham ladles on antitheses contrasting the supposedly pious Richard with his lascivious predecessor: This prince is not an Edward. He is not lolling on a lewd day-bed, But on his knees at meditation; Not dallying with a brace of courtesans, But meditating with two deep divines; Not sleeping to engross his idle body, But praying to enrich his watchful soul.

(R3, 3.7.71–7)

Stichomythia is also endemic. Richard’s off-hand admission, “thy son I killed for his presumption,” provokes Henry’s stichomythic riposte:Â€“Hadst thou been killed when first thou didst presume, / Thou hadst not lived to kill a son of mine” (3H6 5.6.34–36). Long sieges of this make tedious theater, but stichomythia is apt for revenge plays, each witty riposte a payback for the one before: l a dy a n n e Black night o’ershade thy day, and death thy life. r ic h a r d g l ouc e s t e r Curse not thyself, fair creature:Â€thou art both. l a dy a n n e I would I were, to be revenged on thee. r ic h a r d g l ouc e s t e r It is a quarrel most unnatural, To be revenged on him that loveth you. l a dy a n n e It is a quarrel just and reasonable, To be revenged on him that killed my husband. r ic h a r d g l ouc e s t e r He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband, Did it to help thee to a better husband.

(R3 1.2.131–9)

Rhetorical parallels express perfectly calibrated vengeance, as when one queen curses another: qu e e n m a rg a r e t Edward thy son, that now is Prince of Wales, For Edward my son, that was Prince of Wales, Die in his youth by like untimely violence. Thyself, a queen, for me that was a queen, Outlive thy glory like my wretched self. Long mayst thou liveÂ€– to wail thy children’s death, And see another, as I see thee now, Decked in thy rights, as thou art ’stalled in mine.

(R3 1.3.196–203)

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Symmetrical tableaux abound:Â€ the ritualistic scene where each side plucks a rose and vows lasting enmity (1H6 2.4); the scene where Richard stagily poses “’tween two clergymen” (R3 3.7)Â€ – forecasting Henry V’s posing between two clerics (H5 1.2). Henry VI imagines, in antithesis, Margaret’s audience with Louis:Â€ “She on his left side, craving aid for Henry; / [Warwick] on his right, asking a wife for Edward. / She weeps and says her Henry is deposed, / He smiles and says his Edward is installed” (3H6 3.1.43–46). In another tableau, Henry is flanked by opposing factions:Â€ “Four stand on one side and four on the other” (3H6 4.1.6 s.d.). Closing dramaturgy re-enacts the tetralogy’s overall architecture. On the eve of Richard III’s final battle, action toggles between two sides, each with an oration to the troops, and a nightmare for the wicked king, sweet dreams for his pious successor. The preponderance of Shakespeare’s earliest works are revenge plays:Â€the three Henry VI plays, Richard III, Titus Andronicus. His second tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, a year or two after Titus, stages a vendetta. Two years or so later comes the “revenge comedy” The Merchant of Venice. His most famous play, Hamlet, is a revenge tragedy. The First Folio’s grouping into genres helps obscure how many plays across genres deal with revenge. Henry VI, Part 3, what we might call a “revenge history,” opens on a bracing spectacleÂ€– the mild-mannered, irresolute Henry VI inciting followers to wreak revenge:Â€“Earl of Northumberland, he slew thy fatherÂ€– / And thine, Lord CliffordÂ€– and you both have vowed revenge / On him, his sons, his favorites, and his friends.” Northumberland snarls, “If I be not, heavens be revenged on me” (1.1.54–57). Henry’s startling fervor, front-loaded in the opening scene, marks Part 3 as a full-blown revenge play. But Part 2 is also peppered with retaliations and vengeful vows. “Angry heavens” are implored for “hot coals of vengeance!” (5.3.34–36). The sweet swan of Avon savored revenge. This is where his career began, and revenge kept burning right up to his last sole-authored play:Â€ Caliban vows revenge for usurpation by Prospero, who resolves (grudgingly) that “the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (Tmp 3.2.53–56, 5.1.27–28). B a l a nc e of T r a de T h e or y F l a r e s u p Ag a i n: Â€T h e E a r ly S e v e n t e e n t h C e n t u r y Trading conglomerates were often attacked for creating an unfavorable trade balance while pursuing private gain. After a burst of acrimony, with

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salvos by Malynes, John Wheeler, and Thomas Milles in 1601 and 1604,25 resentment smoldered, then flared up again in the 1620s, explicitly in terms of balance of trade. In a serious recession, international traders were charged with draining England’s money. Monetary solutions to international problems typified an era of bullionism:Â€if a country imported more than it exported, the difference flowed out in bullion. Primary gauge of a nation’s wealth, bullion was to economists what satisfaction was to revengersÂ€– a measure of self-realization. Both were relational, calculated against an opponent. Critics accused exporters such as the Merchant Adventurers of keeping the pound sterling artificially low, causing bullion outflow, and accused importers such as the East India Company of exchanging silver for imports, since warm-climate India preferred cash to England’s major export, wool. Xenophobia fueled suspicion of conglomerates, and balance-of-trade theory served as a public bromide, holding traffic with foreigners acceptable if one got the better of them on the global balance sheet. Thomas Mun’s 1621 defense of the East India Company agrees that kingdoms should “vent out more of their home commodities than they import” (2), shrugging off the Company’s cash pipeline to India. England’s “abundance of rich commodities,” he breezily claims, creates a “superfluity” of bullion (2–3). With its huge profit on European trade, England can afford to send silver to India (27). That Mun found it impossible simply to evade this perilous topic speaks to the strength of balance-of-trade theory. This stout defense of importers was matched by the rhetorical pugilism of the exporters’ spokesman, Edward Misselden, in Free Trade or the Means to Make Trade Flourish. Malynes responded with The Maintenance of Free Trade. They skirmished through two more ripostes,26 differing on international traders, government intervention, and the controllability of the exchange rate.27 But both seek a balance of trade. Everyone’s thinking was saturated with “balance.” Like many a revenger, Milles is disturbed by lack of an authority guaranteeing fairness. “Public authority” isn’t regulating value, and he is unsure whether to blame “mere chance” or a merchant plot (10). Chance is the more frightening. An excellent example of early modern difficulty coming to terms with market-determined value, Milles’ work instantiates such tormented thinking in the arena of international trade. 26 Misselden, The Circle of Commerce, or the Balance of Trade, in Defense of Free Trade, and Malynes, The Center of the Circle of Commerce, both 1623. 27 Misselden believes exchange rates are set solely by international supply and demand, a kind of law of Nature:Â€“As all other natural things must have their course, so also must exchanges” (Circle 105). Malynes holds that although supply and demand initiate rate changes, some control is possible (Maintenance 14). 25

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As Malynes, Misselden, and Mun furiously debated, book-balancing revenge plays were again prominent. Contemporary with Mun’s Discourse of Trade (1621), Malynes’ Maintenance of Free Trade (1622), Misselden’s Circle of Commerce, or the Balance of Trade (1623), and Malynes’ Center of the Circle of Commerce (1623) is Massinger’s Duke of Milan, 1621–3, a manically symmetrical play for a balance-obsessed age. Sforza, married to Marcelia, has a sister Mariana; Francisco, married to Mariana, has a sister Eugenia. In revenge for Sforza’s having seduced Eugenia, Francisco tries unsuccessfully to seduce Marcelia, then induces Sforza to murder her, seeing this as the prologue to Sforza’s death and damnation:Â€“I did begin his tragedy in her death, / To which it serv’d as prologue, and will make / A memorable story of [Eugenia’s] fortunes / In my assured revenge” (5.1.83–89). Later, Francisco trades the theatrical for an economic metaphor:Â€Sforza “must pay / The forfeit [i.e., penalty for late debt repayment] of thy falsehood … / Thou art marked for the grave. I have given thee poison” (5.2.236–9). Like a nation whose exports outweigh imports, Francisco outdoes his foe by imperiling his soul:Â€“I made thee do a deed heaven will not pardon, / … kill an innocent” (5.2.229–30). Massinger helps restore the balance, however:Â€Francisco faces torture and execution. The two men’s lives run parallel, and each at one point steals away from court. A war is evenly balanced:Â€ “Two royal armies full of fiery youth, / Of equal spirit to dare, and power to do” (1.1.81–82). Sforza supports the French, offending the emperor, who then wins the war. A tiny shift toward one pole creates a drastic imbalance. Francisco and Eugenia regard revenge not as unchristian but as a high calling; they speak loftily of “the honor of our full revenge” (5.1.131). Francisco’s last words take deep satisfaction in a manly vengeance:Â€“Now I have kept my word, torments I scorn; / I leave the world with glory. They are men, / And leave behind them name and memory, / That wronged do right themselves before they die” (5.2.251–5). The word “equal” resounds in another revenge play contemporary with trade-balance debate, Hemings’ The Jews’ Tragedy, c. 1626:Â€“Jehochanan we know as deep in blood as Simeon, / Both equal guilty; yet should both be banished / Their equal strength … / May much endanger us” (1.1.259–62). The play is set in Judea under the Roman Empire. Hand-wringing officials fear both Roman invasion and domestic uprisings:Â€ “We know the weakness of our state to be / Unable to resist, yet know not how / To yield, or not to yield, or what to do:Â€/ The furious tempest drives us on the rocks / Of foreign and domestic enemies” (1.2.317–22). Judea yearns for a balance of power with Rome:Â€“We will stand / In terms of equal honor”;

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“Proud Roman … / Tell proud Vespatian, that Judea standsÂ€ / In equal terms of honor with his lord” (1.2.352; 2.2.236–9). Here as in The Spanish Tragedy, wars are sparked by a nation’s refusal to pay tribute, and in each, a leader recognizes an enemy warrior’s worth. Titus in The Jews’ Tragedy calls a foe “noble,” directing, “Use him / With equal honor to his worth” (2.2.328, cf. Spanish Tragedy 1.2.134–50). The Spanish Tragedy describes battle geometrically, as a square, The Jews’ Tragedy more algebraically as two balanced sides:Â€“I give to thee the sole command / Of the right wing; to thee the left, Nicanor. / My self will stand betwixt ye both, / That I may see your equal valor strive / For equal honor in the victory” (2.2.251–5). As one side weakens, a brave soldier “stoutly still maintains the unequal fight / With equal fury” (4.1.56–57). This tragedy’s revenger, Zareck, is a throwback to the sprightly Vicelike figures of early revenge plays who reveled in evil and called it “sport.” As Aaron gleefully calls Lavinia’s mutilation “trim sport” (Tit 5.1.96), so Zareck gloats, “Ha, ha, ha! Here’s sport alone for me, / The murder of his father troubles him / With ghastly apparitions. Horror and despair / Pursue thy guilty soul, ’til I may see / My full revenge in thy calamity” (4.1.605–9). He exults, “Lord Eleazer’s mad:Â€ there’s my revenge on him. /Â€… Now the sport begins” (5.1.336–8). Aaron’s boast “I have done a thousand dreadful things / As willingly as one would kill a fly, / And nothing grieves me heartily indeed / But that I cannot do ten thousand more” (Tit 5.1.141–4) is echoed in Zareck’s vaunt “Ha, ha, ha!Â€– all this! All this and ten times more / All this is nothing, not the thousand part / Of my unknown designs” (5.1.766–9). Both reckon mischiefs in thousands:Â€they are personifications of evil with the souls of bookkeepers. This play about a nation’s quest for equal international standing, the concern of a balanceof-trade era, adopts revenge plays’ numeric idiom. An ideal of balance animates revenge plays from the Henry VI plays, Titus Andronicus, and The Spanish Tragedy to the early Jacobean Revenger’s Tragedy and Mulleases the Turk to plays of the 1620s (The Duke of Milan, The Jews’ Tragedy). Often, international rivalry animates the plots. In this first age of English nationalism, a nation’s equal standing among peer nations was entwined with economic thinking, balance-of-trade thinking, which also informed that parallel discourse, revenge, in which books are ferociously balanced. Revengers’ book-balancing and their economic languageÂ€– “strokes received, and many blows repaid” (3H6 2.3.3)Â€– situate accounting, balance-of-trade theory, and revenge in the same mental universe.

Ch apter 4

Payback time: reward, retaliation, and the deluge of debt

Strokes received, and many blows repaid.

3 Henry VI

Who e’er knew / Murder unpaid?

The Revenger’s Tragedy

Revengers are often embittered over unrewarded merit. The Andronicus family give Rome military service, the lives of twenty-six young Andronici, two heads, three hands, and a tongue; and yet the emperor spurns its patriarch, leaving him no recourse but revenge. Hoffman avenges his father, whose heroic military service was neglected. Revenge plays rectified unfairness of reward by meting out fair punishment. This society didn’t distinguish restitution firmly from punishment:Â€ “reward” could mean cash or a flogging; one could “pay” money or a beating. Reward and punishment belonged to the same system.1 Avengers talk like bookkeepers partly because the imperative to avenge a relative was a debt, analogous to money owed. Conceiving of revenge as a debt helps make sense of a revenger’s desire to exceed the crime he avenges. Muir notes the widespread idea that “escalation of retaliatory killings” is “a kind of interest payment” (68). This had special meaning in Renaissance England, which witnessed an epidemic of personal and family indebtedness. As Craig Muldrew shows, few Englishmen paid cash for anything: After 1530 consumption expanded, and as the amount of buying and selling increased, marketing structures became more complex. With limited amounts of gold and silver in circulation, this economic expansion was based on the Jeremais Bastingius, commenting on “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” illustrates the interlocking of debt and injury:Â€“We are wretched sinners and great debtors unto God”; God’s “book of accounts … showeth us what we owe … Sins are called spiritual debts because we owe the punishment of them” (185–6). Because of original sin, “all mankind … owe a death unto God” (186). God’s retaliationÂ€– punishment and deathÂ€– comprises payment of man’s debt to God.

1

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increasing use of credit … As chains of credit grew much longer and more complex in a relatively short time, defaults became much more common. (3)

Is it a coincidence that revenge plays became highly popular at a cultural moment when debt repayment was on everyone’s mind? S u b t e r r a n e a n Obl ig at ion Can we imagine revenge as a world-upside-down equivalent of debt? World-upside-down broadsheets were common in this period (see Kunzle), which relished underworlds mirroring earthly hierarchies. Hell was a kingdom, mimicking earthly monarchies, as were the animal kingdom with its leonine lord, fairyland with its monarchy, and the world of rogues, thought to be organized in hierarchies. Botanical drawings represented roots in detail, a mirror to the plant’s above-ground foliage (Tongiorgi Tomasi/Hirschauer 44–46, 49, 78–79). We might figure revenge as playing root system to financial debt’s foliage. But which system is subterranean? Revenge had colorations of aristocratic honor, while monetary debt involved filthy lucre. Money could bespeak the underworld. Through a lens of aristocratic hauteur, revenge might look celestial, debt repayment mundane. Gift reciprocity and revenge formed a seamless whole of honorable aristocratic obligation. Both involved personal and family honor, power displays, and face-saving. Both could be self-aggrandizing or maliciousÂ€– a gift impossible to repay can be an injury “as disabling as a dose of arsenic” (Kerrigan, Revenge 95; cf. Bailey, Raheja). In both gift reciprocity and revenge, obligation can devolve on family members if the original recipient of gift or injury cannot repay.2 Pure gift exchange, it was feared, was now corrupted by mercantile values, as privileges and knighthoods were marketed.3 A dignified exchange of largesse and fealty was degenerating into sale of favorsÂ€– a kind of Trade. Poets fretted that “gift” poems seeking courtly favor might deteriorate into commodities. Distinctions between gift and commodity, however, were illusory. Writers as early as Cicero had observed that gifts are never Among early Greeks, revenge was “a form of necessary repayment, the opposite twin to the gracious return of favors that was called charis”; by offering “pleasure or advantage to a fellow,” one “made a friend from whom would come the eventual return of a similar boon … And in the same way an initial offer of injury created an enemy from whom could be expected an unlovely return” (A. Burnett xvi). On lucre belonging to the underworld, see Jonson’s Staple of News, 1.6.42–44; Act 2, 2nd intermean, 30–31. On family obligation, see Davis; Murphy; Godelier; Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Promises 9, 49–54. 3 King James’ favorites received gifts from supplicant courtiers in exchange for access to the king (see Peck; Elliott/Brockliss). James famously sold knighthoods. 2

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disinterested:Â€they always create obligation, are given with expectation of benefit (see Derrida). Beneath rhetoric mystifying Anglo-Saxon treasure or chivalric largesse lies a quid pro quo system of obligation. Just as financial creditworthiness rewrote aristocratic honor, so revenge plays’ repayments, often tinged with aristocratic honor, delighted public theaters’ market-oriented clientele. Various systems of obligationÂ€– gift exchange, borrowing and lending, injury and retaliationÂ€– readily stood in for each other in Renaissance thinking. Hamlet worries that his revenge, if not an elegant condign retribution, might seem tainted with lucreÂ€– “hire and salary, not revenge” (3.3.79). Like Arthurian romance and elegant manners, revenge was descending the social ladder. Some revenges were financial. Marlowe’s Jew of Malta kills two gentlemen, two friars, a Turkish slave, a courtesan, a pickpocket, a convent of nuns, a garrison of soldiers, and his own daughter, ultimately because the state has confiscated his money. In Thomas, Lord Cromwell, a revenger plots against a merchant:Â€“I will be revenged … / I’ll to his creditors, buy all the debts he owes … / I’ll make his heart t’ache with sorrow” (232–7). A revenger in J. W.’s Valiant Scot prefers monetary to blood revenge:Â€“If I should kill thee now, thou owest me nothing; / Live, and be still my debtor; I shall do thee / More harm to give thee life, than take it from thee. / Heaven … / Shall strike for me a revenge more just and fairer” (3.278–82). Ta k i ng t h e F i f t h:Â€t h e Lor d’s Pr a y e r a n d t h e C onc e p t of De b t t o God The locus classicus of man’s indebtedness to God was the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, recorded by Luke and Matthew:Â€“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” In Luke 11, Latin peccata indicates “sins”; in Matthew 6, Latin debita represents sins metaphorically as debts. “Debt” might have been a dead metaphor in biblical times, just meaning “sin.”4 But Tudor England took seriously the economic implications of “debt.” Unlike the Vulgate’s debt terminology – Dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostrisÂ€ – Tyndale (1535 [?]) used “trespasses” in Matthew. But Coverdale (1535) used “debt,” as did all later translations:Â€ the Geneva (1557), Bishops’ (1568), Douai (1582), and King James (1611).5 Of many treatises on the Lord’s Prayer (three aptly printed Metzger/Coogan, 464; Buttrick iv:Â€157. Early Protestant catechisms and liturgiesÂ€– Cranmer’s 1548 catechism, the 1549 Book of Common PrayerÂ€– used “trespasses” in Matthew, as did many later catechisms. But as the century wore on, “debts” began to creep in (see catechisms of Bastingius and Crook). “Debts” might have been an

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in Paternoster Row), the English translation of the first, Erasmus’ Devout Treatise upon the Paternoster (1526[?]), renders debita as “offenses”; Thomas Lever’s in 1551 uses “trespasses.” But from the 1580s, treatises chose “debt”Â€– Tomkys (1585), Perkins (1592), W. Burton (1594), R. Hill (1606) discussing the implications of applying an economic term theologically. They routinely link “forgive us our debts” with a parable, Matthew 18: 23–35. A king doing his accounts (“he began to reckon,” the Bishops’ Bible has it) finds that a man owes him 10,000 talents. The insolvent man throws himself on the royal mercy and is forgiven the debt. The debtor then encounters one who owes him 100 pence. He “throttle[s] him,” demands “pay what thou owest” (Douai), and has him jailed. The king orders this uncharitable man imprisoned (tortured, in some translations) until he pays his own debt.6 Sins are called debts, Robert Hill explains, “because by them we become indebted to God, either to discharge them, or to be imprisoned” (47). But how can one owe sins to God? And a coin of good deeds couldn’t pay such a debt. Espousing Protestant justification by faith, Hill insists that even an angel cannot satisfy God for man’s debt, since “a thing finite in goodness” cannot “cover an infinite evil” (173). Death and purgatory discharge only interest, not capital. Only Christ’s death can pay off capital debt. Confusion plagues the metaphor. “Owing God a death” harbors the sense that death discharges it. Perkins berates Catholics for believing that man pays his own debt. Some Protestants held that Christ’s death paid the debt, some that God forgave the debt if one had faith. The forgiveness theory preserves benevolence in God, who otherwise seems a merciless creditor. “To forgive and to satisfy be contrary,” Perkins concedes (Exposition 123). “Debt” works better than “sin” in that sacrificial atonement “ignores an elementary principle of justice:Â€ penalties should be paid by offenders” (Kerrigan, Revenge 124); but anyone can pay a debt. The debt model’s disadvantage is its materialism, quantifying the unquantifiable. Perkins waxes arithmetical:Â€two Lord’s Prayer petitions “concern spiritual things” (debts, temptation), but only one concerns temporal (daily bread). “Care for our souls must be double to the care of our bodies” (Exposition 119). Hell is like debtors’ prison:Â€“Even as a debt doth bind a man, either to easier conceptÂ€– and wordÂ€– for children, catechisms’ primary audience, chiming better with catechisms’ brisk, direct language, such as Richard Jones’ forthright exchange:Â€“Who made you?” “God.” “Prove it” (Sig. aiiii). 6 Used to state torture and debtors’ prisons, Elizabethans would have taken for granted the link between debt and punishment that helps make sense of revenge as a shadow system to debt.

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make satisfaction or else to go to prison, so our sins bind us either to satisfy God’s justice or else to suffer eternal damnation” (119–20). William Burton uses mathematical infinity in a bleak calculation:Â€“God is infinite, and therefore the offense is multiplied according to the worthiness of the person against whom it is committed … The fault is infinite, and the punishment must be proportionable to the fault, and the satisfaction likewise to the punishment, therefore it must be infinitely infinite” (171–2). It is unsurprising that “debt” took hold in Tudor translations. The debt model of transgression arose during the Reformation: Early patristic accounts of the atonement describe Christ on Calvary as a second Adam, furnishing “ransom” to Satan to free mankind from death. St. Anselm modified this by arguing that Jesus died to “satisfy” the Father for the “dishonor” caused by man’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. Some theologiansÂ€… resisted the negative effect which this had on perceptions of the Father’s mercy, but the prevailing explanation of the atonement … remained that of Anselm. What altered the picture was the emergence of a revised “satisfaction” theory … Protestant reformers were less concerned with divine honor than with what man owed in obedience. They argued that the fall … had left a “debt” due to an angry God, and that “satisfaction” was rendered on the cross. Christ was man’s substitute in paying for disobedience, since only his divine sacrifice could be large enough to meet the bill. (Kerrigan, Revenge 121)

As the “ransom” and “dishonor” models suited a medieval world of captured knights and aristocratic honor, the debt model suits a Renaissance commercial milieu, and a culture of credit. Alternative terms stem from different discourses:Â€ “sin” is theological, “trespass” legal, “debt” economic.7 “Sin” and “trespass” break interdictions, but that debt only potentially requires forgiveness (only non-repayment is bad) presents theological difficulties:Â€if one punished in debtor’s prison still owed a debt, then a sinner must die even though Christ paid. Robert Hill sweats to explain:Â€“We owe punishment for doing wrong … satisfaction for the wrong done” (49); sins can be “(1) discharged by the person that committed them:Â€ so the devils and the damned discharge their debts by suffering; and (2) paid by another:Â€ and so are our sins discharged by Christ” (41). But surely he did not mean that devils and the damned can leave hell once they discharge their debt. Perkins reads “debt” not as what “comes by lawful bargaining, but of hurts and damages” to “bodies, goods, or good names” (Exposition 130)Â€– but can one Though “trespass” has now shrunk mainly to its property-oriented meaning, in the Renaissance it also signified more generally “a breach of law or duty; an offence, sin, wrong; a fault,” especially in legal contextsÂ€– “violation or transgression of the law” (OED).

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owe God “hurts and damages”? Theologians’ attachment to “debt” in the teeth of illogicalities attests to the culture’s debt-mindedness. Like earthly debts, a debt to God was an “obligation”Â€ – an “agreement, enforceable by law,” binding one to payment; “a written contract or bondÂ€… containing a penalty with a condition annexed” (OED). In S. S.’s play The Honest Lawyer, a character vows to second another “as inseparably as a condition does an obligation” (2.128). In J. Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque, a character asks, “Let me see the condition of this obligation” (780). Fifthpetition theorists imagined a legal bond with a condition:Â€“Parent:Â€Is there not a condition added to this petition? Child:Â€Yea:Â€… as we also forgive our debtors” (Tomkys Sig. [b2]). Perkins notes that the fifth petition has “a condition:Â€forgive us as we forgive others” (Exposition 128; cf. R. Hill 39). A tricky condition, however. To William Burton, “forgive our debtors” meant not actually forgiving them, but “beseech[ing] the Lord” to forgive them (177). Some worried that humans’ forgiving sins usurped divine prerogative. But the biggest problem with forgiving neighbors emerged starkly in the translator’s choice of “debts” rather than “sins” or “trespasses.” One might easily enough forgive a neighbor for angry words, or trespassing in one’s garden, but excusing him from repaying 50 shillings was another matter. Given society’s debt load and accelerating defaults, creditors often wrote off “desperate debts,” sometimes as a charity:Â€forgiven debts greatly outweighed all direct charities together (Muldrew 304–5). But despite sermons extolling debt forgiveness, England witnessed a “massive increase” in debt litigation (195, 236). By the 1590s, Lord’s Prayer commentaries stressed that “forgive our debtors” did not imply forgoing litigation. Asking “may a man forgive him that hath offended him, and yet sue him?”, Hill answers emphatically, “He may not only sue his adversary, but pursue him to the death, and yet forgive him; for, unless offenders be punished, God’s glory will be hindered, justice decayed, the commonwealth ruined and all men wronged” (50). Debt litigation is necessary “to maintain godly peace, for if all injuries were put up [i.e. tolerated] there would be no civil state” (Perkins, Exposition 131). The duke urges Shylock to settle out of court, even forgive half the principle, but once the case is aired “in the open court” he can’t afford not to prosecute Antonio:Â€“’Twill be recorded for a precedent, / And many an error by the same example / Will rush into the state” (MV 4.1.24–25, 333, 215–17). Antonio admits that excusing his debt would damage Venice’s international credit:Â€ to abrogate “the commodity that strangers have / With us in Venice”Â€– that is, trading privileges of foreign nationals and resident aliensÂ€ – will greatly

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damage “the justice of the state,” since the city’s “trade and profit” are with “all nations” (3.3.26–31). It will mean, as Hill says, a “commonwealth ruined” (50). Not only may creditors sue, but judges should be tough on crime. Tomkys’ catechizing parent asks, “May not the magistrate punish malefactors, notwithstanding that we forgive them the offenses which they commit?”, eliciting the unchildlike “Yes, why not? For punishment lawfully inflicted by the magistrate is not contrary to private charity” (Sig. b2–b2v). Perkins insists, with law-and-order zealotry, on chastizing offenders:Â€“If many men were not repressed they would grow worse” (Exposition 131–2), reminding us that this forgiveness-preaching culture executed vagrants and petty thieves. One way this was rationalized illuminates revenge. One “may in an holy manner sue another” but must avoid “all private revenge” (Perkins, Exposition 131). Hill, for whom clemency is without material consequenceÂ€– “He may not only sue his adversary, but pursue him to the death, and yet forgive him”Â€– adds a condition:Â€one must “do nothing with a revenging mind,” even “when the flesh will tell you that you must be revenged” (51). A Godly and Short Treatise upon the Lord’s Prayer explains, “we must neither be hard to forgive, nor hasty to revenge” (Sig. a5v). Christianity is reconciled with a harsh judicial system by otheringÂ€ – distinguishing (good) state-sponsored justice from (bad) private revenge. In a forgiving frame of mind, one can sue a neighbor into bankruptcy. Judicial harshness is projected onto revenge, keeping justice pure. Establishment thinkers cast revenge as the judicial system’s evil twin. As long as society piously repudiated revenge, courts could mete out extremely harsh punishments. Theologians helped project the evil of the system onto revenge, and modern readers accept this as public opinion. How might a citizen deal with a harsh, inequitable legal system?8 Taking the Lord’s Prayer seriously, he could advocate debt forgiveness, agitate for merciful courts. Even if keen on punishment, he could at least spread the harshness around, seeking a system wherein those in “robes and furred gowns” (Lr 4.5.155) were not above prosecution. Or he could give up on the polity and seek revenge. Revengers usually maintain that court justice is unavailable. They seldom consider forgiveness:Â€ if even pious commentators on the Lord’s Prayer look askance at forgiveness, why In Chapter 1, the fantasy aura of plays’ “legal” scenes led me to view them as a metaphor for general unfairness and to place more weight on economic malaise as a fomenter of vengefulness. Debt involved both legal and economic issues, and in the explosion of debt litigation we see again the nexus of economics, the judicial system, and revenge.

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should a revenger bother with it? Accepting private revenge as honorable, plays reverse Elizabethan scapegoating of an ancient obligation, revenge, and expose the mechanisms by which an unjust judicial system maintains its power. A L a nguag e of De b t i n a C u lt u r e of C r e di t Drama renders fealty as debt:Â€ “I owe allegiance to my king” (Greene, Selimus 9.75). Filial and wifely duty also evoke this idiom. In the anonymous King Leir, Cordelia avows, “what love the child doth owe the father, / The same to you I bear”; Leir thinks his daughters “owe to me the tribute of their lives” (1.3.80–81; 3.3.82).9 Spouses owed a sexual “marriage debt,” and sermons warned against falling into arrears. Friendship evokes debt:Â€ Falstaff tells Hal, “Thou owest me thy love” (1H4 3.3.126). Daily life was a tissue of good or ill turns, conceived as debts:Â€ “Let me go; / And many a good turn I to thee will owe” (Chettle, Downfall 1996–7). Greville’s Alaham complains, “[I] brought thee good luck, where good turns are forgot. / And is it a return of that you owe, / For you to work your patron’s overthrow?” (1.2.90–92).10 A language of owing subtends duty. “Ought,” denoting obligation as in “ought to go,” was the past tense of “owe.” “Obligation,” “bond,” and “bound” made reference to money and family:Â€“Your father lost a father; / That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound / In filial obligation …/ To do obsequious sorrow” (Ham 1.2.89–92). This meaning of “obligation”Â€– “a moral or legal tie” or “one’s bounden duty” (OED)Â€– primary in our day, had only recently entered English usage. Earlier it meant “a binding agreement or bond.” Immaterial “obligation”Â€– including a duty to avengeÂ€– stemmed metaphorically from legal documents. “Obligation” was a duty to repay money, to mourn, to avenge. “Bound” means “under obligations (of duty, gratitude),” as in Hamlet’s “speak, I am bound to hear” and his father’s reply, “So art thou to revenge” (1.5.6–7). “Bond” denotes filial duty. Cordelia loves her father “according to my bond” (Lr 1.1.91). But these words too primarily referred to legal “Tribute” compares filial love to the debt a subjugated people “owe” a conqueror. A subjugated Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew declares, “Such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband”; husbands expect the “tribute” of “love, fair looks, and true obedience, / Too little payment for so great a debt” (5.2.159–60, 156–8). 10 The pun on “turn” / “return” depends on a meaning of “return” new at the time:Â€“that which is given or received, by way of recompense” (OED). The late sixteenth century intensified words denoting reciprocal action by prefixing them with “re”:Â€“return,” “requite,” and “revenge” gained popularity as against the medieval “turn,” “quite” or “quit,” and “venge” (OED). 9

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documents. A “bond” was an agreement by which “A … binds himself … to pay a certain sum of money to B” (OED). Shylock holds Antonio’s bond. Perennial debtor Falstaff claims that pickpockets stole from him “bonds of forty pound apiece” (1H4 3.3.92–93). Creditors wave bonds at Timon (Tim 2.2.37–38). Hamlet is filially bound, Antonio financially bound, Bassanio “infinitely bound” for a loan. Portia sardonically fuses the emotive and financial:Â€“You should … be much bound to him, / For … he was much bound for you” (MV 5.1.134, 135–6). “Obligation” stems from the Latin ligare, to bind or tie. “Bound” literally means “tied.” The oldest, most literal meaning of “bond” is “shackle”; figuratively, it meant “a constraining force or tie acting upon the mind, and recognized by it as obligatory” (OED)Â€– Cordelia’s “bond,” Hamlet’s being “bound” to revenge. People in plays are always saying “I am in your debt” or “we are indebted to you,” to mean “thank you,” suiting a society in which (despite Polonius’ precept) nearly everyone was both a borrower and a lender. In the anonymous Puritan, a scholar “walk[s] in great danger of small debts” (1.598). The drama (especially city comedy) brims with usurers, debtors’ prisons, young men ducking down alleys to dodge creditors. In Chettle and Day’s Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, creditors descend on a veteran who owes a laundress 9 pounds, a victualer 7 marks, etc. He settles with all for 30 poundsÂ€ – all his ready money. (The creditors could learn at Humphrey Baker’s reckoning school to figure the proportion each was owed.) Theology had long employed economic language. “Reckoning” meant not only “computation” (especially of “the sum owing”) but also “rendering an account of one’s life or conduct to God at death or judgement” (OED). A patristic tradition envisions God as a creditor; St. Ambrose called Christ a creditor (Schaff x:Â€446). In the new Arabic arithmetic, “borrowing” was a subtraction term, and the method taught in reckoning schools was apt for a culture of credit:Â€“borrowing above and paying back below” (Karpinski 105) means balancing as one goes along,11 like bookkeeping or eye-for-an-eye revenge. All English arithmetic books used “borrowed” as a subtraction term, and Tunstall’s Latin arithmetic used mutuo, which gave rise to “mutual” and came to mean “reciprocal,” but literally meant “borrowed.” Debt was built into the concept of mutuality. In the problem 358 minus 79, instead of replacing the minuend’s 5 with a 4, as we do, a student replaced the subtrahend’s 9 with a 19, “paying back” the borrowed ten to the 7 in the subtrahend:Â€each loan was repaid immediately.

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No literal monetary debt is involved in loyalty owed to king or family. But are these instances truly figurative? Monetary debt was not so much a metaphor for filial obligation as both belonged to a social system cohering by obligationÂ€ – to pay debts, to pay loyalty, to avenge injuries. Although fealty, family obligation, friendship, theology, and revenge all earlier spoke a language of debt, the explosion of personal, corporate, and government debt in late Tudor England may well have re-literalized debt, re-investing a dead metaphor with full monetary force. When Hal reminds Falstaff “thou owest God a death,” that habitual debtor thinks of dated bonds:Â€ “’Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay him before his day” (1H4 5.1.126–8). Hamlet’s notion of owing God a death evokes London officials who arrested debtors:Â€ “This fell sergeant Death / Is strict in his arrest” (5.2.278–9). In Chapman’s All Fools, a youth impatiently awaiting his father’s lucrative death imagines Mother Nature as a London creditor:Â€“My father yet hath ought [i.e., owed] Dame Nature debt / These threescore years and ten, yet [she] calls not on him. / But if she turn her debt-book over once, / And finding him her debtor, do but send / Her sergeant, John Death, to arrest his body, / Our souls shall rest” (1.2.77–82). The Atheist’s Tragedy literalizes life as a profitable investment:Â€“Set down the body. Pay earth what she lent. / But she shall bear a living monument, / To let succeeding ages truly know, / That she is satisfied, what he did owe, / Both principal and use [i.e., interest]; because his worth / Was better at his death then at his birth” (3.1.5–6). When Henry V publicly repudiates him, all of Falstaff’s visions of making free with the royal treasury, paying his debts, being somebody in the nation and not just in the Boar’s Head, of endless arpeggios of wit and loving insult with his “sweet boy” Hal collapse into a black hole of rejection expressed in one heart-breakingly businesslike utterance:Â€“Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound” (2H4 5.5.70). Revenge speaks a language of debt and obligation. A duchess neglects to avenge her murdered lover, “as if [she] thought that no arrears were due / To his death” (Cardinal 4.2.126–7). Vengeful Bosola’s first words are, “I have done you better service than to be slighted thus” (Duchess of Malfi 1.1.29–30). Hotspur vows revenge for Henry’s unpaid debt of gratitude for Hotspur’s father having helped him to the throne. He urges relatives to “revenge the jeering and disdained contempt / Of this proud King, who studies day and night / To answer all the debt he owes to you, / Even with the bloody payment of your deaths” (1H4 1.3.181–4). A default of positive obligation creates an obligation to avenge.

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Economic unfairness:Â€revenge and money De b t, R e v e ng e , a n d S oc i e t y

Worry over default was endemic.12 A default could ignite a chain reaction, as in The Comedy of Errors: s e con d m e rc h a n t You know since Pentecost the sum is due … Therefore make present satisfaction, Or I’ll attach you by this officer. a ng e l o [the goldsmith] Even just the sum that I do owe to you Is growing to me by Antipholus, And in the instant that I met with you He had of me a chain. At five o’clock I shall receive the money for the same. Pleaseth you walk with me down to his house, I will discharge my bond.

(4.1.1–13)

When Antipholus denies receiving the chain, mayhem threatens. A default could put credit beyond reach for a family. Borrowers worried about bankruptcy and foreclosure, lenders about default and inflation that devalued repaid money. Williams imagines what fellow soldiers muse on as they face death:Â€ “Some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe” (H5 4.1.132–3). John Taylor the Water Poet penned a homely account of such worry: I care [i.e., worry] when I want [i.e., lack] money, where to borrow, And when I have it, then begins new sorrow, For the right anagram of woe is owe. And he’s in woe that is in debt I know. For as I cared before to come in debt, So being in, my care is out to get … I care to keep me from the sergeant’s mace, Or from a barbarous bailiff’s rough embrace.

(“Taylor’s Motto” 54)

Diarists recorded worry. Nehemiah Wallington was “discouraged” because he could not “get out of debt … but still worse and worse”; Roger Lowe was “troubled” by “debts I did owe and for fear lest I should miscarry”; Oliver Heywood recalled his indebted father, “battered with anxious thoughts” (Muldrew 296, 291–2). No one was immune to credit risk. Robert Recorde, whose phenomenally popular arithmetic, geometry, and algebra texts helped many an Englishman balance his books, died in debtors’ prison. â•‡ Leinwand documents widespread anxiety about bankruptcy and foreclosure (82–83 ff.).

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Credit instruments became nearly as abstract as electronic moneyÂ€ – sealed bonds, bills of exchangeÂ€ – and money dematerialized to a disconcerting airiness in that (as Muldrew shows) small debts were often recorded orally; neighbors witnessed transactions, leaving no paper trail. Widespread debt etherealized money:Â€its evaporation into webs of promises caused worry. In a culture of credit, one had to trust others. International traders extended credit to people known only by reputation. And even the creditworthy defaulted in hard times, like the harvest failures and famine of the 1590s, or if their own debtors defaulted. Although trust was mandatory, even business partners didn’t fully trust each other. Accounting arose largely out of the demands of partnerships and joint ventures:Â€ accurate books assured all parties of a fair share. Money’s increasing abstractness made this necessary:Â€tangible goods or coins require no such paper trail. Credit is based on trust, accounting on mistrust. Bruce G. Carruthers explores alliance through debt: After the loan is made, creditors are in a sense beholden to their debtors. Their interests become aligned with the debtor because the creditor now has a stake in the ability of the debtor to repay. Since at least the fourth century b.c., debt has been one way to win friends and influence people … Debt is not just about raising money, it is also about creating allies. (3–4)

In optimistic moments, Muldrew imagines credit fostering sociability and community, debtors and creditors happily interconnected. But in darker moments, he dwells on debtors’ prisons, debt litigation, chains of debtors going down like dominoes. Serial defaults echo the talionic chainÂ€– one killing demanding another in infinite regress. The echo reflects a homology between debt and revenge. Talionic chains reflect group solidarity. If A hits B and B hits A, they are even; a chain develops when A’s son avenges B’s counter-blow. Family feuds (Montague/Capulet, Lancaster/York) make revenge appear genetically transmitted. Hoffman’s hero sets out to kill all relatives of his father’s killer, anyone with “but one ounce of blood, of which he’s part” (1.1.74). Titus, Tamora, and Hieronimo avenge their children, Hamlet and Hoffman their fathers. Women Beware Women’s grand finale, where revenges go off like skyrockets in all directions, is fueled by blood relation:Â€Fabritio, Hippolito, and Livia (siblings); Isabella their niece; Leantio and his mother; the duke and cardinal (brothers). Baligny in The Revenge of Bussy, faced with avenging his brother-in-law, defers to a biological brother. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, Vindice and siblings tackle a reconstituted family:Â€duke, duchess, and assorted sons, stepsons, and bastards.

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From Orestes and Pylades onwards, revengers often have confidants. Hamlet’s soul long ago chose Horatio (3.2.56–58), but some alliances, such as Hieronimo/Bel-Imperia, coalesce without prior friendship. The Revenge of Bussy features an extended revenge partnershipÂ€ – Baligny, Renel, Charlotte, Tamyra, and ClermontÂ€– like a joint stock company or a class action suit. But like commercial partnerships, these mingle trust and mistrust. Horatio’s friendship sustains Hamlet; but Barabas and Hoffman kill their confederates. Debt and revenge occupied similar positions in society’s webs of obligation and evoked similar language. Both were highly social; both involved duty and promises of action; both were dangerous and could lead to ruin; both could produce satisfaction. Both were all about paying back. On t h e Econom ic R h e t or ic of R e v e ng e in the merch a nt of v enice The Merchant of Venice, which deals in both monetary and vengeful repayment, opens upon a ticklish situation. Wishing to borrow from Antonio, Bassanio faces the rhetorical challenge of playing down his extravagance without ungratefully devaluing the squandered money previously borrowed from Antonio. He has disabled his estate “by something showing a more swelling port” than his “faint means” would support and now must get out from under “the great debts / Wherein my time, something too prodigal, / Hath left me gaged” (1.1.123–30). Evasive syntax makes time, not Bassanio, the prodigal. He shares his debt repayment scheme with Antonio, since to him “I owe the most in money and in love, / And from your love I have a warranty / To unburden all my plots and purposes / How to get clear of all the debts” (1.1.131–4). The person one owes the most is often the best source for more:Â€as Carruthers observes, creditors’ “interests become aligned with the debtor because the creditor now has a stake in the ability of the debtor to repay” (3).13 Antonio loves Bassanio; but he also has a financial stake in recouping Bassanio’s losses. For all their love, Bassanio treads warily. A little less than frank about past extravagance, he falls short of perfect candor when broaching a new scheme:Â€he will “unburden all his plots and purposes,” as if he has mapped out with his accountant a welter of debt-restructuring scenarios, a labor so As Lars Engle puts it, “The relationship between Antonio and Bassanio … resemble[s] that between Citibank and Zaire, whereby the creditor, by the magnitude of the investment, becomes the thrall of the debtor, who can cause ruin by defaulting” (25).

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intense that it will be a relief to “unburden” himself of such onerous complexities. However, he needs no spreadsheets for what finally amounts to one plot and one purpose:Â€to marry a wealthy heiress. All Bassanio requests is advice or a friendly ear. But after long experience Antonio can see a touch comingÂ€ – in fact he anticipates it:Â€ “My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions” (1.1.138–9). Instead of directly requesting cash, though, Bassanio erupts into an epic simile likening investment to archery, which risks provoking thoughts of throwing good money after bad, but allows him to hint that his fecklessness is but boyish high spirits: In my schooldays, when I had lost one shaft, I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight The selfsame way, with more advisèd watch, To find the other forth; and by adventuring both, I oft found both. I urge this childhood proof Because what follows is pure innocence. I owe you much, and, like a wilful youth, That which I owe is lost; but if you please To shoot another arrow that self way Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt, As I will watch the aim, or [i.e., either] to find both Or bring your latter hazard back again, And thankfully rest debtor for the first.

(1.1.140–52)14

Turning on the boyish charm, Bassanio invites a homoerotic reverie:Â€ will Antonio imagine him as a pretty, Cupid-like little archer? Maybe Antonio will identify with that boy, want to recapture his own youth with a flutter on a risky venture. But Bassanio misjudges:Â€Antonio dislikes digressive parables. He will soon be snapping at Shylock for a sheep anecdote. Why this impatience with the standard circumlocutions of loan negotiation? Does Antonio feel he is being manipulated? (Judging by his later behavior, he should recognize manipulation when he sees it.) He objects bitterly, “You know me well, and herein spend but time / To wind about my love; / … You do me now more wrong / In making question of my uttermost / Than if you had made waste of all I have. / Then do but say to me what I should do” (1.1.153–8). Perhaps because he is the elder, he uses imperatives:Â€“tell me,” “let me know it,” “say to me what I 14

Recalling Bassanio’s winsome metaphor, Shylock later vengefully spends money to trace the daughter who has decamped with his money. “I know not what’s spent in the search … Loss upon loss:Â€the thief gone with so much, and so much to find the thief, and no satisfaction, no revenge” (3.1.77–79).

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should do,” “speak,” “go forth,” “try what my credit can … do,” “go presently inquire” (1.1.119–83). Detouring into archery, Bassanio subtly resists his command to speak directly. Urging him to get to the point, Antonio implies that friendship suspends the etiquette of loan negotiation. The hurt audible in “you do me … wrong” reveals a slight chill in the friendship. Antonio’s dislike of indirectness resembles Cordelia’s irritation when her sisters address their father in a courtier’s flowery idiom. In both cases, mannered words sugar-coat self-interested professions of “love.” Getting to the point as instructed, Bassanio veers too far in the other direction. Not pausing to acknowledge Antonio’s profession of love or even murmur polite preambles such as, “Well, if you insist on hearing my silly schemes” or “Thanks for being willing to listen,” Bassanio announces with brutal directness, “In Belmont is a lady richly left” (1.1.161). Several degrees of frost set in, as Bassanio’s rave review of Portia presents the gloomy prospect of Antonio’s young man defecting to the heterosexual world. And the scheme reveals the old Bassanio:Â€by the will’s terms even a tramp choosing the right casket would win Portia’s hand, but Bassanio wants money for new outfits, to cut a dashing figure while choosing, and to buy Portia “gifts of rich value” (2.9.90). Perhaps the humiliation of thraldom to this irresponsible young man abets Antonio’s fabled melancholy (see 1.1.1). His reaction to the Portia Project is chilly in its very grammar:Â€after 176 lines of dialogue employing “you,” Antonio shifts to “thou” and “thee” for the rest of the scene.15 As Jonathan Hope sums up, “if someone was more powerful than you were, you used ‘you’ to them, and they used ‘thou’ to you; if you were of equal status … you would exchange the same pronounÂ€– ‘thou’ between lower-class speakers, and ‘you’ between upper-class speakers” (246). Bassanio, a young aristocrat, and Antonio, an established Â�merchant, both employ “you.” Perhaps age difference, inviting a deferential “you” from Bassanio and a condescending “thou” from Antonio, cancels out class difference, which would arrange pronouns in the other direction, although rich merchants were becoming the equals of aristocrats. The mutual “you” also expresses intimacy. Antonio’s shift to “thou” would register with Elizabethans in ways we no longer detect. Changing Â�pronouns can mark emotional shifts (Hope 247, Freedman 3). Or “thou” could be a move to assert control. Bassanio, who clearly cares a little less about Antonio than Antonio cares about him, will now be even more firmly beholden to Antonio. Debt is “about creating allies” â•‡ On the “emotional force” in this shift, see Freedman 74–75.

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(Carruthers 4)Â€– or binding an ally so close that not even a rich heiress can pry his affections loose. In the second loan negotiation, Act 1, scene 3, Bassanio flatters Shylock with equal-status pronouns, “you” and “your,” three times in a line and a half:Â€ “May you stead me? Will you pleasure me? Shall I know your answer?” (6–7). Shylock’s assertion of equal status with these Christians is no friendly move. He hurls “you” at Bassanio:Â€ “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you … but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (29–32). When Antonio enters, he hears Bassanio addressing Shylock as “you,” which cues him to interpret Shylock’s “you” as an assertion of equality rather than an inferior’s “you.” But he doesn’t readily join in. He addresses Shylock icily as “sir,” “Shylock” (in contrast to Shylock’s more polite “Signor Antonio”), “he,” and “the Jew” as if he were not there (87, 56, 59, 149), before finally slipping in a “your” (91) and then stooping to “shall we be beholden to you?” (102). At first, Shylock speaks colloquial prose:Â€ “Antonio shall become bound. Well … Three thousand ducats for three months, and Antonio bound” (5–9). Antonio’s arrival shifts the register into blank verse. Although a certain formality suits a loan negotiation between professionals, it is startling after Shylock’s colloquial musings to hear Antonio’s stuffy legalese, with its Latinate suspended verb:Â€ “Albeit I neither lend nor borrow / By taking nor by giving of excess, / Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend / I’ll break a custom” (56–59). Antonio comes right to the point. Scorning extra words such as “that is, if you are willing to lend me money,” Antonio turns a request into an arrogant demand. He rudely interrupts Shylock twice, calls him “the devil,” “an evil soul,” a “villain with a smiling cheek,” and “a goodly apple rotten at the heart,” and then addresses him as “you” (71, 94–102). The pronoun of equality is prompted solely by his wanting something. And just as Shylock has bitterly cast “you’s” at Bassanio, he here trains a veritable machine gun of them on the hated Antonio, fifteen in one speech: Signor Antonio, many a time and oft In the Rialto you have rated me About my monies and my usances. Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe. You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine, And all for use of that which is mine own. Well then, it now appears you need my help:

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Economic unfairness:Â€revenge and money Go to, then. You come to me, and you say, “Shylock, we would have moneys”Â€– you say so, You, that did void your rheum upon my beard, And foot me as you spurn [i.e., kick] a stranger cur Over your threshold. Moneys is your suit. What should I say to you? Should I not say “Hath a dog money? Is it possible A cur should lend three thousand ducats?” Or Shall I bend low, and in a bondman’s key, With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness Say this:Â€“Fair sir, you spat on me on Wednesday last; You spurned me such a day; another time You called me dog; and for these courtesies I’ll lend you thus much moneys”?

(1.3.102–24)

After this eloquent outburst, peppered with pronouns of equality, Antonio declares himself Shylock’s “enemy” and reverts savagely to “thee” and “thou,” appropriate to an inferior:16 I am as like to call thee so again, To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too. If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not As to thy friends; for when did friendship take A breed for barren metal of his friend? But lend it rather to thine enemy, Who if he break, thou mayest with better face Exact the penalty.

(1.3.125–32)17

If Bassanio’s borrowing situation was delicateÂ€– approaching a creditor whose previous loans he has not repaidÂ€– Antonio’s appears desperate:Â€he seeks money from one he has reviled, kicked, spat on. (Would we expect a mortgage from a loan officer we had called misbeliever, cut-throat, dog, while spitting on his pin-striped suit?) In Politeness:Â€Some Universals in Language Usage, discourse analysts Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson explore language conventions in tricky requests. Speakers in all languages, they observe, recognize the deferential circumlocutions heralding a touch. Rarely do people: Similarly in Twelfth Night, Sir Toby urges Aguecheek to “thou” Cesario provokingly (3.2.37–38). Ching-hsi Perng, who discusses this speech as “an attempt … to regain control of the situation” (27), also notes that in the trial scene Shylock applies the contemptuous “thee” to Antonio and even Portia (28–29), while Portia’s virtuoso shifts from “you” to “thee” in that scene help her set Shylock up for defeat.

16

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actually say things like “I hereby request …”; and yet as soon as one hears things like “Look, I’m terribly sorry to bother you, would it be awfully inconvenient ifÂ€…” one knows perfectly well what sort of interactional fix one is in … Even if one doesn’t know the language, on seeing one person approach another with the kinesics of unusual deference … and speak to him with hesitations, umms and ahhs … we have a strong clue that he is making a request … that he considers … imposing. (57)

If circumlocution reveals the magnitude of an imposition, Bassanio’s archery story forecasts a hefty request. But Antonio flouts all politeness rules. He does in effect march up and say, “I hereby request … ” Without preamble, he informs Shylock that he will borrow money from him, then turns away to ask if Bassanio has informed Shylock how much he needs. Such a big loan usually elicits deference. Politeness theory predicts placatory small talk:Â€“Nice weather on the Rialto today.” “I hope I’m not catching you at a busy time, Shylock.” “I like your new gaberdine.” Antonio’s abruptness signals that such is his contempt for Shylock that he will not trifle with politeness.18 He is insultingly curt:Â€ “And for three months” (62); “I do never use it” (67); “And what of him? Did he take interest?” (71). The usual subject positions of borrower and lender are reversed:Â€one who did not speak the language might peg the remote Antonio as lender and the voluble Shylock, beating about the bush, as borrower. Shylock’s sheep story, like Bassanio’s archery story, is a long digression interrupted by Antonio’s insistence on getting to the point, a similarity where we would predict difference. The linguistic strategies of creditor Shylock unexpectedly resemble those of borrower Bassanio, while AntonioÂ€– creditor in scene 1 and debtor in scene 3Â€ – behaves like a creditor in both. Very abrupt speech with no politeness formulae normally occurs “only if the speaker does not fear retribution” (Brown/Levinson 69). Antonio may not fear retributive foreclosureÂ€– his ships are to return “a month before / This bond expires” (153–4)Â€– but surely a prudent man would fear the retribution of being denied the loan. Why this commercially suicidal stance? If Christian fervor animates Antonio’s antipathy to interest, he doesn’t mention it, and his treatment of Shylock comes short of Christian charity. It’s odd that a merchant, used to doing business with all sorts of people in Europe’s most cosmopolitan trading city, cannot muster businesslike civility. His puzzling rudeness fits into a pattern of pointless risk. Luke Wilson thinks he is “perversely self-destructive”; he wonders why he hasn’t insured his 18

If length of niceties forecasts the size of a request, Antonio’s brevity, minimizing the 3,000 ducats, may be a negotiating strategy.

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ships, routine practice in London and Venice (33). Perhaps we should read Antonio as wanting Shylock to refuse, to rein in Bassanio’s financial excess or scuttle the Portia Project without having to refuse Bassanio himself. Or rudeness, suggesting affronted pride at lowering himself to ask an inferior for money, may serve to distance Antonio from Shylock’s mere wealth. Fastidiously recoiling from usury, he resembles Coriolanus, who cannot be civil to plebeians though his political career depends on it. In an age when native merchants and resident aliens had competing economic interests, rudeness buttresses the position of this merchant who affects patrician hauteur and hobnobs with aristocrats. Maintaining that position might outweigh for Antonio the risk of being refused this loan. But why does Shylock agree to lend money to a man who routinely insults and even assaults him? To hear Antonio ask (with at least a flicker of deference) “Shall we be beholden to you?”19 and then refuse him would have been sweet. But even sweeter for Shylock is to grant the loan and luxuriate for three glorious months in knowing that the man who had flinched at speaking to him is financially obligated to him, and so in his power. Antonio’s rudeness hones Shylock’s ill will, but well before that, Shylock has talked of revenge, longing to “feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him. / He hates our sacred nation, and he rails, / Even there where merchants most do congregate / On me, my bargains, and my well-won thriftÂ€– / Which he calls interest” (42–46). Now among other merchants, Shylock can call this arrogant critic his debtor, smiling at Antonio’s hypocrisy in denouncing usury until he needed money himself. If debt can be “about creating allies,” loans can be malicious, forcing enemies to become allies or (worse) dependents. Politeness evolves, say Brown and Levinson, because societies have a stake in people’s ability to maintain face. Antonio recommends that Shylock consider him an enemy rather than risk foreclosing on a friend:Â€ thus he may “with better face / Exact the penalty” (131–2). Renaissance creditors could lose face by foreclosing on the poor (Muldrew 181), but not on an enemy:Â€in revenge, that mirror image of a debt economy, one owes not ducats but a knife plunged into flesh. Shylock’s loan, making a haughty anti-Semite dependent on a Jew, is itself revenge, followed by the pound of flesh. Considering that “thou” was gradually dying out and “you” becoming the default form, Freedman reads “you” in this part of the scene as “neutral” (9, 78). But in the context of Antonio’s haughty condescension and tendency to think of Shylock in “thou” terms, I see “you” here as the “marked” form. As Freedman notes in another context, “it is the deviation from the character’s prevailing use that is important” (152).

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Payback time

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Shylock is a rare avenger in retaliating not for poisonings or mutilations but for mental anguish. Whether his revenge is disproportionate, whether abuse and bigotry justify murder, is debatable. But his injuries do exceed hurt feelings:Â€in denouncing him “where merchants most do congregate,” Antonio has assailed his reputation, imperiling his credit rating. To Elizabethans, who lived on credit, this was disastrous:Â€“You take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live” (4.1.371–2). Such vandals of reputation Thomas Wilson called “worse than any thief, because a good name is better than all the goods in the world … money may be recovered, but the loss of man’s good name cannot” (155). Even before Antonio approaches him, Shylock performs a background check, pinpointing the location of his ships. He suspects Antonio is overextended with risky venturesÂ€ – “his means are in supposition” (1.3.15). When Shylock muses, “I think I may take his bond,” Bassanio huffily snaps, “Be assured you may,” defending Antonio as credit-worthy. But “credit” meant both “trustworthiness (one’s worth in the realm of belief) and solvency (one’s worth in the realm of finance)” (Leinwand 13); Bassanio means the first, Shylock the second. Shylock answers “I will be assured I may, and that I may be assured, I will bethink me” (25–26). From the 1580s, “assured” acquired meanings concerning risk management; for example, where today we generally talk about “insurance,” people then talked only about “assurance.” Shylock’s assessment reveals the risk of default as genuine, not the long shot Antonio blandly claims. The loan sets up a win–win situation. if Antonio pays on time, Shylock gets principle and interest; if not, he gets revenge and flesh. Because “he hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies” (3.1.46–49), human flesh, worthless on the Rialto (3.1.43–44), is legal tender in a parallel universe:Â€“It will feed my revenge” (3.1.45–46). Despite its fairy-tale ogre plot, Merchant’s world was familiar:Â€ the fanciful trial is at bottom a debt-recovery litigation. Also familiar were chains of borrowers:Â€Bassanio borrows from Antonio, who borrows from Shylock, who borrows from Tubal. Antonio is creditor to Bassanio and debtor to Shylock; Shylock is creditor to Antonio and debtor to Tubal. Default could trigger a disastrous chain reaction. Reflecting the preoccupation with just deserts, one casket is inscribed, “Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves” (2.7.7). But when the prince of Morocco chooses it, the promise becomes a threat:Â€it all depends on what one deserves. And again, Christianity undercuts just deserts. As

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the revenger Hamlet, in a fit of Christian clemency, demands “Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?” (2.2.508–9), Portia observes, “We do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy” (4.1.195–7). Many have noted the oddity of regaling a Jew with the Lord’s Prayer and, as we have seen, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” had troubled recent Christian commentators. Hill had insisted that a creditor could “not only sue his adversary, but pursue him to the death, and yet forgive him,” but must “do nothing with a revenging mind” (51). Christians force Shylock into virtual bankruptcy and sail off into a happy ending, presumably because they took legal action with serene, unvengeful hearts. How exactly did Elizabethans get to this point from “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”? Again, revenge was the demonized twin of the judicial system. The evil of a harshly punitive system was projected upon private revenge; and Shylock is a vengeful man. But stage history shows a persistent thread of sympathy for him. He has sometimes been acted as a tragic heroÂ€– a tribute both to sympathy for an oppressed minority and to the deep cultural resonance of revenge. Also, as postcolonial theorists argue, enemies are forged from the disowned traits of heroes. In The Tempest, the evil magician Sycorax draws the fire of anti-magic moralists away from the virtuous magician Prospero. Renaissance othering of revenge works like the modern war on drugs. Great energy goes into battling heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, distracting attention from law-abiding citizens hooked on prescription drugs. Demonizing drug lords, who make huge money at the expense of little people and control local governments, cleanses pharmaceutical companies, which make huge money at the expense of little people and control national governments. True to the conjunction of revenge and money, Shylock is a usurer, an occupation often scapegoated for protocapitalist ills. Leinwand argues that usurers got an unfairly bad press:Â€ they after all extended creditÂ€ – England’s main currency (6). But in the dawn of the Protestant work ethic the usurer, who seemed to do no productive work, didn’t deserve his gains; and besides, he might foreclose. In a world where revenge is debt’s shadow, this play stages a crucial form of financial revenge:Â€foreclosure.20 Human relations are here steeped in an idiom of paying back. As Muldrew envisions borrowing as binding neighbors together, Portia calls it an act of “neighborly charity.” But by this seemingly benevolent image â•‡ In The Bastard, too, an indebted-merchant plot parallels an intricate multiple-revenge tale.

20

Payback time

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she mocks foreign suitors and means not monetary lending but its sister, revenge:Â€her Scottish suitor has “a neighborly charity in him, for he borrowed a box of the ear of the Englishman and swore he would pay him again when he was able” (1.2.66–68). Different kinds of obligationÂ€– gift exchange, debt repayment, retaliationÂ€ – united in the Renaissance imagination. As Feste observes, even “pleasure will be paid” (TN 2.4.69). Did Shakespeare mean us to notice how the inequitable Venetian legal system maintains its aura of justice by scapegoating a vengeful plaintiff? We can’t be sure. But many Renaissance playwrights make clear why the dispossessed resort to vengeance, and few unequivocally condemn revenge. It was responsible and honorable to pay one’s debts, whether in pounds sterling or pounds of flesh. The Renaissance relished competitive jesting; Feste is “put down” by another jester (TN 1.5.72). In friendly flytings, a well-aimed insult created a debt. When Benedick assails him with a joking insult, Claudio promises, “For this I owe you.” He now has other debts to pay, to expiate his treatment of Hero; when she and her party enter he murmurs apprehensively, “Here comes other reck’nings” (Ado 5.4.52). Jesting’s competitive pay-backs often had serious consequences:Â€Henry V repays the Dauphin’s tennis-ball jest by invading his country. Insult exchanges were microcosmic war, and jests invited revenge. Malvolio, victim of a practical joke, spits in fury, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” (TN 5.1.365). In this culture preoccupied with repayment, enmeshed in webs of credit, worried about foreclosures, defaults, and inflation, a language of owing pervaded life. And revenge, whether the satisfying pay-backs of a revenge tragedy like The Spanish Tragedy or the scapegoated retribution of a revenge comedy like The Merchant of Venice, was a driving force in Renaissance drama.

Ch apter 5

The goddess with the scalesÂ€– and the blindfold

A false balance is abomination to the Lord; but a just weight is his delight.

Proverbs 11:Â€1

Are ye then deaf, ye gods, ye cannot hear it? Or is just Libra fallen out of your spheres, That wronged states must to the earth appeal For justice and revenge?

Mulleases the Turk

Revenge-play audiences knew what injustice looked like:Â€ kangaroo courts, perjury, conviction without right to testify, summary executions. Revengers turn vigilante when tyrants deny them justice, or higher-status figures block access to the courts. And they knew what Justice should look like. In emblem books, poems, and plays, majestic Justitia held scales (a “balance”) in one hand, a sword in the other. Ripa’s Iconologia explained, “The scale, used to measure quantities of material things, is a metaphor for justice, which sees that each man receives that which is due him” (120). Henry V charges the Chief Justice to “bear the balance and the sword” (2H4 5.2.102). Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses stages Justice “with her balance, and her sword” (118). Even the hired killer Bosola invokes her:Â€“When thou kill’d’st thy sister, / Thou took’st from Justice her most equal balance, / And left her naught but her sword”; the murder merits “a most just revenge. / The weakest arm is strong enough, that strikes / With the sword of Justice” (Duchess of Malfi 5.5.38–40, 5.3.338–40). Othello identifies with Justitia:Â€“O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade / Justice to break her sword!” (5.2.16–17). Justitia was so visible, I suggest, because people worried so much about injustice.1 And her bilaterally symmetrical scales, like an accounting ledger, satisfied the passion for order. The Atheist’s Tragedy, or The Honest Man’s Revenge, like Jonson’s Volpone, ends with judges meting out what each character deserves.

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The goddess with the scales

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Ever since the Greek goddess Themis, female emblems of Justice carried scales.2 Weighing was anciently linked with justice:Â€in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, souls are weighed in a balance, and such weighing also appears in the Old Testament, the Koran, Homer (see Curtis/Resnik 1741; cf. Daube 113–17). St. Michael as a great judge of souls, central figure of an enormously popular cult in Western Christianity, was iconographically represented with a sword and scales. The first meaning of “balance,” dating to 1275, is “an apparatus for weighing, consisting of a beam … with a scale pan at each end” (OED). The London headquarters of the Hanse, a trading conglomerate, was the Stilliard or SteelyardÂ€ – meaning a set of scales. In a neighborhood play imagined in Marston and Barkstead’s Insatiate Countess, a grocer with scales plays Justice (2.1.40–41). In double-entry, “balance” meant ledger equilibrium:Â€“A leaf of paper [is] crossed in the mids [i.e., middle] … If the sums of money of debitor and creditor be like, then is your balance well” (Mellis Sig. f8v). The OED dates the word’s figurative sense to 1410 (“the metaphorical balance of justice … by which actions and principles are weighed”), but it had always been implicit in the scales as an attribute of Justice. Siena’s Allegory of Good Government personifies Distributive and Commutative Justice (with a scale), and Vindictive Justice (with a sword) (Curtis/Resnik 1744). In Aristotle’s schema, as filtered through Aquinas, distributive justice is equitable sharing of benefits and duties; commutative justice includes both injury and fairness in commercial transactions (Rubinstein 182–3). Of the two sides of commutative justice, seventeenthcentury theorists emphasized fair dealing; earlier, retribution loomed larger. (The Allegory of Good Government embodies Vindictive Justice separately.) Sir Thomas Elyot finds commercial fairness and criminal punishment a logical hybrid (159); but Aristotle obliquely notes its oddity. In sentencing, a judge “tries to equalize” between victim and assailant by “taking away from the gain of the assailant. For the term ‘gain’ is applied generally to such cases, even if it be not a term appropriate … to the person who inflicts a wound” (Nicomachean Ethics 115).3 Here in embryo is the application of economic termsÂ€– “pay,” “owe”Â€– to retaliation. Christianity also gave Justice economic and retaliatory faces. “Measure for measure” is retributive for Matthew and economic for Luke. Matthew Justitia, though, carries scales only infrequently in classical Roman iconography (Daube 114–15). As David Bady notes, the mean between extremes in Aristotelian commutative justice is downright arithmetical, dealing “with inequalities by determining the arithmetic mean. According to Aristotle, the difference between extremes is to be halved … and added to the lesser value while it is subtracted from the great … ‘splitting the difference’” (27).

2 3

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warns, “Judge not that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you” (7:Â€ 2). Although, according to tradition, Matthew had been a tax collector, it is Luke who stresses the economic:Â€ “Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over … For with the same measure that ye mete … it shall be measured to you again” (6:Â€38). In biblical and Aristotelian thinking, economic and retaliatory justice harbor under one umbrella:Â€the scales of justice weigh both grains and crimes. Justitia, says Ripa’s Iconologia, “is blindfolded, for nothing but pure reason, not the often misleading evidence of the senses, should be used in making judgments” (120). Nowadays her blindfold usually represents impartiality. But for the Renaissance, which first gave her this attribute, blindfolds could spell trouble:Â€hooded cupids signified love’s irrationality. In a Dürer woodcut, a fool blindfolds Justice, possibly an “attempt to lead Justice astray” (Curtis/Resnik 1756, 1757). Brueghel’s depiction is sinister: Blindfolded Justice is in the middle of a large, crowded scene … Various kinds of punishment, including hanging, burning, scourging, and beheading, are being imposed … A man is being stretched on a rack while a fluid is poured through a funnel down his throat. Justice, accompanied by a retinue of armed men, holds a raised sword and carries scales. Is the blindfold a celebration of Justice’s inner wisdom or … is she blindfolded not to see the many injuries imposed in her name? (Curtis/Resnik 1757)

Disturbing questions abound:Â€ “Does the blindfold represent impartiality?” Or is it “a criticism of Justice, easily corrupted or led astray because she is unable to see?” Does blind Justice possess “the rectitude of one who receives information only through the filter of the law, or shall we distrust her as one who cannot take into account human experience?” (Curtis/ Resnik 1739). Elizabethans, familiar with equityÂ€– taking circumstances into accountÂ€– would have understood an editorial in Legal Affairs:Â€“Do we want judges who blindly apply the law or ones capable of weighing the mitigating details that can’t be seen through the blindfold?”4 C or ru p t ions of J us t ic e : Â€ t h e Dr a m a The drama seethes with judicial corruption. The earliest tragedy, Preston’s Cambyses, stages the spectacular demise of a corrupt judge. Ignoring the Justitia’s empty scales aren’t wholly reassuring either, connoting justice in potentia, remote and hypothetical. For David Daube, the two pans reveal what is wrong with the Law:Â€a “tendency to see no shades between black and white, to admit no degrees of right and wrong” (109). And her

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king’s charge to “judge with equity,” Sisamnes privately gloats, “Now may I abrogate the Law, as I shall think it good” (1.117). When a commoner objects, Sisamnes silences the whiner:Â€“Hold thy tongue, thou prattling knave, and give to me reward; / Else …thy tale will not be heard.” A Vice smiles on the heartwarming scene:Â€“Bribes hath corrupt him, good laws to pollute” (3.330–8). But the returning king, who has delegated power to Sisamnes, hears serious allegations. Denying all, Sisamnes gets a fair trial, itself a restoration of justice. When the allegorical Proof and Trial testify that “by taking bribes and gifts, the poor he doth oppress” (4.389), the king appoints Sisamnes’ son Otian to succeed him, after watching his father’s punishment. This is no rap on the knuckles:Â€the sentence is “Draw thou his cursèd skin, straight over both his ears” (4.438). A stage direction specifies, “Flay him with a false skin” (4.464 s.d.). In Herodotus, Otian presides over later trials seated on the flayed skin. The play omits this, but onstage flaying is grisly enough to gratify those upset by corruption. Appius in R. B.’s Appius and Virginia, modestly calling himself the “princeliest judge, that reigneth under sun” (3.347), tries to extort sex from Virginia. Foreshadowing Titus Andronicus and other abused public servants in revenge plays, her father Virginius is baffled by the way Appius treats him:Â€“I servèd have his … state, I have maintained his weal [i.e., realm]” (6.674–5). To deprive Virginia of paternal protection, Appius suborns a witness to testify that she is not Virginius’ daughter. As the nefarious plot coalesces, Virginius, a believer in justice administered by “no partial hand … no partial mind” (6.707), erupts in a Vesuvius of alliteration:Â€ “O man, O mold, O muck, O clay, O hell, O hellish hound, / O false Judge Appius, wrabbling wretch, is this thy treason found?” (6.764–5). Even modest Virginia denounces the “bloody judge” (6.820). The crime merits “revengement” (6.741). After Virginius kills Virginia to prevent her shame, a sword-wielding Justice allots Appius’ “just reward … deadly death” (7.917) and indicts the perjured witness.5 Taking its title from “with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again,” Measure for Measure mentions justice oftener than any other Shakespeare playÂ€– thirty-four times.6 As in Cambyses, a duke deputizes Angelo to administer “common justice” (1.1.11). Proving a draconian judge, he sentences a youth to death for a sexual offense. Like sword may indicate not only judicial rigor but also “cruelty or an unwillingness to reach compromises” (Curtis/Resnik 1753). The anonymous Peddler’s Prophecy, 1561, also features a corrupt judge, who is admonished, “The upright and fatherless you do reprehend, / The malefactors you let pass” (Sig. e3). 6 Its nearest competitors, Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice, both revenge plays, mention justice twenty-four and fourteen times respectively. 5

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Sisamnes, he is corrupt and, like Appius, favors sexual extortion:Â€he offers to pardon a novice nun’s brother in exchange for sex, trusting in deniability. When the nun threatens to report his power abuse he sneers, “Who would believe thee?” (2.4.154). But she makes good her threat, demanding from the returning duke “justice, justice, justice, justice!” (5.1.25). The duke expresses doubt:Â€“If he had so offended, / He would have weighed thy brother by himself, / And not have cut him off” (5.1.110–12), recalling Jesus’ “judge not that ye be not judged.” But Angelo fears vengeance, and Isabella plots to bring “revenges to [his] heart” (4.4.127). Angelo ends the play in possession of his skin. But this comedy stages the horror of finding corruption in the very seat of justice, as judges make the law “curtsy to their will” (2.4.175). In the drama’s many courtroom scenes, the powerless seldom get a fair shake. Women are especially vulnerable. Katharine faces trumped-up charges in Henry VIII; Hermione in The Winter’s Tale is dragged from childbed to face false charges. Vittoria in The White Devil, rebuked for defending herself in court, protests, “Is my just defense / By him that is my judge called impudence?” (3.2.155–6). Women can be lawyers only in male disguise. They are never judges. In the anonymous Swetnam the Woman-hater Arraigned by Women, a lawyer objects to a misogynistic verdict:Â€ “We do appeal / From you to judges more indifferent:Â€ / You are all men” (3.3.262–4). Denied justice, the women form a revenge coalition and plan assault: au r e l i a What punishment Shall we invent sufficient to inflict, According to the height of our revenge? om n e s Let’s tear his limbs in pieces, joint from joint … s c ol d Three or four pair of pincers, now red hot, Were excellent.

(5.2.156–61)

The prevalence of revenge in plays can be ascribed partly to the frequency with which the Tudor pursuit of justice ended in disappointment. “The revenging hero almost invariably has no way of bringing his criminal opponent to justice” (Ornstein 23); for Hattaway, revenge plays ask, “How is justice to be found if the fountainhead of justice, the court, is itself polluted?” (“Rebellion” 15). The Halletts view revengers’ inability to accept society’s unjustness as a symptom of insanity.7 But Renaissance “Inability to accept … that the world is essentially unjust” drives Hieronimo mad; he suffers from “an obsessive desire to make the world behave justly”Â€– such desire is “irrational” (Halletts 145, 152–3).

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audiences savored not plays about sad cases of insanity among believers in justice, but plays about revengers’ imposition of justice by force. J us t i t i a Mor ph s i n t o a Di f f e r e n t G odde s s Justitia’s blindfold could connote perilous blindness. And crucially, she shares it with the goddess Fortuna.8 The Renaissance possessed complex discourses of fortune:Â€the medieval Boethian tradition with its falling princes; humanistic debate on freedom; moral discourses indebted to Aristotle, Plutarch, and Seneca; theological debates over fortune and providence. (See Kiefer, Fortune; Steppat; Chew.) In Chapman’s All Fools, “Fortune the great commandress of the world” treats followers differentially:Â€“To some she gives honor without deserving,” to others “deserving without honor” (5.1.1–4). She was linked with evil:Â€Vices such as Courage in Wapull’s Tide Tarrieth No Man urge “reliance on ‘fortunate chance’” (Steppat 32). Why did lofty Justice and whorish Fortuna look so disconcertingly alike? Chew blandly notes, “Fortune looks not where she bestows her gifts but scatters them at random, while Justice … is blind so as to play no favorite, see no friend” (95).9 But these attributes are at odds. Justitia’s blindfold signifies impartiality, and Fortuna’s, callous indifference as to who prospers and who plummets. The blindfold, traditional to Fortuna, joined Justitia’s iconography in the sixteenth century. Did Fortuna’s indifference rub off on Justitia’s impartiality? Further, the Renaissance sometimes endowed Fortuna with Justitia’s scales. In Giordano Bruno’s Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Fortuna stands between balance pans (178–9). In Jost Amman’s allegory of commerce, a huge woodcut brimming with merchant lifeÂ€ – cash-counting, bales of merchandiseÂ€ – market god Mercury holds scales identified as double-entry columns, near Fortuna on a sphere representing luck (see Yamey 115–18).10 Not all luck is good:Â€in the background, a ship is sinking in Antwerp harbor. This woodcut conflates the scales of Justice, measure of fairness, with the precarious balance of Fortune. “Balance” meant a set of scales, “the metaphorical balance of justice,” or equilibrium between opposing forces. But by Shakespeare’s time it Among Fortune’s attributes (wheel, globe or rolling stone, bridle, double face, blindfold) early Tudor plays like Hick Scorner or Magnificence foreground the wheel. But later the blindfold predominates (see H5 3.6.24–31, Thomas, Lord Cromwell 306). 9 Cf. Curtis/Resnik; Kissel; Henkel/Schöne 1797 ff. 10 Mercury resembled FortunaÂ€ – “mercurial” still means “changeable, unpredictable, fickle” (OED). 8

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also meant “the wavering balance of Fortune,” even “uncertainty or suspense; risk” (OED). A word meaning either the “balance of justice” or the “balance of Fortune” vacillates between Justitia and Fortuna. Similarly, “indifferent,” which had meant “unbiased, impartial, disinterested, fair, just,” came gradually to mean “unconcerned, careless, apathetic” (OED). One word meant “impartial” or “uncaring,” just as impartial Justitia merged with callous Fortuna. Fortuna/Justitia’s remoteness and caprice recall the sonnet mistress:Â€ “IceÂ€ … hath congealed her heart” (Daniel, Delia 49); she will “sport, and toy … / Then frown, then rage, then hate, and then disdain” (Newman Sig. d3). The lover is “full of tears, full of smiles” because his mistress “would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him” (AYL 3.2.371–2). English Petrarchists assume that one can attain love by deserving it (see Chapter 1). It is unfair to blame a woman for preferring anotherÂ€– “They must … first love, ere they be inconstant” (Newstead 23)Â€– but Petrarchists cry cruelty if a lady ignores their suffering. She should love “as I deserve” (Wyatt, Court of Venus 6v). If “inconstancy” suggests Fortuna, insistence on fair treatment conjures Justitia. In their cry of neglected merit, Petrarchists resemble revengersÂ€ – Wyatt even hopes that “vengeance shall fall on such disdain” (Court of Venus 4v). Marotti traces such feelings to career frustration under Elizabeth, but the mistress’ resemblance to Justitia/Fortuna suggests more general frustration at injustice. Love lyrics abound in economic termsÂ€ – one mentions “tributes,” “imposts,” “duties” (Percy #17); one presents love in terms of mortgages, sureties, and usury (Shakespeare, Sonnet 134); one demands, “doth Love thus pay his servants’ hire?” (Procter Sig. ciiv). A mistress’ beauty is a rack-renting landlord:Â€“These eyes thy beauty’s tenants, pay due tears / For occupation of mine heart thy freehold” (Barnes 14). Heartless mistresses figured economic unfairness. Justitia and Fortuna had their own economic coloration. Commutative justice dealt with the market. “Fortune” meant chance, but had also meant “success, prosperity” since the Middle Ages, and “prosperity” increasingly meant “position as determined by wealth” (OED). Unrewarded merit and unmerited reward were not simply economic issues, under the sign of Fortuna, and unpunished guilt and undeserved punishment legal issues, under Justitia:Â€Justice and Fortune overlapped. Their conflation bespeaks a breakdown in justice, the triumph of contingency. Wages and prices were unstable, markets fickle; national currencies fluctuated wildly, economies took drastic downturns, creditors foreclosed unexpectedly, unpredictable


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weather caused harvest failures, plague struck suddenly. A ruler’s mortal illness could change a nation from Protestant to Catholic or vice versa. People felt helpless, in the hands of Fortune. Seeking the Judgment Seat, they found the marketplace; seeking stable value, they found what the market would bear. Christian providentialism had long denied randomness. Boethius and Augustine subsumed fortune under providence:Â€despite human ignorance of the big picture, what appears random is really a divine plan (Kiefer, Fortune 37). Thomas Beard voiced Renaissance orthodoxy in denying “the reality of chance, for all is of God” (Kiefer, Fortune 40). But religion failed to dispel Fortuna’s potency; her image appeared even on church walls (11). Humanists, hoping to control her, ascribed man’s life course to “his own decisions and deeds,” not “some purely external force acting upon him” (206). Bacon’s “On Fortune,” while conceding that “outward accidents conduce much to fortune,” insists that “man’s fortune is in his own hands” (Essays 122). Humanists often figured “the heroic ability to master Fortune” in Hercules, symbol of virtù (Steppat 2); he wins the battle between Fortune and Hercules (Cassirer 73–74). In Bruno’s Expulsion, Fortune fails to usurp Hercules’ celestial place. He displays fortezza, “the strength of the human will …, the domitrice della fortuna … a heroic passion” (Cassirer 75), analogous to Machiavelli’s virtù (“ability, power, forcefulness, industry, valor”), “often counterpose[d] to the word Fortune” (Kiefer, Fortune 200). The new humanist science, too, assailed Fortune. The title page of Recorde’s astronomy text casts Fortuna as conquerable via astronomy. But for many, science itself created uncertainty:Â€ “New philosophy calls all in doubt.… / ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone” (Donne, “First Anniversary” 205–13). Economists also hoped to master Fortuna. Malynes thought governments could control exchange rates; but Misselden plumped for Fortuna. Who controlled the marketÂ€ – governments, or the capricious goddess? This age invented risk management; but risk could prove unmanageable. Revengers, too, combated Fortuna, seeking vigilante redress when providence, humanism, science, and economics failed. Disastrous chance is rife in plays about revenge and vendetta:Â€ in Romeo and Juliet, the plague quarantines a crucial messenger, and Juliet awakens too late to save Romeo; in Othello, the handkerchief is fatally lost, Cassio exits at the wrong moment, and dreadful bad luck places an Iago in proximity to an Othello in the first place. Revenge plays obsess about Fortune:Â€“Thou placed are in top of fortune’s wheel, / Her wheel must turn” (Caesar’s Revenge 3.1.16–17); Fortune “turned all her favors into frowns, and … in

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one hour o’erturn’d me from the top of her proud wheel … Build not on Fortune; she’s a fickle dame” (Hoffman 3.2.1546–9). This was so from the dawn of English revenge tragedy. The Senecan translators of the 1550s and 1560s (see Chapter 6) “intensify and broaden” two themes:Â€“the mutability of fortune and the severity of retributive justice” (Kiefer, Fortune 60). In a dedicatory epistle, Alexander Neville says his translation of Oedipus aims “to declare the unconstant head of wavering Fortune, her sudden interchanged and soon-altered face, and … the just revenge and fearful punishments of horrible crimes.” Kiefer (Fortune 71), Winston (“Seneca” 49), and Bruce Smith (Ancient Scripts 206) take “revenge” to mean “divine retribution” and thus see a conflict:Â€ “The strict cause-and-effect relationships dictated by the operation of retributive justice are undercut by the exploits of an arbitrary Fortune” (Kiefer, Fortune 71). But if it refers to human revenge, which indeed abounds in many of the plays, the conflict disappearsÂ€– human revenge often comprises a self-assertion against the vagaries of contingency. Kiefer notes that Neville alters passages in Oedipus to stress Fortune and “fear of contingency” rather than fate:Â€“What bothers Neville most is not the Senecan notion that all things move along on their appointed paths, but rather that they are ‘uncontrolled’”; Seneca himself was committed to Fortune, but translators present “a world even more precarious and unstable”Â€ – they “out-Seneca Seneca” (63, 67). Revengers invoke Fortuna (and other fortune-reversers such as Nemesis)11 to explain unmerited misery, but are seldom fatalistic:Â€ if the elite response to Fortuna is virtù, that of the dispossessed is revenge. The Mirror for Magistrates, that compendium of precipitous falls, suggests harnessing Fortuna herself to the project of retribution:Â€she provides “means to punish and destroy tyrants” (Baldwin 170). But if humanists, scientists, and economists did not always control Fortune, neither did revengers. In 3 Henry VI, revenge loses ground to fortune as chaos spirals. In Act 1, references to revenge outnumber those to fortune by 10 to 1, but by Act 4, references to fortune prevail, 10 to 2. Fortune gradually foils both factions’ efforts to execute perfect revenge. Early Renaissance confidence that humanity could master Fortune made unexpected reverses even harder to bear. Men of virtù resemble complacent figures high on Fortune’s wheel, As Richard Linche wrote in 1599, “Among the ancients … Fortuna and Nemesis were oftentimes taken to be all one” (Sig. aa4v). On conflation of the two, see Steppat 29–30, Kiefer, Fortune 34–41. Nemesis is called “the mistress of Revenge” (Locrine 5.3.45), “high mistress of revenge” (George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar 1. first dumb show 35), and “queen of revenge” (Caesar’s Revenge 5.1.251).

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oblivious to danger. And Jacobean dramatists created a “world where Fortune’s power can no longer be checked … where caprice riddles the body politic … where irrational forces frustrate man’s most determined efforts” (Kiefer 302). Questing for just deserts, a revenger combated not only a competitorÂ€– a zero sum gameÂ€– but also the forces of contingency, personified as Fortune, indifferent to deserving. As a marketplace mentality replaced fair reward, glimpses of the dice game at society’s heart fueled revenge. Even when doomed, revengers are existential heroes in a culture which, seeking justice, found chance and fortune. Who was that masked goddess? Justitia, goddess of justice, and Fortuna, goddess of contingency, should have been opposites, one granting just deserts, the other an arbitrary destiny. But the bestowal of Fortune’s blindfold on Justitia and of Justitia’s scales on Fortuna bespeak a horrific suspicion:Â€under that blindfold, Justitia and Fortuna were the same goddess. A Dic e G a m e at t h e H e a r t of S o c i e t y:Â€ G a m bl i ng a n d t h e M a r k e t pl ac e In one woodcut, Fortuna holds cups, like the pans of Justitia’s scales. With callous caprice, she inverts and spills one cup. This prefaces the Liber de Ludo Aleae, The Book on Games of Chance, by mathematician Girolamo Cardano, who theorized algebraic equations. Also a compulsive gambler, he used mathematics to calculate statistical probabilities in dice rolling.12 In Bruno’s Expulsion, Fortune runs a lottery:Â€“I put all beings into one urn, and … stir them”; winners are chosen by lot (173). The luck of the draw, she argues, favors the unworthy, since they are more numerous (174). Medieval Fortuna often cast dice with humans (Patch 81). Nowadays her wheel belongs to roulette; and FortunaÂ€– Lady LuckÂ€– was always a gambler’s goddess. Venture capitalismÂ€– investments in voyages to India or the AmericasÂ€– was regarded as a form of gambling, like plunking down a bet on a gaming table. Susan Strange argued in 1986 that “the Western financial system is rapidly coming to resemble … a vast casino” (1); but “casino capitalism” Mathematician Luca Pacioli also studied games of chance. His treatise on mathematics and accounting offers this problem:Â€“A and B are playing a fair game of balla. They agree to continue until one has won six rounds. The game actually stops when A has won five and B three. How should the stakes be divided?” (Bernstein 197). The solution to this problem 200 years later provided the groundwork for “the theory of probability, the mathematical heart of the concept of risk” (3).

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emerged in the sixteenth century. Widespread games of chance coexisted with “fluctuations in money economy and maritime expansion” (Steppat 21). Venture capitalists, like high-stakes gamblers, were called “adventurers”; meaning “gambler” since medieval times, “adventurer” now also meant “speculator” (OED). Futures speculation was born:Â€ “‘betting’ on future exchange rates,” parties forecast “exchange rates that would prevail at a certain date, and the discrepancy between these rates and the actual rate … determined who won the bet and how much the loser was to pay,” a practice used “not only for gambling but also for covering exchange risk” (Einzig 120). Closely akin to gambling was “arbitrage,” buying currency in one city and racing to sell it in a city where its value was higherÂ€– a true gamble, given hazardous travel conditions (De Roover, Gresham 140).13 Entrepreneurs in a John Taylor poem lament that all their trading venturesÂ€– soap, tobacco, starch, mousetraps, sea coals, sedan chairsÂ€– have failed:Â€the “dice run against us, we at cards are crossed” (“Complaint”). Moralists saw gambling as a perversion of legitimate trading. John Northbrook calls poverty, swearing, and stealing “fruits, and revenues, of that wicked merchandise of diceplaying” (119). “Gaming,” he growls, “was never allowed as a kind of bargaining [or] traffic … No usury in the world [is] so heinous as the gain gotten by this play at dice, when all is gotten with a trice over the thumb, without any traffic or loan” (120, 129). Renaissance literature bristles with betting. Arden of Faversham is murdered while rolling dice. In Shirley’s Hyde Park, ladies ante up at a horse race, to a “confused noise of betting within” (4.3.s.d.). A gentleman in Middleton’s Nice Valor wants to “thrive as I deserve at billiards; / … or at primero” (1.1.41–42). In a nondramatic work on gambling, Gilbert Walker’s A Manifest Detection of Dice-play, one speaker contends that landlords, lawyers, and merchants cheat as regularly as dice-players. In Shakespeare, Posthumus in Cymbeline and Collatine in Lucrece wager on their wives’ chastity; Emilia would bet her soul on Desdemona’s chastity (Oth 4.2.13–14). Men wager on wives’ obedience (Shrew), whether a battle has begun (Coriolanus), on who will laugh first (Tempest). Horatio, who perhaps watched Hamlet work out, ventures “you will lose this wager” (on fencing); but Hamlet (having consulted bookies?) predicts “I shall win at the odds” (5.2.147–9). His own mother doesn’t like his chancesÂ€– like many ambitious sports mothers, she frets that he is undertrained, “scant of breath” (5.2.230). But Claudius backs him. He has rigged the Arbitrage as an exploitation of price discrepancies still exists and gave rise to the slang term “arb” for hand-signals used at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

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match against him, but if it works and he keeps the kingdom, he can afford to pay up. Hamlet, whose father wagered half his kingdom on a hand-to-hand combat, knows gambling:14 c l au di u s You know the wager? h a m l e t Very well, my lord. Your grace hath laid the odds o’ th’ weaker side. c l au di u s I do not fear it; I have seen you both. But since he is bettered [i.e., favored], we have therefore odds [i.e., handicapping].

(5.2.198–201)

Dice and cards have a medieval history, but the term “gaming” dates to Tudor times, when gambling became a unified discourse. It was not exclusively linked with back rooms or criminals. Respectable Elizabethans were avid bettorsÂ€– John Ashton records bets between noblemen; Raleigh wagered with the queen (Gambling 153). Moderns assume a gulf between good gambling (the stock market) and bad (a floating craps game). Our politicians take care not to be espied in Monaco, or running highstakes poker in the back rooms of constituency offices. But no disrepute besmirches Shakespeare’s Antony or Octavius for betting on cock fights. And Anglican divines, usually austere, granted gambling “qualified permission.” Repeatedly: the arguments against gambling, the many ways in which it is … abused, the evils which so frequently attend upon … it, are piled up as if to lead to its absolute condemnation. And yet … such a judgement is consistently rejected. Each one agrees that though … on almost every occasion it would be wiser to refrain, circumstances may conceivably be such that its practice would be innocent. (T.Â€Wood 160)

William Ames allowed betting on “some truth,” but not on who can drink the most (244–5). Jeremy Taylor wrote that despite attendant drink and profanity, “cards and dice are of themselves lawful” (T. Wood 161). Highstakes gambling ruins fortunes, but at low stakes it can be wholesomely recreational. Surprisingly, Taylor tolerates “trifling” wagers:Â€ Protestants didn’t often excuse venial sins. What was Protestant was encouraging self-examination in gamblers. William Perkins opposed games that provoked covetous feelings. Richard Baxter defended betting on horse-races 14

See Sprinchorn. The sociologically inclined might worry about a young man whose step-father appears to be an alcoholic and whose father was a gambler:Â€ “Well over half ” of the addictive gamblers studied by Maryland’s Task Force on Gambling Addiction came from families in which “an immediate relative was either an alcoholic or compulsive gambler” (www.nyu.edu/its/ socsci/Docs/task_force_4.html).

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if pursued without covetousness. A little gambling couldn’t hurt the pure of heart, just as a Christian could sue a neighbor if he harbored no vengefulness (see Chapter 4). The evil of games depended on their reliance on chance:Â€ “If dice be wholly evil, because they wholly depend upon chance,” cards must be “somewhat evil, because they somewhat depend upon chance” (Balmford Sig. a4v). Through the lens of the Protestant work ethic, chance was bad:Â€ skill demanded effort, while chance bestowed windfall profits. Gamblers win “by chance,” not “by cunning and industry” (T. W., Sig. h6). But not everyone denounced chance:Â€for merchants, risk was a mark of legitimacy. As De Roover shows, the chance that exchange traders took on fluctuating rates insulated them from usury charges:Â€ a usurer’s certain return, a mutuum or straight loan requiring negotiating skill, was legally constrained. The distinction between acceptable and bad gambling exactly inverted that between money speculators and usurersÂ€– in the latter case, risk and chance were good, skill bad. Such conflicted attitudes expose faultlines in this protocapitalist culture to which risk and chanceÂ€– Fortuna’s realmÂ€– were fundamental. Portia’s casket test valorizes one who “hazard[s] all he hath” (MV 2.7.16). “Hazard” meant “to expose to risk”; and “Hazard” was a popular dice game. The ideal Christian gambler, imagined by Anglican divines, frequents not a gaming house with its quaffing and swearing, but a private gathering, “some little hospitable entertainment” (J. Taylor in T. Wood 162), glowing with neighborliness. He gambles for small change, not coveting his neighbor’s pence but cheering other players on, that no one may lose too much or feel sad. His mind is untroubled by fear of losing big wagers. He favors cards, which require skill. He might wager (no more than sixpence!) against some rash assertion, but only out of devotion to truth, and to provide a moral lesson. The improbability of gambling men observing such modest Christian limits highlights the strangeness of distinguishing good gambling from bad. Denunciation of bad gambling served a cultural agenda:Â€as revenge was the disowned twin of justice and usury the disowned twin of exchange trading, so bad gambling was venture capitalism’s evil twin. Establishment evils were projected onto caricaturesÂ€– grasping usurer, gambler in a sordid den, vengeful man. The Anglican divine Robert Sanderson sees a continuum among gambling, economic and legal practices, and revenge, all pairing acceptable with evil twins:Â€“In our sermons we … condemn as evil, swearing, and gaming for money and dancing and recreations upon the Sabbath-day … and retaliation of injuries, and monopolies, and


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raising of rents, and taking forfeitures of bonds”; but most of these are “in some cases lawful” (69). Why defend any gambling? Because, I suggest, it occupied the same conceptual space as mercantile ventures. Preachers defended gambling because of its striking resemblance to protocapitalist practices, especially exchange speculation and high-stakes trading ventures. Why offend the bankers, merchants, and wealthy investors in one’s parish by assailing the principle of risking money to gain money? In sermons on gambling, preachers muffled the boom of their heaviest rhetorical artillery. G a m bl i ng, L o t t e r i e s, R e v e ng e , a n d S h a k e s pe a r e’s a n t o n y a n d c l e o p at r a

Antony is a gambler. He shoots dice, plays cards, draws lots, and bets on cock fights, quail fights, fishing. To modern eyes, gaming suits a heroically dissolute Antony who in feasts, drinking bouts, and sexual marathons “wastes / The lamps of night in revel” (1.4.4–5). Cleopatra too loves a wagerÂ€– she bets on fishing with AntonyÂ€– and speaks like a gambler even of his death:Â€ “The odds is gone” (4.16.68). Moderns also consider hers a gaming personalityÂ€– indeed, her high-stakes dinner invitation on the Cydnus makes her the original riverboat gambler. But Jacobean attitudes toward gambling differed from ours. Upright Octavius, who recoils in fastidious distaste from Pompey’s drunken revel, is also a gambler, and a luckier one than Antony. Gambling permeates the play. Triumvirs decide by lot who hosts the first feast (2.6.60–63). Enobarbus warns Antony that the long-odds gamble of a sea battle means giving in “to chance and hazard” (3.7.47). When Antony loses, Enobarbus lashes out that lust has “nicked his captainship” (3.13.8)Â€– “nick” is a dice throw in Hazard. Antony calls Caesar’s messenger a “jack” (3.13.93)Â€ – likely the playing-card. Gambling savvy deserts Antony as he challenges Octavius to single combat, although the odds favoring Octavius’ army give him no incentive to reduce his chances to the 50–50 of single combat. Enobarbus notes, “Being twenty times of better fortune, / He is twenty men to one,” but still commits to the long-odds battle:Â€“I’ll strike, and cry ‘Take all!’,” meaning “winner take all” (4.2.3–8). When this battle is lost, Antony suspects Cleopatra of having “packed cards with Caesar, and false-played my glory / Unto an enemy’s triumph” (4.15.19–20). The card game “Triumph” gave us “trump” (OED). Antony calls Cleopatra’s betrayal “fast and loose,” a crooked gypsy game:Â€“Like a right gypsy hath at fast and loose / Beguiled me” (4.13.28–29; see Lloyd 553).

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Here Cleopatra resembles Fortuna. Her desertion in the battle of Actium is the turning-point of Antony’s fortunes, like a capricious turn of the wheel:Â€“Fortune and Antony part here” (4.13.19). Cleopatra “treats Antony very much as Fortune does” (Williamson 427). He identifies with his ancestor Hercules (4.13.43–45), and his struggle with Cleopatra recalls the humanist Hercules combating FortunaÂ€ – except that here, Fortuna wins. Lady Luck deserts this gambler. One cannot readily imagine the redoubtable OctaviaÂ€– she of the “holy, cold, and still conversation” (2.6.120)Â€– betting on cock fights. Maecenas’ utterance is startlingÂ€– “Octavia is a blessèd lottery” (2.2.248).15 Identifying this paragon with lotteries (and that churchly “blessèd”) hints at the legitimacy of this form of gambling, a new mode of Elizabethan fund-raising. The first state lottery, 1569, raised money to repair England’s harbors. Its prize list, 19 inches wide and 5 feet long, lists 30,000 prizes (Ashton, Lotteries 5–16). Many tickets survive, with identifying poems:Â€pleasingly, gambling fever turned 400,000 subjects into poets. Poems often name Fortune:Â€“If Fortune be froward my angel is gone, / But if Fortune be friendly with increase it cometh home” (Alice Crewe, #268,223, Ashton, Lotteries 18). “Prize,” in this list spelled “price,” meant both a commodity’s asking price and a prize in a contest ‘”by chance or hazard” (OED)Â€– a telling conflation of retailing with lottery gambling. In 1602 Sir Thomas Egerton presented the queen with the entertainment “A Lottery.” A mariner sang of Fortune and passed out tickets; the grand prize was “Fortune’s Wheel.” Scripture mentions lotteries, part of God’s “special providence” (Ames 248). Lot-casting for trivial, worldly purposes was to theologians a blasphemy:Â€ “The use of a lot is an act of religion” (Perkins, Whole Treatise 590); to use it for “sport” or to decide petty disputes is “to make God an umpire” (Balmford Sig. [a5], [a6v]). Northbrook calls lots “one of the principal witnesses of God’s power,” governed directly “by his hand” (139). The godly use lots only “in causes of great importance,” such as “parting of goods, dividing of lands, election of magistrates, choice of ministers” (T.W., Sig. [h8]). But the godly swallowed objections to secular lotteries; many state lottery tickets were bought by churches. Identifying poems were often good-luck prayers:Â€“We put in one lot, poor maidens we be ten. / We pray God send us a good lot, that all we may say, Amen”; “God send a good lot for my children and me, / Which have had twenty Octavia is not the only Shakespearean woman to serve as a lottery prize:Â€ Portia is a prize in “the lottery that [her father] hath devised in these three chests of gold, silver, and lead” (MV 1.2.25–26).

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by one wife truly” (Ashton, Lotteries 18–19). To imagine Antony winning an advantageous wife as a lottery prize was not unseemly. The 1569 lottery promised all ticket-holders a return of at least 2 shillings 6 pence, and a life pension to anyone buying 30 or more lots who won back less than one-third of their price. Enticing the public into a flutter on the lottery demanded reassuranceÂ€– it was not too dangerous. This age invented risk management:Â€“You do not plan to ship goods across the ocean, or to assemble merchandise for sale, or to borrow money without first trying to determine what the future may hold” (Bernstein 21). Strategies included credit inquiries like Shylock’s; insurance:16 investment diversification.17 Antony tries bird omens and soothsayers.18 Empire-building, like global trade, was a gamble. Antony and Cleopatra, c. 1606–7, is exactly contemporary with the high-risk Jamestown colony, financed by lottery,19 and Britain aimed at empire:Â€Speed’s 1611 atlas was grandly called The Theater of the Empire of Great Britain. Characters in Antony and Cleopatra seek fortune in the theater of empire, and the play mentions “fortune” more than any other Shakespeare playÂ€ – forty-five times, as against twenty-five in The Merchant of Venice and twenty-nine in Timon of Athens, economically oriented plays. Cleopatra is a bold international gambler. As expansionist Rome gobbles up principalities, she maintains some autonomy for her client kingdom by strategic seduction. One need not wholly discount real passion to note (with a gambler’s eye) the long odds against passion’s lighting on three consecutive Roman triumvirs. While beauty lasts, she gambles on its power; when “wrinkled deep” (1.5.29), she bets on personality. It’s risky:Â€any lover might discard her. But, holding few cards, she plays with finesse the hand she has been dealt. And Cleopatra is an international avenger. Like Shakespeare’s English histories, the play stages attempts to distract attention, through foreign Insurance was itself a wagerÂ€– a person bet that he would die, insurers that he would live. Marine insurance, dating to medieval times, was common in the Renaissance. Life insurance was available by the 1570s, personal injury insurance soon after. See Barbour, Cockerell/Green, Ewald, Sibbett, Supple. 17 Though remiss in not insuring his ships, Antonio has at least diversified:Â€“My ventures are not in one bottom [i.e., ship] trusted, / Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate / Upon the fortune of this present year” (MV 1.1.42–44). In Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Barabas survives confiscation of his money and soon appears wealthy again, since his investments are diversified in many vessels (and under floorboards). 18 See my essay “‘He beats thee ’gainst the odds’.” 19 Further emphasizing the capitalism/gambling nexus, one prize in a 1615 lottery, in aid of the Virginia colony, was a share in the Virginia Company (“A Declaration for … the Great Standing Lottery,” in Three Proclamations). 16

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conquest, from a smoldering vendetta at home. It keeps alive the memory of earlier feuding:Â€Ventidius avenges Crassus’ death (3.1.1–3); young Pompey seeks to avenge his father’s assassination. Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus, having avenged Julius Caesar’s assassination by Brutus and Cassius, are attacked by Pompey’s son, avenging Brutus and Cassius. Like revenge-play heroes, Octavius and Pompey undertake to avenge paternal figures, Pompey his biological and Octavius his adoptive father. Meanwhile, the empire strikes back. As queen of a subjugated province, Cleopatra resorts to Scott’s “weapons of the weak”:Â€here, women’s traditional sexual weapons and an avenger’s scheming. Her waiting woman sketches a program of retaliatory sexuality:Â€ “It is a deadly sorrow to behold a foul knave uncuckolded … Keep decorum, / And fortune him accordingly” (1.2.63–5). Cleopatra threatens revenge on Enobarbus:Â€“I will be even with thee” (3.7.1); but her sexual power over Antony comprises revenge against Rome. If triumvirs use foreign wars to distract from domestic feuding, Cleopatra turns the tables:Â€a conquered province fuels Roman civil war through a triumvir’s sexual entanglementÂ€– the revenge of the colonies. Antony is finally beaten by an opponent of superior gambling luck. But Cleopatra plays on, even as the odds grow desperately long. She may be a “gypsy,” a “boggler,” a “triple-turned whore.”20 But she is never so paltry as to be risk-averse. At last she trumps the Empire, out-gambles the great Octavius with his uncanny gambling luck. She doesn’t live to a ripe old age, but does live to “mock / The luck of Caesar” (5.2.276–7). Pompey postures as avenger, asking why “my father should revengers want [i.e., lack], / Having a son” (2.6.11–12). But he is bought off, giving up this filial obligation. Antony vows to be “revenged” on Cleopatra for a betrayal (4.13.16), but flaccidly forgives her instead. In contrast to such a feeble vindicta interrupta, Cleopatra remains vengeful, unable to kill her enemy but successful in staggering his pompous dignity, publicly making him an “ass unpolicied,” outwitted by a better schemer. Octavius must condignly “see performed the dreaded act which [he] / So sought to hinder” (5.2.322–3). He has been a master beguiler:Â€“His power went out in such distractions / As beguiled all spies” (3.7.76–77). But “beguile” meant both “cheated” and “charmed,” and a Cleopatra who sexually “beguiled” Antony (4.13.28–29) now cheats Caesar. In a reversal dear to revengers, a beguiler is beguiled, and her very death is revenge:Â€ “Caesar’s beguiled” (5.2.314). â•‡ 1.1.10, 4.13.28, 3.13.111, 4.13.13.

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The goddess with the scales Fa i r Pa y m e n t a n d F or t u n a i n

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t h e s p a n i s h t r a g e dy

Vengeful motives bubble just under the surface even in plays such as Antony and Cleopatra which are not primarily revenge plays. In the play that put revenge tragedy on the map, they are central. The opening speech of the sixteenth century’s most popular play, voiced by a ghost, evokes an afterworld of condign punishment, torments decorously fitting:Â€“Usurers are choked with melting gold, / And wantons are embraced with ugly snakes, / And murderers groan with never-killing wounds” (1.1.67–69). Battles are as orderly as chess, armies “in squadron [i.e., square] form, / Each corner strongly fenced with wings of shot. /Â€… / I brought a squadron of our readiest shot / From out our rearward … / They brought another wing to encounter us” (1.2.32–37).21 In this balanced world, “justice” flows from “heaven”; and a king punctiliously resolves “to see our soldiers paid,” to “bestow on every soldier / Two ducats, and on every leader ten” (1.2.10–11, 196, 129–30); he gives his general a chain, promising “deeper wage and greater dignity” to “reward thy blissful chivalry” (1.2.20–21). Rewards become schematic when two soldiers claim the same prisoner: k i ng To which of these twain art thou prisoner? l or e n z o To me, my liege. hor at io To me, my sovereign. l or e n z o This hand first took his courser by the reins. hor at io But first my lance did put him from his horse. l or e n z o I seized his weapon and enjoyed it first. hor at io But first I forced him lay his weapons down.

(1.2.153–8)

The king, renowned as “just and wise,” meticulously apportions rewards:Â€“Nephew, thou took’st his weapon and his horse; / His weapons and his horse are thy reward. / Horatio, thou didst force him first to yield; / His ransom therefore is thy valor’s fee” (1.2.166, 180–83). Even enemies can be deserving:Â€“Although thy father’s hard misdeeds, / In keeping back the tribute that he owes, / Deserve but evil measure at our hands, / Yet … / … in our hearing thy deserts were great”; Balthazar promises, “I shall study to deserve this grace” (1.2.134–51). In Spain, Justitia presides:Â€ wise authority figures ensure fair payment. Cf. The Atheist’s Tragedy:Â€“The pride of all their army was drawn forth / And equally divided into front / And rear” (2.1.47–49; see also Shakespeare’s R3 5.4.21–24, Ant 3.11.40). On military geometry and the growing faith in a mathematically comprehensible universe, see Chapter 3.

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And yet not quite. Hints of nepotism flicker:Â€“Welcome, nephew, / And thou, Horatio, thou art welcome too” (1.2.132–3). As Hieronimo knows, nepotism can trump meritÂ€– a man “might seem partial” when “enforced by nature” to favor a relative (1.2.167–8). The king assesses equal shares in capturing Balthazar, though Horatio unhorsed and disarmed him, while his nephew only caught the reins and retrieved the sword. The king awards his nephew the honor of entertaining the prisoner on grounds of his “estate” (i.e., superior social status) and larger house (1.3.186–7). Justitia grows tarnished. Balthazar shrugs off Spain’s victory as “fortune of the wars” (1.2.139). Winners write history books; but a loser here files a minority report, undercutting the king’s fulsome sponsorship of just deserts. The opposing locker room reverberates with laments about a Fortune-governed world:Â€the Portuguese Viceroy mopes, “Fortune is blind and sees not my deserts” (1.3.23). And in Spain too, fair payment soon frays at the edges. As the focus shifts from reward to punishment, Andrea’s ghost seethes with frustrationÂ€– his killer is at large and enjoying life:Â€“Come we for this from depth of underground, / To see him feast that gave me my death’s wound?” (1.5.1–2). Horatio ascribes Andrea’s death only secondarily to Balthazar’s military prowess and primarily to bad luck, personified as goddesses Nemesis and Pallas. Seeking control over Fortuna, Bel-Imperia, claiming that the enemy violated the law of arms in an unsportsmanlike outnumbering of Andrea, vows civilian revenge.22 Perhaps because this revenge is dubiously just, Kyd adds a clearer case:Â€Horatio is murdered and his killer goes free. His father Hieronimo demands, “O wicked butcher … / How could thou strangle virtue and desert?” (2.5.30–31), and at this disconnect between deserving and reward goes mad. As the meritorious suffer and malefactors go free, madness demarcates a loss of faith in state justice. Alluding to the biblical “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord,” Hieronimo resolves “Vindicta mihi! / Ay, heaven will be revenged of every ill” (3.13.1–2), then vows “I will revenge his death!” (3.13.20). Erne calls this crucial speech a pivot between sane Christian patience and insane pagan vengefulness (110); Empson calls it insane.23 John Ratliff Broude notes that “the warrior fairly slain in battle … might require the same vengeance” as a civilian (44). This is certainly the premise on which warriors act in Locrine, where Albanact’s ghost demands revenge for his death in battle; in Peele’s Battle of Alcazar, too, nearly all the twenty-five mentions of revenge refer to retaliation for military actions. Here is a good reason to consider 1 Henry VI, whose many threats of revenge are uttered against French military opponents, as a kind of revenge play, although it conforms to the vendetta pattern much less readily than do 2 and 3 Henry VI, with their rival-family revenges. 23 David Laird, though, grants the speech rhetorical and logical sanity. 22


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frowns on Hieronimo’s wish to avenge safely; Scott McMillin charges him with unfairly enlisting Seneca to help him “reject” vindicta mihi (202). I don’t think Hieronimo rejects vindicta mihi:Â€he simply nominates himself as God’s agent.24 What he rejects is waiting for God to choose a time:Â€ “Stay Hieronimo, attend their [the heavens’] will, / For mortal men may not appoint their time” soon yields to “wise men will take their opportunity” (3.13.4–5, 25). Anyway, if heaven won’t sponsor him, he won’t be choosy:Â€if on earth “justice will not be found, / I’ll down to hell” (3.13.108–9). Shakespearean figures too associate revenge with both heaven and hell:Â€“O, war, thou son of hell, / Whom angry heavens do make their minister, / Throw in the frozen bosoms of our part / Hot coals of vengeance! (2H6 5.3.33–36). Hamlet’s “prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell” (2.2.562) “suggests that both Heaven’s justice and the ancient savagery of revenge … combine to prompt him to the same action” (Mercer 197). In these cases, adding hell to heaven is more a rhetorical intensifier than a theologically perilous move. Hieronimo’s condign retributions artfully suit the crime. He chooses a time carefully:Â€“All times fit not for revenge” (3.13.28). As his son was hanged for his father to find, he kills sons before their fathers’ eyes. Choosing a play resembling The Spanish Tragedy, he casts actors in appropriate roles, killing them during the performance. Some revenges are questionably justÂ€– has Don Cyprian merited death by penknife? But we cannot doubt the play’s preoccupation with just deserts. Titus’ opening lines too foreground deserving:Â€for his “great deserts,” Titus is appointed to arbitrate between two men claiming power by “justice” and “desert” (1.1.124). Throughout these plays, revengers scheme furiously to restore justice to an unfair world. I n F or t u n a’s H a n d s Cleopatra bids “the false hussy Fortune break her wheel” (4.16.46); but inevitably the wheel turns. In the main source, Plutarch, Fortune dictates the lovers’ fall in order to help Octavius stabilize Rome, but Shakespeare’s Fortuna is “not the planning goddess who brings stability to an unstable world, but the very ‘chance’ that ‘shakes’ it” (Lloyd 548–9). A more medieval, capricious Fortune best fit the Renaissance. As few gamblers beat the 24

He is not without qualifications, being that rarity in Renaissance drama, a non-corrupt judge:Â€“Blood with blood, shall while I sit as judge, / Be satisfied, and the law discharged. / And though myself cannot receive the like, / Yet will I see that others have their right” (3.6.35–36).

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house, even masters of virtù seldom get the better of Fortuna. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine boasts that he “turn[s] Fortune’s wheel,” but, with Fortuna’s lightning speed, he is struck mortally ill, failing to “slaughter” the gods “in revenge of this” (1 Tamburlaine 1.2.175; 2 Tamburlaine 5.3.50, 57). In 1642 even the closing of the theaters was imagined as Fortuna’s doing:Â€a verse prefixed to one of the last plays acted, the revenge tragedy The Cardinal, laments that when humans are “to envied greatness grown, / She wantonly … throws them down. / So, when our English drama was at height, / And shined, and ruled with majesty and might, / A sudden whirlwind threw it from its seat, / … and quenched the Muses’ heat” (3–8). Hieronimo turns revenger because “on this earth justice will not be found” (3.13.108):Â€ judicial power rests with those who “will bear me down with their nobility” (3.13.38). Class-based injustice drives many revenge plays (see Part III). Hoffman ascribes his father’s legal woes to low status:Â€“Wretches sentenced never find defense, / However guiltless” (Hoffman 1.1.222–3). When a high-born rapist goes free, Castiza cries, “He deserves to die”; her brother concurs, “You’ve sentenced most direct, and true. / The Law’s a woman [i.e., Justitia], and would she were you” (Revenger’s Tragedy 1.1.112–15). But justice “is near kin to favor” and, wellborn villains smirk, “A duke’s soft hand strokes the rough head of law / And makes it lie smooth” (1.4.55, 2.3.73–74). Getting justice depends on the fortune of birth. Helen blames Fortuna for her humble birth (AWW 1.3.108–9). A power abuser in The Revenge of Bussy owes his position only to “high birth”Â€– his “fortune” (1.1.293–4). A fair break in life depended on Fortuna. Many stage avengers confront tyrants (see Part II), unjust and unpredictableÂ€– capricious like Fortuna. To Brutus, life under a tyrant is a daily gamble:Â€ if Caesar isn’t assassinated, tyranny will “range on / Till each man drop by lottery” (JC 2.1.117–18). More generally, the vagaries of life in a protocapitalist marketplace, the sense that society was governed by forces beyond control, made audiences receptive to stories about people attempting to assert control, even when they die trying, like Hieronimo and Cleopatra. Humanists gloried in tales of Hercules controlling Fortuna. Lesser mortals relished tales of vigilantes regaining self-respect, taking charge. An age that couldn’t trust either Justitia or Fortuna proved a hatchery of longings for revenge.

Pa r t I I I

Political unfairness: revenge and resistance

Ch apter 6

“A special inward commandment”: the mid sixteenth century

She had lost her belief in divine retribution. Vengeance was for this world. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

The preoccupation with Fortuna’s mutability dovetailed with the era’s Â�passionate responses to tyranny, with which strong Renaissance rulers, like the Tudors with their centralized authority and enforced religious conformity, were routinely charged. The sudden falls of Henry VIII’s most trusted advisors (More, Cromwell, Wolsey) uncannily resembled the capricious whirl of Fortuna’s wheel. As Raleigh recalled, “How many servants did he advance in haste (but for what virtue no man could suspect) and with the change of his fancy ruined again; no man knowing for what offense? … How many wives did he … cast off, as his fancy and affection changed?” (133–4). Sir Thomas More wrote seven poems on Fortune (Complete Works i:Â€31–43, 45–46). Imprisoned in the Tower, he lamented, “Long was I, Lady Luck, your serving-man, / And now have lost again all that I gat” (i:Â€46). Henry VIII was often accused of tyranny “not merely by his rivals and enemies abroad but by his own subjects, and despite novel and savage legislation that made it a specific capital offence for anyone to do so” (Greg Walker 1). Tyranny was a concern across Europe. Italian city-states modulated from republics into virtual monarchies:Â€a prominent family would gain control of the state and abolish democracy (Piccolomini 65). In the absence of peaceable means of redress, resistance theorists advocated violent overthrow of rulers, and European resistance movements burgeoned.1 Contemporary with such resistance was tyrant-slaying in the English resistance writing is often traced to continental influences, but England had its own medieval heritage of resistance theory as well, often fueled by oppositional Christianity. John of Salisbury, a twelfth-century theologian, posited an implicit contract:Â€if a ruler “ignores the rights of the people and follows his own will, then the bargain is broken and it becomes ‘not merely lawful … but even right and just’ for an individual to slay him” (Hudson 112–13; cf. Tierney 4). The theologian John Wyclif, c. 1328–84, held that a poor governor could be deposed (Wilks 228). He

1

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Political unfairness:Â€revenge and resistance

drama. Although avengers such as Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, and Vindice benefit their countries by assassinating power-abusing tyrants, revenge tragedy and resistance theory have traditionally occupied separate mental compartments. Let us bring them into conversation. T h e Daw n of R e v e ng e T r ag e dy i n E ng l a n d Is there reason to rescue from the cobwebbed attic of literary history the ten Senecan plays translated 1559–67, anthologized in 1581? Except under duress, few read them now. We post-Romantics lionize original composition, not translation. Poetically, their ragged fourteeners and jogging pentameter couplets provoke smiles or groans.2 Medea alone affords such immortal words as “The rigor rough of ramping rage from burning breast out cast”; “Thy thumps of thwacking bolts”; and “swelling knobs of wondrous size and boist’rous bobbing bumps / Doth thump the great and lesser bear that feel his heavy lumps.” But yes, we should revere those modest versifiers:Â€they pioneered English revenge tragedy. Although most scholars trace the genre’s origins to The Spanish Tragedy, c. 1587 (e.g. Erne 84), the Senecan translations of a generation earlier inaugurated familiar conventionsÂ€– vengeance-thirsting ghosts, fatal prophecies, lovingly detailed gore.3 The first printed use of “revenge” as a noun occurred in Studley’s translation of Seneca’s Agamemnon, 1566 (OED). Translators routinely heighten influenced the Bohemian Jan Huss, who influenced Luther, who influenced radical Anabaptist thinking. 2 C. S. Lewis included the translations, an “unhappy enterprise,” under “Drab Age Verse.” He pronounced the work “execrable:Â€the metre is a torment to the ear,” and winced at a poetic style marred by “yokel garrulity” (254–6). Edmund Gosse uncharitably called the translations “verse of the ‘ugsome bugs’ kind” (i:Â€9). T. S. Eliot wrote mildly that the fourteener “repels readers who have not the patience to accustom their ears and nerves to its beat” (vi), and Braden, among the impatient, complains of “numbing fourteener verse” (Renaissance Tragedy 173). B. R. Rees grumbled about “sensationalism and bombast” (130); Evelyn Spearing granted the translators no “greater sense of dramatic fitness” than Seneca himself; “they often accentuate his faults and obscure his merits” (Elizabethan 9). 3 J. W. Cunliffe, Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy, and M. L. Stapleton chronicle Senecan influence on Elizabethan drama. The Spanish Tragedy’s Hieronimo quotes Senecan passages in Latin: “the prologue featuring the Ghost of Andrea and Revenge clearly recalls the Ghost of Tantalus and Fury in the prologue to Thyestes”; and “the opening lines of the third act follow Seneca’s Agamemnon (ll. 57–73) so closely that Kyd could expect part of his audience to recognize his debt” (Erne 80–81). Robert Miola notes a reaction against Seneca’s supposed vast influence on Shakespeare, by Baldwin, Baker, Hunter, and others, but calls reaction itself “excessive” in ruling out legitimate influences (3–4). Bullough lists as sources of Macbeth Studley’s translations of Medea and Agamemnon; as a source of Hamlet Studley’s Agamemnon; as a source of Richard III Heywood’s Hercules Furens; and as a source of Titus Andronicus Heywood’s Thyestes. Later, the “great pledge of vengeance” in Jonson’s Sejanus (2.2.139–57) is “a tissue of quotations from Thyestes” (Miola 41).

“A special inward commandment”

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the emphasis on revenge which is already strong in Seneca. To Seneca’s description of roaring altar-flames, the translator adds “presaging wreakful ire / Of angry Gods who do foretell some purposeÂ€…Â€/ For to revenge some foul misdeed that vengeance just doth crave” (Oedipus 2.2.86–88). The translator invents a long speech for Thyestes, including “Turn again ye skies awhile, ere quite ye go from me; / Take vengeance first … / Ye scape not from me, so ye Gods, still after you I go, / And vengeance ask on wicked wight, your thunderbolt to throw” (Thyestes 5.4.53–62). And I read these as dissident plays. Seething with tyranny, power abuse, and resistance, they were contemporary with much resistance writing, and did similar cultural work. In the teeth of critical contempt, I nominate these intrepid translators for a posthumous medal of literary honor, for serious commitment to political resistance in an era of religious repression and censorship.4

Mid-sixteenth-century Senecan translations 1559:Â€Seneca, Troas, trans. Jasper Heywood 1560:Â€Seneca, Thyestes, trans. Jasper Heywood 1561:Â€Seneca, Hercules Furens, trans. Jasper Heywood 1563:Â€Seneca, Oedipus, trans. Alexander Neville5 1566:Â€Seneca (pseudo), Octavia, trans. Thomas Nuce 1566:Â€Seneca (pseudo), Hercules Oetaeus, trans. John Studley [no Â�separate quartoÂ€– first published 1581] 1566:Â€Seneca, Medea, trans. John Studley 1566:Â€Seneca, Agamemnon, trans. John Studley 1567:Â€Seneca, Hippolytus, trans. John Studley [no separate quartoÂ€– first published 1581] [date?]:Â€Seneca, Thebais, trans. Thomas Newton [no separate quartoÂ€– first published 1581] 1581:Â€ Seneca, Ten Tragedies, compilation by Thomas Newton of the above translations The rare exploration of the translations’ political commitment is usually confined to viewing them as the conventional speculum principis; Jessica Winston posits that “many of the translators saw Senecan tragedy as a classical version of advice-to-princes poetry” (40). In contrast, I suggest that they were advice-to-subjects poetry, an intervention in contemporary radical discourse. As Greg Walker argues (see above), Henry VIII’s growing tyranny took the shine off the humanist counselor role, leading courtiers to abandon the speculum principis in favor of more oblique genres of counsel and protest. The reigns of Mary and Elizabeth called forth similar literary obliquity. Even those who sometimes resisted openly could at other times judge an indirect protest the more effective vehicle. 5 The 1581 collected edition dates the Neville translation 1560, which places Neville closer to the origins of the Senecan translation project in 1559. Neville is the only translator to have revised his play extensively for the collected edition, apparently on stylistic grounds. See Spearing, “Neville’s Translation.” 4

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Translated in the waning days of Queen Mary’s heretic-Â�incinerating reign and the early reign of that as-yet-unknown quantity, Queen Elizabeth, the majority of Senecan tragedies deal with tyrannyÂ€– several with female tyrants.6 Of the first three, translated by Jasper Heywood, the most famous is Thyestes,7 in which Atreus feels disgraced as a tyrant, having failed to wreak vengeance on the brother who has cuckolded him and stolen the golden fleece, icon of royal power. In classical times tyrannus, which Seneca applies to Atreus, could refer neutrally to an absolute ruler rather than denoting despotism; but by Heywood’s day, “tyrant” nearly always meant “despot,” and it suits Atreus. To a servant who asks if public opinion might oppose his bloody revenge on his brother, Atreus replies with tyrannical gleeÂ€– the “greatest good” of reign is that subjects must both endure and praise a ruler’s actions, “constrained their prince’s deeds as well / To praise, as them to suffer” (2.32–35).8 That the adulation is insincere provides its highest satisfaction, “his ability to command it” (Braden, Renaissance Tragedy 31). In a set-piece debate, Atreus scorns virtuous kings:Â€they reign “by others’ leave” (2.43). Piety and honor are for commoners; kings can do what “likes their will” (2.48). Few take more intense delight in vengeance than Atreus. Dismembering Thyestes’ three little sons and serving their flesh to their father, he experiences a rush of quasi-divine power: Now equal with the stars I go, beyond each other wight [i.e., person], With haughty head the heavens above, and highest pole [i.e., pole star] I smite. The kingdom now and seat I hold where once my father reigned, I now let go the gods, for all my will I have obtained. Enough and well, yea even enough for me I am acquit. But why enough? I will proceed and fill the father yet With blood of his, lest any shame should me restrain at all … Would God I could against their wills yet hold the gods that flee And of revenging dish constrain them witnesses to be.

(5.1.1–10)

Thyestes’ resistance to this megalomaniac is at first feeble, so staggered is he by realizing what his acid indigestion signifies. But once kindled, it In addition to these Roman tragedies, vengeful Greek tragedies circulated in Europe, some translated into English. Medea and Erasmus’ Latin translations of Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis were printed together in Paris in 1544; the 1567 edition added Buchanan’s translation of Alcestis and other Greek tragedies. Some of these classical tragedies were staged (see B. Smith, “Rediscovery”). 7 Famous, of course, for influencing Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus. 8 Since neither the original editions nor T. S. Eliot’s modern reprint of Newton’s Seneca’s Ten Tragedies possess line numbers, line references are to the Chadwyck-Healey English Drama. 6


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takes the form available under a tyrant:Â€revenge. His threat, “The gods shall all of this revengers be, / And unto them for vengeance due my vows thee render shall” (5.3.153–4), didn’t satisfy Heywood:Â€he added a scene of more fulsome rage, of Thyestes calling down divine vengeance, on himself for his unwitting cannibalism, and on Atreus. He conjures gods and “ghosts of hell” to “take vengeance” (5.4.1, 54, 62). He will eventually get revenge by the death of Atreus’ son, Agamemnon. In Heywood’s translation of Hercules Furens, tyranny resides in heaven:Â€ Juno, introducing herself in Act 1 scene 1 as “sister of the Thunderer,” plans revenge on Hercules, Jove’s “base son” (“Argument”)Â€– an unprovoked attack disguised as revenge. As a pretext, she casts him as a resister:Â€ “The scepter from his father will he take” (1.65). Hercules’ superhuman strength itself gives her an idea:Â€ “Let him against himself rebel.” The political term “rebel” she associates with “vengeance” (1.105). Of the traditional kinds of tyrant, the play’s Lycus is proud to be both:Â€usurper and despot, he got power by “conquering” and rules “without the law” (2.198–9). He plans to violate Hercules’ wife. If subjects hate him for it, so much the betterÂ€– hate makes a man a good tyrant:Â€“Chief knack of kingdom is to bear thy subjects’ hates” (2.151). He is indignant when she begs for death rather than rapeÂ€– a self-respecting tyrant inflicts protracted suffering, not merciful death. The soft-hearted man, “tyrant wots [i.e., knows] not how to be.” Tyrants must “restrain the wretched man from death, command that th’happy die” (2.318). Like many tragic figures, Hercules’ father Amphitrion taxes heaven with negligence:Â€ “Why do I to gods in vain thus cry? / … Wherever thou be, hear me soonÂ€–.” He breaks off, startled, when heaven apparently provides one of those signs that resistance writers counted on to authorize assassinationsÂ€– an earthquake (see below):Â€“Why roareth out the ground? / … We heard are!” (2.324–8). However, the seismic tremors signify something even better:Â€ the footsteps of Hercules returning from an errand to Hades. Furthering the tyranny theme, Hades, he reports, is ruled in “cruel majesty” by “the tyrant” Pluto (3.132). Earthly tyrants, though, suffer condign punishment there, some tormented by their subjects. The back of one is “with his people’s hand / All torn and cut,” a lesson for despots:Â€“Abstain from man’s blood, / Whoso thou be that reignest king” (3.149–57). A tyrant-slayer with no touch of Hamlet’s indecision, Hercules briskly dispatches the tyrant:Â€ “With my revenging right hand slain now, Lycus lo, the ground / With groveling face hath smit” (4.1–3). But a greater tyrant triumphs:Â€Juno strikes him with madness, and he kills his wife and children. When he regains sanity, but

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before he knows who killed his family, his father discourages revenge. Hercules is shocked:Â€ “That I should unrevenged be?” Amphitrion carefully moralizes:Â€ revenge is “oft hurtful.” But Hercules demands, “Did ever man so grievous ills without revenge sustain?” (3.51–53). Juno’s fiendish cleverness prevents him from avenging his family unless he kills himself. When he learns the truth, he is merely bewildered and ends the play wishing that those judges who reward good kings and punish tyrants would come through for him:Â€ “Whatever judge thou be, / … repay a worthy thank to me / And my deserts” (5.210–12). Heywood’s first translation, printed the year after Elizabeth acceded, dealt less emphatically in tyrant-resistance than the other three, but still chronicled oppression:Â€Troas deals with winners who oppress losers. Not content with crushing Troy, the Greeks stamp out pitiful Trojan survivors. The Greek king opposes this:Â€oppressing losers is hubristic. Greece herself may someday fall. Oppression is tyranny; and “the proud estate of tyranny may never long endure” (2.3.61). Other Greeks, though, are spoiling to kill Trojans, spurred on by Achilles’ ghost, seeking revenge on Paris for treacherously killing him. This is English revenge tragedy’s first ghost, and Heywood invented him. In Seneca he was mentioned but did not appear. Heywood gives him a huffing vengeance rant:Â€“Not yet revenged hath the deepest hell, / Achilles’ blood on them that did him slay”; “Now of vengeance come the ireful day”; “Achilles’ death shall be revengèd here”; “With slaughtered blood revenge Achilles’ death!” (2.1.52–53, 54, 59–60, 70). Hecuba, forlorn Trojan who has outlived her husband and all her children, resorts to the last hope of the dispossessed, revenge. She puts a curse on the Greek fleet:Â€“The vengeance ask I on your ships / … / This wish I to your thousand sails:Â€God’s wrath light on them all” (4.141–3). As readers knew, the murder of Agamemnon lies ahead. When Heywood, for reasons I will discuss, left England soon after publishing Hercules Furens in 1561, his translator’s mantle fell upon Alexander Neville, whose translation of Oedipus appeared in 1563. Oedipus has a moment of tyranny, holding that a monarch reluctant to use fear as a weapon “unskillful is, and knows not how he ought himself to bear / In king’s estate. For fear alone doth kingdoms chiefly keep.” He is warned that power abuse exposes a tyrant to vengeanceÂ€– “Whoso the tyrant plays and guiltless men doth smite, / He dreadeth them that him do dread; so fear doth chiefly light / On causers chief, a just revenge”; but cries, “Come take this traitor vile away! In dungeon deep him fast / Enclose” (3.1.218–26 [1581 version]); he orders that the giver of this advice be cast into a dungeon. But the play traces Oedipus’


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growth from incipient tyrant to scapegoat-king, as he accepts the truth of his patricide and incest and sacrifices himself to end the plague. Although the words “revenge” and “vengeance” ring throughout, the king who once threatened a subject with revenge finally absorbs all vengeance into himself. This rare king who pulls back from the brink of tyranny serves as a rare positive political exemplum:Â€ tyranny is not a ruler’s inevitable condition. Octavia, a pseudo-Senecan revenge/tyrant play translated by Thomas Nuce, departs from Greek myth to focus on Nero, a central exemplum in resistance texts.9 Octavia repeatedly labels Nero a tyrant.10 Even his mother’s vengeful ghost berates him as “that tyrant dire,” “wicked tyrant,” and “that tyrant proud” (3.1.29, 48, 55)Â€– unmotherly, yes, but he has murdered her. Forced to wed Nero, Octavia laments his “tyranny,” which is indeed notable:Â€ he has killed her brother and dissected his mother. Declaring himself above the law, he issues arbitrary beheading orders, and wants to be rid of Octavia to marry his mistress Poppaea (charmingly Englished as Poppie). Like many stage revengers, Octavia laments an unavenged murdered father, whose military exploits were unrewarded. Sunk into “revenging greedy grief” (1.2.31), she likens herself to Electra (1.3.1–7). And like later avengers racked with religious doubt and craving thunderbolts, she demands, “O Father of heaven, in vain why dost thou throw / Thy great unvanquished rattling thund’ring blow / Upon the whistling woods” rather than on the tyrant (1.4.264–8). That Nero gets away with tyranny casts more doubt on heaven. Greek and Roman gods were capricious and self-serving rather than reliably benevolent, and were sometimes themselves tyrants; Octavia’s Chorus recalls Jove’s raping Leda, Europa, and Danae (4.2). Jove as woman-violator is a Nero writ large. That heavenquestioning was a generic feature of Senecan plays made it safer:Â€ such classic texts, staples of school curricula, gave Elizabethans an acceptable way to criticize heaven and a way to suggest that humans take some initiative rather than waiting for heaven.11 Ponet stresses that Nero was killed by his own people; Buchanan asserts that no one would deny that assassinating Nero was just (11). 10 1.3.46, 1.4.18, 25–26, 120, 246. 11 The play Caesar’s Revenge sets religious skepticism in the context of classical Rome:Â€stabbed and dying Caesar has breath to demand, “O heavens, that see and hate this heinous guilt, / And thou immortal Jove that idle holdest / Deluding thunder in thy fainting hand, / Why stay’st thy dreadful doom, and dost withhold, / Thy three-forked engine to revenge my death? / But if my plaints the heavens cannot move, / Then blackest hell … be thou judge. / … Revenge and death … / Plague these villains for their treacheries.” The assassination moves Antony to a yet deeper atheism:Â€“O unjust heavens (if heavens at all there be), / Since virtue’s wrongs makes question of your powers” (3.6.114–26, 150–1). 9

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Octavia casts Seneca as a character, fruitlessly advising Nero:Â€ some Roman dramatist enlisted a classic genre to comment topically.12 Tudor translators might have been doing the same, camouflaging resistance as academic translation. Octavia replays a debate appearing in Seneca’s Oedipus and Buchanan’s Baptistes: s e n e c a A sovereign salve for fear is for to bear Yourself debonair to your subjects all. n e r o Our foes to slay, a chieftain’s virtue call … Full meet it is that Cæsar dreaded be. s e n e c a More meet of subjects for to be beloved. n e r o From subjects’ minds fear must not be removed.

(2.2.10–40)

The ghost of Nero’s mother utters a picturesque threat in the translators’ bouncing idiom:Â€“Mother’s grief, and hand-revenging wracks, / Shall send [him] with heave and ho to funeral stacks” (3.1.5–8). The play denies swift vengeance to her, and the Chorus finds the people too cowed to rebel against this tyrant:Â€“Kept down with heavy, cumbrous fear. / And slow revenging grief … / Where doth the people’s power appear, / That brake the force of princes?” (3.2.46–49). The people do eventually revolt, but are crushed by tyranny. A fourth writer, John Studley, translated Medea, Agamemnon, Hippolytus, and the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus. “Princely power” has corrupted Creon, “puffed up with pouncing pride” (Medea 2.122). Conflict of interest sullies his banishment of Medea:Â€ he is father of Creusa, for whom Jason has abandoned her. Medea objects to his conflating executive and judicial roles:Â€“If thou be king, command a judge for such a matter fit” (2.148). Creon ignores this, and Medea must resist by that resort of the powerless, revenge. She murders Creon, Creusa, and her two children by Jason, a condign revenge. Playing on Creusa’s vanity, Medea gives her gorgeous robes. (They fry her bones.) Creusa was to wed Jason among Hymen’s torches; instead, Medea torches the palace and sets fire to Creusa’s hair.13 For condign revenge on Jason, she plans to transform this swashbuckling traveler into a miserable vagabond:Â€she calls on “grisly ghosts” and “hellish hags” to turn him into a “roguing runagate” (1.20–21, 31). Sadly, he has no brother whose death might offset that of Medea’s brother, but she makes do with the personnel at hand:Â€“I would the wretch a brother had:Â€but what? he hath a wife” (2.21). If only she had A. J. Boyle’s new edition of the Latin original discusses its historical and social context. Stapleton notes (43) that Shakespeare’s Joan La Pucelle, appearing Medea-like on a roof with a burning torch, seems to allude to Medea in her “happy wedding torch” but “fatal” (1H6 3.3.9, 11).

12 13


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more children to sacrifice! But at least the score is evenÂ€– her dead father and brother balance two dead children:Â€“My barren womb for my revenge hath yielded little store; / Yet for my sire and brother, twain I have, there needs no more” (5.110–13). As an inspired insult, she omits Creon and Creusa from the body count. Studley is no more elegant a stylist than Heywood:Â€the play offers ludicrous moments. (“O Jason, dost thou sneak away, not having mind of me, / Nor of those former great good turns that I have done for thee?” [3.282–3].) But its blend of resistance and revenge was in tune with its times. In Agamemnon, Thyestes’ ghost foments revenge on the house of Atreus, who butchered his children. Agamemnon, Atreus’ son, is the forebear of all ill-rewarded revenge-play soldiers (Titus Andronicus, Hoffman’s father, Bosola). On his first night home from defeating Troy he is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra.14 When she seizes power with her lover Aegisthus (Thyestes’ son), her daughter Electra accuses her of “a great and grievous guilt. / Go purge thy hardened hands, the which thy husband’s blood have spilt” (5.4.35–36). Refusing to reveal her brother’s whereabouts, Electra defies Aegisthus, which sparks tyranny in her mother: To snap her head off with thy sword, Ægist, dost thou refrain? Let her give up the ghost or bring her brother straight again; Let her be locked in dungeon dark, and let her spend her days, In caves and rocks, with painful pangs torment her every ways. I hope him whom she hidden hath she will again descry, Through being clapped in prison strong and suff’ring poverty With irksome and unsavory smells on every side annoyed.

(5.4.47–53)

Electra would rather die; but Clytemnestra, like Hercules Furens’ Lycus, considers that beneath a tyrant’s dignity:Â€“Unskillful is the tyrant” who by letting subjects die “doth end their pains” (5.4.59–61). 14

The 1588 Misfortunes of ArthurÂ€– whose vengeance-thirsting ghost gives the play some claim to rival The Spanish Tragedy as an initiator of 1580s revenge tragedyÂ€– adapts Senecan conventions to the “matter of Britain,” in staging a reprise of Clytemnestra’s direful greeting of her long-absent husband. As Clytemnestra vows revenge on Agamemnon for long absence at war and fears his revenge for her infidelity with Aegisthus, so this play’s Guinevere vows revenge on Arthur for long absence at war and fears his revenge for her infidelity with Mordred. She also seeks to outdo Medea in vengefulness (1.2.11–12) and appropriates one of Seneca’s most famous lines:Â€“Wrong cannot be revenged, but by excess” (1.2.47). Gorlois’ ghost reinitiates all Arthur’s “misfortunes” by casting a vengeful curse over the house of Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s father, who has robbed him of wife, lands, and lifeÂ€– we recall the doomed house of Atreus. The ghost returns at play’s end to express satisfaction (“not one hath ’scaped revenge:Â€ / Their line from first to last quite razed out. / Now rest content” [5.2.9–11]), before descending to the underworld. Here is another example of Senecan traditions seeding revenge plays of England’s dramatic golden age.

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Studley added a choric speech, vividly capturing public panic at Agamemnon’s death:Â€“The people moan their prince’s death … / With howling, crying, wringing hands, with sobs, with sighs, and tears, / And with their fists they beat their breasts. / … / Deprived of their prince, they fear the bloody tyrant’s hand” (5.4.112–14). Studley was only 8 when the English were “deprived” of Edward VI; but his staunchly Protestant family (see below) might well have experienced Mary’s accession as a plunge into tyranny. The hero of Hercules Oetaeus preens himself as a tyrant-slayer, advising Jove to retire his thunderboltsÂ€– Hercules has rid earth of tyranny:Â€“Thwack not about with thunder thumps:Â€… / The ravening tyrants, scepterless, are pulled from their crown” (1.5–6). Poisoned with a fatal shirt, he blames all on a female tyrant, Juno.15 And in Hippolytus, the sexual harasser Phaedra recalls female tyrants like Juno and Clytemnestra. T u d or R e s i s ta nc e W r i t i ng Were these Senecan translations of tyrant plays simply an academic, humanist exercise, or did they possess a political agenda in an age of strongminded, possibly tyrannical queens? Mary and Elizabeth haled from opposite sides in the Reformation’s great battle, and so did the translators. Is it possible that opposition to religious persecution united an otherwise diverse company of Catholic and Protestant academics? To answer this question, we must know something about contemporary resistance writing. Across Europe, it was an age of iron-fisted rulers, political assassinations, and tracts justifying resistance. Pertinent to the choice of Senecan tragedy as a vehicle of resistance, a strong influence on resistance writing was Roman republicanism of the sort Seneca espoused. Renaissance tyrant-slayers emulated Julius Caesar’s assassin, Brutus. In 1476 three rulers were assassinated in Genoa and Milan; plots were hatched against the Medici in 1478 and 1513. Facing execution, one plotter asked pardon “for having allowed the myth of Brutus to control his actions” (Piccolomini 65). Michelangelo celebrated the assassination of the duke of Florence by sculpting a bust of Brutus (38); The Revenger’s Tragedy was later modeled on this assassination (J. Lever 29). Italians seeking restoration of republican freedoms often cited Cicero’s De Officiis:Â€in “exceptional circumstances” everyday moral laws are suspended; “if anyone kills a tyrant … he has not This play features a talionic chain of revenge:Â€ because Nessus has kidnapped Hercules’ wife Dejanira, Hercules wounds Nessus, and Nessus conveys to Hercules a poisoned shirt via Dejanira, and Hercules wants revenge on DejaniraÂ€– who also wants revenge on Iole for alienating Hercules’ affections:Â€“Vengeance, vengeance, will I have” (2.66).

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laden his soul with guilt” (Piccolomini 20). De Officiis was staple educational fare in England, where republicans positioned people as citizens, not subjects, with a right to call their rulers to account (Hadfield 17). In Justinian’s law codes, Tudors found the “problem of unjust judges”:Â€using the Roman legal principle that “it is always justifiable to repel unjust force with force,” one person’s right to self-defense was extended to a people’s right to defend itself against tyranny (Skinner 125). Renaissance jurists and philosophers drew from Roman law the idea that subjects only delegate, rather than permanently alienate, rights to a ruler.16 Most sixteenth-century English prose resistance writing emanated from Christian, often clerical, sources, both Catholic and Protestant.17 Catholic Reginald Pole opposed Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, warning him that “the people of England possess the right to rebel” and that “he himself might be deposed”; subjects are justified in removing a ruler who violates their rights (Hudson 175). Pole called Henry a greater tyrant than Nero (T. Freeman, “Introduction” 14), and indeed, the 1530s Acts of Succession and the 1534 Treason Act criminalized the mere statement that the king was a tyrant. Henry proclaimed Pole a traitor and may have backed attempts to assassinate him (K. Burton 194). Pole was a serious threat:Â€genealogically he had a claim to the throne; he supported the Pilgrimage of Grace In Italy, republicanism underpinned tyrannicide; English republicans did not join religious theorists in advocating tyrannicide until the seventeenth century. English republicanism, however, created preconditions for resistance by stressing virtue in government officials and criticizing hereditary monarchy for failing to ensure that the worthiest would rule. England’s homegrown local “semi-autonomous, self-governing political cultures” (Collinson 21; cf. Peltonen 56) opposed state interference with personal liberty; for example, in 1576 John Barston, a Tewkesbury official, wrote that a “central goal of the commonwealth was to uphold liberty” (Peltonen 60–61, Barston Sig. 8v). The English admired foreign republics, such as the Dutch and Polish. Contarini’s account of the Venetian republic, in English in 1599, described an elected duke deprived of the means to “abuse his authority or become a tyrant” (42). Republican-influenced Tudor thinkers evinced “enthusiasm for Livy,” who portrayed the “conspirators against CaesarÂ€ – Brutus, Cassius and PompeyÂ€– in a positive light”; also popular was Lucan’s anti-tyrannical Pharsalia, a key grammar-school text (Hadfield 53). Shakespeare endowed Brutus and Cassius with lucid statements of the republican cause, presenting their “regicide” and doomed republican restoration with understanding and some sympathy. Julius Caesar’s plebeians “discourage Caesar from accepting the crown with their claps and hisses, making a more effective objection to imperial aspirations than the tribunes, who are ‘put to silence’” (Whitney 200). Historians who remark the absence of pre-1650 republican theory in England ignore “the many situations in which republican political practice was actively imagined” by playwrights (Norbrook 12). 17 The secular/religious boundary was permeable. Theologians sometimes drew on republican theory:Â€Melanchthon notes that in Roman law a private citizen may kill even a consul, for instance “if he discovers him in bed with his daughter or wife” (Skinner ii:Â€203)Â€– the prominence of this example in Roman law helps account for the heavy emphasis on sexual tyranny in Renaissance anti-tyrannical texts (see Chapter 7). To justify tyrant-resistance, Calvin drew on Cicero to posit “a special class of popularly elected magistrates” to restrain kings, and Zwingli posited “ephoral” authorities resembling Roman tribunes (Skinner ii:Â€230–2). 16

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uprising against Henry; he was nearly elected pope (K. Burton 4; cf. Mayer). During Mary’s reign, he would become archbishop of Canterbury. In A Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, written c.Â€ 1533–5 by the Catholic cleric Thomas Starkey, speaker Pole (Starkey’s patron) radically proposes choosing rulers “by free election” (64). He indicts England for legal corruption, poverty caused by enclosures, and a “pestilent tyranny” (154). Pole favors a new form of governmentÂ€– a mixed constitution (165; see Greg Walker 421). Lupset’s toadying remarks provide Starkey with insurance:Â€ “We have so noble a prince … There was never king in any country which bare greater zeal to the administration of justice and setting forth of equity and right” (Starkey 38). Pole brushes this aside:Â€ English rulers do what they like, unresisted “by any private man and subject … [But] that country cannot be long well governed … where all is ruled by the will of one not chosen by election”; seldom are hereditary rulers “worthy of such high dignity” (99). Lupset splutters, “Take you heed here what you say”Â€– it sounds like “treason”; he insists that “a king is above his laws; no law bindeth him; but he … may do what he will” (99). But Pole plows ahead. To leave government “to the free will and liberty of one is the open gate to all tyranny … The wit of one commonly cannot compass so much as the wit of many” (101). Elective monarchy nurtures “princely virtues,” but hereditary monarchs act upon “lust, vain pleasure, and inordinate will.” This is “pernicious and hurtfulÂ€… a great destruction to our country” (102).18 During these years, William Tyndale was translating the Bible, itself a resistant act. Sir Thomas More, noting in Tyndale’s works an “insistence that an evil command must never be obeyed,” accused him of promoting rebellion (Skinner ii:Â€ 70). When Tyndale demurred, More spewed out 2,000 pages of vitriol, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer. Did this hysterical reaction project More’s fear of a rebellious streak in himself? He too ultimately resisted his king and paid with his lifeÂ€– a loyal subject and a principled resister.19 After the mid-century return to Catholicism, just before the Senecan translations, many Protestants wrote resisting Queen Mary. John Ponet, a golden boy who held a royal fellowship at Cambridge, had connections Greg Walker’s Writing under Tyranny tracks the efforts of Henrician courtiers, used to the speculum principis as a vehicle of humanist advice to a ruler, to cope with Henry’s escalating tyrannies and disregard of counsel:Â€ “The literature of counsel was slowly asphyxiated in Henrician England” (422). 19 More’s life of Richard III chronicles the reign of a tyrant and those who resisted him (see Cousins). 18


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at Edward VI’s court, and became bishop of England’s largest see at age 37, suffered a rude awakening when Mary succeeded:Â€he was ejected from his bishopric and imprisoned. John Stow reports that Ponet later participated in Wyatt’s unsuccessful uprising against Mary. Acquainted with radical Protestant theologians from Strasburg, he fled there after the rebellion, “one of the highest-ranking English clerics in exile” (Peardon 36). He found continental Protestants in a resistant mood. After harsh repressions and the defeat of Protestant forces at the Battle of Mühlberg, 1547, even Luther and Calvin softened their opposition to violent resistance. After 1530 Luther and Melanchthon suddenly held that “any ruler who becomes a tyrant may be lawfully and forcibly opposed” (Skinner ii:Â€74). The twenty-ninth sermon of Calvin’s Homilies on the First Book of Samuel asks “whether a tyrant can ever be lawfully resisted,” concluding that magistrates ordained by God may “constrain the prince” and even “coerce him’” (Skinner ii:Â€214). Calvin left “several ‘loopholes’” for resistance, notably in his terms “open avengers” and “constitutional defenders” (Wollman 29). His successor, Beza, published a justification of resistance. Suppression of dissent itself fomented resistance. As the Battle of Mühlberg galvanized continental Protestants, Calvinists were later stirred into active opposition by the 1572 massacre of French Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day, catalyzing “a flood of antiabsolutist literature” (Hudson 195). In 1556 Ponet, in A Short Treatise of Politic Power, and of the True Obedience which Subjects Owe to Kings, set forth the issues starkly in the chapter “Whether it be lawful to depose an evil governor, and kill a tyrant” (Sig. [g]v). Though no legal deposition process existed, Ponet speaks of legality:Â€ without an “express positive law for punishment of a tyrant … the question is, whether it is lawful to kill such a monster” (Sig. giii). He answers unequivocally yes:Â€ by “lawful” he means “acceptable to God.” Ponet finds justifiably assassinated tyrants in the Bible (Ahab, Jezebel, Athaliah) and classical and English history (Sardanapalus, Caligula, Nero, Edward II, Richard II). Concluding that “it is lawful to kill a tyrant” as “it is natural to cut away an incurable member” which might “destroy the whole body” (Sig. [g6]v), he praises tyrant-slayersÂ€– Ehud, Judith, Jael. Kings lack “absolute power”:Â€they are “subject to the law of God, and the wholesome positive laws of their country and … may not lawfully take … their subjects’ goods.”20 God seems “to favor and further” deposing “an 20

In 1555, the year before Ponet published his treatise, the Crown had tried to seize the property left behind by exiled Protestants. In response, Ponet “elevated the possession of property by private

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evil governor” (Sig. gv v). Ponet makes a crucially secular extension:Â€ “As men ought not to obey their superiors that shall command them to do anything against God’s word,” they should also disobey commands “contrary to civil justice” (Sig. [d6]). He opposes anti-tyranny laws:Â€rulers are accountable to existing laws (Sig. [g8]v–h). Anyway, new laws wouldn’t help:Â€ tyrants disregard laws. Hence the need for extra-legal resistance. Opposing lawless tyranny with extra-legal resistance is a condign move. As Calvin warmed to resistance, he adopted a language of revenge, insisting in every post-1539 edition of the Institutes that God may raise up “‘open avengers from among his servants’” (Skinner ii:Â€192). Ponet too links resistance to revenge:Â€if rulers claim “absolute power … to dispense with the laws,” God will “revenge the cause of the oppressed” (Sig. biii). God’s words to Cain, “the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (Genesis 4:Â€10), Ponet gives a bracingly vengeful spin:Â€“Abel’s blood did cry to the Lord, ‘Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance’” (Sig. dv v). A robust-sounding word, “vengeance”Â€– and for Ponet, not exclusively a divine prerogative. The only virtue of the aristocracyÂ€– otherwise a vicious lotÂ€– is that historically they have “revenged and delivered the oppressed people out of the hands of their governors, who abused their authority, and wickedly, cruelly and tyrannously ruled” (Sig. [g7]). All resistance theorists debated whether private citizens could kill tyrants. Recognizing its danger, Ponet advocates lone assassination only as a last resort:Â€“It cannot be maintained by God’s word that any private man may kill, except (where execution of just punishment upon tyrants … is by the whole state utterly neglected …) any private man have some special inward commandment … of God” (Sig. [g8]–[g8]v). Desperate cases demand solitary action:Â€ a confederate might give away the plot. Oppressed by a tyrant for eighteen years, Israelites “cried unto the Lord,” who “raised them up a deliverer.” Ehud announced with dark wit, “I have a message from God unto thee,” then stabbed Eglon. The dagger disappeared into belly fat and excrement poured out (Judges 3:Â€14–21). Asking, “now, was this well done or evil?” Ponet judges it: so commended in Scripture, that the Holy Ghost reports Ehud to be a savior of Israel. But note … the text sayeth not that Ehud was sent of the people to kill the king, nor that he told them what he intended:Â€for by that mean, one Judas or other would have betrayed him, and so should he have been drawn, hanged, and quartered … and all his conspirators have lost both life, lands, and goods … The individuals to the status of a right” (Peardon 35). The title of his fourth chapter is “Whether all the subject’s goods be the Kaiser’s and King’s own, and that they may lawfully take them as their own?”


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Scripture sayeth that Ehud (being a private person) was steered up only by the Spirit of God. (Sig. h[2])

Ponet goes all the way:Â€an assassin may act on his own unauthorized initiative. In fact, he favors civilian assassination over action by “an official performing his constitutional duty” (Beer 382), “a decisive break” with the Lutheran/Calvinist dogma that a legitimate ruler, however tyrannical, “can only be lawfully resisted by another ordained magistrate” (Skinner ii:Â€235).21 Ehud, vigilante hero, does what revenge-play heroes do, and Ponet relishes slashed belly and gushing excrement as Vindice enjoys nailing the duke’s tongue to the floor. Those who consider Christian Elizabethans squeamish about revenge might contemplate Bishop Ponet. Modernity is skeptical about special commissions from GodÂ€ – how does the deity single one out? But in the Renaissance, signs from heaven were routine. An earthquake during the trial of Wyclif was read as a divine message (Foxe i:Â€ 570). Ponet sees signs of ire with papist-tolerating England:Â€ a “horrible comet” and eclipses “signify the great wrath and indignation of God,” just as comets, earthquakes, and thunder heralded historical events such as Nero’s assassination (Sig. kiii,v kv v). Further signs of divine displeasure are a two-headed child, famine, and monetary inflation:Â€“When were ever things so dear in England, as in this time of the popish mass and other idolatry restored? Who ever heard or read before, that a pound of beef was at 4 pence?” (Sig. [k8]). In revenge plays, thunder and lightning signal heaven’s demand for vengeance:Â€lightning chides Hoffman for tardiness in avenging his father (Hoffman 1.1.11–14). But divine authorization could take more intimate forms. Ponet’s assertion that “any private man may have some special inward commandmentÂ€… of God” (Sig. [g8]v) unveils the drastic political implications of belief in “inner light.” The central Protestant tenet that laymen could interpret Scripture without priestly intercession embodied resistance to clerical authority. By the Civil War, the inner light operated politically, as “the habits of introspective Puritan spirituality allow the individual saint to back the most radical proposal … Frances Allen revealed that God … told him to take away the … veto power of the king” (Holstun 229–30). This was a logical development of Tudor inner political light:Â€God might direct the lowliest Christian to assassinate a queen. Divine recruitment Some resistance writers were always uneasy about lone avengers, preferring that lesser magistrates resist. Knox encouraged the Scottish nobility in that role (see Mason/Smith xviii). A militant 1568 tract, as the Dutch chafed under Spanish overlords, urged that William of Orange “was eminently qualified to count as an inferior magistrate with authority to resist a superior engaging in … injustice” (Skinner ii:Â€215).

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was routine. God “called” one to the clergy or to a lay “vocation.” He called John Knox, a “launchful vocation” (Works i:Â€185). Ponet’s “special inward commandment”Â€– the launchful vocation of an assassinÂ€– was a specialized “calling.” Some were called to preach, some to kill. Two years after Ponet’s fiery plea for tyrannicide, another call to arms burst from a continental press:Â€ Christopher Goodman’s How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed of their Subjects, and Wherein They may Lawfully by God’s Word be Disobeyed and Resisted. This Marian exile takes as his main text Acts 4. As a crowd of 5,000 gathered to hear about Jesus, Jewish authorities, fearing public unrest after the crucifixion, forbade Peter and John to preach. The apostles demanded “whether it be right in the sight of God to obey you rather than God.” Their opposition to merely human authority received a nod from Above:Â€an earthquake. “The place was shaken … and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God boldly” (Acts 4:Â€ 18–31, Geneva). In ActsÂ€5, early Christians practice communism. That central text justifying Anabaptist community of goods (see Chapter 9) links radical resistance with radical economic praxis. Principled resistance was, for Goodman, the cornerstone of a responsible Christian life. Had the apostles at this crucial moment obeyed the authorities, “the foundation of the Church should have been shaken” (30). Goodman excoriates the blind obedience of Christian citizens who will not “resist and disobey the superior powers,” but submit “to all kinds of punishments and tyranny” (30). Under Mary, “mayors, sheriffs, bailiffs, constables, jailers” practice “unlawful obedience”; they are “ministers of injustice, and tyranny” (36). What God has in store for such a Ministry of Injustice can be inferred from the Flood, plagues of Egypt, fire and brimstone raining on Sodom and Gomorrah:Â€all acts of a “mighty revenger” (46–47). Acts 4 pertains now:Â€“As none will condemn Peter and John of disobedience, because they would not herein obey their ordinary magistrates, no more will any which have right judgement condemn the like resistance” to Mary (61). Goodman denounces biblical non-resisters who (like Nazis) were just following orders:Â€ Doeg killed eighty-five priests and a whole town at Saul’s behest; soldiers obeying Herod slew the innocents; Jews obeyed the order to kill Jesus (61). Deploring “wicked commandments” is not enoughÂ€ – we must “withstand them” (63). Joining Protestants such as Martin Bucer, who insisted on magistrates’ duty to resist evil superiors, Goodman replaces “the religious duty of obedience” with “a religious duty of resistance” (Dawson, “Resistance” 75). He lauds “faithful


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martyrs,” resisters of authority whose “deaths in all ages have given glory to Christ” (68). What Ponet implies, Goodman makes explicit, identifying Athaliah and Jezebel, justifiably assassinated queens, with “that wicked woman, whom you untruly make your queen” (Goodman 96). David declined to assassinate Saul only because he was Saul’s successorÂ€– private interest ruled out his seeking “his own revengement” (138–9). A principle of contraries, typical of Goodman (one must do the opposite of what God hates),22 operates here:Â€revenge in a private cause being wrong, revenge in a public cause is right. The New Testament’s very admonitions against personal revenge, Goodman turns to divine insistence on public-spirited revenge. Inconsistently, Goodman forbids servants and children to resist:Â€masters’ harshness “is no lawful or just occasion why the servants should be disobedient”; children should obey parents, “for that is just” (116).23 But he opens the door to class conflict, deploring that “common and simple people” think revolting against tyranny isn’t their business. He concedes their vulnerability:Â€they are easily accused of “tumults and rebellion” (145). Still, in disavowing a duty to rebel they behave “as though they had no portion or right at all” in their nation (149). The “people” actually didn’t have much “portion or right”; but did a duty to resist itself create rights? Later, soldiers of the New Model Army, called upon to resist the “tyrant” Charles, would claim a right to own land and make a decent living (see Chapter 8). The duty to resist seemed to imply rights. Resistance was disturbingly elastic:Â€once admit the right to kill a king and anyone might resist. After reading “that it is lawful for every private subject to kill his sovereign,” Matthew Parker darkly predicted: if such principles be spread into men’s heads … and referred to the judgment of the subject to discuss what is tyranny, and to discern whether his prince, his landlord, his master, is a tyrant, by his own fancy … what Lord of the council shall ride quietly minded in the streets among desperate beasts? What minister shall be sure in his bed chamber? (Strype i: 85) E.g., “God is not fully obeyed, when we will not do the ungodly commandments of men, except also we apply ourselves with all diligence to do the contrary.” For example, it is not enough to abstain from murder, adultery, and false witness:Â€we must “do the contrary, so often as occasion is ministered, that is, to save, preserve, and defend, as well the goods as the persons of our brethren and neighbors” (Goodman 64, 69–70). 23 Renaissance political patriarchalism applied the language of insurrection to disobedient children or wives. In Shakespeare’s revenge play Othello, an eloping daughter makes “a gross revolt” (1.1.135) which her father calls “treason” (1.1.170); if he had another child, her revolt “would teach me tyranny” (1.3.196). Othello affects to see in his supposedly disloyal wife’s hand “a young and sweating devil here / That commonly rebels” (3.4.42). The issue of servants’ and wives’ resistance would be re-opened in the Civil War era. 22

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Arguing like Ponet that when rulers “cease to do their duty,” the people are “without officers … and then God giveth the sword into the people’s hand” (185), Goodman makes what Quentin Skinner calls the “private law” argument:Â€a ruler who violates state duties finds himself shifted into a private realm, forfeiting his anointed status and absolving subjects of their oaths of obedience (Skinner ii:Â€198). The Confession and Apology of the Pastors of the Church at Magdeburg declared that rulers who “persecute the good” are “no longer ordained of God” (173; see Wollman 30). These views reverberated across Europe after Magdeburg’s thrilling, successful stand against a siege.24 Ponet mentions private law (Sig. gv), and Goodman articulates it fully:Â€rulers who “transgress God’s laws” lose the “honor and obedience which otherwise their subjects … owe unto them, and ought no more to be taken for magistrates, but punished as private transgressors” (118–19). And like Ponet, Goodman posits a social contract. If rulers harm subjects rather than providing national defense and social services, subjects “are discharged, and no obedience belongeth to them”Â€(190). Though claiming that his ideas comprise “no doctrine of rebellion” (191), Goodman doesn’t sound non-rebellious when praising Wyatt’s revolt against Mary:Â€ “That worthy knight” was moved by “the zeal of God’s truth and the pity that he had to his country, for the miseries” caused by “the usurped power of ungodly Jezebel” (204). Although it seems “perilous” to “move sedition amongst the people, and to take from the lawful rulers all due obedience, yet whoso will consider the matter aright shall find it sound and true doctrine” (191). His prescription is stark:Â€ Mary “ought to be punished with death” (99). That same year, John Knox published from exile The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, outlining the Deity’s opposition to female rulers, a theme also dear to Goodman.25 Distaste for female rule, easily transferable from Mary to Elizabeth, facilitated Catholic adoption of Protestant resistance arguments after the regime change.26 But Catholic and Protestant resisters had long borrowed from each other. Huguenot resistance theorists adopted natural-law arguments from Francisco Suarez and other Thomists; and the Jesuit Robert Parsons As Dawson notes, “Knox was acquainted with the Lutheran [resistance] theories through such works as the Magdeburg Confession” (“Two John Knoxes” 572). 25 Goodman and Knox were joint ministers of an exiled congregation in Geneva and lifelong friends. Dawson and Glassey reprint Knox/Goodman correspondence. 26 By that time, Knox was seriously out of the new queen’s good books, and Goodman’s work so offended her that he “was forced to remain outside England until 1565”; on his return “he was still so outspoken in his extreme nonconformity that he was twice made to recant” (J. E. Phillips 29). 24


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echoes keynotes of Protestant resistance. Skinner views resistance theory as “independent of either religious creed” (ii:Â€346). Ousting the queen, Knox begins judiciously, “is in the hand of God alone” (5). But He might profit from assistance:Â€those who “by ignorance” chose Mary as queen must now “without further delay … remove from authority” all who reign “by usurpation, violence, or tyranny” (53)Â€– “an unequivocal call to revolution” (Mason/Smith xv). Killing “cruel and mischievous” Athaliah was the right biblical course of action, and “the same is the duty” toward Mary; “that monster” deserves “the sentence of death” (Knox 53–54). Subordinates must “refuse to be her officers” (53). England awaits a hero to begin the revolution. Like Ponet and Goodman, Knox anticipates God’s appointment of an avenging assassin, a “noble heart to vindicate the liberty of his country” (54). Mary’s “tyranny” in executing innocentsÂ€– Latimer, Cranmer, Ridley, Lady Jane GreyÂ€– demands “vengeance” (56). Later that year, revenge animated Knox’s Appellation:Â€“Horrible shall the vengeance be” upon all who think ungodly commands must be obeyed (28); an “oath to God” binds magistrates and people to “revenge to the uttermost of their power” injuries to God or to law (35). Like Goodman, Knox sanctifies the lone avenger through covenantal theory:Â€each citizen has implicitly promised to resist tyranny. This covenant “rendered civil disobedience a precondition of salvation” (Mason/Smith xii). A group exiled with Knox and Goodman translated the Geneva Bible, 1560Â€– a channel for radicalism. Marginal glosses cited biblical precedents for “elective kingship, a compact between the ruler and the ruled, the subjection of magistrates to the law, and the right of active resistance and even of tyrannicide” (Hudson 185). The gloss to 2 Kings 9:Â€22 threatens tyrants:Â€ God “will ever stir up some to revenge his cause.” Jezebel’s death (2 Kings 9:Â€ 33) is glossed as condign revenge:Â€ “Her blood should be shed, that had shed the blood of innocents.” She is dumped in a field to rot:Â€“Thus God’s judgments appear” against those who “persecute his servants.” Even tyrant Ahab, who expropriated Naboth’s land, would not take another’s property “without full recompense” (1 Kings 2)Â€– a glance at Mary’s seizure of exiles’ property? In 1 Samuel 8:Â€11, Israel alters its form of government to monarchy, and God sardonically responds by bestowing a tyrant who “will take your sons, and appoint them … to be his horsemen … he will also take your daughters and make them apothecaries, and cooks, and bakers”Â€– apparently not desirable career paths in God’s estimation. The gloss hastens to deny that kings may meddle in family affairs:Â€“Not that Kings have this authority”Â€– only kings sent as divine punishments can “usurp this over their brethren contrary to the law.”

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King James seriously disliked the Geneva Bible. Its glosses were “partial, untrue, seditious”Â€ – full of “dangerous and traitorous conceits” (Craig 41). But it ran to 120 editions before 1611. “Even after James put forth the Authorized Version to counteract its influence, it remained for many years the most popular English translation … Among generations of Englishmen, both in England and in America, these belligerent marginal notes served to make current coin of revolutionary political principles” (Hudson 185–6). Theatrical avengers had access to many tyrannicidal polemics. Avengers and resistance writers alike reveled in gruesome death. Ponet relished Ehud’s gory murder. Caliban, victim of a usurper, plans to “revenge it,” to “knock a nail into his head” (Tmp 3.2.52, 59) like Jael, darling of resistance writers. ShakespeareÂ€– who used the Geneva translationÂ€– endowed Caliban with Jael’s sense of justifiable tyrannicide. Resistance literature was often penned by exiles. As England turned from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic to Protestant within two decades, ousted believers often fled abroad, to seethe in revolutionary ferment and access continental presses. There they encountered radical Christianity:Â€ they often mention Anabaptism (if only to disapprove).27 Many continental dissidents fled to England, bringing radical ideas.28 The Familist sect arrived in 1560, its leader industriously issuing publications. Since Familists supposedly refused obedience to civil authority, the Privy Council moved to suppress them in 1579–80; a royal proclamation mandated burning Familist publications and jailing those who possessedÂ€them. Familists were said to believe that “they may (before any magistrate …) deny anything for their advantage” (Hughes/Larkin ii:Â€474–5).29 But was resistance Christian? English theorists denied that God sent tyrants as punishment for a nation’s sins. The cleric Starkey declares, “It is not God that provideth tyrants … This is in man’s power” (153). More Although fearing that Anabaptists would abolish “all political power” (47), Ponet regards Anabaptist economic communism (see Chapter 9), if too idealistic, as at least preferable to tyranny:Â€“Anabaptists do not only take other men’s goods as common, but are content to let their own also be common,” whereas tyrants want all their subjects’ goods, “but they themselves will depart [i.e., part] with nothing” (Ponet 80). Goodman approves of Anabaptists’ defiance of secular authorities (108). 28 The service of the Dutch church, founded in London in 1550, was modeled on that of English exile churches in Strasburg and GenevaÂ€ – an international exile liturgy. Edmund Grindal, superintendent of Elizabethan “stranger” churches, treated “strangers” with fairness and generosity, grateful for hospitality he was shown when in continental exile. Persecuted continental Protestants corresponded with leaders of London’s Dutch church about the legitimacy of armed resistance to Catholic oppressors (Pettegree 68, 137, 240–1). 29 Kristen Poole treats the near-hysterical response to supposed Familist sexual promiscuity as displaced anxiety over verbal slipperiness. Though the 1580 proclamation mentions Familist 27


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troublesome was St. Paul’s dictum, “Let every soul submit himself unto the authority of the higher powers … The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth power resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist shall receive to the self damnation” (Romans 13:Â€1–4, Tyndale trans.). Every resistance writer grappled with this “most influential biblical precept of the age” (Mason/Smith xii). The politically oriented Geneva Bible softens to “condemnation” the “damnation” with which other translations threatened resisters. Paul’s mention of conscience prompts an emphatic gloss:Â€“The magistrate hath no power over the conscience of man.” And Paul’s blunt “Ye must needs obey,” the Geneva glosses “so far as lawfully we may:Â€ for if unlawful things be commanded us, we must answer as Peter teacheth us, It is better to obey God, than men”Â€– alluding to Acts 4, Goodman’s central text. Anabaptists set Peter’s own civil disobedience (Acts 4) against his command to obey (1 Peter 2:Â€13–18):Â€“Although Peter had commanded obedience to the civil authorities, he had himself indicated that this authority was strictly limited, for when he had been commanded to disobey God, he had rather chosen to disobey the government” (Klassen 101). Wrestling with “obedience” texts, Goodman becomes radically relativistic:Â€ Paul’s Roman situation doesn’t obtain in present-day England. Eroding the Bible’s trans-historical truth nudges it toward being a merely human text.30 And he glosses Romans 13, “All men are bound to obey such magistrates whom God hath ordained over us lawfully” (109)Â€ – clearly not including Mary. No tyrant can have divine sanction, “else should He approve all tyranny and oppression” (110). A resistance theorist could drive a coach and horses through loopholes of these dimensions. These Christian writers didn’t ignore Scripture, they merely sculpted it. T h e T r a ns l at or Di s s ide n t s The Senecan translators, then, worked in the aftermath of bombshells of political resistance. Ponet published in 1556, Goodman and Knox in mendacity, the issue was less “semantic instability” (Poole 78) than lying to evade government authority. The displacement of political insubordination into sexual profligacy could be read through Bakhtinian eyes:Â€lust was a revolt of the lower bodily stratum against upper mental and spiritual regions, aptly homologous with lower-class resistance to governance. Most radical sects drew largely from tradesmen classes. 30 Buchanan (see below) took the same historicist tack to disable Romans 13. The influential Puritan divine William Perkins called on the concept of “particular equity” to argue that Christians are not bound by culture-specific biblical injunctions meant only for the ancient Hebrews (see Fortier 41–42).

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1558; Heywood published his translation of Seneca’s Troas in 1559, and the other translations followed hard upon Troas. The translators’ biographies suggest political motives for translating Seneca. Jasper Heywood had to resign as fellow of Merton and All Souls, Oxford, because of his Catholicism.31 He became a Jesuit in 1562 and taught at a Jesuit College in Bavaria for seventeen years. Edmund Campion, on a secret Jesuit mission to England, recruited him and in 1581 Heywood joined Campion and Robert Parsons in England; when Campion was executed, Heywood became head of the English mission. One of his converts, the duke of Northumberland, became a leader of the English Catholics. Heywood was in touch with the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, and peripherally involved in the duke of Parma’s plot to invade England, restoring Catholicism. On a trip to Rome, Heywood’s ship was blown back to England; he was arrested and charged with being a Catholic priest. Imprisoned for over a year, he resisted pressureÂ€– including tortureÂ€– to recant, and then was exiled.32 He saw persecution from both sides:Â€at Oxford when Catholic authorities burned Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer there, he was later tortured and experienced the execution of his associate Campion, by Protestant authorities, in Elizabeth’s reign. To write directly about this was dangerous:Â€ “The topic above all on which successive monarchs … wished to suppress comment was religion” (Dutton 21). Translating tyrant-plays could have been an attempt to evade such suppression. Heywood hailed from a tenaciously Catholic family. His father, dramatist John Heywood, married Sir Thomas More’s niece. Remaining Catholic after the Reformation, he was arrested for denying the royal supremacy. He delivered an oration at Mary’s coronation and was her close companion, perhaps with her when she died; after Elizabeth’s accession, he lived out his life in voluntary exile.33 Jasper’s elder brother Ellis also forfeited an All Souls fellowship. Exiled, he became secretary to Cardinal Pole, who had argued for the people’s right to depose rulers. Returning to England on Mary’s accession, and again exiled on Elizabeth’s, he became a Jesuit, joining Jasper in Bavaria. Their sister Elizabeth, with her young Henry De Vocht, noting that Heywood dedicated Troas to Elizabeth, infers that “he had no special reasons to be displeased” with her policies (xxiv). But dedicating a resistant work to a monarch proves nothing:Â€Tyrannical-Government Anatomized was (provocatively) dedicated to King Charles (see below). And there is no evidence to support the assertion that Heywood was once Princess Elizabeth’s page; evidence on whether he was known to her earlier in his life is contradictory (Flynn, “English Mission” 46 n.2). 32 Details of Heywood’s life are from three essays by Dennis Flynn. 33 Johnson 17, 26, 29, 33. 31


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son John Donne in tow, smuggled into the Tower Heywood’s successor as head of the English mission. John overheard his whispered conference with Heywood.34 Conflict with authority “was a hallmark of Heywood’s career” (Flynn, “English Mission” 45). As an undergraduate Lord of Misrule, he overstepped the bounds even of that licensed anti-authoritarian revelÂ€ – the college warden admonished him three times. As a doctoral student, he resisted defending his thesis, neglected to apply for his degree, and laughed inappropriately in a meeting about his academic progress. As a priest, he brought the Bavarian Jesuits into conflict with local merchants by denouncing loans at 5 percent interest as unchristian usury. Deported from England after a bruising year of torture, interrogation, and solitary confinement, he made a speech on the ship’s deck demanding that deportees “be tried in a court of law,” not deported “for crimes they had never committed, never been prosecuted for, or never even been formally charged with” (Flynn, “English Mission” 45–49, 64). And through most of his years teaching in Bavaria, he complained about the waste of his abilities, “listing his fluency in Italian, French, Latin, and English as qualifications for a different assignment” (Flynn, “Out of Step” 181).35 In Heywood’s view, most people with authority over him abused it. He was the ideal reader of Seneca’s tyrant-infested tragedies. Neville, translator of Oedipus, was later commissioned to write a history of the 1549 anti-enclosure uprising, Kett’s Rebellion. His history did conventionally deplore the evils of revolt; but unlike Nicholas Sotherton, on whose account he drew, Neville ventriloquized the common people’s grievances with verve:36 Said they, the pride of great men is now intolerable, but their [i.e., their own] condition miserable. These [the landowners] abound in delights, and compassed with the fullness of all things and consumed with vain pleasures, thirst only after gain; but themselves [the peasants], almost killed with labor and watching, do nothing all their life long but sweat, mourn, hunger and thirst. (Neville, Norfolk’s Furies Sig. b2) Donne, Pseudo-Martyr 46; Flynn, “Out of Step” 189–90. Winston ignores most signs of dissidence in the translators, reducing Heywood’s fairly spectacular non-conformism to the mild “Heywood had no place in the new Protestant government, and left England in 1562 to become a Jesuit priest” (“Seneca” 52). 36 Sotherton scorns the protestors as “evil-disposed people,” “vagrant,” “wicked,” and “rude” (81–82). “Ventriloquism” is Annabel Patterson’s term for the unintended emergence of common people’s voices in “texts of the dominant culture,” in “the trope of reported speech”; a reporter must utter, in order to refute, “ethical and pathetic claims whose force may linger beyond his powers of persuasion” (Shakespeare 41–42). 34 35

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Rebels charge that peasants possess land on very tenuous terms, which is “miserable and slavish”; “they hold all at the pleasure of great men, not freely, but … at the will and pleasure of the lord. For as soon as any man offend any of these gorgeous gentlemen, he is put out, deprived, and thrust from all his goods.” Neville speaks of resistance as revenge:Â€“How long should we suffer so great oppression to go unrevenged!” (Sig. b2). Here is another Senecan translator whose interest in resistance went beyond his translated tyrant-play. John Studley, translator of plays brimming with cruel female oppressorsÂ€– Clytemnestra, PhaedraÂ€– might well have identified with helpless men oppressed by tyrant queens. Like Heywood, he had a history of resisting authority. Attending the prestigious Westminster School, he was the first from there to be elected to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he achieved his MA and became a fellow. But his promising career crashed when he signed a letter protesting the University’s anti-Puritan statutes. Charged with non-conformity, he resigned his fellowship.37 As Elizabeth’s regime enforced religious conformity, a powerful Phaedra abusing helpless Hippolytus might well have held special meaning. To oppressed young intellectuals, Seneca’s own life must have offered notable parallels to their own. He himself was a translator and adapter, drawing plots from all three great Attic tragedians. And as for tyranny, he knew whereof he spoke. Arbitrarily banished by Caligula, he wrote his tragedies in exile and was forced to commit suicide when he lost favor with Nero, whose childhood tutor and adult advisor he had been. A R e s i s ta n t Proj e c t ? In an era of religious and political polarization even deadlier than our own, it is fascinating to find an oppressed Catholic like Heywood making common cause with an oppressed Protestant like Studley. These two dissident translators made seven of the ten translations. But was the translation of nine Senecan plays within eight years (1559–67) a concerted effort? Studley, Nuce, and Neville were at Cambridge at the same time. In 1566, when three translations appeared, Nuce’s poem introducing Studley’s Agamemnon described checking the translation against the Latin original, to forestall carping criticism. (He wittily threatens carpers with Atreuslike retribution upon their posterity.) Another poem praises Heywood’s His other known work is a translation of a rabidly anti-papal work by John Bale. See Spearing, Elizabethan 32–33.

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Troas and calls Neville just as good a translator as Heywood. (Alas, too true.) Studley’s own preface mentions “the other tragedies … set forth by Jasper Heywood and Alexander Neville.” Prefaces to Agamemnon, then, mention all four translators of the nine plays. And of the seven surviving quartos, six follow the same title format (The First Tragedy of … Seneca, entitled Hercules Furens; The Second Tragedy of Seneca, entitled Thyestes). Printers, too, were interconnected:Â€a close-knit group (Tottel, Powell, Colwell, Denham) printed six of the seven plays whose quartos survive. Heywood placed Troas with the printer Richard Tottel, a probable Catholic patronized by a group of Catholic lawyers exiled during Edward VI’s reign but returned to prominence during Mary’s. One was More’s nephew, William Rastell, Jasper Heywood’s uncleÂ€ – Heywood lived with him after leaving All Souls under a recusant cloud. Rastell willed his estate, including a locket with More’s portrait, to Ellis Heywood (Flynn, “Heywood”). For a young Catholic trying to place his first book, a Catholic uncle owed favors by a crypto-Catholic printer must have helped; Rastell (once himself a printer) likely put Heywood in touch with Tottel. Thyestes issued from the press of the late Thomas Berthelet, now run by his nephew Thomas Powell, who earlier had printed a poem on Queen Mary by Heywood’s father. In 1562 Powell printed a second edition of Troas. (Tottel, its first printer, had apprenticed with Powell’s brother.) This press next passed to Powell’s apprentice Thomas Colwell, who printed Oedipus, Medea, and Agamemnon. Thomas Delapeend, who wrote a commendatory epistle for Agamemnon, was also a Colwell translator. Tottel’s apprentice Henry Denham, who set up his own printing house in 1564, published Octavia. The plays were anthologized in 1581, along with Thebais, as Seneca’s Ten Tragedies, Translated into English.38 The compiler, Thomas Newton, was a prolific author who knew everybody:Â€his over two-dozen book dedications and prefaces attest to “a significant network of contacts sustained for over two decades within Elizabethan literary and intellectual circles” (Braden, “Newton”). Attending both Oxford and Cambridge in the late 1550s and early 1560s, he could have met all the other translators. Scholars usually consider this simply an academic project; but I posit that it was animated not only by devotion to Latin tragedy but also by principled opposition to official religious persecution. The dissident main The collection’s Hippolytus, Hercules Oetaeus, and Thebais have no extant quartos. Its printer, Thomas Marsh, also printed that resistance treasury, the Mirror for Magistrates (see below). Heywood praises it in a preface to Thyestes.

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translators, Heywood and Studley, were both deprived of university fellowships by the Anglican establishmentÂ€ – one as a Catholic, one as a non-conforming Puritan. Oppression makes strange bedfellows. Even the academic impetus for translation had a radical angle:Â€Heywood and Studley aimed to bring Seneca to the under-educated. In Thyestes’ preface, Heywood imagines Seneca’s pleasure that common readers “my tragedies shall see / In English verse, that never yet could Latin understand.” In a preface to Medea, Studley says he translates “for the profit of the unlearned by reading of it in their native language.” These are socially progressive attitudes. All educated males could read Seneca in Latin. Challenging monarchy, as resistance writers did, fostered mental habits capable of challenging the premises of hierarchy itself. S e c u l a r R e s i s ta nc e W r i t i ng Although the most potent influences on resistance writing were religious, some secular texts belong to this story. Contemporary with Ponet, Goodman, and Knox, A Mirror for Magistrates, like the Senecan translations, once maintained a tenuous foothold in the literature curriculum as a forerunner of Renaissance tragedy; it was swept out with the decline of literary history. Considering that what replaced literary history was politically tinged criticism, it is ironic that the Senecan translations and the Mirror disappeared, since both deal heavily with tyranny and resistance. Precisely because it did feed into tragedy, it is crucial that the Mirror is a compilation of tyrant-resistance tales. Here Mary’s subjects could read “How King Richard the Second was for his evil governance deposed” (Baldwin civ v). The first edition, c. 1554, was suppressed.39 Not until after Mary’s death was it printedÂ€– unsurprising, given its provocative take on “vices … punished in great princes and magistrates” (1571 subtitle). Modern readers often take “magistrates” to mean “kings”:Â€ this “mirror” reflects the danger of tyranny so that kings can mend their ways. But “magistrate” usually meant not “king” but a lesser official such as a “local justice” (OED). The subtitle’s “great princes and magistrates” On the suppression, see Winston, “Mirror” 398. A few scholars situate the Mirror politically. Sherri Geller sees the Mirror as a protest against censorship. Scott Lucas posits that it used fifteenth-century upheavals “to challenge the doctrine of strict obedience to rulers … and to assert the need for sub-magistrates to oppose misrule by their prince” (52–53); he notes that early 1554, when the first edition was suppressed, “witnessed violent opposition to Mary Tudor, especially Wyatt’s rebellion … The trials and executions in the aftermath of the rebellion, and the fear surrounding Mary’s approaching marriage to Philip of Spain, produced one of the heaviest outpourings of oppositional literature of any Tudor reign” (52).

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implies a distinction between them. Resistance writers often blame lesser officials for non-resistance, thus necessitating extra-legal action by God’s special avengers:Â€“When the magistrates … cease to do their duty … God giveth the sword into the people’s hand” (Goodman 185). I suggest that the Mirror is mainly addressed to such lesser officials.40 This anthology of political disasters opens with a magistrate, chief justice Tresilian, “misconstruing the laws and expounding them to serve the prince’s affections” (Baldwin, Mirror 1). Richard II’s spinmeister, who “could have made black seem white” (2), corrupts the legal system:Â€ “At sessions and ’sizes, we bare the stroke and sway … / The true man we let hang somewhiles to save a thief. / Of gold and silver our hands were never empty” (2). (The corrupt judge Sisamnes [see Chapter 5] was onstage about the same time.) The Mirror opens with an official toadying to a tyrant, and the early stories are of lesser “magistrates”:Â€two Mortimers, Mowbray, and Constable Thomas of Gloucester. Before the first king falls, many lesser counselors are blamed for not resisting kings who abrogate the law. Although political comment was safer when aimed at a century-old tyranny, Mary couldn’t have missed the warning that a ruler’s “transcending the limits of his law” would meet resistance:Â€“The barony of the land not bearing this abuse, / Conspir[ed] with the commons” (3).41 Each figure relates his own fallÂ€– the tales are all told by ghosts, potently resembling revenge tragedy’s presiding specters. And they speak of revenge, echoing a proverb (Luke 7:Â€2, Mark 4:Â€24):Â€“Blood asketh blood as guerdon [i.e., reward] due, / And vengeance for vengeance is just reward, / … / For look what measure we other award, / The same for us again is prepared. / Take heed ye princes … / Blood will have blood” (12). (Cf. Macbeth’s ghostridden cry, “It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood” [3.4.121].) Although the Mirror takes up the same sweep of history as Shakespeare’s eight history playsÂ€– Richard II through Richard IIIÂ€– Baldwin focuses more unwaveringly on resistance to tyranny. Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke topples Richard II largely out of personal ambition; in the Mirror he is motivated by opposition to the king’s ruling “without all justice, cause, or law” (14). Perhaps to forestall charges of sedition, Baldwin periodically warns against resistance; but his left hand takes back what his right gives. Winston, though, makes a good case for the gradually widening audience of successive editions, as the work drew ordinary people into political discourse (“Mirror” 397). 41 Several times in the Mirror, aristocrats join commoners in resistance. The earl of Nottingham reports, “peers and people jointly to me came, / With sore complaint against them that of late / Made officers, had brought the king in hate / By making sale of justice” (ciiv). 40

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Rebellion against Henry IV elicits the piety “who causeth bloodshed shall not ’scape the sword” (28). Then Baldwin calls the revolt justified:Â€its “chief cause” was that the king imprisoned a rival claimant to the throne (28). Cade waxes submissive:Â€“Full little know we wretches what we do, / When we presume our princes to resist … / God hath ordained the power; all princes be / His lieutenants” (63). But Baldwin defends Cade’s uprising, which “caused the king and queen whom all did hate / To … suddenly depart” to assuage “the people’s grudge” (62). The Mirror editorial board (Baldwin, Ferrers, et al.) meet between tales to discuss the project (like Chaucer’s links between tales), and they justify Cade:Â€ the devil might raise rebellions, but “God always useth them … as a part of his justice” (63). Lord Say, “a very corrupt officer” whom the king tolerated, deserved to be killed by Cade. A prince wishing to live “without rebellion, must do his subjects right in all things,” punishing officers who “oppress his people” (71).42 The editorial board is a model of impartiality, letting each figure tell his story. After the duke of Somerset denounces the duke of York, the board calls on York “to hear what he can say for himself” (78). The figures advocate giving everyone his day in court, deploring denial of due process:Â€“Where by law the lowest of free estate / Should personally be heard ere judgment pass, / That common grace to him denied was” (6). The compilers’ own commitment to literary due process rebukes the lawless tyrants they chronicle.43 The Mirror ascribes the failure of rebellions to Fortune and the triumph of “might” over “right” (32), without finding rebellion intrinsically wrong. When one revolt fails as a conspirator turns state’s evidence, Baldwin insists, “Yet was their purpose good” (32). He admires popular opposition to Henry VI’s marriage and Suffolk’s bad influence, praises commoners who bombarded “Parliament with bills, / Of heinous wrongs and open trait’rous crimes, / That king and queen were forced against their wills / Fro place to place to adjourn” (59), and approves when a pirate beheads Suffolk:Â€“Mark how vengeance waiteth upon vice” (59). Baldwin’s ascription of tyrants’ downfalls to Fortune looks like insurance:Â€ unlike Ponet, Goodman, and Knox, he lived in England and published with an English press. However, these tyrants clearly fall not because Fortuna’s wheel turns but because aggrieved subjects overthrow Mervyn James discusses the Mirror’s ascription of revolt and disorder to “misgovernment” (192–3). 43 Winston argues that adding the frame in which the authors converse “turned a kind of writing designed to speak to power into one that depicted and fostered a conversation about power”; in 42


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them. Fortuna, an agent of political justice, provides “means to punish and destroy tyrants” (59–60).44 One figure resists a “bloody tyrant” because “vengeance drove me on” (Mirror 27). The earl of Worcester blames himself for non-resistance. Although forced “by mean of governance” to “execute whate’er my king did bid,” still “from blame herein myself I cannot rid” (84). That he was obeying orders is no excuse:Â€“Who for love or dread of any man, / Consents to accomplish any wicked thing, / Although chief fault thereof from other spring, / Shall not escape God’s vengeance” (84). One who cannot defy unjust commands should not take office:Â€“Let none such office take, / Save he that can for right his prince forsake” (85). No resistance writer could have said it more plainly. The Mirror often calls its tales “tragedies” (e.g., Sig. [bii]), and an important resistance author who also wrote tragedies was a Scot, George Buchanan, exiled in youth for penning anti-Catholic satire. In the 1560s he advocated resistance to Mary, Queen of Scots, whose confidant he had once been. Roger Mason and Martin Smith speculate that he grew disillusioned with her Catholic, Francophile court in 1565–6, through contact with Huguenots in France (xxvi). In 1567 a public outraged at her complicity in murder forced Mary to abdicate. Europe was electrified. As Duncan MacNeill notes, kings “had fallen at the hands of rival claimants, but the idea that a people could themselves bring their own Crowned Head to order was indeed novel” (5). Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos, justifying Scots’ right to depose their queen,45 achieved “instant notoriety as an incendiary call to popular rebellion” (Mason/Smith xv). The Scottish parliament banned it. De Jure is a dialogue between Buchanan and Thomas Maitland, the latter home from abroad bearing news of the continental furore over Mary’s deposition. Maitland defends monarchy; Buchanan justifies the Â�deposition. (Still, a panicky Maitland wrote to the deposed Mary, Â�denying any involvement in the dialogue in which he figures [Mason/Smith xxvii–xxviii].) Buchanan knew Goodman and Knox (xlvi); but where they use biblical examples, he draws from classical history (Caligula and the first eight editions, “the prose frame is printed in larger type than the poems themselves” (“Mirror” 382, 387). 44 Revenge plays too sometimes identify political rebellion with Fortune. Assassin Cassius in Caesar’s Revenge soliloquizes, “Caesar … / Thou placed art in top of fortune’s wheel, / Her wheel must turn, thy glory must eclipse, / … I’ll be the man that shall this task perform” (3.1.14–21). 45 Buchanan wrote De Jure “in time for the meeting of the Scottish Parliament of December 1567 that ratified Mary’s deposition” (Mason/Smith xxvii). Unless otherwise stated, all De Jure quotations are from Mason and Smith’s translation.

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Nero “suffered justly” [Buchanan, Dialogue 11]) and modern history (a recent Danish king died in prison twenty years after being deposed). For Buchanan, a just society has less to do with Christian piety than with Roman equity. “By establishing equity,” Romans “restrain[ed] high and low alike by equal law … For the law always aims at justice, otherwise it would not be the law” (39). Society is humorally balanced:Â€“Just as in our bodies, composed … of conflicting elements, there arise diseases … [so] these larger bodies which we call commonwealths” comprise men of “opposing sorts, ranks, conditions” (21). A ruler, like a doctor, merely provides balance among competing sectors (21). Those “equal in all other respects should be equal by turns in ruling and obeying” (27). Scotland was more democratic than England:Â€ its king combined the ceremony of monarchy “with the utility of the president of a republic” (MacNeill 7). Scottish politics was immersed in republican thinking, fostering “civic virtue as a bulwark against tyranny” (Peltonen 233). Buchanan proposes electing kings for merit; citizens “have the right to bestow authority on whomever they wish” (Dialogue 27). He helped familiarize this idea in England, where Shakespeare stages the Scottish elective monarchy in Macbeth, and elective rule in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. Maitland is startled when Buchanan argues that kings unwisely elected can be deposed:Â€shouldn’t a king “possess complete power over all matters”? “Not at all,” Buchanan shoots back; a king is human, “erring in many things” (33). Maitland ventures, “In our country kings are not elected but are born, and … their will should have the force of law” (93). Buchanan vehemently denies this. Even “the Roman kings never had that power” (93). Buchanan reduces a monarch to “little more than a cipher with no clear legislative, judicial or governmental function” (Mason/Smith liv). Many Scottish kings have been “called to account by their subjects”Â€– imprisoned, exiled, executed. Even when their sons were chosen to replace them, “no judicial inquiry was ever decreed against their killers” (Buchanan, Dialogue 95).46 During coronations, kings promise to obey the laws (103) and obedience is owed only to those who do:Â€ “If a good prince must be obeyed, it does not follow that a bad one must not be resisted” (113). Maitland, a good Christian, isn’t satisfied with Ciceronian or Senecan rationales:Â€“What passage can you cite in the Scriptures which allows that tyrants may be killed?” (Buchanan, Dialogue 117). Buchanan effortlessly 46

Buchanan expanded on this theme in Rerum Scoticarum Historia, 1582. Drawing on Hector Boece, 1527, Rerum cites twenty-one Scottish kings (many mythical) “held to account by their subjects” (Mason/Smith xxxiv). Very influential across Europe, Rerum may well have nourished resistance to unsatisfactory rulers.


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produces from Scripture “a clear injunction to do away with crime and criminals without any exception of rank or degree” (117). Like Ponet, Goodman, and Knox, he posits a divinely appointed avenger. God often: stirs up from the lowest ranks of the people humble and obscure men as avengers of the pride and violence of tyrants. For God … commands that the evil man be removed from our midst, and He makes no exception of rank, sex, condition or even person, for kings are no more acceptable to Him than beggars … God, father of all equally … will leave no crime unpunished. (Buchanan, Dialogue 125).

Maitland insists that subjects swear a “sacred oath” to obey (Buchanan, Dialogue 151). Buchanan rejoins that kings promise to “administer justice,” creating “a mutual pact between a king and his subjects”; a king who violates the accord “makes the pact and agreement void” (152–3). He accepts lone tyrannicide, offering “no institutional checks on individual initiative” (Mason/Smith lxii). Maitland objects, “If anyone at all is allowed to kill a tyrant, see what an opening for villainy you leave” (Buchanan, Dialogue 157). As Goodman had protested “this is no doctrine of rebellion,” Buchanan asserts, “I am not issuing a call to action … If anyone attempts it rashly, the blame for his mistake does not attach to me any more than a doctor who has properly prescribed remedies for diseases should bear the blame for someone who has given them to patients at the wrong time” (159). Reducing the fault in regicide to a matter of poor timing might have warmed Mary’s heart toward Buchanan; but he refrained from publishing De Jure until a decade after her deposition, just in case. De Jure twice refers to a Roman revenge play, Thyestes (39, 77), and ends by quoting its chorus. Buchanan provides an arresting link between resistance writing and tragedy:Â€he wrote a tragedy about power-abusing tyrants, Baptistes sive Calumnia. “The Baptist, or Calumny” was one of his four Latin tragedies, including Medea, a revenge play translated from Euripides. Baptistes turns a familiar Bible story into a classical tragedy. Herod, exemplary tyrant of resistance writers,47 had put the “rant” in “tyrant” in mystery plays (recall Hamlet’s “it out-Herods Herod” [3.2.12]) and appears in Grimald’s Archipropheta, Goldingham’s Herodes, Cary’s Mariam, and Markham’s Herod and Antipater. Buchanan’s fiery desert preacher, John the Baptist, denounces Herod. As Steven Berkowitz notes, John resembles Protestant reformers of Buchanan’s day (109). As this lowborn dissident inspires the Jewish nation, Gamaliel defends commoners’ right to play important political roles:Â€ “Moses a shepherd was, and David too”; if God taught them, he can also tutor John; “God neither 47

â•‡ Ponet Sig. h[8], Goodman 61, Knox, First Blast 6.

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scepter, parents, noble stock, / Beauty, nor kingly riches doth respect” (118–23).48 Herod takes an initial stab at sweet reasonableness:Â€“A tyrant and a king that’s good, / Differ in this:Â€the one his foes preserves, / The other is a foe to them he rules” (351–3). But the reversed syntactic parallel suggests mental confusion on the issue, and the Baptist sees tyranny in Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife:Â€“Consider with yourself / Whether you ought to serve your carnal will, / Rather than your creator” (500–3). (On tyrants’ carnality, see below.) After minimal soul-searching, Herod chooses tyranny:Â€if he kills John, “I shall offend the people; / If I preserve him, for my royal state / I little do provide; what shall I do then? / I must regard my kingdom, none so near / As I am to myself” (561). He declares, “All things to me are lawful without law” (596). John rages, “The rich oppress the poor, / Both right and wrong are set at equal price” (773). Herodias, whose marriage to Herod John opposes, pants after “joy of my revenge”Â€– John’s head on a platter will send a message to uppity plebeians, “vindicate / Our royal dignity” and “force / The stubborn people” to “bear and obey” all the king’s decrees “though never so unjust” (1253, 1350–6). But Herod has qualms when the Salome figureÂ€– “Daughter” in the English translationÂ€– demands John’s head. In a Machiavelli-tinged debate, she helps stiffen his tyrannical resolve: daug h t e r The people must obey, and [i.e., if] kings command. h e r od ’Tis a king’s duty just things to command. daug h t e r Kings by commanding may make those things just Which before were unjust … If that be right Which pleaseth princes, then they rule the laws, Not the laws them. h e r od Then, for a king, a tyrant The people will divulge me … daug h t e r It is not needful that a king be lov’d, But feared.

(1283–97)

Herod loses the argument, John his head. But the Chorus points to what Bible-readers would know:Â€Herod is in for a “just revenge.” God’s “revenÂ� ging arm / Will punish thy unspeakable misdeeds” (1381–8); “famine and war, with barrenness and want, / Shall overwhelm thee, not to be withstood; / Till thou be quitted [i.e., requited] with deserved blood” (1407–9). Quotations are from the first English translation, TyrannicalÂ€ – Government Anatomized, 1643. Contrary to Berkowitz’s contention that Baptistes displays contempt for the common people (124), all contempt for “plebeians” is uttered by nefarious charactersÂ€ – Malchus, Herod, the queen. Admirable figures such as the Baptist and Gamaliel treat commoners with respect.

48


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Buchanan wrote Baptistes in the 1540s, breathing anti-tyrannical air while teaching in Bordeaux alongside Marc-Antoine Muret, whose Latin Julius Caesar was performed about 1544.49 The first of many plays on Caesar’s assassination, Muret’s coincided with the Brutus craze sweeping Italy. Brutus, his central figure, makes a stirring anti-tyrannical speech. As Protestants clashed with the French crown, Muret was denounced for Huguenot sympathies. In 1558, as English resistance tracts appeared, Jacques Grévin’s play Jules César emulated Muret’s, including Brutus’ speech. Grévin, also suspected of Huguenot sympathies, was exiled. When Buchanan wrote Baptistes, long before helping depose Mary, other principled resisters haunted him. Charged by the Spanish Inquisition with seditious allegory, Buchanan (perhaps in self-defense) claimed that Baptistes alluded to More’s defiance of Henry VIII (Berkowitz ix). Although Baptistes “falls short of articulating a fully-fledged theory of resistance, its portrait of a vicious tyrant seduced by flattery and self-indulgence clearly does anticipate a key theme of the De Jure” (Mason/Smith xli), and contemporaries linked the works. Buchanan dedicated both to his star pupil, Scotland’s James VI (whose mother he had helped depose), warning him against tyranny. He “was intent on instilling in his pupil a political philosophy that as an adult monarch James would quite rightly regard as profoundly subversive of royal authority” (Mason/Smith xxxix). Unlike later tyrant plays, in Baptistes vengeance is rather dispersed. God is left to avenge the tyrannized hero, while the blood-relishing avenger of later plays appears in a villain’s role (Herodias). But the essential ingredients are there, if atypically mixed:Â€thirst for vengeance, political resistance, commoners rising, a leader divinely chosen to oppose tyranny. Buchanan took tragedy seriously as a vehicle for exploring power abuse and resistance, matters he cared about deeply. In their early days, British tragedy and resistance writing meet in Buchanan. And in this mid-sixteenth-century double dawn, revenge is everywhere.50 R e s i s ta nc e a n d T r ag e dy Was it coincidence that the mid sixteenth century spawned both resistance texts and tyrant plays? To Sidney, tragedy as a genre “maketh kings fear to be See Berkowitz ix. In his Apology for Poetry, Sidney mentions “Muretus” and Buchanan consecutively as “great orators” and “piercing wits” (Sig. i2v). 50 In these years, resistance theory appears even in mainstream political works such as Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum, written in 1562–6 when Smith was Elizabeth’s ambassador in France. Smith considers subjects’ responsibilities in an unjust regime in chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8. 49

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tyrants” (Sig. f3v).51 Having witnessed the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, he fervently opposed the oppression of fellow Protestants, as did his powerful connections at court. His uncle the earl of Leicester (who had opposed Mary’s accession) and secretary of state Walsingham, Sidney’s father-inlaw, urged the queen to aid Huguenots militarily. On this issue, Leicester, Walsingham, and Sidney comprised a dissident faction within the queen’s innermost circle of advisors (see Phillips) and patronized the fiery resistance writer Goodman.52 Blair Worden notes echoes of Goodman’s writings in Sidney’s Arcadia (Sound 185–9). Seneca’s Ten Tragedies appeared in 1581, just when Leicester was agitating for aid to Huguenots, and Senecan tragedians are tantalizingly linked with this circle. Nuce dedicated Octavia to Leicester, honoring “his bountiful goodness towards my friends.” Leicester approached Neville and his brother in 1585 to pressure Archbishop of Canterbury Whitgift to aid continental Protestants (Leedham-Green). The brother was dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, of which Whitgift had been master when Studley lost his fellowship for protesting Whitgift’s crackdown on religious dissent. When Leicester finally led an army into the Spanish-occupied Netherlands, Elizabeth recalled him in 1586, and versifying on the recall was Newton, compiler of Seneca’s Ten Tragedies. (Holinshed reprinted his poem.) Newton also wrote a poem for the 1587 Mirror for Magistrates, nudging readersÂ€ – to the point of cracking their ribsÂ€ – to apply the text’s antityrannicism to current events:Â€ “Read it … attentively, / Consider well the drift whereto it tends,” for “things forepassed are precedents to us, / Whereby we may things present now discuss” (Sig. [ci]v). When Sidney died in the Netherlands war, Neville edited a collection of verses in his honor, contributing two verses and a prose preface, and dedicating the collection to Leicester. Several translators, then, had links to a vigorous court party which opposed tyranny, both by continental oppressors of Protestants and “When the commonwealth is evil governed by an evil ruler” one must ask whether “a good and upright man, and lover of his country” should obey unjust laws “or to seek by all means to dissolve and abolish them” (51–52). 51 Knox too identifies tyranny and tragedy:Â€Mary’s reign is a “miserable tragedy” (First Blast 31). To Thomas Heywood, the Muse of tragedy “held in awe the tyrants of the world, / And played their lives in public theaters, / Making them fear to sin” (Apology Sig. b2). The play A Warning for Fair Women defines tragedy as enacting the deeds of “some damned tyrant,” praising tragedy as a “hangman unto tyranny” (Induction 51, 27). 52 As James Phillips writes, “In view of [Goodman’s] frequent clashes with English officialdom,” the Sidney circle’s defense of him is remarkable; they protected him “regularly through a period of more than twenty years” (29). Leicester appointed Marian exiles as his domestic chaplains and influenced the appointment of Goodman as archdeacon of Richmond (see Adams).


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(implicitly) by Whitgift, who suppressed dissent at home and helped block aid to Protestants abroad. The queen herself, who never fully acceded to Leicester’s interventionism, at times seemed tyrannical. Senecan plays with female tyrantsÂ€– Juno, Phaedra, ClytemnestraÂ€– had special appeal. Sidney, regarding tragedy as politically instrumental, was excited by Buchanan’s resistance texts and tyrant tragedies. The Sidney circle helped bring his work to England.53 Baptistes’ first English edition had a Huguenot printer, Thomas Vautrollier, five years after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Its defiant religious leader and courageous persecuted followers must have appealed to Huguenot refugees. Several scholars posit “an almost conspiratorial motive” for Vautrollier’s printing this play (Berkowitz 56), linked with the Sidney circle’s support of Huguenots.54 Dutch translations of De Jure appeared in 1598 and 1610, as the Dutch grappled with Spain. Baptistes ran to over forty editions in French, German, and Dutch (ix). It was finally translated into English in 1642, a later era of resistance to power abuse, provocatively re-titled Tyrannical-Government Anatomized and pointedly dedicated to King Charles.55 Buchanan often quoted Seneca and gave as admonitory gifts to his pupil James his own books and Seneca’s tragedies. Mason and Smith postulate that Buchanan’s anti-tyrannical tutelage backfired:Â€James’ belief in divine right “developed partly as a response to [Buchanan’s] radical politics” (lxxi). Once James became king of England, did Buchanan reflect anxiously on what happened to the Emperor Nero’s tutor, Seneca, when his charge came of age? Senecan tyrants are outsized, unforgettable. Anti-tyrannical tracts of the 1550s had a counterpart in mid-century plays. Ponet, Goodman, Knox, and Buchanan published in relative safety on the continent; publishing in England required more oblique tactics. The resistant couldn’t have taken a more populist course than translating Latin classics for the masses, or a more useful author than that bard of tyranny, Seneca. In 1576 Daniel Rogers, a member of the circle, urged Buchanan to publish:Â€“I very eagerly read your dialogue De jure regni, which is not irrelevant to the conditions of this time”; Rogers had ties to the Frankfurt press that published Baptistes with a prefatory epigram by Rogers (Berkowitz 30, 26). Baptistes was seen through the press by Buchanan’s friend Thomas Randolph, “a longtime associate (and relative by marriage) of Francis Walsingham” (Mason/Smith xl). 54 Vautrollier also printed North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, the main source of four Shakespearean tragedies. Perhaps of special appeal to a Huguenot printer was its exploration of that master plot of tyrannicide, Brutus’ assassination of Caesar. 55 Interest didn’t flag with time:Â€Berkowitz lists an astonishing number of English translations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (273–8). 53

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Political unfairness:Â€revenge and resistance T y r a n n y, R e s i s ta nc e , a n d R e v e ng e i n O t h e r Pl a y s of t h e s e Y e a r s

In 1566 (the year of Medea, Agamemnon, and Octavia), Jocasta was acted, said to be translated from Euripides but really adapted from Dolce’s Giocasta by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe. Its blank verse, smoother than Heywood’s jouncing fourteeners or Nuce’s choppy couplets, bristles with tyranny and revenge. We know little of Gascoigne’s politics, but life for his Catholic father, a member of Mary’s Parliament, would have been difficult under ElizabethÂ€– a situation like Heywood’s. In Jocasta, a Tamburlainian tyrant avant la lettre, “not content to have subdued many princes,” forces kings to pull his chariot “like beasts” (Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe 74). Creon and Eteocles tyrannize, while Polynice resolves that his “life shall not be left without revenge” and Antigone laments that her mother must die “and I not venge her death” (2.1.9–11; 5.3.17). Being deprived of revenge was dire. In this symmetrical playÂ€– two rival brothers, two suffering sistersÂ€– Polynice demands that Eteocles with “equal judgment consent, / That I … / sway with him alike the kingly seat” (2.1.324–6). He seeks “sharp revenge” because Eteocles “usurps most tyrantlike … / The right that doth of right to me belong” (2.1.291, 322–3). Nature sanctions bilateral symmetry:Â€the brothers should share rule as “days and nights … yield each other place” (2.1.427). The play’s composition echoed this power-sharing ideal:Â€Gascoigne composed Act 1, Kinwelmarshe Act 2, etc. The Renaissance conceived fairness in terms of numeric equality (see Chapter 10); and to redress tyrannic inequality, Polynice seeks revenge. The play challenges divine benevolence. Pious advice rings hollow:Â€“Trust in mighty Jove:Â€/ His will is not, that for th’offense of one / So many [i.e., the whole family] suffer undeserved smart” (1.1.368–70)Â€– but Jove doesn’t lift a finger to help this family. Hearing a prophecy that the city can be saved only by sacrificing his son, Creon cries, “Can heavens condemn but him alone to die?” Tiresias counsels, “We ought believe the cause is good and just.” Creon believes no such thing:Â€“Unjust is he condemns the innocent.” Tiresias warns, “A fool is he accuseth heavens of wrongs” (3.1.222–5), but the accusation hovers. Antigone scorns Creon’s defense that he was just following orders in declining to bury her slain brother: c r e on Is then a fault to do a king’s command? a n t ig on e When his command is cruel and unjust. creon Is it unjust that he unburied be?

“A special inward commandment” antigone He not deserv’d so cruel punishment … creon Canst thou undo the thing that is decreed? antigone A wicked foul decree to wrong the dead.

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(5.5.86–105)

Native English plays of the same era also treat tyranny. Corrupt judges who abuse political power appear in Appius and Virginia and Cambyses. In Pickering’s Horestes, Orestes plays resister and revenger to the tyrants Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. This was what revenge tragedy looked like in the 1560s:Â€here, on the genre’s ground floor, tyranny and resistance are central, as they were for resistance theorists in the 1550s. When revenge plays enact resistance, the distinction between types of revenge play is crucial. In vendetta plays (Caesar’s Revenge, Shakespeare’s first tetralogy), parties of equal status retaliate reciprocally; in individualgrievance plays (Titus, The Revenger’s Tragedy), the disempowered retaliate against tyrants.56 Resistance theory pertains to the latter. Cycles of violence in vendetta plots may impart a sense of futility:Â€plays in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy offer weak closure, breaking off in mid-retaliation, many scores yet unsettled. But closure in individual-grievance plays is potent:Â€tyranny is defeated. Vendetta plots are horizontal, aristocrat vs. aristocrat; individual-grievance plots are vertical, the dispossessed opposing entrenched power.57 The latter share resistance theory’s article of faith:Â€a subject’s right to resist unjust authority. In Tragedies of Tyrants, Rebecca Bushnell notes, “political prose and drama shared a language” (xiv). Like most who consider tragedy’s connection with tyranny, she focuses on plays’ message for rulers. But what about audiences? Might a tragedy provoke an audience to resistance or tyrannicide? Shakespeare’s Richard II is something of a tyrant, wielding power arbitrarily and acting beyond the law; and in 1601 Richard II was considered capable of inspiring an audience to resistance.58 Rebels paid the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform the play, apparently to foment sedition, on the eve of Essex’s revolt against Elizabeth.59 Renaissance avengers are “usually less powerful than the objects of their revenge, while Senecan revengers are typically more powerful”; where Seneca’s rulers take revenge on subjects, the “most prominent type of revenge” in Renaissance plays comprises “nonrulers seeking revenge on rulers” (Griswold 90–91). 57 A vertical plot sometimes erupts amidst a horizontal plot. In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI a vendetta, the Wars of the Roses, is interrupted by a “vertical” revenge/revolution, Cade’s uprising. See Chapter 9. 58 Alzada Tipton places Gaunt, York, the earl of Worcester, Northumberland, Willoughby, and Ross in the category of “magistrates” or high-ranking advisors who engage in principled resistance. 59 For a caveat against overrating the seditious potential of this performance, however, see Barroll. 56

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In their simultaneous infancy in the 1550s and 1560s, resistance writing and revenge tragedy were siblings. To let the Senecan translations moulder in the attic of literary history for their ragged fourteeners, to dismiss them as decadent for their sensational violence, is to miss out on their thrilling, clandestine dissidence. We will hear, in the more mature offspring of this fledgling genre, the clarion accents of its original political defiance. The tragedies of the 1590s recall Seneca not only in the ghost of Caesar or the gore of his gashed corpse, but also in the cry of his republican resisters:Â€“Speak, strike, redress!” 60 60

â•‡ Shakespeare, Julius Caesar 2.1.47.

Ch apter 7

Resistance in the golden age of revenge plays

Methinks their ghosts come gaping for revenge, Whom I have slain in reaching for a crown. Clarence complains, and crieth for revenge. My nephew’s blood, “Revenge, revenge,” doth cry. The headless peers come pressing for revenge. And every one cries, “Let the tyrant die.”

The True Tragedy of Richard III

Good, excellent revenge, and pleasant!

The Cardinal

There is no point denying that England’s golden age of revenge dramaÂ€ – the 1580s through the Jacobean decadesÂ€ – luxuriated in sensationalism. Hieronimo stabs a duke with a penknife and bites out his own tongue. The Jew of Malta poisons a nunnery, dynamites an army, and plunges to his death into a cauldron of boiling oil. Titus Andronicus rejoices in rapes, dismemberments, insanity, cannibalism. Antonio’s Revenge features a dismembered child. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s hero talks to a skull, and poison eats away an evil duke’s lips. In The Atheist’s Tragedy, a duke tries to rape his daughter-in-law in a graveyard and accidentally brains himself while striving to behead innocent subjects. In The Revenge of Bussy, five ghosts dance to celebrate vengeance. Hamlet and Women Beware Women end like grand operas of spectacular death. Renaissance audiences loved sensational gore. Modern audiences love sensational gore. But no one would reduce, say, Hamlet to the titillation of violence. And much more transpires in other revenge plays too. Rebecca Bushnell writes of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, “Govianus gets his revenge by painting her face with a poison that kills the Tyrant when he kisses her … more like a Jacobean revenger’s work than a rightful heir’s triumphant victory” (156). To dismiss tyrant-resistance precisely because it works through revenge, deemed a priori non-serious, is to deny that revenge can serve political dissent. But let us view the gore through the lens of resistance writing. 167

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Like the hero of a western film purifying corruption by killing an evil sheriff, revengers cleanse courts through assassinations. The rulers killed in Titus Andronicus, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Atheist’s Tragedy, and Women Beware Women have abused subjects’ rights. Hamlet’s assassinated king is a double tyrantÂ€– usurper and despot.1 The Revenge of Bussy opens with a kingdom sunk in power abuse. Antonio’s Revenge and Richard III feature classic tyrant debates and the killing of lawless rulers. These plays offering sensational orgies of death also stage serious political resistance. Was the sensational partly a smokescreen, a way to slip radical plays past censors2 or past an audience’s guard? Do these exuberantly depraved plays enact Sidney’s theory that just “as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things, by hiding them in such other as to have a pleasant taste” (Sig. [e4]v), literature works by sliding serious ideas down our throats in a sugar glaze of delightÂ€– in this case, pleasure in gore? Can art be both sensationalistic and dissident? Before we view classic revenge tragedies through a resistance lens, I will mention briefly a new burst of resistance writing on the eve of revenge’s golden age. In 1579, the year of Buchanan’s De Jure and two years after a Huguenot printed Buchanan’s Baptistes, a Huguenot resistance blockbuster exploded:Â€ Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, the vindication (or revenge) against tyrants. The pseudonymous authors were probably Hubert Languet and Philippe du Plessis Mornay, Huguenots who had escaped the St.Â€Bartholomew’s Day massacre.3 Languet’s extensive correspondence with Sidney is extant (see Pears). Mornay was associated with the Sidney circle; Sidney translated his work. The two corresponded with Buchanan (Mason/Smith xlvi). Vindiciae combines religious and secular resistance, drawing on the Bible and Justinian.4 It represents Christianity’s history as Prosser’s appendix on resistance theory (280–94) denies that resistance is relevant to Hamlet. Dismissing Ponet’s call for an individual assassin as completely anomalous, she ignores Goodman, Knox, and many other resistance writers. Insisting that “revolt against a king is different from the question of private vengeance,” she also objects to the authors of Gorboduc treating revolt “as if it were revenge” (41). As I have shown, though, this age made strong connections between political revolt and individual vengeance. 2 Although modern critics consider vengefulness in the plays immoral, I don’t recall any Renaissance act of censorship explicitly on grounds of morally offensive vengefulness. 3 The pseudonym was “Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt,” probably affiliating with Buchanan (a Scot). The work claimed an Edinburgh printer. 4 Skinner credits the authors with “the epoch-making move from a purely religious theory of resistance” based on “a covenant to uphold the laws of God” to a “genuinely political theory of revolution, based on the idea of a contract which gives rise to a moral right (and not merely a religious duty) to resist any ruler who fails … to pursue the welfare of the people”; but he acknowledges that Buchanan anticipated this secularizing move (335, 339). 1


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a study in defiance of tyrants:Â€“Innumerable martyrs” chose to “die rather than to obey” (Garnett 32). (For Goodman too, martyrs were resisters [68].) And Protestant “inner light” had progressed far enough that assassins needn’t await thunder, earthquakes, or comets:Â€“external signs” have yielded to “interior ones” like “authentic zeal” (63). Vindiciae says much on vengeance:Â€can’t God “raise up some vindicator against tyranny from amongst private men? … What now prevents the same God, who has loosed tyrants against us … from also sending extraordinary avengers against tyrants?” (Garnett 171); “justly … was vengeance visited upon [Athaliah]” (48). The tyrannophobe deity is termed “almighty God, avenger” (25). George Garnett explicates the terms vindex (“avenger”), vindicator, and “vindiciae.” Vindicare in libertatem meant “to liberate a people from oppressive rule” (Garnett’s glossary lxxxiii). “Vindicate,” then, meant “take revenge on” and “liberate from oppression.” A Catholic resister, Robert Parsons (or Persons) had links with a Senecan translator. Arriving at Oxford just as Jasper Heywood was forced to leave, Parsons later crossed paths with him again:Â€ he led a clandestine Jesuit mission to England in 1580, fleeing when Campion was executed; Heywood became leader. In exile, Parsons penned Certain Reasons why Catholics Refuse to Go to Church. Its pseudonymous dedication to Elizabeth protests the persecution of Catholics. With a touch of mischief, he reminds the queen that it wasn’t a Catholic who wrote the obnoxious First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Many Protestant resisters, he notes, have annoyed monarchsÂ€ – Wyclif, Luther, Calvin, Knox (Sig. [ʄ7v]–[ʄ8]). Pious talk of Catholic obedience notwithstanding, the work’s object is, after all, to justify Catholic refusal to obey the law dictating Anglican church attendance. Parsons advocates resisting ungodly lawsÂ€ – exactly the Protestant position he denounces. His Epistle of the Persecution of Catholics in England graphically details the torture of English priests, with an eyewitness account of torturers practicing “cruel tyranny upon my body” (Sig. m). Although he protests loyalty, this Catholic answer to the Book of Martyrs seems designed to whip up English Catholic resistance, as does his (and Allen’s) Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, which closely resembles Protestant resistance writing.5 Anti-tyrannical arguments could apply to 5

Parsons’ Treatise of Three Conversions … directly rebuts Foxe’s Protestant martyrology. Parsons was suspected of writing the anonymous Leicester’s Commonwealth, which expressed hope that the Protestant champion Leicester would be toppled, like Nero, by “the fury of the people”:Â€“So implacable a thing is the furor of a multitude when it is once stirred and hath place of revenge. And so heavy is the hand of God upon tyrants … when it pleaseth his divine Majesty to take

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any ruler who persecuted on religious grounds, which most did. One size of resistance literature fit all. Parsons actively plotted resistance. He conspired with the duke of Guise and with William Allen, founder of the Douai-Rheims Jesuit seminary, to foment a Spanish invasion of Britain to overthrow Protestantism; he went to Spain to negotiate plans with Philip II. The plot collapsed, but Parsons was involved in a second invasion plot, by Spanish forces under the prince of Parma. He was in contact with another group plotting to kill Elizabeth (Bossy 145–50). And as the Armada invasion was planned, he wrote a broadside for distribution by the invaders, “justifying the use of force against an illegitimate and heretical ruler” (Houliston 845–6). The three previous decades had witnessed a steady stream of resistance literature and tyrant tragedies, and resistance writing heated up just before revenge tragedy’s golden age. It was dangerous. Most authors of prose tracts had to flee at least once, often lived in exile, concealed their identity, and published with foreign presses. Some dissidents, I suggest, embodied resistance ideas in revenge plays because their outlandish gore and fantastic plots made ideal camouflage. Such plays comprised resistance by other means. R e v e ng e T r ag e dy a s R e s i s ta nc e i n t h e G ol de n Ag e The Spanish Tragedy was written about 1587, just as Parsons published accounts of tortured priests and conspired to overthrow Elizabeth. Although they strained to justify private citizens’ right to assassinate, resistance writers more easily defended magistrates’ right to resist tyranny. Hieronimo is a magistrate, presiding over a court and handing down a death sentence.6 His own access to justice being blocked, his revenge comprises resistance to an unjust regime. Buchanan would have found the Turkish court in Hieronimo’s play-within-a-play an apt locale for tyrant-slaying:Â€“Asian peoples,” of a “more servile turn of mind than Europeans,” readily “give obedience to tyrants” (De Jure, MacNeill trans. 72). Similarities between this Turkish scenario and the main play imply that Spain is as tyrannous as a decadent “oriental” court. Bel-Imperia presents revenge as resistance, crying, “Tyrant, desist!” and “thus she would revenge” as she stabs (4.4.59, 64). revenge” (121). Elizabeth should beware:Â€“The sins of the favorite” may be “returned and revenged upon the favorer” (187). 6 On Hieronimo as a magistrate, see Kerrigan 177, Braden 204, Levin 308–9, and Broude 48–49.


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In Marlowe’s Edward II, a tyrant is deposed. When a bishop speaks truth to power, Edward claps him in prison and confiscates his property, with a tyrant’s rationale:Â€“It is our pleasure; we will have it so” (4.9). In Plato’s terms, Edward is rendered ineffective by sexual obsession, a kind of homoerotic uxoriousness.7 Marlowe even-handedly parcels blameÂ€– if Edward is weak, his opponents are ambitious, hypocritical, and spiteful. In a startling reversal, Edward blames his tyranny on their resistance:Â€“How oft have I been baited by these peers, / And dare not be reveng’ d, for their power is great! / … / If I be cruel, and grow tyrannous, / Now let them thank themselves” (6.201–7). The queen recalls lustful tyrants of history, “misgovern’d kings”:Â€ “Edward thou art one among them all, / Whose looseness hath betrayed thy land to spoil” (15.9–11). As his rival’s lover, she is hardly a disinterested observer. But whoever is more to blame, subjects’ right to elect a king is on the table from the start:Â€ if Edward ignores peers’ demands, decrees an earl, they can “depose him, and elect another king” (4.54–55). Monarchy is under siege. Barons want to share power, and we keep glimpsing a shadowy force, the common people:Â€“I’ll have it published in the streets … This will be good news to the common sort” (4.89–92); “So shall we have the people of our side” (1.4.282); “Why do you not commit him to the Tower? … I dare not, for the people love him well” (6.234–5). Street literature stirs the populace:Â€ “Libels are cast again[st] thee in the street; / Ballads and rhymes made of thy overthrow” (6.177–8). As Mortimer knows, “the king must die, or Mortimer goes down. / The commons now begin to pity him” (21.1–2). In a feudal world of decentralized power, being a tyrant is an uphill slog, and Edward is often reduced to a recourse of the powerlessÂ€– revenge. A supporter urges, “Refer your vengeance to the sword / Upon these barons!… / Let them not unrevenged murder your friends!,” and Edward indeed adopts the posture: If I be England’s king, in lakes of gore Your headless trunks, your bodies will I trail, That you may drink your fill, and quaff in blood, And stain my royal standard with the same, That so my bloody colors may suggest Remembrance of revenge immortally On your accursed traitorous progeny.

(11.123–41)

7

The uxorious tyrant appears in Buchanan’s Baptistes and Preston’s Cambyses (see Bushnell 83–90).

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A king-turned-avenger is a failed tyrant:Â€“I shall pour vengeance … / On those proud rebels”; “’Tis time / To be avenged on you for all your braves, / And for the murder of my dearest friend” (11.223–5, 40–41). He sinks to that arms-length vengeance of the weaponless, the curse. Tearing up a paper bearing Mortimer’s name, he cries, “This poor revenge hath something eased my mind; / So may his limbs be torn as is this paper!” (18.141–2). He calls Mortimer a “tyrant” (20.36), and Mortimer boasts, “What I list command who dare control?” (21.68); tyrant and resister have exchanged places. The play ends, however, like that master revenge plot, the Orestes story. After Edward, like Agamemnon, is murdered by his wife’s lover, his son, like Orestes, “vows to be revenged” (23.18–19). He executes Mortimer and imprisons his mother. Set prudently in medieval times, the play explores weaknesses of hereditary succession and the need for a legal mechanism to remove an unsatisfactory rulerÂ€– topics much aired in recent decades. Not a textbook revenge play, Edward II uses revenge conventions to explore incendiary topics. Other Marlowe plays too are “relentlessly hostile” to hereditary kingship and “political power … in the hands of a few” (Hadfield 65). Tamburlaine stages “the destruction of hereditary monarchy, and the destabilizing of a stratified order of privilege” (Hattaway, “Christopher Marlowe” 199). The Guise in The Massacre at Paris is a monster of “tyranny”; God is asked to “revenge” and Charles vows “to revenge” the “bloody and tyrannical” massacre (1.41, 44, 11.37, 4.6). Marlowe deploys motifs recalling his avenger Barabas (“those perfum’d gloves which I sent / To be poison’d”; “stricken with a poison’d knife” [Massacre 2.13–14, 24.75]). Resisters speak vengefully:Â€“Vengeance now encamps itself / Upon the haughty mountains of my breast; / Plays with her gory colors of revenge. / … / I shall vaunt as victor in revenge” (16.20–25). The ending echoes with vengeful vows:Â€“My father slain! / … I’ll be reveng’ d”; “I am thy brother, and I’ll revenge thy death”; “Weep not … but revenge my death”; “I vow for to revenge his death.”8 The Guise may have been modeled on Caesar in Lucan’s tale of resistance and civil war, Pharsalia (see Blisset), which Marlowe was the first to translate into English. The tyrant Piero Sforza in Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge has no “mitigating qualities of self-searching or remorse. His hypocritical poses, his crude self-congratulations are funny, as those of tyrants and demagogues are at all times in history, without being any the less terrible” (J. Lever 26). He tries to suborn perjured testimony, but Pandulpho resists, launching a Senecan tyrant debate: â•‡ 21.117–21, 23.6, 24.96, 24.109.

8


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pi e r o ’Tis just that subjects act commands of kings. pa n du l p ho Command then just and honorable things … pi e r o Where only honest deeds to kings are free It is no empire, but a beggary. pa n du l p ho Where more than noble deeds to kings are free It is no empire, but a tyranny. pi e r o Tush, juiceless greybeard, ’tis immunity Proper to princes, that our state exacts, Our subjects not alone to bear, but praise our acts. pa n du l p ho O, but that prince that worthful praise aspires, From hearts, and not from lips, applause desires. pi e r o Pish! True praise the brow of common men doth ring, False only girts the temple of a king, He that hath strength, and’s ignorant of power, He was not made to rule, but to be ruled. pa n du l p ho ’Tis praise to do not what we can, but should. pi e r o Hence doting Stoic! by my hope of bliss, I’ll make thee wretched. pa n du l p ho Defiance to thy power, thou rifted jawn! [i.e., yawning abyss]. (2.2.52–72)

Antonio’s revenge is resistanceÂ€– no mere personal retribution, but political restoration. A senator officially thanks avengers for “ridding huge pollution from our state” (5.6.12–13). In Shakespeare, Tamora in Titus wants to “quit her bloody wrongs upon her foes,” aided by gods who gave Hecuba “opportunity of sharp revenge / Upon the Thracian tyrant” (1.1.137–41)Â€ – Hecuba killed the sons of the tyrant who killed her sons. Parading affiliations with classical revenge tragedy, the play also jibes with resistance literature. Saturninus, tyrant fired by uxoriousness, convicts Titus’ sons of murder on evidence fabricated by his wife. Promoting him as emperor is disastrousÂ€– politically for Rome and personally for Titus:Â€“Rome! … I made thee miserable. / … I threw the people’s suffrages / On him that thus doth tyrannize o’er me” (4.3.18–20). In madness, Titus glimpses a universe of tyranny; at the killing of a fly he cries, “Mine eyes are cloyed with view of tyranny” (3.2.55). His revengeÂ€– killing the emperorÂ€– saves Rome. Campaigning for emperor, Saturninus, the late emperor’s eldest son, understandably champions hereditary succession. He appeals to the likeminded:Â€“Patricians … / Defend the justice of my cause with arms / … / Plead my successive title with your swords / I am his first-born son that was the last / That ware the imperial diadem” (1.1.1–6). Rival candidate Bassianus addresses a broader populace (“Romans, friends”):Â€“Let desert in pure election shine” (1.1.9, 16). His claim, Andrew Hadfield notes, “is

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rooted in an ideal of consent, the ruler having to rely on the support of the people to obtain power,” a political model resembling “civic republicanism” (157). That Saturninus becomes a vicious tyrant besmirches hereditary monarchy. In Richard III, Clarence, reasoning with two assassins, employs resistance theory’s central tenetÂ€– God’s law trumps any ruler’s ungodly commands.9 He appeals to the law:Â€ “What is my offense? / Where is the evidence?”; who “pronounced / The bitter sentence of poor Clarence’ death? / Before I be convict by course of law, / To threaten me with death is most unlawful” (1.4.170–6). He argues exactly like Ponet, Goodman, and Knox:Â€“The great King of Kings / Hath in the table of his law commanded / That thou shalt do no murder. Will you then / Spurn at his edict, and fulfil a man’s?” (1.4.183–6).10 Many in the play obey evil orders. Richard dooms Hastings to death on a transparently trumped-up charge, commanding the Council to “rise and follow me” (3.4.79)Â€– without resistance, all desert Hastings. As Richard demands of the little princes, “I wish the bastards dead” (4.2.19), Buckingham “hesitates, unable to muster the moral courage that his role as adviser requires” (Miola 86). And this play about tyranny and resistance is also the culmination of a vendetta. Here Queen Margaret finally gets revenge on the house of York:Â€“I am hungry for revenge, / And now I cloy me with beholding it” (4.4.61–62). The closing scenes riot in revenge ghosts, as Richard dreams that “the souls of all that I had murdered / Came to my tent, and every one did threat / Tomorrow’s vengeance on the head of Richard” (5.5.158–60). He fears “lest I revenge myself upon myself” (5.5.140). But the agent of vengeance is Richmond, whose troops “sweat to put a tyrant down” (5.5.209). Hamlet’s despotic Claudius presides over a heavily fortified police stateÂ€ – no one enters or leaves without permission. His accession to power, bypassing young Hamlet, was smoothed by compliant, non-resistant advisors like Polonius, whom he publicly thanks for having “freely gone / With this affair along” (1.2.15–16). He spies on subjectsÂ€– an early warrantless wiretappingÂ€ – and suborns Laertes to murder Hamlet. He constantly fears insurrection, and his worry over the people’s “whispers / For good Polonius’ death” seems justified:Â€Laertes, in an insurrection, “o’erbears your officers. The rabble call him lord,” crying “Choose we! Laertes shall be king” (4.5.78–79, 98–102). It is not revolution, though, He mistakenly suspects the king, rather then the future tyrant Richard, of authorizing his murder. 10 I am indebted to Ryan Hackenbracht for bringing this use of resistance theory to my attention. 9


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that topples Claudius, but a lone assassin. Hamlet deals the multiple blows dear to revenge tragedy (stabbing and poison), as if to emphasize by an over-Â�determined killing that he acts on behalf of the many. Political assassination and filial revenge coincide. King Lear, though not a classic revenge tragedy, says much about vengeance. Revenge proves that heaven exists:Â€ “This shows you are above, / You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily can venge” (4.2.46–48).11 And Richard Strier makes a strong case that Lear systematically presents the evils of unconditional obedience (Oswald’s toxic execution of Goneril’s commands; the Captain’s obediently killing Cordelia) and the worthiness of principled resistance (the perilous truth-speaking of Cordelia, Kent, and the Fool; Gloucester’s risking torture to aid Lear; the servant’s resistance to the torture of Gloucester). Lear, Strier notes, refers several times to the paradox of principled disobedience as a higher form of loyalty.12 In The Second Maiden’s Tragedy the “new usurping Tyrant” (opening stage direction) compares himself with Herod (4.3.129–32). He relishes cruelty, taunting the rightful heir:Â€“The worst part’s coming! / Thy banishment were gentle, were that all” (1.1.106–9). The tyrant plans to seize his lady. When armed men surround her home to bear her to his lustful embrace, she kills herself. For the long line of Lucrece imitators who met defilement with suicide, death ended a woman’s tyrant problems. Not so here:Â€the tyrant skulks into the cathedral at night and carries off her body. Her ghost watches him slavering over her corpse.13 With necrophilia to be reckoned with, a poor maiden can’t count even on dying to preserve her virtue. Luckily, her true love anoints the corpse’s face with poisoned rouge, and the tyrant dies kissing. The true love enthrones her, crowning Other examples:Â€“revenging gods” (2.1.44); “vengeance, plague, death, confusion!” (2.2.260); “all the stored vengeances of heaven fall / On her ingrateful top!” (2.2.327–8); “you unnatural hags, / I will have such revenges on you” (2.2.444–5); “these injuries the king now bears will be revenged home” (3.3.10–11); “I will have my revenge ere I depart his house” (3.5.1); “the revenges we are bound to take upon your traitorous father” (3.7.6–7); “the wingèd vengeance overtake such children” (3.7.64); “I live / To thank thee for the love thou showed’st the King, / And to revenge thine eyes” (4.2.62–64). 12 Patterson explores the play’s political daring more topically: 11

King James was regaled by a play whose protagonist was an elderly monarch whose hobby was hunting, whose retinue was distinctive in its foregrounding of a Fool, who during the central acts is evidently insane, and whose authoritarian views ultimately destroyed himself and his entire family … The audience would quickly have realized that the archaic setting was a ruse to permit analysis of a particular … ideology of monarchy. (Shakespeare 106) 13 “Corpse-infatuation,” Lancashire mildly observes, “was a not uncommon theme in Jacobean literature” (27).

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her queen, her ghost serving as attendant to her own corpse. To pack the house by outdoing, say, The Revenger’s Tragedy, staged by the same company four or five years earlier, a dramatist had to elevate his plot fairly far Over The Top. This play has been damned even deeper than most revenge plays.14 But sensationalism does not invalidate audience satisfaction at a tyrant’s overthrow, and the play’s interest in “lust, intrigue, usurpation, and tyranny” would have had “particular resonance at the court of King James”; a censor cut many mentions of regicide and topical references tying the action too closely to James’ court (Dutton 195–6, Clare, Art Made Tongue-Tied 179–86).15 The kingdom rejoices that the tyrant is “gone, / And all the kingdom’s evils perish with him” (5.2.209–10, 218–19). And again, not all Renaissance avengers die:Â€this one regains his throne and lives as happily ever after as a ruler can live, with a rouged corpse as consort. Fletcher’s Valentinian misleads the audience. Maximus, appearing to occupy the role of avenger, is unmasked as despicable:Â€ he reflects “If I rise, / My wife was ravished well” (5.3.39–40), frames a confidant with a forgery, and removes the evil emperor only to become an evil emperor himself. In a late-play surprise, two noble avengers emergeÂ€– Aretus and EudoxaÂ€– the latter poisoning Maximus’ triumphal bay wreath. Justifiable tyrannicide is a central theme. Valentinian, cruel “like Nero,” prefers “to be feared for blood, than loved” (1.3.146, 151). His pacifism has ruined RomeÂ€– a jibe at the pacific King James? When a subject demands justice, he snarls, “Justice shall never hear ye; I am justice” (3.1.34). The subject calls for “vengeance”Â€– a coup by soldiers “tired with thy tyrannies” (3.1.43, 51). Valentinian lives in fear, as resistance writers claimed tyrants always did:Â€“Danger? where? / Double our guard” (4.1.85–87). In a resistance debate, even the “obedient” speaker opposes resistance only because assassination imperils the state: Were it not hazard, And almost certain loss of all the Empire, I would join with ye; were it any man’s But his life, that is life of us, he lost it For doing of this mischief:Â€I would take it, And to your rest give ye a brave revenge. But as the rule now stands, and as he rules … E.g. Barker 115; Schoenbaum, Middleton’s Tragedies 51–58; Bowers, Elizabethan 276. Yet the contemporary Maid’s Tragedy, with its assassinated king, went uncensored:Â€“Authors must have found the interventions of authority bewilderingly unpredictable” (Worden, “Literature” 49). Censors behaved like Fortuna.

14 15

Resistance in the golden age of revenge plays One pillar failing, all must fall. I dare not. … On foreign foes We are our own revengers, but at home On princes that are eminent and ours, ’Tis fit the gods should judge us.

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(3.3.146–58)16

But his fear proves unfounded:Â€ even after two emperors are assassinated, Rome does not crumble. Citizens, noting cheerfully that “Rome yet has many noble heirs,” assemble to elect a new emperor (5.8.117). In Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, Baligny and Renel lament current tyranny and aristocratic corruption, yearning for a republican golden age when the meanest subject enjoyed liberty.17 Baligny later discusses Seneca, Brutus, and resistance theory. The hero, stoical Clermont, advises the Guise on virtue and liberty; they high-mindedly discuss merit versus birth and also plan revenge on an earl, Montsurry, who murdered Bussy in the previous play. Actually a royal spy, Baligny double-crosses the Guise and Clermont. Shamelessly flattering the king, he avers that kings, like God, are above the law, free to commit what seems evil to mere mortalsÂ€ – a reminder, in this villain’s mouth, that God is vulnerable to comparison with tyrants. Among other absolutists, three captains, ordered to ambush Clermont, confess that he doesn’t deserve this, but believe that “all true subjects” should obey “without disputing” (3.1.16). Palace guards, ordered to kill the Guise, chime in unison, “Our duties bind us; he is now but dead” (5.2.35). Clermont’s own absolutism hobbles him as an avenger:Â€“Acts that are done by kings are not ask’d why” (3.2.205). Charlotte scorns Stoicism:Â€“A D’Ambois bear in wrong so tame a spirit!” (3.2.117). She is assured, “There will be time enough / For all the vengeance your great spirit can wish … / Death delayed is a redoubled death” (3.2.118–26). Not for nothing did resistance writers prefer a lone assassin:Â€these four revengers lack leadership. The women suffer no qualms:Â€they plot to “cut short off these long and dull delays” (5.3.8). But things go badly until, in Act 5, Bussy’s ghost rises to urge revenge. To him, “Justice, whose almighty word / Measures the bloody acts of impious men” (5.1.5–6) is one with revenge. After he takes charge, Clermont finally kills Montsurry. The other debater “insists on merit as the proper basis of command, an argument that in its extreme makes all obedience voluntary” (Allman 65). Classic republicans often accused tyrants’ courts of “overconcern with appearance (elegant clothes, expensive jewelry … wigs, perfumes …), gaudy display of luxury and wealth … moral decadence (sexual infidelity and license, drunkenness, perversion)” (Sheldon 20)Â€ – much like revenge-tragedy courts.

16

17

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(Conventions receive an original twist:Â€in the final duel, Montsurry plays possum, recognizing that no true avenger will kill a swordsman in the fetal position.) But the tyrant is at large. The Guise dies denouncing him; but owing to Clermont’s absolutist scruplesÂ€ – “There’s no disputing with the acts of kings; / Revenge is impious on their sacred persons” (5.5.151–2)Â€– the tyrant goes free and gets the last word. As a revenger, Clermont is an exemplum horrendum. His long-winded Stoicism creates delay beyond Hamlet’sÂ€ – he never does kill the king. His republican praise of civic virtue is yoked by violence with obstinate absolutism. He makes sexist remarks to Charlotte, who loves him enough to cry herself blind worrying about him. Even this supernaturally devoted lady grows so exasperated by his delay that she takes action herselfÂ€ – a “votist of revenge,” she will be an example “to all you bungling, foggy-spirited men” (3.2.164–6). Clermont’s misogyny may reflect homoeroticismÂ€– he loves the Guise so deeply that he commits suicide to join him in the afterlife. Told that the Guise has only one small blemish, Clermont can’t think of any, and needs reminding that he ordered the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. This was a primal event for Protestant resistance writers:Â€the Vindiciae’s authors narrowly escaped it. Chapman had ties to the Sidney circle, which agitated for England to avenge the massacre militarily. Clermont defends it:Â€what might be “heinous” to “a brutish sense” is not so to “a manly reason” (2.1.206–7). And Clermont, a die-hard Catholic, thinks French Protestants got what they deserved:Â€“Religious Guise” would not have massacred them “had faith and true religion been preferred” (2.1.233–4). Clermont strikes even the Halletts, who normally smile upon the non-vengeful, as a “paragon of prigs” (272). This papist who supports massacres, insults women, and tolerates tyrants seems designed to shift audience sympathy toward characters who are not reluctant revengers. Daniel’s Philotas stages the doom of a naïve resister. Conspiring against Alexander the Great, he is tortured and executed, his treason revealed by his mistress in revenge for his preferring his wife to her. His resistance appears justified. Alexander makes a show of respect for lawÂ€– Philotas must “have his trial”Â€– but prejudges his guilt:Â€“Let him make the best of his bad cause” (4.2.1370–1). He pays lip service to a defendant’s right to speakÂ€– “let him speak at large”Â€– but qualifies this stance:Â€“So long as you remember he doth hate / … our glory and the state” (4.2.1381–3). A Persian welcomes Alexander to the world of oriental despotism:Â€“You civil Greeks, / You great contrivers of free governments. / … / Your kings are but the same / As are our sovereign tyrants of the east.” While a satrap’s


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frown spells death, a Greek ruler “proceeds by form of law t’effect his end”Â€– but it is only a “form,” and serves “his end.” A Greek cynically replies, “Ah, but it satisfies the world, and we / Think that well done which [is] done by law” (5.1.1768–80, 1797–8). Many plays of revenge’s golden age feature principled regicide. In The Atheist’s Tragedy, The Maid’s Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and Women Beware Women tyrants expropriate a woman’s body, a synecdoche for other rights violations. One sends a subject to war, then kills his father and confiscates his estate (Atheist’s Tragedy). One plans to send an inconvenient subject on a dangerous voyage (Women Beware Women). One assassin, killing an insane tyrant on his own initiative, loftily reports, “Touched with a feeling of my country’s good / I dipped my dagger in his royal blood”; all onstage cry gratefully, “The Queen shall crown thee” (Cynthia’s Revenge 5.8.21–25). Responding to human rights violations, revenge here is resistance. Pl a y w r ig h t s a s R e s i s t e r s Some Senecan translators engaged in political resistanceÂ€ – Heywood joined an attempt to overthrow ElizabethÂ€– and some resistance writers advanced beyond armchair theory. Goodman, that “furious hot spirit” (Anthony à Wood i:Â€ 721), joined in a conspiracy to kill Mary Tudor (Garrett 163), and Buchanan helped depose the Queen of Scots. Knox preached a sermon igniting insurrection (R. Mason xxi). Parsons plotted an invasion of England and the assassination of Elizabeth (Bossy 144–6, 149–50). And Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge plays often issued from politically dissident authors. What little is known about Kyd, in whose Spanish Tragedy a duke and crown prince are killed, is intriguingly resistant. Erne cautiously makes a case for his being a Catholic (51–55).18 Kyd got into serious trouble in 1593. As London seethed with anti-alien unrest, sparked by a Parliamentary bill barring resident aliens from retailing, the Privy Council investigated menacing verses posted on the Dutch church. Kyd came under suspicion, and his lodgings were raided. Rather than anti-immigrant verses, however, officers found a document questioning Christ’s divinity.19 Radical religious ideas are unsurprising in Kyd:Â€ The Spanish Tragedy entertains religious doubt. But facing serious heresy charges, Kyd said the document belonged to his room-mate, revenge-play author Marlowe, whose 18

â•‡ See also Bowers, “Kyd’s Pedringano.” â•‡ See Briggs; Buckley; A. Freeman (“Marlowe”; Thomas Kyd 25–32).

19

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possession of radical literature makes even more sense, given his plays’ challenge to religious orthodoxy. Richard Baines charged that Marlowe called St. Paul timid “in bidding man to be subject to magistrates against his conscience” (98), a clear reference to the bugbear of resistance writers, Romans 13:Â€ 1 (“be subject unto the higher powers”). Alan Sinfield holds that Dr. Faustus indicts the Calvinist God (230–7), Michael Keefer that revisions to Faustus belatedly imposed Christian mercy on a text that bleakly foregrounds divine wrath. Marlowe’s biography provides much evidence of a resistant, uncontainable personality. His blasphemies and heterodox sexualityÂ€– too familiar to need rehearsingÂ€– resisted the state and its church.20 And Robert Poley, present at his violent death, was in government employ. Did Marlowe ultimately resist the Crown that may once have employed him as a spy? Chapman, in whose Revenge of Bussy a squad of righteous avengers assassinate an earl, had intriguing links with such dissident figures as Marlowe (whose “Hero and Leander” he completed), the Sidney family (he may have fought in the Netherlands under Robert Sidney, and wrote sonnets to family members), and the religiously radical Sir Walter Raleigh and his astronomer/magician associate Harriot (Spivack 15, 25). Bussy D’Ambois’ protagonist comes into conflict with his monarch and challenges his own place in the social hierarchy. Caesar and Pompey criticizes absolutism, as Caesar ripens into tyranny. The Widow’s Tears glances satirically at King James’ monopolies and marketed knighthoods. Monsieur D’Olive criticizes expensive embassies, monopolies, upstart knights. In the collaborative Eastward Ho, a satiric scene on James’ knighthood-peddling got the dramatists clapped into prison (20). Soon after his release, Chapman unregenerately floated (when king and court were out of town) The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron, on the attempted assassination of France’s Henri IV, a Huguenot who converted to Catholicism in 1593. The French ambassador angled to have Chapman imprisoned; some actors were jailed. Chapman lay low, and the play was eventually printed in mutilated form.21 The play also “clearly paralleled Byron with Essex, two great soldiers condemned for treason” (Dutton 185). Chabot’s plot runs perilously close to the trial of royal favorite Robert Carr (Spivack 22), and a lost Chapman play “openly satirized King James” (Dutton 182). Nicholas Davidson situates him “within a documented tradition of anti-Christian thought” (142). 21 Eccles 193, Spivack 21. In a risky reference in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy to the same event, and to the torture of the assassin, the censor changed “the Frenchman’s tortures” to “extremest tortures” (Dutton 198). 20


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Daniel was haled before the Privy Council for Philotas, which alluded closely to the recent Essex rebellion (Dutton 165–71). It was printed with a nervous “Apology”:Â€ although “beholding” to Essex’s “bounty,” Daniel insisted that any resemblance was purely coincidental. Shakespeare also took a risk in praising Essex in a Henry V chorus. Patterson marvels “that he should have chosen to insert so tendentious a passage” into a play already suspect “by virtue of its historical subject”; he alluded to “Elizabeth’s intransigent favorite only weeks after Hayward’s History had been called in for doing the same thing” (Shakespeare 85). Fletcher’s revenge plays on royal power abuse, The Maid’s Tragedy and Valentinian, and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy which may be his, “appeared at the end of James’ first decade of rule, when his financial struggles with Parliament prompted him to emphasize” his divine right (Allman 38).22 The Maid’s Tragedy staged a regicide, shortly after Henri IV’s assassination in 1610 caused James to fear for his safety. Dale B. J. Randall calls Fletcher a “specialist in tyrannical rulers” (118). In the many tyrants onstage from about 1607 on, Robert Y. Turner sees unease with James:Â€subjects feared “being trapped under a bad monarch” (134). In Cupid’s Revenge, middleclass subjects revolt against a tyrant, rescuing from the scaffold a man unjustly condemned; soldiers vow to “revenge” political wrongs (5.1.301). Philaster criticizes the divine right of kings. In A King and No King, a tyrant is deposed; the king in The Double Marriage “equals all precedents of tyranny” (1.1.84); in A Wife for a Month, a tyrant’s absolutist moves are foiled. Valentinian, Bonduca, and Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt obliquely criticize James’ non-support of continental Protestants. The bishop of London tried to stop production of the last, and the extant mark-up by the censor deletes a scene of subjects manhandling a prince, annotating “IÂ€like not this,” and deletes a stirring speech on “ancient freedoms” possibly aimed at James’ divine-right claims (Howard-Hill; Dutton 212, 22

Revisionist historian Glenn Burgess distinguishes absolutism from arbitrary governmentÂ€– James was constrained by his sacred oath to uphold the law. Burgess denies any “rise of absolutism” during the Stuart era (9), trusting in “royal self-limitation” and divine sanctionÂ€– taken seriously, since “divine punishment … was an accepted fact of life” (19). The argument resembles that of modern free-enterprise advocates insisting that environmental controls be voluntary, left to the conscience ofÂ€– sayÂ€– lumber companies. He admits that Charles I’s behavior tested the limits of voluntary compliance. (So did Mary Tudor’s.) Like many, Burgess unfairly dismisses resistance theorists as a tiny lunatic fringe. Many Renaissance writers would disagree strenuously with his distinction between absolutism and tyranny; they often cited Cicero’s dictum that merely possessing absolute power was tyranny. Smith’s De Republica Anglorum “suggests that all absolute power is inherently ‘tyrannical’” (Bushnell 45). Edward Sexby (see Chapter 8) argues that “though a master does not tyrannize, yet ’tis a most miserable thing that ’tis in his power to do so if he will” (18).

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215). As censorship attests, plays were taken seriously as political activism, “perceived … as political” (Bushnell 162).23 Fletcher came by resistance naturally. His grandfather was a friend of martyrologist John Foxe, and his father, an early Reformation minister, was imprisoned during Mary’s reign. Rye, where John grew up, openly opposed her government. His uncle Giles Fletcher was involved in the Essex rebellion (McMullan 1–12). Massinger, whom I include in this chapter although his work spans the reigns of both James I and Charles I, wrote the revenge plays The Duke of Milan (a duke is poisoned) and The Double Marriage (rebellion is called “revenge,”24 citizens shake off “the tyrant’s yoke” crying “liberty, liberty, liberty!”, and rebels fear dying “unrevenged,” without seeing “our country free” [5.1.152, 4.1.24–25]). The Roman Actor deals with tyranny and revenge. Massinger had a resistant track record.25 The censor blocked performance of Believe as You List for its “dangerous matter”Â€– the deposing of a king (Dutton 90); Philip Edwards finds in it a critique of Charles’ incipient absolutism (“Royal Pretenders”). The Bondman explores “governmental tyranny” (Patterson, Censorship 85) and may satirize the royal favorite Buckingham (Dutton 205). In the wildly popular A New Way to Pay Old Debts, the dastardly monopolist Overreach taps into popular resentment of monopolies, which rested on royal prerogative and were “beyond the jurisdiction of the common law courts”; a sharp increase in monopolies “provoked widespread and scathing criticism in the parliaments of 1597 and 1601” (Peltonen 104). And in The King and the Subject, Massinger intervened pugnaciously in the furore over Charles I’s exaction of forced loans, which fueled resistance ultimately leading to his Certainly London considered plays political, and playhouses as fomenters of “mutiny.” In 1597 the mayor and aldermen petitioned the Privy Council for total suppression of playhouses because interrogated apprentices and servants revealed that “stage plays were the very places of their rendezvous” with those involved in “mutinous attempts” (Dutton 107). The authors of Sir Thomas More attempted to stage the anti-alien Evil May Day riots at a time when London was a tinderbox of anti-immigrant violence and Parliament was debating restrictions on immigrant retailing (ca. 1593). The censor heavily crossed out sections of the manuscript, writing, “Leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof ”; authors were to reduce scenes of rioting to “a short report and not otherwise, at your own perils” (Dutton 82–83). He crossed out two strong references to insurrection as revenge:Â€“It is hard when Englishmen’s patience must be thus jetted on by strangers, and they dare not to revenge their own wrongs”; and “Must these wrongs be thus endured? / Let us step in, and help to revenge their injury” (1.1.25–27, 35–36). 24 E.g., 2.1.88; 2.5.3; 4.1.15; 4.4.73; 5.3.44, 64, 80, 85–86, 122. Recalling resistance theory’s condemnation of non-resistant subordinates, the play’s rebel/revenger criticizes the tyrant for selecting “men that only do what he commands, / And search no further” (4.1.53–54). 25 Even Allen Gross, who testily dismisses most of Massinger’s topical allusions as identified by other scholars, admits that his plays critique domestic taxation and non-intervention in the Thirty Years’ War. 23


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overthrow. Only one speech survivesÂ€– preserved, ironically, by the censor. Charles himself wrote “this is too insolent, and to be changed” on the script where a king informs subjects, “Moneys? We’ll raise supplies what ways we please, / And force you to subscribe to blanks” (Dutton 91). In this outstanding example of resistance via stage play, a dramatist pillories a specific power abuse and the king himself silences the play.26 The eighteenth century recalled Massinger as one who “boldly attacked the faults of ministers and of kings”; he assailed Carr and Buckingham, James and Charles; he opposed “arbitrary power” and refused to embrace “the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance” (Thomas Davies, in Edwards/Gibson i:Â€liii). Massinger may have been a Catholic (Lawless 63), which would have acquainted him with political oppression. Another possible Catholic was Beaumont, who collaborated with Fletcher on Philaster with its critique of Jamesian autocracy, on A King and No King with its deposed tyrant, and on the revenge play The Maid’s Tragedy, in which Amintor espouses royal absolutism although he knows the king is cuckolding himÂ€– hardly a defense of divine right. His mother came from a recusant family, and many relatives had been persecuted. No baptismal records exist for the four Beaumont siblings, suggesting secret baptisms by a Catholic priest. Even Shakespeare, author of many revenge plays, might have been a secret Catholic:Â€hidden in the roof of his birthplace was his father’s testament of Catholicism, and during a crackdown on Catholics his daughter was haled before the authorities with a group of recusants for failure to attend Anglican services.27 Prince Charles’ journey to Spain in 1623 to negotiate a Catholic marriage went over as well with the public as had the possibility of Elizabeth’s marrying the Catholic duke of Alençon, and when Charles returned brideless, celebratory bonfires burned all over London (Cogswell 7); many subjects rejoiced in print (Limon 99, n. 3). The Globe’s allegorical satire on the affair, A Game at Chess, ran for nine days (the longest run in the era) before the Privy Council shut it down.28 Its author, Thomas Middleton, also wrote the revenge plays Women Beware Women and The Revenger’s Tragedy, in which dukes are killed. As Gary Taylor notes: Massinger also probably collaborated with Fletcher on the resistant Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt. 27 Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare 41–46, 234. Although the “testament” is suggestive, nothing definitive can be established on the basis of its evidence, since the original document, discovered in 1757, has now disappeared. 28 As Margot Heinemann notes, “There was a large and profitable audience for ‘opposition’ drama:Â€otherwise the companies would hardly have risked staging it” (70). 26

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The biggest box-office success and most talked-about dramatic work of its era, [A Game at Chess] survives in more manuscripts than any other play … Accounts of it were dispatched to Brussels, The Hague, Madrid, Florence, Rome, and Venice. Middleton went into hiding, pursued by a warrant; his son, Edward, was arrested and brought before the privy council; Middleton himself claimed, in a poem to King James, that he was imprisoned “in the Fleet.” None of his extant plays can be convincingly dated after August 1624, and he was probably released on condition that he stopped writing for the stage. (“Middleton” xxxviii:Â€84)

Under a Protestant king flirting with Catholicism, Middleton’s position resembled that of Protestants resisting a Catholic marriage for Elizabeth. “In the 1620s Middleton’s religious politics became increasingly oppositional” as “the national church and royal family were moving away from Calvinist positions” (G. Taylor, “Middleton” xxxviii:Â€ 80).29 He risked a prison term and possibly ended his career, to criticize the monarch. John Day, whose Humor out of Breath, Law Tricks, and The Travails of Three English Brothers include revenge themes, wrote the Isle of Gulls, 1606, commenting on James’ “extravagance towards favorites, the shortages of the Exchequer … and the unpopular means by which he sought to replenish them, including imposts and patents” (Dutton 180). Day was haled before the Privy Council, and a number of the actors were imprisoned. Of Fulke Greville, author of the tyrant-ridden Alaham and Mustapha, Christopher Hill writes, “His public persona … was that of devoted servant to Elizabeth, James I and Charles I. But in his Life of Sidney and his poems and plays,” he “warns continually of the dangers of the drift towards absolutism, arguing consistently for parliamentary control over taxation” (“Political Discourse” 43–44). The plays have “fostered Greville’s reputation as a subversive thinker” (Wilkes 399). Alaham expresses tyrantresistance as “just revenge” of some “magnificence,” and “a voice cries out, Revenge, and Liberty” (3.5.14, 3.4.15). Finally, Webster, author of the vengeance-soaked White Devil and Duchess of Malfi, in which dukes are killed, wrote much about resistance. The lost Caesar’s Fall must have staged the tyrant-slayer Brutus. Henslowe paid Webster for “a play called Lady Jane” (218); some form may survive as Sir Thomas Wyatt, on a revolt against Mary Tudor. He likely also wrote a lost play on Alessandro de’ Medici (whose assassination Michelangelo celebrated with a bust of Brutus); a fragment was discovered 29

Among other dissident traces, “cuts were made in Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent to remove references to the poverty of the common people and to the vulnerability of even an usurping king to revolt by the commons” (C. Hill, “Censorship” 38).


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in 1985 (Hammond lviii:Â€ 290). The lost Guise may have dealt with the Huguenot massacre. And Webster reworked Appius and Virginia, a tyrant tale which, like A Game at Chess the same year, offers a veiled critique of Buckingham. Revenge dramatists were not cheap sensationalists. Some were religiously dissident and several risked imprisonment to criticize a regime. These feisty dramatists declined to write what the powerful wanted to hear. Many revenge plays stage violence in the service of resistance. S e x ua l T y r a n n y While resistance theory stresses the religious, economic, and political, revenge-play tyranny is usually sexual. To Ponet, tyrants debase currency (84) and put “great taxes … on drink” on the pretext of public health, really seeking “their own private profit” (81). Revenge-play tyrants more typically pursue a woman:Â€“Political repression is reconfigured as sexual assault” (Allman 48). Rulers variously rape a military commander’s wife (Valentinian), poison a woman who resists ducal lust (Revenger’s Tragedy), sexually assault women (Atheist’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women), violate a revenger’s sister (Duke of Milan). But sexual predation does not preclude serious political comment. Not only revenge plays but a wider Renaissance culture associated power abuse with lechery; in fact, that holds true in western culture from Lucrece to Lewinski.30 For Plato, a tyrant gives in to “excessive desire, which unseats the sovereignty of reason” (Bushnell 9). In the Mirror for Magistrates, Richard II’s ghost confesses that he “ruled all by lust” (Sig. [c5]). In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “sexualized politics,” the king’s private life is “a microcosm of his government”; Valentinian’s emperor “reproduces all the conventions of the lustful tyrant” (Bushnell 164). A ruler’s sexual excess was shorthand for many kinds of out-ofcontrol behavior. Prose resistance writers did tax Henry VIII and Mary Queen of Scots with unrestrained sexuality;31 but they also condemned religious As James Grantham Turner observes, sex has been a metaphor for politics “at least since St. Augustine equated erection with rebellion” (xv). Various kinds of “sexually charged carnival,” including “charivaris, horn-displays, ‘satyrical’ tableaux, and lampoons,” protest “abuses of power” (62). I would add sexually charged revenge plays. The constitutional crises of 1640 interwove “the political and the sexual at every level” (74). To a culture used to “contact between lowlibertine ribaldry and serious commentary on politics” (77), revenge plays’ sexual sensationalism could embrace serious political comment. 31 And Catholic resisters to Elizabeth’s favorite, Leicester, charged that “his lust … surpasseth not only Sardanapalus and Nero, but even Heliogabalus … No man’s wife can be free from 30

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persecution, unfair taxation, confiscation of property. They too were heirs to a tradition linking tyranny and lust, but didn’t limit their perspective to the sexual. Revenge plays sometimes dramatize non-sexual power abuse:Â€ in The Atheist’s Tragedy, a tyrant seizes both the hero’s lady and his estate. Still, revenge plays’ more heavily sexual emphasis has obscured their alignment with resistance and led to disrespect for the plays as merely salacious. The sexual, however, can be highly political. Some tyrants are foolishly uxorious or promiscuous. But it was tales of a ruler assailing a powerless subject that fascinated the Renaissance. The stories of Tarquin and Lucrece, David and Bathsheba, Appius and Virginia, Susanna and the elders, Edward IV and Jane Shore were told and retold. Tyrant and besieged female subject became stock figures:Â€The Second Maiden’s Tragedy calls one The Tyrant, the other The Lady. Richard Helgerson teases out a pattern:Â€English domestic drama, Dutch genre painting, and Spanish peasant drama often present a non-aristocratic family “disrupted by a sexually predatory intruder,” usually “from the sphere of the state:Â€a soldier, a courtier, a leading aristocrat, or even the king” (Adulterous Alliances 4). A violated woman encodes conflicts between newly consolidating royal power and local power guarding traditional liberties. Her non-aristocratic home represents “municipal rights or the rights of man,” while monarchy is “the external other from which … those rights must be won” (6–7). Jane Shore, “a London wife seduced by one king, Edward IV, and harshly punished by another, Richard III” (33–34), was highly popular. In More’s account “her merriness, her goodness in power, her dignity in suffering, and her bourgeois nearness to More’s London audience” (37) gain great sympathy. A whole genre, the female complaint, coalesced around her, and Helgerson traces dozens of other besieged-woman tales. In Lope de Vega and Calderón, social inferiors take revenge on “criminally abusive” superiors; “not even the greatest lord can justly lay claim to the wife of another man, however lowly” (Helgerson 124, 134). In English domestic plays and poetry of home-violation, husbands and fiancés of violated women practice patriotic self-denial. But in English revenge tragedy, as in Spanish drama, they kill. Helgerson fears that theatrical revenge is only a “‘private’ expression of offended honor,” not committed to “fundamental change that would him.” Such is “the tempest of his tyranny”; and “always is his power above law” (Leicester’s Commonwealth 86–88, 102, 107). When the monarchy was restored in 1660, the sexually profligate Charles “literalized the old religious vocabulary of whoredom and fornication as synonyms for tyranny” (J. G. Turner 186).


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upset the familiar hierarchical relations” (147). But private and public interpenetrated. Father was analogous to king and God, the household a little kingdom, sexual violation a metaphor for an invaded state. I have elsewhere argued that England’s fear of invasion, especially in the Armada days, helps explain the literary prevalence of penetrated female bodies:Â€the ubiquitous Lucrece story, relentless cuckold jokes, Shakespeare’s four plays featuring a woman unjustly accused of adultery (“Palisading”). Endangered women are juxtaposed with beleaguered states. In Titus, a Roman woman is raped and dismembered, while barbarians combat and infiltrate Rome. In Cymbeline, a Roman villain creeps into a British princess’s bedchamber and Roman soldiers invade Britain. Within a nation, local interests tried to buttress traditional freedoms and privileges against a centralizing nation state and forceful monarchsÂ€– such as the TudorsÂ€– who came to seem like tyrants. In the phenomenally popular Lucrece story, a woman (representing the community?) is violated, and vengeful relatives expel tyrants, reasserting citizens’ rights. We may grant that revenge plays’ sensationalism didn’t simply cater to salacity, that besieged women represented a community threatened with power abuse. But why didn’t dramatists simply assail political abuses, rather than displacing them into sexual crimes? And why did they set plays in Italy or Spain, while prose resistance authors spoke plainly of England and Scotland? Quite simply, revenge tragedians lived in England and wrote for the censored London stage, while prose resistance authors shelled British rulers from the safety of continental presses. But Renaissance audiences sucked in allegorical interpretation with their mothers’ milk. Even the ponderous Polonius could by indirections find directions out. Censors tried to nip allegory in the bud, blue-penciling scripts and leaving theater people open to prosecution.32 But many a political comment 32

Although Dutton and Worden make a good case that Tudor and Stuart “political censorship was a good deal more liberal than it is sometimes given credit for being” (Dutton 86), Worden concedes that “writers were certain to be aware of the censor” and “their awareness of him is bound to have influenced the content of their writings” (“Literature” 45); Dutton concedes that we cannot know how much opinion “was totally excluded from the theater because no one would ever have thought of casting it in dramatic form, or if they had would never have had it accepted by an acting company, much less ‘allowed’ by the Master of the Revels” (93). Even old plays were not immune; as one censor wrote, “all old plays ought to be brought to the Master of the Revels … since they may be full of offensive things against church and state … in former times the poets took greater liberty than is allowed by me” (Gurr 289). Printed plays faced a churchcontrolled censor, and many that “attracted packed houses in the 1620s were not published” (C. Hill, “Censorship” 35). The dampening effect of knowing a play faces a gauntlet of royal and ecclesiastical censorship helps account for dramatists’ cloaking radicalism in revenge plots’ distracting sensationalism.

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got past them. The motif of royal sexual predation itself may have created a screen of deniability during some reignsÂ€– Mary and Elizabeth did not extort sex from middle-class subjects. Accusations of lust may have rolled like water off a duck’s back from morally relaxed Stuart kings33Â€– unlike direct political criticism. Then too, Tudors and Stuarts did not likely see themselves in malicious theatrical despots. And if they did, making a fuss might seem an admission of guilt. The golden age of English revenge dramaÂ€– the 1580s through James’ reignÂ€ – staged clamorous resistance and regicide. This drama was capable of serious dissidence, not mere sensationalism.34 Within a few years, Milton would see that the distinction between tyrant and good king unfortunately preserved monarchy as an institution. On that view, a revenger’s assassinating an evil ruler, though politically radical in championing resistance, did not challenge monarchy as a form of government. It is possible, though, that revenge-play tyrants’ comic-strip villainy was simply insurance against censorship. Reassuring the establishment that here was a bloody, sensational, sex-crazed pot-boiler with an unbelievably wicked fairy-tale ruler, dramatists got dissident plays onto the stage.35 Whether or not Tudor and Stuart authors challenged monarchy as an institution, that challenge lay in the very near future, and their dynamic king-slayings helped pave the way. When The Maid’s Tragedy was banned during the Restoration, it was apparently because of its regicide, not its lustful kingÂ€ – who didn’t seem to bother Charles II at all. (See Hume 486, 488–9.) 34 A number of writers nervously retail anecdotes about revenge-play violence precipitating real-life violence. Both the antitheatrical Rainolds and the protheatrical Thomas Heywood repeat the tale of a classical Roman actor, “playing the part of Atreus in a tragedy,” who “grew to such a rage by thinking how he might wreak his anger, and be revenged on Thyestes, that with his mace royal he struck one of the servants running by, and slew him” (Rainolds 112). Both opponents and supporters of plays recognized their potential for motivating real-world action. Heywood also relates the tale of a woman attending the revenge play Friar Francis (now lost), moved to confess poisoning her own husband by the appearance of a murdered husband’s ghost in the play (gv–g2). Hamlet dramatizes the catalytic action of stage revenge:Â€Hamlet is stirred to vengefulness by watching the rehearsal of a vengeful play, The Murder of Gonzago. 35 Worden takes the prevalence of political assassination on stage as evidence of royal toleration of dissent (“Literature” 53); I read it as dramatists’ success in couching resistance in genres, settings, and modes not easy to attack. Dutton notes that “a successful actor like Edward Alleyn lived to a rich and pious old age, the benefactor of Dulwich College; the Earl of Pembroke described Richard Burbage as ‘my old acquaintance’”; he comments drily, “Such men were not self-evidently anti-establishment vagabonds” (24). But this is a false dichotomy:Â€ principled resisters inhabited many social strataÂ€– Ponet was a bishopÂ€– and need not be imagined as “vagabonds.” 33

Ch apter 8

Revenge and regicide:Â€the Civil War era

Only forty years after the stage revolts of Hamlet and the revenge plays, Charles I and his court were driven from London. The sons of apprentices who hissed Webster’s corrupt Dukes and Cardinals on the stage defeated the cavalier armies in the field. J. W. Lever

All is not lostÂ€– the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield. John Milton, Paradise Lost

In the mid seventeenth century English radicalism boiled over into Â�revolution, the monarchy was abolished, and a republic founded. During the Civil War, culminating in the public execution of the king, major Tudor resistance writings were reprinted, and new writers resisted the republic as it began to resemble monarchy. Ousted royalists, now in opposition, took up resistance writing. And revenge plays again thrived. When a 1638 court upheld the legality of the king’s exaction of “ship money,” judges “affirming the absolute power of the monarch” (Hudson 209), the public uproar may have sparked the reissue in 1639 of Ponet’s Short Treatise; as the Civil War began in 1642, it was reissued again. In 1643 Buchanan’s Baptistes appeared in its first English translation as TyrannicalGovernment Anatomized.1 Randall, noting the “no-holds-barred title,” remarks its fresh relevance:Â€this “play about kingship, religion gone bad, and martyrdom for true religion” offered in John the Baptist a figure to inspire a “reformist spirit” (103). Provocatively, a Parliamentary committee made a presentation of it to King Charles (99). The year before Charles was executed, Mornay and Languet’s Vindiciae appeared in English translation, in two separate editions. Buchanan’s anti-tyrannical history of Scotland also became a favorite republican text (Norbrook 94).

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Cromwell was familiar with Buchanan’s writings (Skinner ii:Â€348), and they were also implicated in a political assassination. The public habit of blaming the nation’s ills on the duke of Buckingham, favorite of James I and Charles I, was to some degree counter-productive to radical politics:Â€ scapegoating this subordinate vented frustration without serious challenges to the king or to monarchy as an institution.2 His offenses, however, were conspicuous:Â€ his backing of unpopular wars with huge casualties;3 his enthusiastic nepotism; his unsavory involvement in the duke of Somerset’s fall; the unfair access to the king and unethical mixing of political and sexual in his homoerotic relationship with James; his failed marriage-brokering for Prince Charles. James’ favors to him rankled:Â€ he alone “received rewards and offices equal to those received by Elizabeth’s entire peerage during her 45-year reign” (Holstun 152). In an age galled by unfairness, here was unmerited reward on a heroic scale. An earlier duke of Buckingham had revolted against a “tyrant king” (see Mirror for Magistrates, reissued 1620); how unlike his ancestor was this duke. Enter John Felton. His father had lost his position and died in debtors’ prison through the machinations of a royal advisor, whom Felton’s brother suspected of having poisoned himÂ€ – all very Italianate, oozing the ambience of revenge tragedy. Paternal ruin forced Felton into the army, where Buckingham slighted his loyal service; he was owed much backpay. Like stage revengers and the neglected soldiers common in the drama, Felton seethed with a sense of injury by an abusive power figure and developed a republican rationale for resisting. In 1628 he borrowed a copy of Buchanan’s anti-tyrannical Detection of the Actions of Mary Queen of Scots (he also owned a copy of Parliament’s anti-Buckingham remonstrance [Norbrook 53]), and wrote a self-justifying letter, spouting republican aphorisms (Holstun 166–71). Then he assassinated the duke. This met with general delight, and soldiers asked for Felton’s life to be spared. Among many celebratory poets, Owen Feltham called Felton a second Brutus (Holstun 178). Another, shocked that Felton’s executed body was left uncovered to rot, closed with the Latin Caelo tegitur qui non habet urnam (Heavens cover the graveless) from Lucan’s Pharsalia Buchanan noted that earlier Scottish aristocrats, to preserve their oath of allegiance to the king, proclaimed themselves opposed only to his wicked counselors. Christopher Hill traces in several European countries the fiction of blaming royal wrongdoing on subordinates (“Political Discourse” 45). The maneuver lost its rationale when resistance writers held subordinates accountable for resisting immoral orders. 3 “Perhaps one-third of the 50,000 men whom the king and Buckingham pressed into service between 1624 and 1628 died in battle, of wounds, or of disease” (Holstun 153–4). 2

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(7.819), criticizing Caesar for denying enemies proper burial. The phrase appears also in The Spanish Tragedy (3.13.19), “one of the greatest literary influences on Felton’s friends” (Holstun 186).4 Felton’s killing of a kingsurrogate nudged the nation closer to civil war. Hoi s t w i t h On e’s Ow n R e mons t r a nc e : Â€R e s i s ta nc e W r i t i ng of t h e C i v i l Wa r E r a The House of Commons officially resisted Charles in A Remonstrance of the State of the Kingdom (or Grand Remonstrance), 1641. It listed grievances:Â€ undue government influence by religious ideologues, unpopular wars waged without Parliamentary consent, prolonged suspensions of Parliament, imprisonment without bail of MPs, extortionate taxation, unfair monopolies, royal meddling in the legal system such as the dismissal of judges and lawyers, and cronyism that opened “a way of employment in places of great trust and advantage to men of weak parts” (10). The blood of an MP who died in prison “cries … for vengeance” (7). Having labored to cure these abuses, Parliament thought matters were under control; but now it notices backsliding toward tyranny. The title page trumpets, “resolved … by the House of Commons, that order shall be now given for the printing of this Remonstrance.” Holstun argues that printing this “critical review of Charles’ entire reign, before he had a chance to respond to it,” invited common readers to mutiny (107–8); indeed, the printing sparked London apprentice riots (Knoppers 76). Treatises for and against armed resistance to tyranny now rocketed from presses.5 When the Parliamentary army captured the king, for the first time in a century of resistance writing resisters had the upper hand; they demanded that he be put on trial. A Remonstrance of … Fairfax, Lord General of the Parliament’s Forces (the Army Remonstrance) taxes Charles with believing he is “above any human justice” (47); his an “unequal and partial way of justice” (50), against “public interest” (16). “Trusted with a limited power to rule according to laws,” he has “pervert[ed] that trust and abuse[d] that power” (21–22). Disposing of the idea that a covenant obliges citizens to obey the king (54) is child’s play for readers of An English translation of the line also appears in the revenge play Caesar’s Revenge (2.4.60), which appears to have drawn on Pharsalia. 5 For example, Henry Ferne’s Resolving of Conscience, upon this question, whether … [if a king] is bent or seduced to subvert religion, laws, and liberties, subjects may take arms and resist? and whether that case be now? declared a stiff “no”:Â€“The shedding of blood in the pursuit of this resistance is murder” (title page). He was anonymously rebutted in The Subject of Supremacy, drily subtitled The Right of Caesar. 4

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Goodman or Knox:Â€Charles’ “absolute tyrannical power” has “absolv[ed] the people from the bonds of covenant” (22). What enabled the move from lone assassins to putting the king on trial was that these resisters had an army. God delivered his verdict on Charles by letting the army capture him (24):Â€“God has given him into your power,” authors remind Parliament, “and given you clear grounds of proceeding against him” (56). To allay fears that regime change by military coup will hatch a new tyranny, considering itself “above law by the power of an army” (10), authors sketch a new constitution, with elections and broad representation. Language of vengeance and vindication abounds. God is a “severe avenger” of self-interested action and “vindicator” of public-spirited action (5). Although He is here both “avenger” and “vindicator,” the Remonstrance elsewhere reserves the Latinity of “vindicate” for justified resisters, applying the more anglicized “revenge” to the self-interested. The king takes “revenge” against “opposers” (30); reinstating him would expose his opponents “as sacrifices to his … revenge” (68).6 But the army has been “vindicating” itself, pursuing “the vindication of public interest” (10, 16, cf. 46); the kingdom must be “vindicated … and satisfied” (61). If “revenge” connotes stabbing, the loftier “vindicate” connotes discursive argument; and the temperature of “vindicate” is a few degrees cooler. Only at one of the Remonstrance’s most heated moments does the army “avenge”:Â€as the king prosecutes “a most unjust war,” how can the “public justice of the kingdom … be satisfied, the blood, rapine, etc. avenged … without judgement executed against him?” (24). The king should give “satisfaction” for his crimes, and “for further satisfaction … capital punishment may be speedily executed” on his agents (13, 63). “Satisfy” and “satisfaction”Â€ – those terms of closure in revenge playsÂ€ – here apply to prosecuting the king and paying the army’s arrears in wages (68). A group of clergymen answering the Remonstrance cited that bane of resistance writers, Romans 13:Â€1–4:Â€“Let every soul be subject to the higher powers … the powers that be are ordained of God; whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God” (A Serious and Faithful Representation 4). Parliament, the clerics pontificate, never intended to overthrow monarchy. But like earlier clerical resistance writers, other clerics stoutly defended the Army Remonstrance, instancing biblical Athaliah as a ruler rightfully killed (An Answer to the City’s Representation 16). By “wrong and injustice to the public” (4), Charles has forfeited any claim to Barry Coward considers fear of royal retaliation a major radicalizing force in the early 1640s (25).

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obedience. Why not discard an ancient form of government? they cheerfully inquireÂ€– is there virtue in mere oldness? Protestants have reformed the church drastically; why not start on the government? (3). They accuse A Serious … Representation of wrenching scripture out of context, rendering clerics as odious as lawyers (4). Commending Parliament and the army for good-faith efforts to negotiate the turbulent waters between tyranny and anarchy (7), they urge that the king be tried (12–13). Many were ambivalent about these upheavals, and William SedgwickÂ€– sometime Parliamentary army chaplainÂ€– excoriated the Army Remonstrance in one text and supported it in another. In Justice upon the Army Remonstrance, he presents harsh criticism as tough love, “vengeance to save you” (Sig. a2v)Â€ – a condign move, since revolutionaries pose as agents of divine vengeance. Sedgwick wishes they had left it to God:Â€“’Tis strange work, to be instruments of His vengeance” (Sig. a3v); “Why will you take it out of God’s hand? Doth not God know how to do it?” (20). He threatens vengeance:Â€“Judge not that ye be not judged (Matthew 7:Â€1). You have judged the king … for it you shall be judged:Â€I’ll judge you” (18). Reserving a lofty surrogate-divine revenge for himself, Sedgwick ascribes to the army a nasty, low-down form of revenge:Â€“malice, death, revenge” (3); “self-love, malice, revenge, envy” (16); “malice, ambition, and revenge” (22). That he views political resistance as revenge appears in his positing its converse as not obedience but forgiveness. He cites not Romans 13 against political resistance (“Be subject unto the higher powers”), but Romans 12 against revenge:Â€“Avenge not yourselves … Overcome evil with good” (12:Â€19, 21). He aligns resistance not with fractiousness as a failure of obedience, but with revenge as a failure of mercy. Condemning Charles without “mitigating mercy” (6), revolutionaries adopt Old Testament vengefulness:Â€“The blood of Christ … cries peace, reconciliation … The blood of Abel for revenge … You despise this rich mercy … and set up your merciless justice” (17–18). Public revenge is even worse than private:Â€ private revenge at least has precedents, “but to do the same thing (in fear and revenge to remove an adversary) … is an unparalleled wickedness” (41). Few authors used “revenge” so persistently to mean “political resistance.” Rebels have “torn a … kingdom in pieces,” “dissolv[ed] the foundations of government,” toppled king and lords and “set up the people” (Sigs. a3v, a3; 10). They can dish out revenge but can’t take it:Â€he mocks their fear that “the king will be revenged of you” (25). He hates their quantitative, bookkeeper’s devotion to proportionate crime and punishment. The Army Remonstrance charged the king with lacking “remorseÂ€… proportionable

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to the offense”; Sedgwick mocks the idea that such remorse might elicit “a proportionable tenderness” (20). Such feelings are immeasurable. Forgiveness cannot be exchanged for remorse:Â€ Christian forgiveness is free. As this deeply fissured society espoused both condign punishment and forgiveness, irreducible conflict between vengeance and amnesty enflamed the debate over what to do with the king. In A Second View of the Army Remonstrance, Sedgwick accepts a major tenet of the Remonstrance’s argument:Â€ military victory signals God’s favor. Power, he now believes, has justly passed to Parliament. Oxford rhetorical training would have equipped him to attack the army in one tract and defend it in another; readers were nonetheless perplexed by the volte face and suspected him of insanity. He did once prophesy that the world would end in two weeks (Sampson) and once claimed to be God (T. Burton, Diary i:Â€ 103–4); but during the polarized Civil War evenhandedness itself seemed insane. Since the king “abused” his authority, Sedgwick now writes, God “blasted His Majesty” (4–5). The army’s very violence incarnates divine vengeance:Â€ “The Lord is as a mighty man of war …for the day of vengeance is in my heart … a Day of vengeance” (26).7 Swords put the fear of God into sinners, and (he remarks with zest) “former swords have been too dull to cut up iniquity” (27). The army wields a “sword bathed in heaven, and executing the divine justice” (27). He concedes that “I shall seem to contradict myself in these two pieces”; but Old Testament prophets did the same. He has wielded, as in Psalm 149, “a two-edged sword, to kill and save, or to save with vengeance.” Responding to Sedgwick’s first blast, T. Collier’s A Vindication of the Army Remonstrance applies the same psalm to Parliament’s right to try the king:Â€“Let the saints be joyful … a two-edged sword in their hand, to execute vengeance” (5–7). He stresses verse 8 (omitted by Sedgwick):Â€“Bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron” (Sig. [a4]). Collier scorns Sedgwick’s recommendation that revolutionaries “sit down in silence, and let God alone to work”:Â€God’s vengeance employs human agents. He has always used men “as instruments in his hand, and they are his battle ax” (5). God never meant “judge not that ye be not judged” to apply to governmentÂ€– what are judiciaries for? (13–14). As for respecting the king’s rights, “Is it his right to oppress the people, to be absolute?” (15). Whether kings had absolute power was exactly the point at issue. The Stuart claim that a king answers only to God, Sedgwick supports and Cf. Jeremiah 46:Â€10:Â€“This is the day of the Lord God of hosts, a day of vengeance, that he may avenge him of his adversaries.”

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Collier dismisses as prima facie absurd, making the king “above law, without law, an absolute king, and a poor people, slaves” (28). Collier shrugs off violence:Â€“The Jews’ life in the land of Canaan was upheld by war, and their liberty obtained and continued in the ruin of many … it was the way of God; and often in the Old Testament was the people preserved in the ruin of others” (18). To call Christianity a religion of mercy is seriously to oversimplify:Â€“God is a God of mercy, ready to forgive, yet he will by no means clear the guilty, but will smite the hairy scalp of him that persists in his iniquity. Jesus Christ is exceeding severe, and just as well as merciful” (6). The adjective in Collier’s subtitle, A … Moderate Answer to Mr. Sedgwick’s Book, is dubious:Â€he is in a smiting humor. Sedgwick had best watch his own hairy scalp. Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates sets forth a radical program:Â€“It is lawful …for any who have the power to call to account a tyrant … and after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary magistrate have neglected or denied to do it” (subtitle). Milton denounces hesitance to try Charles:Â€amnesty to a “tyrant” guilty of “spilling of more innocent blood by far than ever Nero did” is “the mercy of wicked men … hazarding the welfare of a whole nation to have saved one” (iii:Â€193). Scorning the scruples of lily-livered clergymen (“the unmasculine rhetoric of any puling priest or chaplain” [iii:Â€195]), he sternly reminds the tenderhearted of Charles’ “massacres” of subjects, demanding violent retribution in a language of righteous revenge:Â€“The sword of justice is above him; in whose hand soever is found sufficient power to avenge … so great a deluge of innocent blood” (iii:Â€ 197).8 Grant Charles clemency and “many thousand Christians destroyed” will “lie unaccounted for,” their “slaughtered carcasses” crying for “vengeance against the living that should have righted them” (iii:Â€ 214). Milton fulminates darkly against advocates of clemency:Â€“They have blasphemed the vengeance of God” (iii:Â€242). As mounting charges lent Charles the revenge-play tyrant’s lurid air of melodramatic evilÂ€– he was accused of conspiring to poison his father (Charge of the Army 3)Â€– royalists at first responded feebly:Â€“His Majesty having received a copy of the … Remonstrance of the Army … declared Milton draws much from Tudor resistance writers and also sounds new notes. He sees deference to tyranny as internalized:Â€what obstructs resistance is “a double tyranny, of custom from without, and blind affections within” (iii:Â€190)Â€– political subservience as a dark obverse of the Puritan inner light. He argues that the word “peer” suggests that earlier in English history, aristocrats were the king’s equals. He daringly (puckishly?) remodels that bête noire of resistance theorists, Romans 13:Â€1–2, to omit all reference to civic obedience, even claiming that it authorizes individual political conscience.

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a great dislike thereof”; he wanly called on God, “to whom vengeance doth belong, to repay [the rebels] according to their own deserts” (His Majesty’s Declaration 1, 6). But now in opposition for the first time, royalists soon crafted a more potent idiom of resistance. Replying to the Army Remonstrance, the anonymous Recoil of Ill-cast and Ill-charged Ordinances uses “ordinances” to mean fiatsÂ€– appropriate to kings, now illegitimately issued by revolutionariesÂ€– and also artillery, connoting power gained by military force. “Ill-cast and ill-charged” suggests incompetent weapon manufacture and inept gun-loadingÂ€– bumbling military men now presume to issue remonstrances. The recoil conceit governs the piece:Â€ an ill-cast, ill-loaded cannon rebounds to flatten its gunners, as the new government’s ill-advised policies will recoil and demolish it. “Recoil” echoes another reiterative word:Â€“revenge.” An automatic, self-inflicted revenge, recoil is vengeance with no avenger. But God’s hand might guide it:Â€the subtitle, The Wonderful Judgement of God in Returning the Mischiefs of this Present Rebellion upon the Authors … thereof, identifies the cannon’s recoil with divine vengeance. Some revenge plays stage recoils. The Atheist’s Tragedy hints that divine retribution guides the revolt of technology by which a villain brains himself with an ax uplifted to behead the hero. Hamlet offers elements of recoil:Â€Claudius poisons his wife with the wine intended for Hamlet, who expresses recoil as incompetently deployed artillery:Â€“the engineer / Hoist with his own petard” (3.4.185.5–185.6 q2). But revengers didn’t rely passively on favorable recoils:Â€ they capitalized on them. Hamlet forces the poison down Claudius’ throat. God used both technology (cannons, axes, poison) and human avengers. The Recoil takes Jeremiah 2:Â€17, 19 as its epigraph:Â€“Hast thou not procured this unto thyself? … Thine own wickedness shall correct thee.” It counts on condign retribution:Â€revolutionaries, guilty of offenses for which they indict the king, will fall as he has. Rebellion will “condemn itself,” and fall “under those very imputations which it falsely chargeth upon others.” Revolutionaries are “dashed upon those very rocks” against which they “split the royal vessel, acting truly themselves those very oppressions and transgressions which they desire to fix upon His Majesty” (16). Lacking an impeachment process to oppose a tyrant acting above the law, revolutionaries took extra-legal action. Political resistance, like revenge, re-enacts what it redresses. Corruption blocking legal recourse spawns vigilantes, who in turn become vulnerable to charges of lawlessness, and their resistance instructs others. In Shakespeare’s double tetralogy, repetitive revolts follow a successful revolt against Richard II. As


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the Recoil puts it, “They taught the people to despise the king, and by the same lesson the people have learnt to despise them”; the army raised against the king “is ready to turn that very sword … into their own bowels. The House of Lords would have no king over them, and now the army and … Commons will have no Lords over them” (10). Political resistance can spark a chain reaction, like a talionic chain. “Resist” means “stand again.” “Remonstrance” is “a repeat showing.” Rebels resisted the king, and royalists resisted the resisters. The Bible’s symmetrical statements of love and mercy and of condign punishmentÂ€– the Golden Rule (Matthew 22:Â€39; Luke 6:Â€31, 10:Â€27) versus “measure for measure” (Matthew 7:Â€2)Â€– are, the Recoil reveals, inversions of each other. Failure to practice the one will trigger the other. God hath dispensed unto [rebellious Londoners] the rewards of their disobedience and injustice in that very measure wherewith they measured unto others, and made their own seditious principles. Those ordinances which they planted against the true and legitimate government … to recoil upon those that have been the authors of them, when a people will needs reject that golden precept of our Savior, and will not do unto others as they would be done by themselves … then God he pays them many times in their own coin, in making others do unto them, as they have done unto others. (9)

Revolutionaries “are now ensnared in the work of your own hands … fallen into the pit which yourselves have digged … scorched with that flame which yourselves have kindled” (11). Given the army’s current ascendancy, the Recoil refrains from specifying how these snares, pits, and flames manifest themselves. But surely vengeance awaits. The cannon will recoil, “pursuing you with the vengeance of your own impieties” (10). This royalist speaks like a bookkeeping revenger:Â€ God “will bring you to a reckoning” (13). A Plea for the King and Kingdom, by way of Answer to the late Remonstrance of the Army9 skewers the army’s shibboleth salus populi suprema lex (the people’s welfare is the highest law) as “the fruitful mother of rebellions in all ages” (Sig. a2). The cowed House of Commons should “vindicate the laws of the land, the privileges and freedom of Parliament, and the just rights of the People, thus impiously invaded. Acquit yourselves like men” (Sig. a2v). The author scorns the Remonstrance’s central tenet that victory indicates divine sanction (2). The intimidation of the House by military force “inflamed the minds of the whole commonalty with revenge” (4). Revolts are seen as vendettas:Â€“Witness the feuds 9

â•‡ Possibly by Marchamont Nedham.

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betwixt King John and the barons” (10). Current rebels’ fear of the “supposed afterclaps of revenge” (18), if the king’s power is restored, projects their own guilt:Â€ “The most notorious rebellion (next to this) that ever was in our island happened against Henry the third”; when he regained power, the “ring-leaders expected nothing but revenge from their abused prince,” but he pardoned them (12). The day the king was executed, the surreptitiously printed Eikon Basilike was distributed. In the king’s voice, possibly based on his prison notes, it saw thirty-five English and twenty-five continental editions in 1649 alone (Madan 2). Long-suffering martyr Charles assures readers he is too saintly to seek revenge:Â€ “What the height of a king tempteth to revenge, the humility of a Christian teacheth to forgive” (Eikon 77).10 When vengeful urges do arise (rather often), he deflects them onto God:Â€“My blood will cry aloud for vengeance to heaven” (193).11 Soldiers’ resistance to their leaders (see below) evinces “the hand of divine justice:Â€they that by tumults first occasioned the raising of armies must now be chastened by their own army” (180). His opponents, “ready to fight against one another” (182), will “find avengers of my death among themselves”; God will “by mutual vengeance … destroy them” (198–9). It is his foes who are vengeful (84, 99, 126). Charles trusts in recoil:Â€the Lord has “avenged thy servant … made [an enemy’s] mischief to return on his own head” (79); “whom the laws cannot, God will punish, by their own crimes and hands” (181). He asks his son not to take “revenge upon those whose own sin and folly will sufficiently punish them” (190). Answering this best-selling blockbuster of vengeful self-pity, Milton’s Eikonoklastes charges that Eikon Basilike is literary revenge and incitement to revenge. Charles and his collaborators have by “policy” (that Machiavellian watchword) “accomplished after death that revenge upon their enemies which in life they were not able” (iii:Â€342). Tugging heartstrings, Eikon accomplished the “avenging” of Charles’ death, inspiring in the populace “that affection … that revenge … which he himself living could never gain” (iii:Â€342). As Milton bitterly notes, Eikon has calculatingly pursued Paul’s advice “avenge not yourselves … vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:Â€19) to deploy strategically the next verse’s ghastly counsel:Â€“If thine enemy hunger, feed him … for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head” (Romans 12:Â€20). Eikon’s ostentatious forgiveness, he realizes, is one long coal-heapingÂ€ – forgiveness as revenge. See also 58, 67, 123, 199.

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See also 52, 74, 77–78, 79, 80, 91, 199, 200.

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T h e S u b a lt e r n Spe a k s:Â€R e s i s ta nc e w i t h i n R e s i s ta nc e As the Recoil noted, the Parliamentary army was poised to turn its sword into Parliament’s “own bowels” (10), its rank-and-file resisting the original resisters. Now the revenge play’s neglected soldier, unrewarded for service to his country, came to life in the New Model Army, in its moment of victory threatened with being disbanded without satisfaction of substantial pay arrears (see Coward 26). Soldiers petitioned for just deserts. Some hadn’t been paid for more than a year and had no benefits for widows or the disabled. Worse, Parliament labeled petitioners enemies of the state. In Touchstone’s taxonomy of insults leading to a duel of honor (AYL 5.4.48–79), this was definitely the Reply Churlish; and soldiers responded with the Reproof Valiant. The Case of the Army Truly Stated demanded public rescinding of the label “enemies of the state” and “public vindication of the army’s honor” (10). Indignation over wounded honor is a vengeance scenario, and The Case deploys revengers’ diction:Â€ “vindication,” “satisfaction.”12 One can’t help hearing in this manifesto, and in the many soldiers’ petitions and letters, the voices of aggrieved soldiers in revenge playsÂ€ – Titus Andronicus, Hoffman’s father, Bosola.13 Calls for avenging army honor were joined by calls for serious participation in government. The Case both lists grievances and advances a revolutionary agenda, demanding regular Parliamentary elections, national tax-rate equalization, no imprisonment for debt, the right to a speedy trial, reduction of laws’ complexity and their translation into English “that every free commoner might understand” (19), an end to exemption from prosecution for the elite, and universal manhood suffrage. Where did these ideas come from? Classic republicanism shows up in talk of “liberty” and in a proud stance as a citizen militia, resentful that Parliament considers the army “mercenary soldiers,” forgetting that “we, by their invitation, took up arms in judgment and conscience, to preserve the nation from tyranny and oppression, and therefore were obliged to insist upon our rights and freedoms as commoners” (10). But the pride audible in that assertion of commoners’ dignity hints at another source of the crucial move from demanding just deserts and vindication of honor “Vindicate” or “vindication” appear on pages 1, 2, 6, 10, and 17; “satisfy” or “satisfaction” on pages 2, 3, 4, 12, and 18. 13 See the 1647 compilation A Declaration of the Engagements, Remonstrances, Representations, Proposals, Desires and Resolutions from His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the General Council of the Army, … Also Representations of the Grievances of the Kingdom. 12

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to concern for “the poor oppressed people of the nation” (1). Soldiers were forcibly quartered in civilian houses, eating them out of house and home. Did they begin to champion common folk after a daily earful from unwilling hosts? The Case reports no relief yet: for the people in any of their oppressions, by arbitrary powers, monopolies, injustice in the proceeding at law, tithes, excise, etc. … and yet the soldiery burdening the country with free quarters … The love and affection of the people to the Army … is decayed, cooled, and near lost; it’s already the common voice of the people, what good hath our new saviors done for us? What grievances have they procured to be redressed? Wherein is our condition bettered? or how are we more free than before? (8)

The army became a conduit for grievances. Elected “agitators” represented the views of common soldiers, who represented the views of common civilians. All sought vindication and satisfaction. Army leaders shrank from a constitution the soldiers supported, An Agreement of the People, and radicals confronted the leaders in the Putney debates. Colonel Thomas Rainborough, the highest-ranking officer to support the radicals, advocated universal suffrage:Â€the “old law of England … which enslaves the people” binds them “by laws in which they have no voice at all!” He held that no one need obey laws in which he had no say:Â€ if “they have not voices in the choosing of their governorsÂ€… they are not bound” (“Putney Debates” 61). The major legal issues for Tudor resistance writers had been whether kings were subject to the law and whether subjects could justify extra-legal action. Army radicals went farther, demanding that the people help frame the laws; they also advanced from Tudor anti-tyrannicism to oppose monarchy itself. When the debates failed to produce commitment to real political change, army rebels confronted their leadership en masse, pressing for adoption of the Agreement. One mutinous regiment flared into violence. At this moment, with a charismatic and beloved rival leader in Thomas Rainborough, a body of sympathetic troops … a published manifesto-constitution in An Agreement to provide an ideological rallying point, and the first blow struck, the Agitators brought seventeenth-century England closer to a genuinely popular democratic revolution than ever before or after. But it didn’t come close enough. Cromwell charged into the ranks with a drawn sword and demanded the regiment’s submission. (Holstun 251)

In this tense face-off, the army blinked. Mutinous soldiers were courtmartialed and one, Richard Arnold, was shot, as was the leader of a later mutiny, Robert Lockyer. They were remembered when in 1649 several hundred men issued a manifesto listing grievances:Â€“blood of war shed in


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time of peace,” suppression of the right to petition, subversion of the judiciary, imposition of martial law, unjust taxation, oppression of the poor. Legal redress has been exhausted:Â€“Through an inavoidable necessity, no other means left … we are enforced to … defend and preserve ourselves and native rights.” They vow vengeance, “to redeem ourselves and the land of our nativity from slavery and oppression, to avenge the blood of war shed in the time of peace, to have justice for the blood of Mr. Arnold shot to death … and Mr. Robert Lockyer and diverse others who of late by martial law were murdered” (Thompson Sig. [a1]v). The author, cashiered soldier William Thompson, also demanded freeing of imprisoned army radicals:Â€“If a hair of their heads perish in the hands of those tyrants … if God shall enable us, we will avenge it seventy times sevenfold” (Sig. a2). Revenge is political; and as so often, a sincere Christian figures God as the enabler, not the foe, of violent revenge. T y r a n t Pl a y s, R e v e ng e Pl a y s, a n d Pl a y l e t s While the theaters were open, anti-tyrannical drama flourished. “The prominence of stage tyrants throughout Charles’ reign is notable. One thinks of … The Roman Actor (1626), Albovine (1628), Believe as You List (1631), and Aglaura (1637)” (Randall 118). One might add Albertus Wallenstein, 1634; and the titles of lost plays such as Massinger’s The Tyrant (1628) suggest resistance. The last revenge play acted before the theaters were closed, Shirley’s The Cardinal, a “play about a weak king manipulated by a malicious prelate, entered into a fierce debate about the power wielded by the Anglican prelacy in both church and state” (Burks 153). Shortly after closure of the theaters, Buchanan’s Baptistes was published (see above), its closing chorus forecasting “just revenge” for a tyrant (1381). After the theaters were closed in 1642, as Janet Clare shows, “despite frequent raids by parliamentary troops, plays were performed surreptitiously at the private indoor theatres” and some outdoor public theaters (DramaÂ€3). As the government demolished theaters, plays “went underground,” with private performances in noble houses (6). And press deregulation had the unintended consequence of fostering printed plays, “an important substitute for theatre-going as well as a political act” (Potter, Plays 265). No theater-closings could douse the flames of revenge. Among the most outrageous revenge plays of all time, The Bastard was printed in 1652. Seville’s atmosphere quivers with dire vengeful threats. Gaspar vows revenge on Alonzo for scorning him as a bastard and reneging on a marital promise. Balthazar seeks revenge on his fiancée for taking a lover,

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Alonzo on his daughter and niece for shaming the family through sexual escapades, and on his daughter’s lover for violating her honor. Balthazar vows revenge on Picarro for ambushing him. Eugenia goads her brother into revenge on a jilting beau. Praepontio pledges to return as a ghost to plague men who have stabbed him as he left church after his wedding, kidnapping his bride. Picarro pursues revenge on one who recites a “strange epithalamion” of cuckoldry verses during his wedding and announces to guests that the bride is “a hateful prostitute” (4.2.80, 100); on a maidservant for trying to poison him and for impersonating his wife in the wedding bed; on his faithless wife and her deflowerer; and on a lying friend. Mariana vows revenge on Gaspar for being a scheming villain, as does Rodriguez, and for Gaspar’s killing Chavez and inciting varlets to kill Rodriguez. Gaspar threatens revenge on Picarro for supposedly killing Mariana. Mariana vows revenge on whoever is responsible for all the corpses onstage in Act 5. All vows come to a head in the rousing conclusion. The play’s body count of ten (nine in Act 5) is possibly a record. The author mimics Middleton’s Changeling, lifts text verbatim from Shakespeare, and competes to outdo revenge conventions. Black humor abounds; avengers delight in bloodbaths, turning vigilante because “the heavens are deaf” (5.4.163), and commit murder during a masque. (Chavez, impatient with the old masque gag, proposes forthrightly, “Level a cannon at him” [4.3.52].) The play promises atrocities upon the guiltyÂ€– “Convey these bodies in. Our grief shall swell, / And study torments that may equal Hell” (5.4.371–2)Â€– but by then most characters are dead, and even the varlets turn state’s evidence. Who is left to torment? Setting out to “vindicate / The highest style in vengeance-book” (5.4.68–69), the author has (smilingly?) done the genre some justice.14 Political resistance is absentÂ€ – two faithless women with murderous lovers (a Changeling squared)15 leave scant room for matters of state. But other revenge plays of the day were highly resistant. Resistant plays, often dealing in revenge, were authored mostly by ousted royalists, for clandestine performance in noble houses. Many printed plays by dissident royalists appear designed for performance. The Cosmo Manuche, a royalist soldier, possibly wrote the play. Revenge appears too in his tragicomic Just General, where a gentleman whose fortune has fallen into a usurer’s hands gets revenge and recovers his money, and evil Artesia commissions the murder of Aurelia “to revenge / My wrongs” (2.1, p. 15)Â€– her wrongs comprising the fact that Aurelia is lovelier than she is. 15 Many consider The Changeling a revenge tragedy (for example, two essays in Simkin’s collection Revenge Tragedy deal with it). The play, however, lacks a revenger. Even Tomazo, brother of a murder victim, realizes that revenge has been taken out of his hands by the self-destruction of the criminal protagonists. 14


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court had always enjoyed plays, while many republicans, Parliamentarians, and army radicals, under Puritan influence, harbored antitheatrical feeling and wrote in nondramatic genres such as the remonstrance.16 Royalists began with playlets. The pseudonymous Crafty Cromwell, or Oliver Ordering our New State laments the ordinance closing the theaters, “sew[ing] up the players’ mouths”; happily, access to print “heals our dejected sense” (Prologue 1–2, 6–8). An authorial letter states, “that government is best, / Where one sole monarch governs all the rest,” echoing Romans 13:Â€whoever resists kings “resists even God himself.” “Plebeians” have now “found your error, / Now those that were your darlings are your terror”; he signs himself “the deplorer of your miseries and stupidity” (1–2). Parliamentarians threaten “new war and vengeance”; but “revenge should cease” (5), since “Heaven’s bowl of vengeance we have quaffed it up” (10). Act 2 features a ghost, and the Chorus alludes to classical revenge tragedy:Â€“Let the Eumenides come on amain. / The high Cythaerus’ top is Cromwell’s bliss, / But thou Maegera bring him down” (14). Part 2 seeks revenge on Parliament for having “voted down all plays,” summoning an underworld of dramatists (Seneca, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Jonson, Euripides, Webster, Suckling, and Goffe) to hurry back from Elysium and “blast their black souls, who do despise their lays” (Sig. a2). Commander Fairfax, Orestes-like, is pursued by Furies. In the playlet New-Market Fair, or A Parliament Out-cry of State Commodities (by John Crouch?), effects are auctioned after the king’s execution:Â€“Oyes, oyes, oyes! Here is a golden crown, worth many a hundred pound; ’twill fit the head of a fool, knave, or clown; ’twas lately ta’en from the royal head of a king, martyred. Who bids most?” (3). Bidding against Fairfax for the crown, Cromwell observes, “I caused the owner of it to lose his head” (5). The play ends in wish-fulfillment fantasy:Â€Prince Charles invades with 50,000 troops, and all rebels fall on their swords. In The Second Part, loyalists lament the “butchering” of “sacred majesty” (3). Cromwell and Fairfax scheme to wrest neo-feudalism from the jaws of infant republicanism:Â€“The people are too rich and powerful; they must have more taxes … to keep them under. And when they are poor and needy, they’ll be the more our vassals” (5). The play takes literary revenge, presenting Parliamentary leaders as cuckolds:Â€Lady Fairfax, complaining Royalists engaged in much nondramatic revenge/resistance as well. After Charles’ execution, “loyalist pamphlets and newsbooks … invoked the theme of revenge.” The royalist journal The Man in the Moon in July 1649, for example, “appeal[s] to foreign powers as well as ‘Irish, English, Scots’ for vengeance to be exacted for the black deeds and hellish plots of the Parliamentarians” (Clare, Drama 21).

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of her husband’s impotence, is discovered “in the very act” with a lover, as is Mistress Cromwell. Fairfax has a good excuse for impotence:Â€he is actually dead, having fallen on his sword in Part 1. A necromancer resurrects him and Cromwell, and conjures a ghost to rave about revenge and report that Charles has been received into heaven, but that lodgings in hell are being readied for Parliamentary leaders, who will “rue their damn’d regicide. / Their vengeance hast’neth” (9). Furies again pursue Fairfax. When he falls from grace, a loyalist gloats, “Does not divine justice clearly demonstrate to the world their guilt? … Blood shall be revenged; murder and patricide, although concealed long, at last betrays itself, nay, oftentimes proves his own executioner.” The people “threaten revenge on all … That subject [who] makes his sovereign’s heart to bleed / Will find a subject shall revenge the deed” (17–18). The Disease of the House:Â€or, the State Mountebank, Administering Physic to a Sick Parliament was printed in “Nod-nol” (London). Like NewMarket Fair with its auctioneer, it deploys a snake-oil salesman offering the “sick nation” a pill for its regicidal guilty conscience. Taking the state’s pulse, a doctor finds it “desperate sickÂ€ – no head at all” (3). The prescription:Â€“Hang up Cromwell” (5). If regicide spreads and the Devil “destroy[s] monarchy all Christendom over” (6), mankind will wish the hills to fall on them, to “hide them from vengeance” (7). The mountebank despairs of curing a “dying nation” (7). A commoner closes the play with that arm’s-length revenge, a curse, wishing on Parliament the consuming disfigurements that revengers typically wished on enemies:Â€“May agues, aches, gouts, and burning fevers / Consume their members, and … / … rot their flesh, ’til blains and sores grow in’t” (8). A Bartholomew Fairing also opens with a booming voiceÂ€ – a peddler crying wares. Royalists desperately sought a public voice. The revenge motif is sexualÂ€ – the merchant classes having toppled gentlemen, one cavalier helps his son cuckold a draper, smiling “revenge is sweet” (6). Parliamentary leaders again are cuckolds:Â€ while they preen themselves (“The world’s our own, all that we see… / That we may falsely take” [7–8]), their wives frolic in a confiscated royalist park with a crew of randy independent ministers. As stage tyranny often took sexual forms, so the newly powerful commoners were satirized as adherents of promiscuous religious sects, recalling sexual smears on Anabaptists and Familists. Samuel Sheppard’s Jovial Crew, or The Devil turned Ranter is one long orgy varied by other vices (they drink healths … smoking unanimously [10]). A servant whose Ranter master strikes him resolves, “I’ll be revenged on all” (9); he tips off two


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citizens whose wives are Ranters, and the police raid the orgy, jailing the Ranters. The citizens enter the jail, savagely beat their wives, and strip them to be beaten by officers (stage directions:Â€Pulls off her clothes; tears off her clothes [14]). One instructs the officer, “Lash my wife well … I’ll pay you for’t” (15). Savage literary revenge is the resistance open to Sheppard, who identifies himself as a “gentleman.” “Pr a y e r s a n d T e a r s, w i t h t h e H e l p of a Dag g e r”: Â€A N e w Ta rg e t f or R e s i s ta nc e Not only royalists but former supporters resisted Cromwell. The first assassination attempt occurred only five months after he became Protector. The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army, signed by Colonels Alured, Okey, and Saunders, charged that the new constitution gave Cromwell greater powers than the king had enjoyed, and urged a new form of government. Alured had been relieved of command after coming under Anabaptist influence and denouncing Cromwell.17 A postscript claims that the petition would have had many more signatures had it not been discovered when Cromwell had Alured’s chamber searched, after which Alured was court-martialed and jailed for two years. Okey had signed the king’s death warrant but, appalled at Cromwell’s new powers, attended dissident meetings. For signing the petition he was arrested and condemned to death; Cromwell commuted his sentence but cashiered him. Signing a petition against the Crown’s being offered to Cromwell, Okey was again arrested. He later joined an attempted coup d’état. The many radical sects that sprang up during this period (see Chapter 9) were feared as fomentors of political resistance. While working on Gangraena, a compendium of radical sects, Thomas Edwards gradually realized their resistance potential. He devoted the first two parts “almost exclusively to what seemed to him to be the purely religious errors of the sects. By the time he had published the third part … however, he was profoundly agitated by the realization that [they] were defying civil as well as ecclesiastical authority” (Petegorsky 85). A Serious Manifesto and Declaration of the Anabaptist and Other Congregational Churches, 1660, expresses anger at preparations to persecute such churches again. Proudly gathering all dissenting English sects under the Anabaptist mantle, the manifesto stoutly declares that they possess great strength in numbers:Â€ “We are not (if united) an inconsiderable part of this nation, both in respect of power, estates, and strength. So we hope no sober and unbiased persons can think it consistent with our reason and interests to suffer a trampling upon by forms of banishment, sequestrations, and unjust proclamations for making some of us as traitors.” The resolve not to submit to civil authorities was, by 1660, as feisty as ever:Â€“We do hereby manifest and declare, on behalf of ourselves and all other Congregational Churches within this commonwealth … that we shall not submit to any qualifications of Parliament, in point of faith and religion … other than which shall consist with the true teachings and guidance of the Holy Spirit.”

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In 1656–7, Cromwell survived several attempts to kill him. The lead conspirator, Miles Sindercombe, was bankrolled by Edward Sexby with £500, weapons, and ammunition. When the populace was commanded to rejoice at Cromwell’s preservation, a disgusted Sexby penned one of the era’s finest pieces of resistance writing, Killing No Murder. Its mockencomiastic dedication to Cromwell is worthy of Swift: To your Highness justly belongs the honor of dying for the people; and it cannot choose but be unspeakable consolation to you in the last moments of your life to consider with how much benefit to the world you are like to leave it. ’Tis then only, my Lord, the titles you now usurp will be truly yours. You will then be indeed the deliverer of your country, and free it from a bondage little inferior to that from which Moses delivered his … Religion shall be then restored, liberty asserted, and parliaments have those privileges they have fought for. We shall then hope that other laws will have place besides those of the sword, and that justice shall be otherwise defined than the will and pleasure of the strongest … All this we hope from your Highness’ happy expiration, who are the true father of your country:Â€for while you live we can call nothing ours, and it is from your death that we hope for our inheritances. (1)

Seldom in the history of resistance writing has a tyrant been skewered with such panache. Sexby next flays the army:Â€few remember their vows of liberty, as “your tame sufferings do but too plainly manifest. For you that were the champions of our liberty … are you not become the instruments of our slavery?” (2). Soldiers will never redeem their “honor” until they regain public confidence by executing “vengeance upon his faithless head” (2). Complying with the order to “give public thanks for the public calamity” that is Cromwell’s survival, Sexby snarls, would be like Israelites beseeching the Lord for “the preservation of their task-masters … and the daily increase of the number of their bricks” (3). Truly, “brave Sindercombe has showed as great a mind as any old Rome could boast of; and had he lived there his name had been registered with Brutus” (15). Sexby asks whether, if Cromwell is a tyrant, “it is lawful to do justice upon him … that is, to kill him” (3). He lists grievances:Â€changing the government “without the people’s consent”; dissolving Parliament and annulling its acts; cronyism; executing subjects without trial; seizing private property (4–5). “Marks of a tyrant” according to Plato, Aristotle, Tacitus, and Cromwell’s “own evangelist, Machiavelli” are fraud and force; forÂ� cing talented people out of government; prohibition of assemblies; use of spies and bodyguards; unfair taxation; waging war “to divert and busy the people”; blaming failures on subordinates; ostentatious religiosity.


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Cromwell fits perfectly and, “being no part of the commonwealth,” he is not entitled to “protection that is due to a member of a commonwealth, nor any defense from laws, that doth acknowledge none” (7). Drawing on the Roman legal principle that “it is always justifiable to repel unjust force with force” (Skinner ii:Â€125), Sexby holds killing a tyrant as lawful as killing a burglar. It is as absurd: to call him thief and kill him that comes alone … to rob me, and to call him Lord Protector and obey him that robs me with regiments and troops. As if to rove with two or three ships were to be a pirate, but with fifty an admiral. But if it be the number of adherents only … that makes the difference between a robber and a Protector, I wish that number were defined, that we might know where the thief ends and the prince begins, and be able to distinguish between a robbery and a tax. (8)18

In addition to the usual examplesÂ€ – Ehud, Athaliah, Caesar, BrutusÂ€ – Moses was a vigilante (Exodus 2:Â€11–14): Seeing an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, knowing he was out of the reach of all other kind of justice he slew him. Certainly this was and is as lawful for any man to do as it was for Moses, who was then but a private man, and had no authority for what he did but what the law of nature gives every man, to oppose force to force and to make justice where he finds none. (10)

No revenger could have said it more forcefully. Of all the zestful accounts of Ehud’s assassination of Eglon (Judges 3:Â€14–21), Sexby’s call to Christian violence packs the most punch. Ehud’s story illustrates: the natural and almost the only remedy against a tyrant, and the way to free an oppressed people … by prayers and tears, with the help of a dagger. Devotion and action go well together, for … a tyrant is not of that kind of devil that is to be cast out by only fasting and prayer. And here the Scripture shows us what the Lord thought a fit message to send a tyrant … a dagger … in his belly. And every worthy man that desires to be an Ehud, a deliverer of his country, will strive to be the messenger. (10)

Cromwell’s England, lacking legal redress, needs vigilantes, as Samson attacked Philistines for burning his wife (Judges 15:Â€7). Acting on “the law of nature” in the absence of “other laws,” Samson smote them:Â€“As they did unto him, so had he done unto them” (10). An eye for an eye; measure 18

He alludes to Alexander’s asking Diomedes the pirate why he molested the sea:Â€ Diomedes responded, “You molest the world! Since I do this with a little ship I am called a pirate. You do it with a great fleet and are called an admiral” (Holstun 349).

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for measure; condign revenge.19 “Upon the same grounds of retaliation” Samuel prosecuted the tyrant Agag. “As thy sword … has made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless” (10). Cromwell too has made mothers childless, and men will come “to revenge their own relations” (10). Retaliation serves justice:Â€“Neither Samson nor Samuel alleged any other … reason for what they did but retaliation and the apparent [i.e., obvious] justice of the actions” (11). Revenge and vindication fit the republic’s loftiest goals:Â€soldiers who liberated England from tyranny now need to “vindicate … our liberty and our honor” by the “satisfaction” of killing Cromwell (14). If they “let this viper live,” he may pre-emptively strike, fearing “that from our revenge which he knows he has so well deserved” (14). Sexby dreads tyranny’s effects:Â€ “Accustomed to live like slaves, we shall become unfit to be anything else” (12). A patriot should be something else:Â€liberator, tyrant-slayer, avenger. William Prynne resisted nearly everybody. Twice convicted in the 1630s for publishing mountains of anti-Charles invective, he was jailed, pilloried, had both ears hacked off.20 Later, anger over the new government’s jailing him without trial turned him into a royalist. In a massive diatribe penned largely in prison, he informed Cromwell’s government that “in this second year of England’s pretended redemption from tyranny and slavery,” people never “complained so much of both of them as now” (37). He reports that horsemen broke in and seized him, ransacking his house (92), holding him incommunicado in remote prisons without charge, actions “illegal” and “destructive” to “all the people’s liberties” (2). He cites all laws broken in his detainment, going back to the Magna Carta. Like a revenge hero he complains of ingratitude to “one of the most devoted, faithful servants to … England, in whose service I have spent my estate … without enjoying … one farthing salary or reward, when others less meritorious have been bountifully rewarded” (3). He threatens condign vengeance:Â€ “If you pursue, equal, exceed the injustice, oppressions, tyranny” of the king “executed by you so freshly for a tyrant, must you not in all justice … undergo the self-same … fatal ends?” (38–39). He calls down “justice and vengeance on your heads” (Sig. f3v–[f4]).

Sexby notes another biblical condign punishment:Â€Athaliah was assassinated in the very house in which she had murdered the king’s sons. She “receive[d] her punishment, where she had acted so great a part of her crimes” (11). In a nice touch, he renames Athaliah’s royal house “Whitehall.” 20 Richard Overton’s playlet Canterbury His Change of Diet (1642) satirizes Archbishop Laud, who is shown eating the severed ears of Prynne and two fellow resisters. “The rest of the play is a fantasy of revenge,” Heinemann writes (78). Laud’s nose is ground on a grindstone. 19


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Exciting new melodies entered the symphony of resistance in this era, especially the justification of resistance on grounds of the inherent unfairness of class hierarchies. Gerard Winstanley (see Chapter 9) held that, in Petegorsky’s words, “because the government of the wealthy rested on the exclusion of the common people … it could exact no moral claim to obedience” (189). And once again, the drama played its part. F u l l -L e ng t h R e v e ng e Pl a y s of t h e C i v i l Wa r a n d I n t e r r e g n u m Royalists soon produced full-blown resistant revenge plays. The anonyÂ� mous Famous Tragedy of King Charles I appeared just after the king’s execution. Cromwell is ready for “any part of policy i’ the Machiavellian world,” recognized even by his propagandist Hugh Peters as a Richard III born “with his mouth full of teeth.” He has “an iron soul”; his brain is “a store-house of politic stratagems,” meant for “the fall and ruin of all mankind” (1.80–81, 179–82). A dedication urges the exiled prince to seek foreign alliances. Resistance is termed revenge:Â€“By thy … victorious hand / Those monsters who doomed thy great sire to die / May receive treble vengeance” (viii.5–7). Princely “vindictive breath” (viii.4) must blow away the usurping regime. As an example to anyone inclined to assail Cromwell, the play stages Thomas Rainborough being killed by one of his own soldiers, retaliating for the perfidious execution of royalists surrendering under truce. (Historically he was killed by cavaliers.) In revenge-play fashion, he is unnerved by a visit from victims’ ghosts and dies wrenched by a Senecan thought:Â€“Shall I fall without revenge?” (4.231). The play’s Roundheads abuse anti-tyrannical discourse. Peters drafts orations to “prove kings (ab origine) have been the people’s plague.” He asserts “that regal power is devilish, and inconsistent with the people’s freedom,” that Charles “doth merit violent death.” Peters calls monarchy “obnoxious and incompatible with the people’s rights,” painting the imprisoned king “a truculent tyrant” (1.36–109). But republican talkÂ€– “the people’s right transcends the power of kings” (1.128)Â€ – only masks Cromwell’s personal ambition. The antithesis of a citizen devoted to the nation’s good (“A king and kingdom is my valor’s prize, / By both their ruins, I intend to rise” [1.177–8]), he rehearses republican-speak with glib cynicism. He will pose as a Brutus. The epilog sums up pithily, “The King is murdered on pretense / He was a tyrant” (2).

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Cromwell unhistorically cuckolds his second-in-command Lambert, taking a page from Volpone:Â€“Poppea-like, bathe thou thy delicate body in asses’ milk, commixed with almond flower; with Cleopatra dissolve inestimable precious stones in every glass of luscious wine thou drink’st; tread thou on Tyrian silks and ermines’ skins … my treasury is inexhaustible” (4.65–68). Cromwell dubs the nation’s wealth “my treasury”; and Poppea was Nero’s mistress. Comically, he can’t keep his mind on sexÂ€– he drifts off into political thoughts in mid-sigh. Peters recalls him to his task, since Mistress Lambert has started fretting about adultery:Â€“She’s fallen into a relapse; kiss her, sir, quickly, or she’ll cool” (4.121). Arising from bed, Cromwell hears that Charles has been executed and bids Mistress Lambert a tender farewell:Â€“You, lady (the sole mistress of my hopes) are yet untainted in your husband’s thoughts; let him again repose his hornèd head betwixt your delicate paps … Farewell, star of the north.” Then the prosaic seducer turns to the day’s real business:Â€“Let’s post unto the famous city / To sit in council with the state committee” (5.46–54). Like many revenge plays, Famous Tragedy doubts divine justice. Surrendering royalists trust heaven’s “dread vengeance” (3.224). When they face execution, one demands of Jove, “Hast thou lost thy vengeance, can it be / That these aspiring Titans, scape scot-free?” (3.244). Incensed at being “murdered so barbarously after fair quarter promised,” one asks Jove for “vengeance on the authors of my death” (3.296–9). One invokes infernal deities, Senecan-style:Â€ “Oh ye vengeful furies of dark hell! / … Lash, lash these traitors” (3.324–6). The theaters are closed, but this royalist knows English drama:Â€he compares Cromwell’s treatment of Charles to Tamburlaine’s humiliation of captured King Bajazeth (1.27–28). And he lists recent English dramatists who dealt in revenge and tyrant-resistance:Â€Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Goffe. “We’ll be a second Pylades and Orestes” (3.78) may recall Goffe’s Orestes. The Famous Tragedy, a revenge play criticizing a current regime’s power abuse, advocates violent revolt, casting exiled Prince Charles as a fatheravenger. At his hand, the regicides will meet “vengeance, and so perish” (dedication). The play conflates revenge and resistance. Having long been on the receiving end of anti-tyrannical drama, royalists were well placed to recognize its potency. The regicide year also saw publication (abroad) of another dissident revenge play, Christopher Wase’s royalist translation of Sophocles’ Electra. Prefaces interpret the plot in light of the regicide. The play is dedicated to the king’s daughter Princess Elizabeth, and illustrations of her and her


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brother Charles foreground a link with Electra and Orestes, the brother– sister team who avenge their father in Electra. W. G.’s prefatory poem says the play “represent[s] allegorically these times”; one must now “fight the times, / Not in pitched prose, but verse” because “’tis safe … / For ’tis but Sophocles repeated, and / Echo cannot be guilty or arraigned.” This is either naïve or sardonic:Â€even Roundheads can decipher allegory and read prefatory poems. The play directly incites revolt. Prefatory poems call armed resistance “vengeance” and “revenge.” W. G. openly demands revolt, identifying Electra’s slain Agamemnon with Charles:Â€ “Here guilt with guilt is paralleled; the rhyme / Of vengeance too may be complete in time. / Our Agamemnon’s dead, Electra grieves, / The only hope is that Orestes lives.”21 The new regime, he says, fears reprisals, and Electra will terrify:Â€“Each page of your book affrights ’em more, / … They tremble at their own red actions past. / … When [Aegisthus] groans, they start, as if the steel / Reached at their souls, and when he falls, they reel.” In another poem, H. P. tells Elizabeth, “the next age may / See the score of thy royal parents’ wrongs, / Revenged by kings which now sleep in thy loins.” One prefatory piece calls the present regime a “tyrannical usurpation”; another celebrates Electra as “a generous defier.” The choice of Sophocles is significant:Â€ where Euripides’ Electra presents Electra and Orestes harshly, Sophocles unfolds the play through Electra’s perspective, courting audience sympathy for her vengefulness. Sophocles’ Agamemnon is beheaded with an ax, like CharlesÂ€ – “Th’ancient poll-ax razor-edged / With steel wing on both sides fledged” (491–2). “Poll-ax”Â€– from “poll,” or headÂ€– denotes either a special ax-head, or an ax for cutting off heads (OED). The sixteenth-century spelling “pole-axe” suggests the long-poled execution ax. Wase’s term calls attention to the royal head rolling. Wase’s Orestes achieves condign revenge, killing Egisthus in the room where Egisthus killed Agamemnon. The epilogue tells Elizabeth that her brother has returned for revenge, predicting that soon the nation shall be “from a popular bondage freed.” (Was “popular bondage” enslavement of the people or by the people?) A closing poem, “The Restoration,” fantasizes Charles II as king. Government will be rectified and London “give thanks. / … / Not off’ring up constrained rites, / Amidst church-driven proselytes. / No lip a faint amen shall say, / While the recusant heart W. G. wriggles out of the problem that identifying Charles with Agamemnon casts his widow, Henrietta Maria, as Clytemnestra. He claims that allegorically Clytemnestra represents the English body politic which has prostituted itself to Egisthus/Cromwell.

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would, nay.” By 1649 “recusant” could mean any resister of authority, but still referred primarily to resistant Catholics. This was a dangerous publication.22 A prefatory poem fears for Wase:Â€“Bold friend, / … thou must look / To be indicted for thy perilous book.” Indeed Wase, who didn’t hide behind initials like the prefatory poets, was in serious trouble. Like Studley and Heywood, translators forced out of university posts (see Chapter 6), Wase was deprived of his Cambridge fellowship and imprisoned (Randall 219). Later captured carrying letters to exiled royalists, this swashbuckling scholar escaped to the continent (Hodges).23 Published the same year, T. B.’s Rebellion of Naples coyly signals its topicality:Â€“If there be anything in my book which points at the present condition of our affairs, I assure you the times are busy with me, and not I with the times” (“To the Reader”). The prologue is frank:Â€“If you’re pleased with seasonable things, / Here’s fightings ’twixt the people and their kings” (9–10). In a dumb show, beggars topple a king, the throne collapses under them, and kingship is restoredÂ€– a transparent allegory. In the play, the fisherman Massenello leads a tax revolt, evoking resentment of Charles’ “unpopular levies,” or “taxes levied on London to finance the civil wars” (Clare, Drama 24).24 Rebels view resistance as “the sweetest of all sins, revenge” (1.2.56). Massenello, who announces “we will not have … the fewer rule the multitude, nor one rule all” (1.3.28–29) is initially sympathetic. And the epilogue is even-handed:Â€“Let kings beware how they provoke / Their subjects with too hard a yoke. / … It will not do, / You see, they break the yoke in two. / Let subjects no rebellion move, / On such pretenses, lest it prove / As sad a thing … / And fatal as to us it did” (1–8). The Viceroy (called “king”) has faultsÂ€– he barricades himself in a castle lacking ammunition or provisions, owing to his habitual negligence; he is reduced to an alliance with banditti; and he cheats the people with false promises. But the author’s sympathies are mainly royalist. A stage direction dubs rebels “the James Compton, an earl, translated Seneca’s Agamemnon, “perhaps for the same reason that drew Wase to the Electra story”; another translated a Latin play as Alfred, or Right Re-enthroned:Â€contemporary politics inspired translators to create “extra levels of meaning in existing works” (Potter, Plays 267). 23 Like many resistance writers, Wase possessed an independent, resistant personality capable of defying authorities on both sides of the ideological fence. After the Restoration, some royalists blamed the Civil War on the growth of free schools:Â€making education more widely available had eroded class boundaries. Appointed to investigate the nation’s grammar schools, Wase startled the authorities by recommending more free schools (Cressy, Education 25–26). 24 As J. G. Turner notes, contemporaries often drew parallels between the rebellions of the 1640s and Masaniello’s carnivalesque revolt in Naples in 1647 (64). 22


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rabble rout” (1.3.2). The king is empathetic:Â€“Poor people! how they shrink under the burden we are forced to lay upon them” (1.4.8–9). Massenello abandons patriotism to revel in confiscated aristocratic wealth. He metes out “justice” without evidence and breaks his wife’s neck, becoming an insane megalomaniac with delusions of divinity. The king distracts the greedy and credulous commoners from capturing him by tossing a handful of coins, for which they grub, and a faked miracle persuades them that Massenello is a saint. A choric figure advises, “Return! unto your prince, whose arms were always open to receive you” (5.5.31–32). Revenge conventions abound. Massenello assigns gruesome condign penaltiesÂ€ – dishonest bakers are baked in ovens, price-gouging butchers chopped up in their own slaughterhouses. (Surviving bakers vow condign retribution:Â€“We’ll serve him as he served us” [5.3.50].) The revenge tradition of feeding enemies to dogs25 reaches an apex, possibly parodic:Â€asking after a woman he has had cut up and cast to dogs, the prince is reminded, “she is dead.” “Bring her in dead,” he cries. “Sir, she is in pieces.” “Bring in the pieces,” he commands, and is told “the dogs have eaten them.” He summons the dogs (5.2.93–98). The play riots in outlandish violenceÂ€– onstage beheadings, a woman stabbed in the face and poisoned, stage directions like “he breaks her neck between his hands” (3.1.379). Jangling rhymes provoke mirth at tragic moments:Â€“Like Icarus I flied. / And soared too high, fell down and died”Â€– eliciting the droll stage direction Exit vita (5.2.108). Thomas Killigrew, once a page to Charles I, went into exile with the queen after the regicide, penning plays throughout the Interregnum. Upon the Restoration, he headed the new King’s Company and published all ten of his plays. Revenge was a favorite plot element. The Pilgrim speaks of revenge twenty-two times; Cicilia and Clorinda, Part 1 twenty-two times and Part 2 thirty-three times; Bellamira her Dream, Part 1 twenty-one times and Part 2 twenty times; Thomaso, Part 1 fourteen times and Part 2 thirty-seven times. Even Hamlet mentions revenge only fourteen times.26 A court-in-exile’s infatuation with revenge, the fantasy of the disempowered, was predictable. In 1 Cicilia and Clorinda, it takes aristocratic The body of biblical Jezebel is eaten by dogs. Sophocles’ Electra advocates throwing Egisthus’ body to dogs. In The “Gest Hystoriale” of the Destruction of Troy, Orestes exposes his mother’s body “Till the flesh of that fair was fret off the bones, / Todraggen … with dogs” (13022–30). In Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the gods direct Orestes to feed his mother to dogs (ii:Â€2006–11); in Lydgate’s Troy Book, he cuts her into pieces and throws them to dogs. Othello imagines throwing Cassio’s nose to dogs (4.1.137–8). In real-life Renaissance Friuli, avengers fed foes’ bodies to dogs, thereby “dehumaniz[ing] their enemies” (Muir 215). 26 The Folio has fourteen; the two quartos have even fewer. 25

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formsÂ€– challenges, duels. Although one character moralizes, “’Tis hard to say, who repents a revengeful mind most, the revenger or the sad subject of his revenge” (5.5.10–11), revenge is mostly respected:Â€“He that will not be revenged ought not to be esteemed; he that will suffer injuries deserves them” (1.1.69–70); “’Tis but just a soldier’s anger should be revenged” (4.3.133). This play’s original title was Cicilia, or the Revenge (Wertheim 151). Other Killigrew plays explore the court’s feelings about regicide and subjects’ right to resist. In 1 Bellamira her Dream, a group of exiles led by the son of a murdered king unsubtly resemble Prince Charles and the royal exiles. Vowing to kill the “usurper, tyrant, and murderer” (1.2.38), the prince delays retribution until the “fit” moment:Â€“Down all thoughts of my revenge till he bids strike who knows why and when ’tis fit” (1.4.8–9). A banished lord calls the usurper an evil man “that destroy’d his brother … and now usurps his throne, to revenge which the people are armed” (2.2.31–32). The people take arms for their “long lost prince” because of “hatred of the present government” (1.1.24–25). The usurper fears them:Â€“Thy looks are full of trouble; how dost thou find the people inclined?” (1.2.36). His spies mingle with the multitude “to learn the cause of their taking arms” (1.2.2). Bellamira, in the title episode, dreams of a “dangerous rebellion in the people” (1.3.3–4). As they storm the palace, the tyrant flees. His faction heaps contempt on commoners, not expecting reason, justice, or honor “in this beast the multitude; ’tis all back and belly … no room for a heart; all slave when commanded; all lust when they have power; they are full of rage and wine; treason and novelty are the things they worship” (1.2.52–55). But the exiles count on the people to return the prince to powerÂ€ – perhaps suggesting “royalist uprisings projected in England” (Randall 344). Edward Sexby, staunch resister of Cromwell’s growing power, encouraged English radicals to ally with royalists, fomenting “a conspiracy between the Leveler left and the royalist right” (Holstun 317). Randall dates Bellamira about 1652, when popular discontent was welling up against Cromwell. Royalist exiles viewed Cromwell as just Bellamira’s kind of regicidal, usurping tyrant. The project of unseating a usurper, Killigrew calls “hope of a revenge” (2.1.51); exiles seek “justice and vengeance” (4.3.8). Royalist Robert Baron dedicated the revenge tragedy Mirza to the prince, warning against what undid his father:Â€ “the flatterer, and too powerful favorite”Â€ – suggesting Buckingham. A prefatory verse signals topicality:Â€ “Whilst you tell / Your tale, we’ll easily find a parallel.” Persian tyrant Abbas represents Charles I, and scheming counselor Mohamet Ally-beg, Buckingham. Abbas imprisons and blinds his own


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son Mirza, too much admired by the people. Abbas fears that Mirza will seek revenge, a sign of nobility and spirit:Â€ “Persons of his rank / If once disgrac’d, must not be left a tongue / To tell it with, or hand to act revenge” (1:334–6). Mirza indeed becomes a revenger. Spurred by a vengeance-demanding ghost, he takes advantage of Abbas’ love for Mirza’s 7-year-old daughter:Â€“Incapable of obtaining any better revenge,” Mirza kills her, “so strong and so sweet a passion is revenge.” Abbas threatens “exquisite tortures” and Mirza returns “curses, hopes of better and more perfect revenge” (Argument). Learning that Ally-beg seeks his crown, Abbas turns revenger himself, decreeing that Ally-beg’s house be replaced with a latrine. A general cries, “Admired Justice!” and all onstage chime in, using “equal” to mean “fair”:Â€“Equal, equal justice!” (5.1013). In John Tatham’s The Distracted State, c. 1651,27 a war-torn state changes rulers frenetically. The opening line cries “Heaven, where’s thy vengeance?” (1.1.1)Â€– a usurper has seized the throne. A dedicatory epistle identifies the play’s Sicily with England:Â€ the play addresses those to whom “civil war hath been a nursery.” Free speech can spark retaliation:Â€“Words may be / Revenged” (1.1.129–30). Revolutionaries vow to pursue a tyrant “like dire revenging thunder” (3.1.230); he will not “’scape your vengeance” (3.1.36). One king dies by the poisoned picture of a murdered woman. Frustrated with tardy divine retributionÂ€ – “Does heaven hear this, and punisheth not?” (1.1.51)Â€– and fearing that “the gods / Are all asleep,” resisters turn vigilante, rejecting patience, a “fool’s virtue,” and obedience, the road to “slavery” (2.1.407–10). Agathocles enflames hearers:Â€“If / We do retain the glory of our ancestors, / … / We need not doubt (inspir’d with a just rage) / To break the necks of those that would yoke ours” (1.1.252–7). But Tatham treats republican revolt skeptically. The tyrant himself once boasted civic virtue, but virtue’s shelf-life can be brief: Shall we pay duty and obedience To him who does instruct us to rebel By his own precedent? … Was it not His own insinuating tenet to The people (’gainst his brother) that the virtue 27

Annals of English Drama lists the play’s limits as 1641–50; it was probably unacted. The title-page claim that the play was written in 1641 looks like insurance against political trouble:Â€“Since The Distracted State seems so clearly designed to do some political work,” we should “regard the author’s claim of 1641 composition skeptically” (Randall 262). See John M. Wallace.

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Political unfairness:Â€revenge and resistance And justice of the prince were th’ only bonds That bound the people to him, and when he Should violate either, they were tied no longer? Are we not freemen then?

(2.1.242–52)

Resistance writers bound subjects to obey only a law-abiding monarch, but Tatham shows where this leads. When a tyrant is overthrown, a rebel becomes king, only to be murdered by the ambitious Cleander. When monarchy is abolished and a republic founded, plebeians cry “liberty, liberty” (4.1.485 s.d.); soon we see a mob scene, “the people hauling Cleander” (5.1.1 s.d.). Agathocles, advocate of republicanism, finds that group decision-making cramps his style and launches a coup, imprisoning all ten new magistrates. The army executes him. The original ruler finally restores monarchy, to general relief. Topical relevance declares itself:Â€When the play was printed, England’s king had been toppled; ambitious leaders jockeyed for power; a republic replaced monarchy; the army revolted. Tatham allows republicans to make their case persuasively: ag at ho c l e s How sweet and freely Rome enjoyed herself, ’Til she submitted to the power and pride Of one man’s rule. Tell me what good did ever Kings bring unto our country, that we might not Have purchased without ’em? Ills they have Almost incredible; our coffers emptied, To fill their treasury, and maintain their riot. e pe c i de s And wedded to perpetual slavery. For when one tyrant falls another rises From his corrupted loins, that proves far worse Perhaps than did the former … ag at ho c l e s Join with us, And take th’ people’s yoke off from the tyranny Of kings hereafter.

(4.1.396–436)

Hereditary succession brings out the worst in rulers:Â€ “Kings may / Commit what outrages they please” (5.1.31–32). But the new republic fails:Â€“When one tyrant falls another rises” (4.1.404). The answer is not to abolish monarchy but to find a good king:Â€“No question but / The state was much distempered, and Evander / Was not without his faults,” but “people disposed for change, / Survey the vices of their prince through optic / That rather multiply than lessen them; / And what is in themselves but criminal / Is in their prince held horrid, as the symptom / To


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the disease of tyranny” (1.1.221–9). The play finally endorses monarchy, a lesser evil.28 Anti-monarchists in The Distracted State speak persistently of vengeance, as does the exiled king. The last two revolutionaries obligingly kill each other, closing the talionic chain, and the king realizes he might as well forgive them:Â€“We come not to / Possess our own with thoughts to be revenged, / Or if we did, you have escaped it” (5.1.288–90). But resistance remains firmly linked with revenge. In Henry Glapthorne’s Revenge for Honor (printed 1654), five deaths, a villain’s soliloquy (4.1.329–63), murder by handkerchief, and dire threats of vengeance serve a political agenda. Glapthorne was no stranger to tyrant-resistance:Â€in his popular Albertus Wallenstein, assassins vow to kill Wallenstein “as great Julius / Fell by his much loved Brutus” and call assassination “revenge,” glorying in a “brave act of justice”; the tyrant’s crimes “are by us revenged” (Wallenstein 5.2.139–40, 118, 186, 189). But Revenge for Honor’s ruler is the anti-type of a tyrant. When the heir of the Caliph of Arabia lusts after a married woman, a counselor advises, “Think on your father, / That lively image of majestic goodness, / Who never yet wrong’d matron in his lust” (1.1. 316–17). Lust for subjects’ wives being a hallmark of theatrical tyranny, the Caliph’s moral probity signals powerfully that he is no tyrant. He rejoices that “a loving people and a loving sovereign / Makes kingdoms truly fortunate” (2.1.18–19). Far from indulging in arbitrary justice or nepotism, he is renowned for “our impartial emperor’s equity” (3.2.112). He severely sentences his own son. Even his wisest counselor thinks this is going too far; but the guilty son praises him:Â€“I’d not have him / (For my sake) forfeit that for which he’s famous, / His uncorrupted equity” (4.1.116–18). After so many corrupt courts in revenge plays, this ruler’s integrity is astonishing. However, an ambitious faction stirs up the malleable populace to revolt. Villainous and virtuous alike contemn “the giddy people,” the “many-headed beast,” “the vain people,” “the wild people” (2.1.66, 94, 152, 163). Egged on by evil generals, the army revolts (4.1). The Caliph is murdered with a poisoned handkerchief by his younger son, who declares himself Caliph. This galvanizes the elder:Â€“Our dear father’s poisoned by our brother; / We … shall take just vengeance” (5.1.4–6). 28

Tatham probably served in a royalist army; and later his play The Rump satirized republican politicians. First staged a month after the king’s return, it quickly went through four editions. “Tatham’s political satire was given a new lease of life in the exclusion crisis when The Rump was plagiarized by Aphra Behn in 1681 for her play The Roundheads” (Salmon 823). He also wrote a pageant celebrating Charles’ return in 1660, a restoration foreshadowed by Evander’s reinstatement in The Distracted State.

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Revenge for Honor limns an idealized ruler and his loyal son, blackens the opposition, depicts commoners and the army as naïve pawns. Royalist Glapthorne dedicated works to three earls, and to the cavalier poet Lovelace he dedicated “Whitehall,” a country-house poem in the voice of the royal residence. Recalling famous monarchs, the deserted palace mourns England, now ruled by a “faction,” wracked by “tumults” of the “rude / And many-headed beast, the multitude,” terrorized by “mutinous troops” (Sig. bv). The nation is sunk in “rude civil war”:Â€“May these domestic broils / Like morning dew dry up / … May the King love his subjects, they obey / His just behests” (Sig. [b4]–[b4]v). Glapthorne also wrote a response in Charles’ voice to a petition asking him to lay down arms. His Majesty’s Gracious Answer, among the least obstreperous of such “answers,” grants Charles all the dignity and fairness of the Caliph of Arabia. Its printer was imprisoned in the Fleet a few days after publication, and Glapthorne’s literary voice fell silent thereafter (see Sanders). Both political tracts and revenge plays presented good kings beleaguered by ambitious, unscrupulous subjects. Dissidence spoke directly in printed tracts, and revenge plays practiced resistance by other means. A R e pu bl ic a n Pl a y R e s i s t i ng C rom w e l l The torch of dissident revenge drama had passed to royalists. Outside the drama, resistance theory was evolving. Milton saw that the tyrant/ good king distinction projected political evils onto a hyper-wicked king, preserving monarchy as an institution. He still spoke of revenge, calling Brutus “great avenger of the lusts of kings” (Tenure iii:Â€351–2). But he and others advanced beyond tyranny, radically arguing that subjects may depose a ruler “though no tyrant, merely by the liberty and right of freeborn men to be governed as seems to them best” (Tenure iii:Â€206). Plays didn’t go that far. The drama was radical in promoting violent resistance; but before it could challenge monarchy, the theaters closed and what drama remained fell into royalist hands. But one fine Interregnum revenge tragedy assails Cromwellian tyranny from a republican standpoint. The anonymous Tragedy of that Famous Roman Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, 1651, offers several revenge actions. First, Caesar’s ghost curses Rome with bloodshed and silencing of free speechÂ€– “Caesar must be revenged” (1.24). His curse works out in the most decapitations and mutilations since Titus Andronicus, and a proscription silencing the Senate. Second, Antony seeks revenge on Cicero for orations against him (the Philippics). In the ghastly conclusion, Cicero’s brother is


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killed and his young son tortured and slain, and Cicero’s head and hands hacked off. Antony laughs while he and his wife play bowls with the head before nailing up head and hands:Â€“I’ll be revenged / For your tart nipping jeers” (5.379–80). Another Titus touch is the excision of Cicero’s tongue (unlike Lavinia’s, a post-mortem amputation).29 Tongue and hands have resisted:Â€ “The hands that wrote those glorious Philippics / Must be cut off” (5.325–6); “Had I his damned tongue within my clutches, / This bodkin should in bloody characters / Write my revenge” (1.559–61). The audience is invited to sympathize with revenge as a widow drags off a betrayer, vowing, “I’ll make you prey to a more hellish vulture / Than that of Tityus. Thou thyself shalt slice / Thy own foul flesh by morsels off, and make / Thy own gaunt entrails thy own sepulcher” (5.468–71). When a foe is rewarded, she menacingly promises, “I’ll see his wages paid” (5.358). Randall posits a loose parallel between Caesar/Octavius/Antony and Charles I/Prince Charles/Cromwell (269). Caesar’s framing position as revenge ghost aligns the audience with his revenge; and although not “blind to the dangers Caesar posed,” the play “reveals also a lingering sympathy for him” (Randall 269). But the savage portrait of Antony/ Cromwell is not royalist:Â€ it belongs to the moment when republicans found Cromwell morphing into a Caesar. To Randall, the high-minded republican Cicero is “emblematic of free speech” silenced by Antony’s tyranny (267), evoking the time when Cromwell, victorious over rivals, silenced dissent.30 In 1648 he purged Parliament of 140 members thought to disagree with army policies, and two years after Marcus Tullius Cicero was printed he closed down Parliament altogether, by armed force. Violence, as often in revenge plays, does political work. As dissidents enjoy a Last Supper before repression halts all meetings, centurions burst in. Dragging the host by his hair across the dinner table, a centurion re-enters immediately with his severed head. This is no gratuitous sensationalism:Â€ Act 5’s decapitations recall England’s brutalization by civil war and the beheading of her king. The play ends bleakly:Â€ “Rome has The play echoes Titus:Â€Rome shorn of free speech is a “map of woe” (4.725), as Titus calls the tongue-cropped Lavinia a “map of woe” (3.2.12). Cicero is murdered in “that fatal place … a shady wood / Which the sun never pierces with his beams / To glad the widowed earth. / A place decreed / By fate … for such a villainy” (5.267–77). The forest where Lavinia is raped and mutilated is “a very fatal place” where “never shines the sun” (Tit 2.3.202, 96). 30 Supporting this interpretation, the army is a vital political force furnished (like the New Model Army) with representatives:Â€ a centurion describes Cornelius as if he were leader of elected Agitators (“Cornelius speaks the language of us all”); Cornelius announces, “the whole army … speaks in us” (3.315–16). Like Cromwell’s troopers shutting down Parliament, centurions threaten the Senate:Â€“This shall do it, if the Senate / Will not. Shows them the pommel of his sword ” (3.344 and s.d.). 29

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had a long succession / Of state-usurpers; when this Hydra’s head / Is cut away, another may bud forth”; “the state is now so wounded / That there’s no hope of cure” (1.462–4, 4.438–9). A soothsayer predicts a “dismal fate:Â€/ Your freedom shall be lost, your state / Converted to a monarchy” (4.185–7). Resistance is dead:Â€“Where shall we find new Ciceros to oppose them?” (4.418). Like Hieronimo and other revengers, Cicero is ungratefully spurned by his nation:Â€“Are all my labors come to this? My watchings? / My cares and services for the public good? / The dangers which I daily have incurred / By opposition of new-springing tyranny?” (4.662–5). But he dies unavenged. The ending’s bleak vengelessness, matching England’s despair at executing one king and now being ruled by another, speaks eloquently to how a successful stage vengeance might inspire political hope. I n v e n t or i e s of I n j u r y Tragedy crafts a language of grieving, revenge tragedy a language of grievance.31 Justifications of vigilantism usually include three elements:Â€(1) statement of grievances; (2) claim that legal recourse is unavailable; and (3) commitment to revenge. Civil War texts display this structure. The Grand Remonstrance (1) states grievances (undue government influence by religious ideologues, wars without Parliamentary consent, suspensions of Parliament, jailing of MPs, high taxes, monopolies, royal meddling in the legal system, cronyism); (2) states that Parliament has legislated against abuses, but finds only royal intransigence; and (3) demands “vengeance” (7). England’s Standard Advanced (1) lists grievances (dissolution of agitators, no right to petition, subversion of the judiciary, imposition of martial law, unjust taxes, oppression of the poor); (2) claims that legal recourse is blocked (by “inavoidable necessity, no other means left … we are enforced to … defend and preserve ourselves and native rights”); and (3) vows vengeance, “to redeem ourselves … from slavery and oppression, to avenge the blood of war shed in the time of peace” (Thompson Sig. [a1]v). Similarly, one famous revenger (1) lists grievances (he “hath killed my king and whored my mother, / Popped in between th’election and my hopes, / Thrown out his angle for my proper life”; (2) finds legal recourse blocked by a royal choke-hold on power; and (3) commits to revenge (Ham 5.2.65–67). Titus’ Tamora lists fictitious grievances (she has been â•‡ In Kerrigan’s fine phrase, avengers seethe with “agitated grievance” (Revenge 3).

31


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enticed into a wood, threatened with death, insulted) and exacts commitment:Â€ “Revenge it as you love your mother’s life” (2.3.92–114). Titus lists real grievances:Â€one son banished, two unjustly condemned to death, his daughter raped and mutilated, her husband murdered (3.1.98–113). His brother re-states these, adding Titus’ amputated hand. Legal recourse is blocked (Justitia is “gone, she’s fled”; “there’s no justice in earth” (4.3.5, 50). And Titus seeks “Revenge’s cave” (3.1.269).32 The tripartite structure (grievances, lack of legal recourse, vow of revenge) appears early in English revenge plays; and by Jacobean times the term “grievance” itself, meaning “a state of things … felt to be oppressive” (OED), gained currency in remonstrance and revenge play. The Case of the Army Truly Stated demands, “What grievances have they … redressed?” (8). The Jews’ Tragedy glances at Stuart civil tumult in political uprisings and a “humble Petition from the grieved Commons” (1.2.27–28). Its revenger voices filial grievances typical of revenge plays:Â€ his wealthy father was “robbed and spoiled of all, / And I his son left … / Poor and dejected, till my working brain / Projected this employment to relieve me; / Since when, I have been busied for revenge. / O how methinks that very word revenge / Allays the fury of my discontent!” (4.108–15). From behind an arras, he eavesdrops on a conference in which “each man” is invited to “freely speak / His cause of grievance” (4.128–9)Â€– but his own grievance goes unheard. The Rebellion of Naples opens on a tax revolt, listing excise taxes among “grievances” for which “vengeance [will] light” (1.3.10, 1.1.12). The tripartite structure already appears in the grievance lists circulated by Jack Cade’s rebels, 1450. First, the grievances, including “a long catalog of judicial misconduct” (Bernthal 262):33 “Item. They [i.e., evil counselors] say that our sovereign is above his laws … and he may make it and break it as he pleases … Item … The false traitors will suffer no man to come into the king’s presence … without bribes” (Gairdner 94–95). Second, subjects lack legal recourse:Â€“The law serveth of nought else in these days but for to do wrong … No remedy is had in the Court of Conscience [i.e., Equity]” (96). And third, rebels ask God, aided by Kentish dissidents, to “take vengeance and destroy the false governors of his realm” (96). Public grievance petitions sometimes join revenge by those more privately aggrieved. Wolsey’s fall in Henry VIII is fomented by a popular revolt by subjects “in great grievance” about their tax burden (1.2.21), but also by noblemen aggrieved that Wolsey has “strangely neglected” them. One is avenging a family member, seeking “the least occasion that may give me / Remembrance of my father–in–law the Duke, / To be revenged on him” (3.2.11, 7–9). 33 These “written grievances” mark the first time in English history that “rebels articulated a set of demands and disseminated them widely in writing” (Caldwell 19). 32

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“Item” denoted enumerated articles, “especially in a formal list or document, as an inventory, household-book,” etc. (OED). Just as revengers used accounting skills to reckon up decapitations and amputations, so revolutionary manifestos deployed the businessman’s methodical list. Recalling the Italian ricordanza listing business and vendetta debts (see Chapter 3), the grievance list was precisely an inventory of injury. Tudor resistance writers follow the same tripartite structure as revenge plays. Goodman lists grievances against Mary (persecuting Protestants, declaring her brother a heretic, confiscating subjects’ goods, supporting Philip II’s wars), states that legal recourse is blocked (mayors, sheriffs, aldermen are “shamefully corrupted” [215]), and demands revenge (“she ought to be punished with death” [99]). Resistance texts philosophically justified meeting repression with violence; revenge plays dramatized the grievances and the blows. The Renaissance taste for revenge was largely a response to grievances:Â€ inflation, an unfair judicial system, economic inequity.34 Stage revengers found relief in poison, daggers, and swords; audiences found vicarious relief in watching revengers. But far from draining energy from real-world political agitation (a species of Ventilsitten), revenge plays were coeval with such agitations, and very possibly fueled them. But a kind of über unfairness impinged on all other unfairness:Â€unequal social status. Against this Ur-grievance, revenge tragedies provide radical redress. In The Spanish Tragedy, the body count is even (five victims sent to Elysium, five to Hades), although the Hades-bound include a duke and a servantÂ€– one corpse is one corpse. My final chapters will argue that book-balancing revenge was a leveling discourse. In enumerating and cultivating grievances, revenge discourse again resembles the world of martyrdom. Foxe’s assistant amassed “a ‘register’ of documents recording the persecution of the godly,” and the Quakers’ first recording clerk “compiled a ‘Book of Sufferings’ that eventually swelled to 44 folios” (T. Freeman, “Introduction” 27).

34

Pa r t I V

Social unfairness: vengeance and equality

Ch apter 9

Revenge and class warfare

i n 15 49 a .d. r obe r t k e t t y e om a n fa r m e r of Â�w y mon dh a m wa s e x e c u t e d b y h a ng i ng i n t h i s c a s t l e a f t e r t h e de f e at of t h e nor f ol k r e be l l ion of w h ic h h e wa s t h e l e a de r . i n 1949 a .d., f ou r h u ndr e d y e a r s l at e r , t h i s m e mor i a l wa s pl ac e d h e r e b y t h e ci t i z e ns of nor w ic h i n r e pa r at ion a n d honou r t o a no t a bl e a n d c ou r ag e ou s l e a de r i n t h e l ong s t rug g l e of t h e c om mon pe opl e of e ng l a n d t o e s c a pe f r om a s e r vi l e l i f e i n t o t h e f r e e d om of j u s t c on di t ions

In 2 Henry VI, one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, the tradesman Â�revolutionary Jack Cade commands, “Set London Bridge afire” and “burn down the Tower too.” (The king and queen are barricaded there.) When a rebel reports, “London Bridge is afire!” Cade issues an electrifying decree: “Henceforward all things shall be in common.”1 He will abolish social Â�distinctionÂ€– “it was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up” (4.2.6–7),2 demoting “kings and princes” (4.2.33). That early modern specter, armed revolt promoting economic communism and social equality, was a nightmare or a beatific vision, depending on whether one wore starched ruff or leather Â�jerkin. And many violent avengers are levelers. 4.6.12–13, 4.7.116, 16. As Charles Hobday notes, “‘It was never merry world since …’ was a common formula to introduce a criticism of society … The word ‘merry’ in such contexts often had the sense of ‘free’; Robin Hood’s men were merry, not because life in Sherwood was one long round of practical jokes, but because they lived in freedom.” The formula appears in Kett’s Rebellion and other egalitarian uprisings (68).

1

2

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Social unfairness:Â€vengeance and equality

For two centuries, class wars3 had kept Europe in flames, swelling to a Â�tsunami of violence in the 1520s and 1530s.4 In Part II, on resistance, I focused on the lone avenger (sometimes with a few confederates).5 But Â�sometimes a whole oppressed class resisted. Such rebellions were usually crushed. In an episode savoring of revenge tragedy, Hungarian peasant leader György Dózsa (seeking social equality and the abolition of nobility) was roasted on a red-hot throne, and his followers forced to eat his flesh. But egalitarianism, stamped out in one locale, rekindled elsewhere. In Friuli in Italy, economic crisis intersected with a long-running vendetta. Antonio Savorgnan, the head of a dynasty, took the fateful step of enlisting destitute peasants in his feud. They looted a castle, and quickly insurrection flared. A manifesto, “The Eleven Articles of the Friulian Peasants,” dealt with short-term economic problems and larger social justice (Muir 150). Luigi da Porto, author of a novella about vendetta which became the main source of Romeo and Juliet, participated in the Friuli violence (xxviii). On the vexed term “class,” I concur with Thomas Cartelli’s forceful assertion, “a politically motivated class consciousness was capable of being both experienced and represented in early modern England,” and Cade is Shakespeare’s “most realized example” of a figure “able to transform his political subjection into something amounting to our modern sense of class-based resistance” (“Jack Cade” 53). See Cartelli’s defense of the term “class” in this period, 53–58. (For complexities, see Cressy, “Describing”.) Keith Wrightson argues for a nascent “dichotomous perception of society,” employing “a terminology of social simplification, sweeping aside the fine-grainedÂ€ … distinctions of the hierarchy of degrees and regrouping the English into … the haves and the have nots” (21). Such a dichotomy appears in Deloney’s Jack of Newberry:Â€“The poor hate the rich, because they will not set them on work; and the rich hate the poor, because they seem burdenous” (Sig. h1). Cade’s “we will not leave one lord, one gentlemanÂ€– spare none but such as go in clouted shoon” (2H6 4.2.167–8) bespeaks class antagonism, “the wish to destroy class society by violent means” (Bristol 90). See also Michael Hattaway’s discussion of the play as a study in “class oppression” (“Rebellion”). 4 The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was preceded by a Flemish peasant revolt 1323–8, and by the French “Jacquerie,” a series of tax insurrections. Cade’s revolt in 1450 was preceded by the 1437 Bábolna revolt in Hungary. In the late fifteenth century, peasants revolted across Europe. Catalonian peasants rebelled against serfdom, 1462–72. In a Germanic state in 1476, the visionary Hans the Piper revealed that the Virgin had appeared to him, decreeing an end to kingship, aristocracy, papacy, and church authority. All men were to perform manual labor, no one possessing more property than others; taxes were to be abolished, and forests, rivers, and meadows would become public property. In 1491–2 the Dutch peasantry revolted; a Frisian revolt flared in 1497. That same year, an army marched on London, in an uprising sparked by destitute Cornish tin miners rebelling against Henry VIII’s tax levy to support a war. In 1493, in Alsace, a movement of economically aggrieved peasants and plebeians took as its symbol a long-laced peasant shoe; this Union Shoe movement germinated rebellions in Switzerland, Hungary, and Slovenia. Hobday thinks Cade’s “clouted shoon” (2H6 4.2.168) evokes the Union Shoe movement (69). 5 Griswold’s dictum “the revenger is never a revolutionary; his revenge … [is] individual” (165) rests on the unwarranted assumption that lone assassination cannot be revolutionary. Violent regime change is revolutionary; and resistance theory often insisted that acting alone was strategically crucial. 3


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Revolts of the 1520s and 1530s coincided with a pan-European famine. Daily, in Padua, twenty-five or thirty “dead from hunger were found on dung heaps in the streets” (Camporesi 26); Venetian children died of hunger (Geremek 132). London’s poor were weakened by hunger and sweating sickness; Kent witnessed food riots. A Peasants’ War erupted in Germanic states. In Memmingen a conclave of commoners (tradesmen, miners, peasants, even burghers) drafted Twelve Articles, demanding abolition of serfdom and enclosures, and judicial impartiality. Unleashing mercenary armies on petitioners backfired, sparking “a process of radicalization”:Â€peasants rejected class hierarchy and private property (Stayer 7). Just as abuse galvanizes revengers, so assaults catalyzed peasant radicalism. “Involving 300,000 persons … and costing 100,000 lives,” the Peasants’ War was the greatest revolt of subjects against masters “ever in German history” (20). Memmingen’s third article founds egalitarianism on Christ, who died for lowly and great. Luther’s “priesthood of all believers” was potentially leveling. He repudiated the Peasants’ War, but more radical theologians espoused egalitarianism. Intertwined with the war was the rise of Anabaptism, with its classless communities, opposition to private property,6 and democratic practices (Klassen 91). Anabaptists were pacifists, refused military service, and rejected the state church. Deeming their own judgment equal to that of state officials, they sometimes advocated civil disobedience. Most kept to themselves, but some agitated for radical reform of society. Thomas Müntzer, calling for an egalitarian society, all possessions shared, died fomenting a revolt in which (Knox claimed) 8,000 peasants took part and 5,000 were killed. The establishment’s worst fears were realized in 1534–5, when Anabaptists turned Münster, an important commercial city and member of the Hanseatic League, into a communistic theocracy.7 It ended in a massacre. Assailing private property shocked many. “Few charges recurred so frequently as the one that Anabaptists wanted … all things in common”; Anabaptist prisoners were often charged with “advocating or practicing communism” (Klassen 24–25). But early Christians, Anabaptists noted, practiced communal ownership:Â€in Tyndale’s biblical translation, contemporary with the Peasants’ War, believers “had all things common; and sold The Hutterite branch was especially communistic; but all Anabaptists regarded property as “a sacred trust, existing not only for the possessor, but also for the benefit of his fellow-men” (Klassen 28). 7 Henrik Niclaes, founder of the Family of Love or Familists, an offshoot of Anabaptism, spent his formative years in Münster. 6

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their possessions,” sharing “as every man had need.” They “had all things common … Possessors of lands or houses sold them … And distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (Acts 2:Â€44–45, 4:Â€34–35). Anabaptist Peter Reidemann found warrant for human sharing in God’s provision of manna. Although Anabaptists were severely persecuted and often became refugees,8 their staying power appears in their descendants today:Â€ Amish, Baptists, Brethren, Hutterites, Mennonites, Bruderhof communities, Quakers. And Marxists have hailed Thomas Müntzer as a pioneer in the struggle for a classless society. Englishmen often ascribed radicalism to foreign zealots, but English radicals sometimes influenced the continent. Theologian John Wyclif, c.Â€1328–84, blamed private property on the Fall; it was “contrary to man’s ideal nature” (D. Wood 32). His followers, the Lollards, were suppressed after two uprisings, but Lollardry survived underground into the sixteenth century. Wyclif influenced the Bohemian Jan Hus, who influenced Luther (Skinner ii:Â€ 48–49).9 Although Wyclif condemned the Peasants’ Revolt (Dobson 373), his writings were banned as peasants began to slay landlords, and his followers bloodily suppressed. During the revolt, John Ball preached that God created all men equal and that if He had favored serfdom, “He would have said at the beginning of the world who should be serf and who should be lord” (Lindsay/Groves 72). His inflammatory sermons (recorded by Holinshed) popularized the leveling rhyme “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?” (Dobson 374). Under other leaders of the revolt, Jack Straw and Wat Tyler, the Savoy was sacked, the Tower of London raided, and the archbishop of Canterbury killed. Rebels were animated by poverty, oppressive taxes, church corruption, and statutes capping wages and curbing labor Most Reformers opposed AnabaptismÂ€ – Calvin, Luther, Melanchthon, even Zwingli who first sowed the seeds of Anabaptism. So did many Catholics (Klassen 16). One sympathizer demanded, “Who writ the history of the Anabaptists but their enemies?” (C. Hill, “Lollards” 49). And a prejudice against Anabaptism appears among modern scholars:Â€ Hadfield writes of Spenser’s communistical Giant with the Scales, “It might seem easy to dismiss the Giant as a deluded Anabaptist” (179). Judith Kronenfeld, treating Anabaptists as a lunatic fringe, illogically takes official denunciations by bishops and homilists as evidence that contemporaries did not take Anabaptism seriously. Historian Andrew Pettegree patronizes Anabaptists as ignorant and uneducated. Hobday, however, sensibly inquires, “Would the compilers of the 39 Articles have thought it necessary to emphasize that ‘the riches and goods of Christians are not common … as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast,’ if there had been no danger that those Anabaptists would find disciples?” (77). 9 Hus’ followers successfully revolted against the German king Sigismund. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs preserves the epitaph of their victorious general, trumpeting egalitarianism:Â€“I, John Sizka, not inferior to an emperor … a severe punisher of the pride and avarice of the clergy, and a defender of my country, do lie here” (i:Â€851). 8


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10 Â� mobility. After the revolt was squelched, resentments smoldered for decades before flaring up in Cade’s revolt. A year after the Münster conflagration, anti-government uprisings (the Pilgrimage of Grace) rocked ten English counties. A defender stressed that suppressing monasteries devastated the poor. Fierce government reprisals suggest fear that this would turn into a class war like those on the continent:Â€English Anabaptists were executed in 1535 (Horst 60–61). In the 1536 Lincolnshire Rebellion, commoners drafted political demands (James 192). The 1549 Kett’s Rebellion began with agrarian workers tearing down enclosure fences and escalated into organized revolt (see MacCulloch). Rebels occupied Norwich, England’s “second city,” defeating a royal army.11 Citing huge disparities in wealth between landlords and peasants, rebels demanded an end to private property:Â€“Nature hath provided for us, as well as for them … Why should they have a life so unlike unto ours? … We desire liberty and an indifferent [i.e., equal] use of all things” (Neville, Norfolk’s Furies Sig. b2v). Rebels are unwilling to let such unfairness “go unrevenged” (Sig. b2). Seeds of egalitarianism, sown by Lollards or continental immigrants, could lie dormant for years before famine or social injustice helped them germinate in England (Marsh 178–80). “Anabaptist” was a label for anyone espousing egalitarian ideas, and the steady trickle of prosecutions for Anabaptist heresy suggests an undercurrent of such thinking. Riots were frequent during periods of famineÂ€– the 1520s, 1530s, and 1590s. The period 1586–1621 saw at least forty food riots (Sharp 10; cf. Walter).12 In More’s Utopia, 1516, Utopians know no social distinctions:Â€“Unless private property is entirely done away with, there can be no fair or just distribution of goods, nor can mankind be happily governed” (28). More saw stark inequality in England:

What kind of justice is it when a nobleman or a goldsmith or a moneylender … who makes his living by doing either nothing at all or something completely useless to the public, gets to live a life of luxury and grandeur? In the meantime, a laborer, a carter, a carpenter, or a farmer works so hard … that even a beast of burden would perish under the load; and this work of theirs is so necessary that no Foxe’s Book of Martyrs presents the revolt explicitly in class terms:Â€ “dissension in England, between the common people and the nobility” (i:Â€567). 11 “In London the city authorities were so exercised by fears that the clergy would support the pilgrims, that all priests and friars between the ages of 16 and 60 were ordered to surrender anything that might be used as a weapon, keeping only a single meat knife for their own use” (Greg Walker 237). 12 And “during 1591–7 there were peasant revolts in France, Austria, Hungary, the Ukraine, and Finland, in addition to the abortive Oxfordshire rising” of 1596 (Hobday 73). 10

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commonwealth could survive a year without it. Yet they earn so meager a living and lead such miserable lives that a beast of burden would really be better off. (82)

Such radicalism was often momentary. By 1532 More included communism among Anabaptists’ “horrible heresies” (C. S. Lewis 169)Â€– the first recorded use of “Anabaptist” in English. But the idea of equal distribution of wealth kept recurringÂ€– even if rejected. In the wake of the German Peasants’ War, Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Governor, 1531, opens with redistributed wealth. He proposes that “public weal”Â€– a term accepting hierarchy as fundamental to societyÂ€– replace “commonweal,” often taken as meaning “that everything should be to all men in common, without discrepance of any estate or condition” (1). Indeed, a “commonweal” should logically be communist:Â€since “communalty” means “the multitude,” in a commonweal “either the commoners only must be wealthy, and the gentle and noble men needy and miserable, or else … all men must be of one degree” (2).13 While he recoils from leveling, he assumes reader familiarity with the idea and returns obsessively to it:Â€“Where all thing is common, there lacketh order” (5). Robert Crowley, the year after Kett’s Rebellion, notes that the rich suspect the poor of leveling (“they would have no gentlemen”) and communism (they want “all things common” [142, 156]). A speaker in Starkey’s Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (written c. 1533–5) hails primogeniture as the pillar of hierarchy:Â€“In every great family the eldest should succeed,” so as to “contain the rudeness of the people.” If brothers inherited equal lands, “head families,” foundation of “all civil order,” would soon “decay” (106–7). But to another speaker, primogeniture “maketh many reckless heirs,” who little regard “learning or virtue,” since despite bad behavior they will inherit “great portion of entailed land” (109). He ascribes the “disease” of class tension to “lack of common justice and equity (that one part hath too much and another too little of all such thing as equally should be distributed according to the dignity of all the citizens)” (146). Knox assailed Anabaptism with a horrified fascination. On a flimsy pretext, he includes in An Answer to … an Anabaptist a long account of Elyot parades disdain for commoners:Â€ “Plebs in English is called the commonalty, which signifieth only the multitude … the base and vulgar inhabitants not advanced to any honor or dignity” (2). Typical of the privileged classes, he fears a general collapse of society (if not the universe) should social distinction be effaced:Â€“Take away order from all things what should then remain? Certes nothing … except … chaos” (2). But he inadvertently undermines hereditary status when advocating a meritocracy in which intellectuals are “set in a more high place,” their status depending on “understanding” or intellectual ability (4).

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the Münster theocracy twenty-five years earlier, detailing with great relish Anabaptists’ supposed licentious polygamy and their gruesome torture and death.14 (He insists on spelling the city “Monster” [418].) Knox harps on the Anabaptist agenda:Â€Müntzer taught “that their goods should be in common” (410); “not to have any thing in proper [i.e., privately owned], but all things to be common” (418). Some want to abolish social hierarchy:Â€“Those which were set aloft should be brought down, and the other should be exalted, from a vile and base estate” (427–8). Knox ventriloquizes Müntzer with conviction. Tyrants “think the commonwealth is no part of their charge:Â€they know nothing of poor men’s causes; they are not for justice … they help not the widow, neither yet the fatherless. They look not to the good education of youth” (413). Anabaptists think the time has come “that the meek should possess the earth.” (He notes testily, “Anabaptists are as meek as wasps” [433].) A pan-European menace, Anabaptists exist “in great number through all Holland, Brabant, England, and Friesland” (445). Did Knox’s attack on Anabaptism reveal qualms about his own egalitarianism? He after all taught “the religious equality of all men” (Dawson 569). Thomas Nash’s Unfortunate Traveler, 1594, recounts the siege of Münster, casting the tradesman leader John Leyden as a carnival figure, a “tailor’s cushion for a target, the pike whereof was a pack-needle; a tough prentice’s club for his spear,” and “for a helmet a huge high shoe” (209).15 Foolish Anabaptists amuse the narrator:Â€ they “thought they knew as much of God’s mind as richer men” (210). His description of the slaughter of unarmed Münster Anabaptists mingles pity with relish:Â€ so thorough was “the imbrument of iron in blood” that one could hardly tell “clottered hair from mangled flesh” (215). Samuel Rowlands’ poem on Münster, Hell’s Broke Loose, closes by hoping that the devil will “pay” the rebels “vengeance” (Sig. f2v). Such a backlash suggests that egalitarian ideas were making gains in England. Tudor egalitarianism sprang mainly from religious roots, but the republican idea of virtue had some influence. In A Mirror for Magistrates, Glendower moralizes, “Our parents’ virtues theirs are and not ours. / Who This account occurs in his 454-page argument against Sebastian Castalio’s opposition to predestination, An Answer to a Great Number of Blasphemous Cavillations written by an Anabaptist (1560). Castalio, a theologian who broke with Calvin and was hounded out of Geneva, was not really an Anabaptist, and predestination is not relevant to Münster’s communistic society. The sheer gratuitousness of Knox’s extended account of Münster argues a subconscious attraction to radical social thinking, not so surprising in one who advocated radical political solutions. 15 Another possible allusion to the Union ShoeÂ€– see note 4, above. 14

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therefore will of noble kind be known / Ought shine in virtue like his ancestors. / Gentry consisteth not in lands” (Sig. dii). By “not in lands” he means “not only in lands”Â€– gentle birth, while not sufficient to virtue, is necessary. But a more radical notion is also floated:Â€“Virtuous life doth make a gentleman” even without “elders” (i.e., noble ancestors; Sig. diiv). “Virtue among an assembly of equals,” Hadfield calls “the central idea of humanist republican political thought” (82). Although “equals” for republicans meant “upper-class males,” Hadfield argues that “positions of responsibility held by ordinary citizens/subjects” helped level the playing field (53). Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy turns vengeful when his position as knight marshall counts for nothing against his foes’ hereditary nobility. Republicanism fostered demands for equality. Most issues explored in this book have a class dimension. Justice was perceived as available to the well-born and well-off. Education was status-linkedÂ€– classical literature and university for young gents, bookkeeping and apprenticeship for common folk. Translating Senecan texts comprised a gesture of resistance to an educationally inequitable system. Debt and a culture of credit brought different status groups into close contact. For resistance writers, all classes had a duty to resist tyrannyÂ€– which might imply rights. Literary tyrants typically exploit a lower-caste woman. Peasant uprisings comprise resistance by whole disadvantaged groups to privileged classes. Even balance-of-trade theorists had things to say about equality.16 No wonder social inequality was a major theme of revenge plays. S h a k e spe a r e Tac k l e s C l a s s Wa r : Â€J ac k C a de Behind the Anabaptistical ring of Cade’s “all things shall be in common” in 2 Henry VI lay two centuries of fear, by propertied classes, of the poor rising up and demanding an equal share. The main issues of Cade’s rebellion were evil counselors and the loss of France (see Caldwell); to turn it into a blazing class war, Shakespeare lifted details from the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.17 2 Henry VI both dramatizes a class war and sets the stage for In The Canker of England’s Common Wealth, Malynes argues that while such extreme “equality” as the communism of More’s Utopia “cannot be established,” still a ruler “ought to keep a certain equality in the trade or traffic betwixt his realm and other countries, not suffering an overbalance of foreign commodities with his home commodities, or in buying more than he selleth” (2). This early statement of balance-of-trade theory casts balanced trade as the next best thing to communism as a guarantee of “equal” treatment, to ensure that “every man should have enough” (2). 17 See Hilton/Aston, O’Brien, Dunn, Lyle, Harvey. Shakespeare thus joined in the Elizabethan practice of “collating the popular protests of the past … Jack Straw of 1381, Jack Cade of 1450, and 16


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Shakespeare’s most intense vendetta, in 3 Henry VI. Both plays link class war and revenge. Eleven of 2 Henry VI’s twenty-five scenes, its whole center, stage class warfare. Bracketing the mid-play revolutions are scenes of toxic feuding among nobles and royalty, gradually coalescing into the two factions of the great English vendetta, Lancaster and York. In the aristoÂ�cratic scenes, revenge operates horizontally, among social equals. But the central scenes operate on a vertical axis, as lower-downs assail higher-ups. In the first vertical encounter commoners, despairing of legal process, petition the queen and duke of Suffolk. In exactly the scenario Helgerson isolates, an incursion into a private household, one alleges that an aristocratic retainer has appropriated his “house and lands and wife” (1.3.20). In another grievance, a duke has “enclose[d] the commons of Melford” (23–24). But the queen and duke tear up the petitions and revile them with class slurs (“Away, base cullions!” [44]). Commoners have exhausted peaceful avenues of redress. In one petition, vertical meets horizontal. When Peter, an apprentice, launches a petition to leverage his minuscule power, he encounters the vendetta:Â€his master, Horner, whom he accuses of sedition, is armorer to the duke of York, who is planning a coup. (York denies all, heaping class slurs on Peter:Â€“Base dunghill villain and mechanical!” [197]). Horner dismisses Peter’s whistle-blowing as a socially leveling revenge:Â€“When I did correct him for his fault the other day, he did vow … he would be even with me” (203–4). In Act 2, the stage gradually thickens with menacing commoners. The Simpcoxes are reminders of hordes of Elizabethan beggars; and if Shakespeare buys into the myth that beggars only feign disability, he at least lets Mrs. Simpcox plead, “We did it for pure need” (2.1.157). By Act 3, scene 2, a crowd chanting “down with Suffolk” forces the king to banish the class-snobbish duke. By Act 4, plebeians have gained the upper hand. In Act 4, scene 1, Suffolk is beheaded; in scenes 2 and 3, Cade’s army defeats royal forces, killing their general, and Cade promises all goods shall be in common (4.2.60–61); in scene 4, rebels reach Southwark and the king flees; in scene 5, rebels storm the Tower; in scene 6, Cade fires London Bridge; in scene 7, he decrees, “Burn all the records of the realm. My mouth shall be the Parliament of England” (11–13) and declares all Robert Kett’s Norfolk rebellion of 1549, were linked together in an ideological chain” (Patterson, Shakespeare 39).

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goods to be common (16); and in the same scene, rebels execute Lord Saye and sack London. In Act 4’s closing scenes, the rebels suffer a failure of nerve; they surrender, and Cade is killed. Shakespeare’s most sustained portrait of class conflict, 2 Henry VI sounds keynotes of egalitarianism. In a “list of social grievances whose inarticulate and violent expression does not invalidate their demand for resolution” (Cartelli, “Jack Cade” 58), Cade demands communal property ownership (4.2.62–64, 4.7.16), low bread prices (4.2.60–61), beer and wine (4.2.61–62, 4.6.3–4), an end to social inequality (4.2.167–8), drastic legal reforms (“Is not this a lamentable thing that … parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? … I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since” [4.2.71–76]).18 The exclusion of the unlettered from legal process was a grievance long animating egalitarian movements. Rebels seek to destroy “a system of privileges which renders them … permanently powerless” (Cartelli, “Jack Cade” 62). Cade’s “ancient freedom” (4.7.169) is the idiom of “ancient constitutionalism” (Arab 15). Materially and legally deprived, the lower orders are also insulted and patronized. The rebels loot and murder, and Cade becomes tyrannous,19 but the play vividly stages provocations that foment class rage. Captured by pirates in Act 4 scene 1, lesser gentlemen calculate whether they can afford a £1,000 ransom; but for the duke of Suffolk, money is no object. “Look on my George,” he smirks, smugly parading membership in the Order of the Garter. “I am a gentleman. / Rate me at what thou wilt, thou shalt be paid” (30–31). Flaunting his French, he informs Walter Whitmore, “Thy name is Gualtier, being rightly sounded” (38). Twitted about his ragged disguise, he joins the company of Olympian gods:Â€“Jove sometime went disguised, and why not I?” (49). As Ralph Berry notes, “Suffolk strikes the tuning fork of class pride that vibrates throughout the play” (5). This hostage does not deign to be polite to a captor who has mentioned beheading him: Cade also attacks “the records and recorders whose presence permitted and promoted the oppressive collection of revenues” (Caldwell 59). 19 Greenblatt states that Shakespeare “depicts Cade’s rebellion as a grotesque and sinister farce” (23), and Helgerson includes it as evidence that Shakespeare, unlike the “Henslowe dramatists,” programmatically distances himself from the concerns of the common people; but he does acknowledge 2 Henry VI as a rare Shakespearean example of “a strong counterdiscourse … of popular protest” where “the people” become “fundamental to the nation’s identity” (Forms 195– 245). Hobday drily observes that “Cade’s rebels in their brutality sink to the moral level of the English nobility” (73). Comparing Shakespeare with his sources, Paola Pugliatti shows that he blackens the aristocrats considerably (457). 18

Revenge and class warfare Obscure and lousy swain, King Henry’s blood, The honorable blood of Lancaster, Must not be shed by such a jady groom. Hast thou not kissed thy hand and held my stirrup? Bare-headed plodded by my foot-cloth mule And thought thee happy when I shook my head? How often hast thou waited at my cup, Fed from my trencher?

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(51–58)

Suffolk probably hasn’t known this man earlier:Â€ he means that he is the sort of low-life who would have tended mules, held stirrups, eaten leftovers. But the pirate captain, knowledgeable about current events, is distinctly unimpressed with Suffolk’s contributions to the commonwealth.20 He taxes him with misappropriating national funds, arranging a poor marriage for the king, fornicating with the queen, complicity in Gloucester’s death,21 loss of French provinces, and creating conditions for York to claim the throne and Kentishmen to revolt. He cites the vendetta:Â€“The house of York, thrust from the crown, / By shameful murder of a guiltless king / And lofty, proud, encroaching tyranny, / Burns with revenging fire” (94–97)Â€– he finds revenge justified. Forgoing ransom, he decides to execute Suffolk. Facing this articulate challenge from a man better informed than he is and more concerned about national justice, Suffolk reverts to class slurs, wishing to “shoot forth thunder / Upon these paltry, servile, abject drudges. / … / It is impossible that I should die / By such a lowly vassal” (104–11). As Muir notes, insults are “similar to curses” (72), and Suffolk’s reliance on them betrays his impotence. But ignoring who is now in charge, he issues commands:Â€“I charge thee, waft me safely cross the Channel!” (115). Offered good adviceÂ€– “My gracious lord, entreat himÂ€– speak him fair”Â€– he is no more capable than Coriolanus of civility to “vassals”:Â€ “Suffolk’s imperial tongue is stern and rough, / Used to command, untaught to plead for favor. / Far be it we should honor such as these / With humble suit. No, rather let my head … / … dance upon a bloody pole / Than stand uncovered to the vulgar groom” (122–30). The headÂ€– imperial tongue and allÂ€– is soon being wafted about the castle by the forlorn queen. On the incipient radicalism of Elizabethan pirates, see Fitter 134–5. The murder of this friend of the common people comes close to precipitating a popular revolt, imagined in terms of vengeance:Â€ “The commons, like an angry hive of bees / That want [i.e., lack] their leader, scatter up and down / And care not who they sting in his revenge” (3.2.125–7).

20 21

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Although Cade’s rebels, in “infinite numbers,” carry “long staves,” Sir Humphrey Stafford addresses them with hauteur:Â€“Rebellious hinds, the filth and scum of Kent, / Marked for the gallows, lay your weapons down; / Home to your cottages” (4.2.110–13). Earlier, he sneered at them as “rude unpolished hinds” (3.2. 273)Â€– domestic servants or farm hands. This is how the upper crust talk about (and to) commoners. He spits at Cade, “Villain, thy father was a plasterer / And thou thyself a shearman” (4.2.121–2). Cade’s rejoinder, “and Adam was a gardener” (4.2.123) cites Ball’s “when Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?” The warrior elite proves no military match for shearmen, weavers, and butchers, who handily defeat the royal army. Cade dons Sir Humphrey’s armor. Hinds 1; aristocracy 0. Even in desperate straits, lack of practice in inter-class civility leaves noblemen nothing sensible to say. Swamped by Kentish troops, Lord Saye twitters ingratiatingly:Â€Kent is “the civil’st place of all this isle; / Sweet is the country … / The people liberal, valiant, active, wealthy; / Which makes me hope you are not void of pity” (4.7.55–58). Unfortunately, Saye lets slip that he hasn’t actually visited Kent, only read about it in Caesar’s commentaries (4.7.48). Cade may be satirized for yokel ignorance, but noblemen are downright stupid. After Cade’s sneer at grammar schools, who would be so tone-deaf as to mention Caesar’s commentaries, especially when Cade has just charged Saye with wantonly spreading education around (4.7.27–39)? WorseÂ€– Saye boasts, “Large gifts have I bestowed on learnèd clerks / Because my book [i.e., erudition] preferred me to the King” (4.7.65–66).22 Toffs simply do not hear commoners:Â€Saye’s disregard of Cade’s objections to education to which he has no access typifies the nobility’s habitual deaf ear to the people’s concerns. Cade is spurred by the duke of York, who hopes to enlist discontented peasants on his sideÂ€ – just as in Friuli, Antonio Savorgnan altered the complexion of an inter-clan vendetta by enlisting peasant aid. Horizontal conflicts thus acquired a vertical dimension, and Savorgnan and York could not control the forces they unleashed. With obtuseness typical of his class, York doesn’t see it coming. He knows that acquiring an army made him dangerous:Â€“’Twas men I lacked, and you will give them me” (3.1.345). Then he arms Cade. In 2 Henry VI, class warfare and egalitarian issues rub shoulders with vendetta. And class-based frustration animates many revenge plays. As Ronald Knowles notes, Lord Saye’s execution, partly for speaking Latin, balances the execution of illiterates for inability to read Latin (benefit of clergy) (181).

22

Revenge and class warfare S o ci a l I n e qua l i t y a n d R e v e ng e :Â€ t h e

237 s pa n i s h t r ag e dy

Much of The Spanish Tragedy’s injustice (see Chapter 5) is class-inflected. Son of a London tradesman, Kyd attended the innovative Merchant Taylors’ School, devoted to the “humanist credo that gentility ought to be measured in virtue and achievement rather than in mere birth” (Siemon 574). Social status inflects the Spanish king’s nepotismÂ€– favoring his nephew over Horatio. Although Horatio is much more active in capturing Balthazar than is Lorenzo, the king allows Lorenzo to entertain the royal prisoner, because of his social class and big house (1.3.186–7). Underscoring the affinity between Spanish and Portuguese nobility, at a state banquet the king smiles at Balthazar, “Sit down, young prince, you are our second guest”; he directs Horatio, “Wait thou upon our cup, / For well thou hast deserved to be honored” (1.5.13–16). Pouring the king’s wine is an honor not in the same league with sitting at the table. Promoting an arranged marriage between Balthazar and Bel-Imperia, cementing relations between two nations, Lorenzo is aghast to find his sister in love with the son of a lowly government official: pe dr i ng a no She loves Horatio. Balthazar starts back. l or e n z o What, Don Horatio, our knight marshal’s son?

(2.1.78–79)

Not “that valiant soldier who fought side-by-side with me,” but “our knight marshal’s son.” The proprietory “our” casts Horatio almost as a family retainer. The king too calls him “our knight marshal’s son” (2.3.36), treating Horatio like a household pet, a senior civil servant’s brat but hardly “one of us,” and inconceivable as a husband for Bel-Imperia. Lorenzo and Balthazar plump for the practical expedient of murdering him. Bel-Imperia fancies lower-caste men. The rank of her first love Andrea, “though not ignoble,” was “inferior far” to hers (Induction 5, 10). This caused trouble, as we hear thrice. Lorenzo shielded a servant from the duke’s wrath for acting as a go-between for Andrea and BelImperia (2.1.46–47). Apparently not having missed his daughter until recently, though she has been locked up for days, the duke greets her cordially:Â€“Content thyself, for I am satisfied:Â€/ It is not now as when Andrea lived; / We have forgotten and forgiven that, / And thou art graced with a happier love” (3.14.108–13). And after catching Horatio with Bel-Imperia, Lorenzo recalls “that old disgrace, / Which you for Don Andrea had endur’d / And now were likely longer to sustain, / By being found so meanly accompanied” [i.e., by Horatio] (3.10.54–57).

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Lorenzo was present when Andrea was killed. The murky circumstances, muddied increasingly in five recountings, hint that he rid the family of that “mean” suitor too:Â€ “The play invites us to wonder” if Lorenzo “choreographed” the death, to take Bel-Imperia away from “hated Andrea” (Bevington 8; see also Empson). Bel-Imperia picks lovers not for soulful eyes but for purposes of revenge, precisely because of their humble station. Choosing Horatio, Balthazar’s captor, she makes her agenda explicit:Â€ “Second love shall further my revenge! / I’ll love Horatio, my Andrea’s friend, / The more to spite the prince that wrought his end; / And where Don Balthazar, that slew my love, / Himself now pleads for favor at my hands, / He shall, in rigor of my just disdain, / Reap long repentance for his murderous deed” (1.4.66–72). She doesn’t say she chose Andrea as a rebellious statement, but it’s suggestive that after the family outrage over Andrea, she chooses another lowborn lover. She drops her glove near Horatio, in front of Balthazar and Lorenzo. Blinkered by class views, the two young aristocrats don’t recognize this as flirtation. Balthazar thinks Horatio’s proximity to the fallen glove was a lucky accident (1.4.102)Â€– and Lorenzo, striving to discover the identity of Bel-Imperia’s love, is astonished that Horatio is the man. He is similarly dense about her devotion to Andrea:Â€baffled by what’s upsetting her, he can’t imagine why she doesn’t want to marry Andrea’s killer. In Lorenzo’s social circles, those below his own rank don’t count. Casually he shrugs off two lives, accomplices to his murder:Â€ “Better it’s that base companions die / Than by their life to hazard our good haps … / Slaves are ordained to no other end.” They are “worthless twigs” (3.3.124–9, 3.4.38). He scorns public opinion (3.14.78). Both snob and sexist, he can’t imagine a sister pursuing her own agenda:Â€only Horatio’s ambition explains her morganatic affair. And if it’s height that this social climber wants, Lorenzo will hang him high:Â€ viewing Horatio’s dangling body, he jests, “Although his life were still ambitious, proud, / Yet is he at the highest now he is dead” (2.4.59–60). Balthazar too is haughty. Invited to act in a play, surely beneath his rank’s dignity, he bridles, “What, would you have us play a tragedy?” Hieronimo soothes him:Â€“Nero thought it no disparagement, / And kings and emperors have ta’en delight, / To make experience of their wits in plays.” Like Quince handling Bottom, he assures him that the play is fit for classy performers, “gentlemen and scholars” (4.1.83–101). Balthazar accedes with smug hauteur:Â€“It shall be play’d by princes and courtiers, / Such as can tell how to speak” (4.1.100)Â€– lines that must have tasted sour to the professional actor who spoke them.


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Why doesn’t Hieronimo seek state justice? He does resolve to complain to “my lord the king, / And cry aloud for justice through the court” (3.7.72–73). The 1592 edition capitalizes “Lord,” “King,” and “Court” in this speech, suggesting a civil servant’s inhibiting veneration for superiors. The king doesn’t listen to inferiors anyway, any more than Lord Saye does in 2 Henry VI. Preoccupied with a wedding, he is now even deafer than usual. And whenever Hieronimo approaches him, Lorenzo looms up menacingly: h i e r on i mo Justice, O justice to Hieronimo. l or e n z o Back! see’st thou not the king is busy? h i e r on i mo â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•‡â•›O, is he so? k i ng Who is he that interrupts our business? h i e r on i mo Not I. Hieronimo, beware! go by, go by.

(3.12.27–30)

Hieronimo is reduced to completing Lorenzo’s blank verse line (28), and then the king doesn’t recognize himÂ€– he is preoccupied, and Lorenzo is standing between them. After this dispiriting failure, Hieronimo tries again. When the king mentions Horatio, not knowing he is dead or noticing his long absence from court, Hieronimo blurts out, “Justice, justice, gentle king! … O my son, my son!” But Lorenzo, hissing “Hieronimo, you are not well-advised,” explains the outburst:Â€Hieronimo is “distract and … lunatic” (3.12.62–88). The king readily accepts this, and Lorenzo presses to remove Hieronimo from his position on grounds of lunacy. Lorenzo’s father begins to notice:Â€ “It is suspected … / That thou, Lorenzo, wrong’st Hieronimo, / And in his suits towards his majesty / Still [i.e., always] keep’st him back, and seeks to cross his suit” (3.14.52–56). Suspense attends the duke’s dawning recognition that Lorenzo is blocking Hieronimo from lodging a grievance:Â€“Myself have seen thee busy to keep back, / Him and his supplications from the King” (3.14.52–78). He investigates:Â€“I hear you find yourself aggrieved at my son, / Because you have not access unto the King, / And say ’tis he that intercepts your suits”; he asks if Hieronimo has “reason to suspect my son.” But class difference and Lorenzo’s presence prevent Hieronimo from confiding. He obsequiously bows outÂ€– “your lordship’s to command”Â€– but once alone, snorts, “Pah! keep your way,” and mutters in Italian about suspicious friendliness and likely betrayal (3.14.130–7). Hieronimo turns to revenge because his low status blocks access to justice:Â€“Nor aught avails it me to menace them,” who “will bear me down [i.e., crush me] with their nobility” (3.13.36–38). But low status can also

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serve as camouflage:Â€“Enjoin / Thine eyes to observation, and thy tongue / To milder speeches than thy spirit affords, / Thy heart to patience, and thy hands to rest, / Thy cap to courtesy, and thy knee to bow, / Till to revenge thou know, when, where, and how” (3.13.36–44). Royal hearing impairment is compounded by a deaf heaven. To Hieronimo, heaven is high, remote, indifferent, “imperial.” His passions “beat at the windows of the brightest heavens, / Soliciting for justice and revenge; / But they are placed in those imperial heights, / Where countermured with walls of diamond, / I find the place impregnable” (3.7.9–14). Heaven’s “imperial heights” recall earth’s impregnable ruling class, its society ladies sporting names like “Bel-Imperia”Â€ – “beautiful imperial rule.” Neither king nor heaven listens to Hieronimo. When he finally justifies his revenge to the court, with a detailed account of his son’s murder by Lorenzo and Balthazar, and of Lorenzo’s blocking his access to justice by charging him with “brainsick lunacy” (4.4.76–154), the Aristotelian recognition scene misfires. The Spanish king is baffled:Â€“Why has thou done this undeserving deed?” The Portuguese viceroy demands, “Why hast thou murdered my Balthazar?” And the duke of Castile asks, “Why hast thou butchered both my children?” Has shock deafened them to the lucid 79-line explanation? Or is it that they never have listened to “our knight marshal”? To some, his failure to make himself heard attests to the futility of revenge:Â€this “victorious avenger” ends as “a criminal in custody” (Braden, Renaissance Tragedy 213). But upper-crust selective deafnessÂ€ – so like that in 2 Henry VIÂ€ – explains why Hieronimo becomes an avenger rather than a legal plaintiff.23 Upper-class incomprehension reveals why revenge plays appealed to ordinary folk. Hieronimo’s rage against his society puzzles Mercer, who sees no evidence of “general corruption” (45). But even without being “corrupt,” a society can habitually be unjust through class inequity. Hieronimo dies, but takes the upper echelons with him, leaving two royal families heirlessÂ€– satisfying to the frustrated and the powerless in the audience. o t h e l l o :Â€I ag o’s

Qu e s t f or E qua l i t y

Othello, seldom considered a revenge tragedy, certainly exhibits atypical features. Iago’s speed and dispatch are a contrast to the revenger’s delay And perhaps why he famously abjures speech, biting out his tongue. As Braden notes, this is an anti-tyrannical gesture:Â€Hieronimo’s “assertion of the right not to talk is taken directly from one of Seneca’s exchanges on imperium,” and the tongue-excision is a gesture of “ingenious defiance shown by the victims of classical tyrants” (Renaissance Tragedy 214).

23


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(“Dull not device by coldness and delay,” he reminds himself [2.3.361]). Most avengers relish shedding blood themselves, but Othello commissions Iago to kill Cassio. And rather than killing a licentious tyrant, Othello mistakenly kills an innocent.24 But revenge conventions abound. Thunder is associated with divine retribution (5.2.241–2). Iago suggests killing Desdemona in “the bed she hath contaminated” (4.1.197–8), a condign revenge judged apt by Othello:Â€“Thy bed, lust-stained, shall with lust’s blood be spotted” (5.1.37). Suspecting Othello of seducing his wife, Iago works to unman him, accusing him of unmanliness four times in Act 4, scene 1:Â€“Bear your fortune like a man” (58); “Be a man” (63); “a passion most Â�unsuiting such a man” (75); “You’re … nothing of a man” (86–87). He retaliates for Othello’s not promoting him by eroding the civilized manners marking Othello as a senior officer:Â€ “He called her whore. A beggar in his drink / Could not have laid such terms upon his callet” (4.2.124–5). But the best reason to treat Othello as a revenge play is its outstanding revengers. Othello quantifies like a good avenger:Â€ “O that the slave had forty thousand lives! / One is too poor, too weak for my revenge.” He conjures, “Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell,” seeks a “wide revenge,” claims that “had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge / Had stomach for ’em all,” and longs for “sweet revenge.”25 He threatens to throw Cassio’s nose to a dog (4.1.137–8), recalling an old revenge motif (see Chapter 8, note 26). But the great avenger is Iago, with his equational threat:Â€“Nothing … shall content my soul / Till I am evened with him, wife for wife” (2.1.285–6). Fueling revenge is Iago’s intense resentment of his social status. He boasts of exalted connections:Â€“Three great ones of the city” acted “in personal suit to make me his lieutenant” (1.1.8–10). This rings hollow:Â€we never see “great ones” aiding Iago. But duke and senators do respect Othello, while Iago plays the porter (“I must fetch his necessaries ashore” [2.1.270–1]) and his wife appears less a waiting-gentlewoman than a servant:Â€Desdemona directs, “Give me my nightly wearing” and “unpin me here” (4.3.15, 33). The play opens with a common revenge scenarioÂ€ – a claim of unrewarded merit.26 Iago claims battlefield merit (1.1.27–29), but a plain soldier has little hope of a lieutenancy against a high-born candidate like This last was not unprecedented, howeverÂ€– Theseus’ revenge on Hippolytus, familiar in Seneca, is also based on a false accusation of sexual infidelity. 3.3.447–8, 451, 462; 5.2.81–82, 125. 26 However, neither cronyism (knowing “great ones”) nor the seniority system Iago has also tried (“old gradation” [1.1.34]) is merit-based. One of the play’s many departures from the traditions of revenge drama is that Iago’s grievances are largely bogus, just as Othello’s grievance is mistaken. 24 25

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Cassio. Class rage enflames him. Common folk lead lives of humiliating servility:Â€ “We cannot all be masters”; “Many a duteous and kneecrooking knave, / … doting on his own obsequious bondage, / Wears out his time much like his master’s ass / … and when he’s old, [is] cashiered” (1.1.43–48). Underlings can at least maintain self-respect by subversion:Â€“Throwing but shows of service on their lords, / Do well thrive by ’em, and when they have lined their coats, / Do themselves homage. These fellows have some soul, / And such a one do I profess myself” (1.1.52–55). Though it seems a feeble assertion of “soul,” to Iago such coat-lining at the expense of the privileged expresses self-worth. Unlike Cade, who tries to abolish hierarchy, Iago works within it:Â€if he encounters a glass ceiling, he uses underhanded means, sneering at those contented with their place.27 Iago’s “thieves! Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags” (1.1.79–80) insinuates that in eloping with a senator’s daughter Othello has lined his own coat. Brabantio charges Othello with status violation:Â€patricians “cannot but feel this wrong as ’twere their own; / For if such actions may have passage free, / Bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be” (1.2.98–100). Othello is no slave or pagan; but senators outrank mercenary generals, and no alien can equal a Venetian; and to this racist, blackness too subtracts from one’s standing. Othello claims royal blood (1.2.21–22), but an African pedigree cannot stand up in Venice:Â€marrying him, Desdemona has passed up suitors “of her own clime, complexion, and degree” [i.e., class] (3.3.235). Used to throwing his weight around, Brabantio pulls rank:Â€ “My spirits and my place have in their power / To make this bitter to thee” (1.1.105–6). To foil elopement, he summons a posse:Â€“At every house I’ll call; / I may command at most. Get weapons, ho, / And raise some special officers” (1.1.181–3). This “magnifico” possesses “a voice potential / As double as the Duke’s” (1.2.13–14)Â€– status-enhanced voice power expressed arithmetically. The wealthy control the law:Â€Brabantio “will divorce you, / Or put upon you what restraint or grievance / The law, with all his might to enforce it on, / Will give him” (1.2.14–17). In Cyprus, too, Cassio’s brawl will cause trouble, since the man he hurt is from a prominent family (3.1.42–44). Desdemona’s alleged infidelity with a lieutenant violates the army’s class system: o t h e l l o I will chop her into messes. Cuckold me! i ag o O, ’tis foul in her. Bowers provides historical examples of servants taking violent revenge on employers for having mistreated and/or undervalued them (24).

27

Revenge and class warfare o t h e l l o With mine officer. i ag o That’s fouler.

243

(4.1.190–3)

Despite Brabantio’s wishful depiction of her as “a maiden never bold, / Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion / Blushed at herself” (1.3.94–96), Desdemona is “an aristocratic speaker whose discourse is full of the assurance and self-confidence of her class”; the “ease with which she speaks before the Duke and Senators” contrasts with Iago’s silence in the senate (Magnusson 94). When Brabantio and Desdemona speak, dukes and senators listen. People from good families assert distinction through mutual solidarity and snubbing inferiors. Not Iago but gentlemanly Cassio “came a-wooing” with Othello. Desdemona needs accommodation suitable to “her breeding” (1.3.237). Brabantio asks who the gutter-mouthed Iago isÂ€– “What profane wretch art thou?” (1.1.116)Â€– but deigns to know Roderigo, a nitwit but a gentleman. (This is why Iago recruits Roderigo [Magnusson 97].) Even Roderigo knows enough to court solidarity with Brabantio via class sneers:Â€he sniffs at Desdemona’s elopement by means of “a knave of common hire, a gondolier” (1.1.126). Cassio and Desdemona’s affinity as well-bred patricians abets Iago’s claim that they are lovers. They even talk alike:Â€Desdemona declares of Othello, “I never gave him cause”; Cassio declares to Othello, “I never gave you cause” (3.4.153, 5.2.305). As Ralph Berry shows, “relations between Cassio and Iago are continuingly tense”; Cassio pursues a “policy of putting Iago down” (144). He publicly kisses Emilia, asserting a gentleman’s right to take liberties with inferiors’ wives, implying that Iago wouldn’t recognize kissing as courteous behavior:Â€ “Let it not gall your patience, good Iago, / That I extend my manners. ’Tis my breeding / That gives me this bold show of courtesy” (2.1.100–2). (Sharpening the insult, “gall”Â€– to cause saddle soresÂ€– presents Cassio as cavalier and Iago as horse.) Iago swallows the insultÂ€– even augments it by placing his wife in the plebeian context of the shrew:Â€“Sir, would she give you so much of her lips / As of her tongue she oft bestows on me” (2.1.103–4). As E. A. J. Honigmann observes, “Between that condescending ‘good Iago’ and the word ‘Sir,’” audiences “must have recognized a familiar class barrier” (83). Cassio waxes even more offensive under the fool’s license of a drunkard:Â€“No offence to … any man of qualityÂ€– I hope to be saved.” To Iago’s “so do I too, lieutenant,” Cassio rejoins, “Not before me. The lieutenant is to be saved before the ensign.” He boozily confides, “Do not think, gentlemen, I am drunk. This is my ensign, this is my right hand, and this is my left” (2.3.92–99). The man who had hoped for a lieutenancy is

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now reduced, by the man who got it, to a possession, “my ensign.” Cassio will pay for this. In fact, he is already paying:Â€Iago has got him drunk. A move in a larger game, degrading Cassio is also in itself revenge. Even the divine Desdemona scorns Iago’s quips as plebeian, “to make fools laugh i’ th’ alehouse” (2.1.140–1). In her ladylike imaginings, an alehouse is the sort of place where sub-senatorial talk like Iago’s belongs. Using “you” to Cassio and “thou” to Iago, she invites Cassio to join her in walking on Iago:Â€“O most lame and impotent conclusion!” turns a protest against his jokes into a smear on his virility. She asks, “Cassio, is he not a most profane and liberal [i.e., libertine] counselor?” Cassio obligingly casts Iago as a coarse soldier:Â€“He speaks home, madam. You may relish him more in the soldier than in the scholar” (2.1.163–7). “Speak home” was the verbal equivalent of “thrust home”Â€– what revengers did. Iago’s lethal penetrations do work through words; but Cassio means it only as a class slur, and Desdemona smiles and plays along. No wonder Iago is not too sad that Desdemona becomes collateral damage in his revenge on Othello. “Class resentment,” Berry observes, “permeates Iago” (115). It burns inside him like the mines of sulfur, as he watches Cassio’s elegant attentions to Desdemona: He takes her by the palm. Ay, well saidÂ€– whisper … Ay, smile upon her, do. I will gyve [i.e., shackle] thee in thine own courtship [i.e., courtliness] … If such tricks as these strip you out of your lieutenantry, it had been better you had not kissed your three fingers so oft, which now again you are most apt to play the sir in. Very good, well kissed, an excellent curtsy … yet again your fingers to your lips? Would they were clyster-pipes for your sake. (2.1.168–76)

Iago “derogates Cassio’s style” and “civil conversation,” Magnusson thinks, “not because he cannot replicate them but because he is not socially positioned to receive advantage from them” (96). Social events on Cyprus are class-calibrated:Â€“Some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to what sport and revels his addition leads him” (2.2.4–5). (Iago would likely be consigned to bonfire-building.) “Addition,” a title added to a name to designate rank, evokes arithmetic:Â€social distinction is added to the standard human being. Failing at additionÂ€– his attempt to rise in military rankÂ€– Iago embarks on subtraction. He will tear others down. The status hierarchy built into language reminds characters of their station. Cassio is the only character with two names, and Othello three times calls him by his Christian name.28 He never addresses Iago so familiarly. â•‡ 2.3.1, 7, 171.

28


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Iago privately snarls out the full name:Â€“I’ll have our Michael Cassio on the hip” (2.1.292)Â€– the same wrestling image Shylock and Gratiano apply to vengeance (MV 1.3.41, 4.1.329). Othello addresses to Brabantio the “you” of upper-caste equals:Â€“Good signor, you shall more command with years / Than with your weapons”; Brabantio insultingly demotes him:Â€ “Thou foul thief, where hast thou stowed my daughter?” (1.2. 61–63). Even in the Senate, where “you” is standard, Brabantio continues to “thee” Othello. At first Othello gives his drunken lieutenant the benefit of a doubt, using his Christian name and the “you” of high-status equals:Â€ “How comes it, Michael, you are thus forgot?”29 But when he dismisses him, he drops “Michael” and switches to “thee”:Â€“Cassio, I love thee; / But never more be officer of mine” (2.3.231–2). Cassio calls Iago “you” like a fellow officer when kissing Emilia, even while his boast about his “breeding” reminds Iago that some are more equal than others. Drunken Cassio mocks Iago as “you.” Once disgraced, however, he begins to “you” Iago in earnest, asking his help. His “I humbly thank you” (3.1.37) must sound as sweet to Iago as Antonio’s “shall we be beholden to you?” sounds to Shylock. But if the lieutenant unbends when asking a favor, the general never does. Except for once before the Senate, where everyone but Brabantio uses “you,” Othello never calls Iago “you,” even in discussing his wife’s fidelity. That not even personal intimacy can rupture social barriers pours oil on the already crackling flames of Iago’s class resentment. The very elusiveness of Iago’s motivation hints that revenge, apart from its proximate stimuli, gratifies him in asserting equality with those who slight him. He is obsessed with unfairnessÂ€ – why should worldly success depend so little on talent? Had Cassio listened, he might have caught the subtext of Iago’s “reputation is … oft got without merit and lost without deserving” (2.3.251–2). If Cassio’s reputation was lost without deserving (he tried to decline the drink), it was also got (Iago believes) without merit. Even in Iago’s drinking songs, men of “high renown” sneer at those “of low degree”; “’Tis pride that pulls the country down” (2.3.81–83). “Pride”Â€– the overweening complacency of those who owe lofty station merely to birth. Iago’s last utterance addresses upper-crust bystanders as “you”:Â€“What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word” (5.2.309–10). He can hardly expect anyone to turn the “you” of inferior to superior into an equal-rank “you” and may be gratified when one 29

To reiterate pronouns’ function as status markers, “If someone was more powerful than you were, you used ‘you’ to them, and they used ‘thou’ to you; if you were of equal status with someone, you would exchange the same pronounÂ€ – ‘thou’ between lower-class speakers, and ‘you’ between upper-class speakers” (Hope 246).

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Venetian gentleman favors him with “torments will ope your lips.” But the final words spoken to Iago are “This is thy work” (5.2.374). A “thee” and “you” society offers no way to assert equality from below. “You,” demarcating equality between the high-born, is a posture of deference from the low. Pronominally, only the higher-status speaker can grant equality. Inflexible hierarchy permeates Iago’s language; and the army; and civil society. His recourse is that of the powerless:Â€revenge. His revenge is usually deplored as part of his villainy. But might not the play also be indicting the hierarchy that left him only that recourse? S o ci a l S tat us i n O t h e r R e v e ng e Pl a y s Revenge tragedy, Griswold notes, was “crafted for the public theatres,”30 and a subset of revenge plays stage class resentment. To those already discussed, we can add many others. In The Jew of Malta, Barabas muses on the systemic unfairness denying Jews political power:Â€“That’s not our fault:Â€alas, our number’s few, / And crowns come either by succession / Or urged by force”; he seeks instead to be “wealthier far than any Christian” (1.1.125–9). His growing rich within a Christian polity that disdains him recalls Iago’s admiration of coat-lining servants; wealth creates elbow room within a class hierarchy. And Barabas asserts autonomy through revenge. An avenger, like a rich merchant, is a self-made man. In The Revenge of Bussy, Montsurry tests Clermont’s stoicism with class slurs, calling him and another man “a ragged couple of decayed commanders” and “ambitious beggars” (1.1.235, 248). One of many fortunefallen avengers, Clermont laments having “little left” of “noble birth” (3.4.51–52). Disenchanted with hereditary status, he rasps, “You are a king’s son born … You did no princely deeds / Ere you’re born … to deserve it; / Nor did you any since that I have heard; / Nor will do ever any” (1.1.280–7). The Guise also decries “the insolence / Of his high birth and greatness (which were never / Effects of his deserts, but of his fortune)” (1.1.296–7). Great men “take their births and birth-rights left to them / (Acquir’d by others) for their own worth’s purchase” (1.1.299–300). And Clermont, with his class resentment, takes revenge on Montsurry. In Women Beware Women, a duke appropriates the wife of Leantio, a lowly merchant’s agent. Internalizing the status hierarchy, Leantio feels he Of pre-1609 revenge tragedies, she notes, only Antonio’s Revenge first appeared in a private theater (67).

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deserves this, for marrying above himself:Â€“Equal justice, thou hast met my sin / With a full weight” (3.2.96–97). His mother has always feared marital trouble, since he drew his wife away from her fortune (1.1.59). In the loutish Ward, high station is divorced from merit. The duke honors Leantio for “desert” (3.2.43)Â€– but really for accepting the duke’s keeping his wife as a mistress. Only high birth bestows power. Fittingly, the play culminates in an orgy of vengeance killings. In The Duke of Milan, a lowly civic official delights in whipping a gentleman and tells a salacious story about a gentlewoman being whipped. And a remarkable scene of class resentment views war through soldiers’ eyes. They complain of treatment by superiors and hope a besieged town will hold out rather than surrenderingÂ€– at their pay grade, they rely on spoils. And anyway, they like taking revenge on a sacked city’s privileged classes, “chuffs, that every day may spend / A soldier’s entertainment for a year. / … / I have seen ’em stop / Their scornful noses first, then seem to swoon / At sight of a buff jerkin” (3.1.22–37). War profits end up in “the emperor’s coffers,” while poor soldiers are “left / To starve, or fill up hospitals” (3.1.12, 16–17).31 Civil War soldiers were radicalized by the belief that their leadersÂ€– who owed them hefty backpayÂ€ – had made war for the interests of the propertied. Soldiers’ poverty is a frequent grievance in revenge plays. Flamineo makes better money than a soldier as his sister’s pander (White Devil 3.1.34–43). Bosola complains that hawks and dogs are rewarded for service, but not soldiers (Duchess of Malfi 1.1.59–61). Hoffman’s father, who fought thirty battles for his country, was outlawed for a small debt (1.1.158–62). In The Atheist’s Tragedy, a duke assists the impoverished Charlemont to go to war, and then seizes his home and girlfriend. Later falsely imprisoned, Charlemont meditates that a graveyard levels rich and poor:Â€“Now both their states are equal” (4.3.19). In The Double Marriage, a revenger seeking “vengeance,” “liberty and freedom” seizes a tyrant’s treasury, promising citizens “we’ll share the wealth among ye” (5.1.157–64). Revenge and class resentment figure in some plays that are not classic revenge plays. In 1593, when economic hardship fueled agitation against London’s resident aliens, the anonymous Jack Straw staged the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. Straw kills a tax collector who has strip-searched his under-age daughter:Â€“We’ll revenge this villainy” (1.1.42). Parson Ball trumpets his lines:Â€“England is grown to such a pass of late, / That rich men triumph to see the poor beg at their gate. / … But when Adam delved, and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?” He decries Â�“difference â•‡ In Massinger’s Fatal Dowry, a faithful soldier rots in debtors’ prison until he commits suicide.

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in degrees”; that “the rich have all, the poor live in misery” is cause for revolt, to “make division equally, / Of each man’s goods indifferently” (1.1.58–63, 83–87). He tells the king, “We come to revenge your officer’s ill demeanor. / And though we have killed him for his knavery, / Now we be gotten together, we will have wealth and liberty”; Wat Tyler adds, “Ere we’ll be pinched with poverty, / … / That are as worthy of good mainÂ� tenance / As any gentleman … / We will be kings and lords … / And not abide the pride of tyranny” (3.10.565–80). Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, a mere shepherd, conquers the known world, achieving power by merit alone. Throwing off his shepherd’s clothing, Tamburlaine “defies the sumptuary laws which maintained what Shakespeare called ‘degree’ and we would call a status system”; his rise evokes “class war” (Hattaway, “Christopher Marlowe” 199, 201). In his poem on the Münster commune, Hell’s Broke Loose, Samuel Rowlands identifies Marlowe’s class-shattering Tamburlaine with revolutionary Anabaptist John of Leyden (Sig. d3v). And Tamburlaine’s notion of the ideal conqueror is vengeful:Â€ “In the furrows of his frowning brows, / Harbors revenge, war, death and cruelty” (Part II, 1.4.77–78). He speaks of “a God full of revenging wrath, / From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks, / Whose scourge I am” (Part II, 5.1.181–3).32 Coriolanus, contemporary with famine and the Midlands Rising, stages a vengeful class revolt and a soldier’s revenge. Hunger sparks the uprising:Â€the nobility’s surplus food “would relieve us … Let us revenge this” (1.1.12–18). Coriolanus, resenting “the painful service, / The extreme dangers, and the drops of blood / Shed for my thankless country,” offers “revengeful services” to Rome’s foes; he “leads a power ’gainst Rome, / And vows revenge” (4.5.67–69, 88, 4.6.68–69). R a dic a l E g a l i ta r i a n i s m i n t h e C ivi l Wa r E r a Radical mid-seventeenth-century social critique commandeered many genresÂ€ – polemical essays, open letters, manifestos. Gerard Winstanley and his collaborators attacked inequity in prose, challenging aristocrats to “prove that the earth was made by Almighty God peculiarly for them, and not for others equal with them” (12). They advocated legislation by public consent (Winstanley 52–53), pronouncing equality man’s primal state:Â€“Ye the great ones of the earth … your first estate was … equality with your fellow creatures” (Everard Sig. a2v); “In the beginning … not one word â•‡ On Tamburlaine’s appeal in an age of class resentment, see Cartelli, “Tamburlaine Phenomenon.”

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was spoken … that one branch of mankind should rule over another” (6). The true Fall was a plunge into inequality, when some instituted private land ownership “and the others were made servants and slaves”; by inequality, God “is mightily dishonored, as if he were a respecter of persons, delighting in the comfortable livelihood of some and rejoicing in the miserable poverty … of others. From the beginning it was not so” (6–7). England will be free only when the landless poor “have a free allowance to dig … the commons, and to live as comfortably as the landlords” (15). One manifesto quotes Acts 4, the favored Anabaptist justification for communal property (Everard). The word “equal” rings in these works:Â€“Landlords have stolen the earth from their fellow creatures, that have an equal share” (14). No Englishmen should lord it over another, but all look upon each other “as equals”; God “equally loves his whole creation” (12–13). In The Case of the Army Truly Stated, army radicals demanded universal manhood suffrage. Studded with the word “equal,” 33 it declared “the meanest vassal … equally … accountable to God with the greatest prince” (21).34 An Agreement of the People demanded that everyone be equally subject to laws, that no “degree, birth, or place do confer any exemption from the ordinary course of legal proceedings” (227–8). In the 1647 Putney debates, the conservative debater Henry Ireton reeled at Article I of the Agreement:Â€if it really meant that every man could vote, “I have something to say against it” (“Putney Debates” 52). Thomas Rainborough resoundingly affirmed, “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he”; everyone should live under a regime only “by his own consent”; “the poorest man in England is not at all bound … to that government” in which “he hath not had a voice” (53). Gasping “that’s the meaning?”, Ireton spluttered that being born in a country was not “a sufficient ground” for having a say in its government (53–54). He frankly declared that his main interest was “property,” here threatened most Anabaptistically:Â€if “all the people should have right to elections … you must deny all property.” If “one man hath an equal right with another to the choosing of him that shall govern him,” the same principle would authorize “equal right” to “any goods he sees” (57–58). Rainborough denied that equal voting rights implied communism. God accepts private property, “else why hath God made that law, Thou shalt E.g., “full and equal satisfaction to the whole soldiery of the kingdom” (4); “the people may be equally represented” (15); “all without distinction, as well parliament men as others, may be equally accountable” (16); “an equal rate propounded throughout the kingdom” (18). 34 Letters and addresses of the General Council of the Army “were always signed by officers as well as soldiers, their names sometimes interspersed without any distinction of rank” (Woolrych 103). 33

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not steal?” (59). But Ireton thought the poor would “vote against all property.” Colonel Rich agreed:Â€the landless outnumbered the propertied by five to one; “if the master and servant shall be equal electors,” masters will be outvoted (63). He worried about the propertied sixth, Rainborough about the disenfranchised five-sixths, shocked that “one part shall make hewers of wood and drawers of water of the other five, and so the greatest part of the nation be enslaved” (67). But however brilliantly revolutionaries used the press for petitions and manifestos, however mighty their public debates, egalitarians lost a powerful populist resource when the theaters closed. In the quest for equality, the public theaterÂ€– especially revenge playsÂ€– had often been on their side. Were it not for religious objections to the theater, dramatists alive to the class resentments inherent in personal pronouns might have made common cause with Quakers, who in a potent leveling gesture called everyone “thou”:Â€“No man is to be called master or sir” or “have power over another” (Ross 384). But the royalist exiles who now sponsored revenge plays abhorred egalitarianism. A dedication in The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I laments: Our goods and lives, we forfeit at their wills; Our noble heroes do by dozens fall; The loyal gentry, grief or prisons kills; The people each day robb’d and spoil’d of all. While those plebeians who procure our ills Feed high, sleep soft, have kingdoms at their calls. Strange revolution, O accurs’d mutation That appoints cobblers for to rule a nation.

Religious radicals and revenge dramatists made strange bedfellows:Â€plays often satirize religious sects,35 which often opposed the theater. But dramatists took great interest in egalitarianism, staging their own A jailer in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho rattles off a list of sects:Â€ “Brownist, Anabaptist, Millenary, / Family o’ Love” (5.2.32–33). Licentious Anabaptists inhabit several plays. In Middleton’s The Widow, “an Anabaptist may lie with a brother’s wife all the while he’s asleep” (1.2.179–80). The Family of Love are orgiastic wife-swappers:Â€in the anonymous Family of Love and Marston’s Dutch Courtesan, citizens’ wives attend orgies at Familist meeting halls. Anabaptist communal property was linked with common ownership of women. Wives are as “loose-bodied” as other property:Â€ “Each man’s copyhold will become freehold … their wives … will be made common” (Family of Love 5.1.164–7). A lecherous lord in Chapman’s Sir Giles Goosecap, archly proposing that “all things should be common betwixt lords and ladies,” is jestingly said to be “of the Family of Love” (2.1.270–3). The Jovial Crew, or the Devil Turned Ranter depicts Ranters as promiscuous. Anabaptists are also seen as gluttonous, their opposition to Catholic fasts merely an excuse for gormandizing:Â€ “I was born an Anabaptist, a fell foe, / To fish and Fridays, pig’s my absolute sweetheart” (Middleton, Inner-Temple Masque 84–85). Jonson

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radicalsÂ€– revenge heroes. Even if revenge drama and religious sects had taken entirely separate paths, they shared a provocation (class resentment) and goal (social equality). And the paths were not entirely separate:Â€religious radicals often speak of revenge. Müntzer’s followers proclaimed, “Christ will give the sword and revenge to … Anabaptists, to punish all sins, stamp out all governments; communize all property”; and “the government does not treat the poor people properly … When God gives them revenge they want to punish and wipe out the evil” (Cohn 255). Ponet, viewing uprisings as revenge for an unjust social system, said that the rich “oppress the poor, and the poor seek the destruction of the rich … the great fish eat up the small, and the weak seek revenge on the mighty” (10). Fifth Monarchist Thomas Venner demanded, “no person of what rank, degree, or quality soever [should] be privileged from law” (19); his revolt against Cromwell he called “the vengeance of the Lord” (24), and he stirred followers to “execute vengeance” (Medley 10). Both religious radicals and revengers resented social inequality. Anabaptists favored group decision-making, and revengers equalized commoners with aristocrats:Â€a duke’s son is killed in recompense for humble Hieronimo’s slain son. As Venner demanded an end to “private interests of lordship, power, and advantage, contrary to … common good” (19), a revenger bitterly ascribes the privileges of “high birth” not to “deserts,” but to “fortune” (Revenge of Bussy 1.1.293–4)Â€– social station is Fortuna’s gift, not God’s. Both revengers and religious radicals protested economic inequity:Â€ Winstanley found England unfree “until the poor people … live as comfortably as the landlords” (Everard 15), and Hoffman retaliates on those who “wring the poor, and eat the people up” (5.2.2613). Both religious radicals and revengers protest commoners’ political disempowerment:Â€ Venner demands taxation “by common consent” (20), and Titus Andronicus laments being closed out of civic participation. Both religious radicals and revengers assailed inequitable legal systems. Winstanley charged, “Thou hast made many promises … to make the land a free nation”; yet the people “are oppressed by the courts, ’sizes, sessions, by the justices and clerks of the peace” (Everard Sig. b2); in revenge plays, satirizes two Anabaptists attracted to alchemy by hope of money; if one doesn’t bring more money soon, “All hope of rooting out the Bishops, / Or th’ antichristian hierarchy shall perish.” When the other has a momentary qualmÂ€– “This act of coining, is it lawful?”Â€– the first responds, “Lawful? / We know no magistrate” (Alchemist 2.5.82–83, 3.2.149–50). The Alchemist was onstage over ninety years after the suppression of the Münster Anabaptist theocracy, but Jonson still counted on his audience’s catching an allusion to “Knipper-Doling,” a Münster leader (2.5.13). In his Epicoene, a wife rages at her husband as “no Anabaptist ever railed” (3.2.15); his Staple of News features fractious “saints at Amsterdam” (3.2.124).

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realists know that “a duke’s soft hand strokes the rough head of law / And makes it lie smooth” (Revenger’s Tragedy 2.3.73–74). If injustice fostered religious skepticism in avengers, religious radicals opposed first an oppressive Catholic church and later unjust Protestant dogmas:Â€Socinians, Arminians, and Catharists denied predestination, by which God might elect a murderer to salvation or doom a saint to perdition if it tickled His fancyÂ€ – one was born into reprobation or salvation as into a social station.36 To the illiterate, landless, wage-earning classes, inequity was iniquity. Some of them would have seen, in the socially mixed public theater, kings dethroned, aristocrats beheaded, Jack Cade in control of London. Humble actors impersonated dukes and earls. How hard could it be, to be a duke or an earl? All species of Renaissance radicalismÂ€– resistance to tyranny; social, legal, and economic egalitarianismÂ€– appear in revenge plays. Not all radicals embraced every radical notion:Â€ Ponet advocated tyrant-resistance and legal equality but defended private property (Peardon 35); republicans advocated tyrant-resistance but shuddered at social leveling; Levelers advocated legal reform and universal suffrage but opposed economic leveling;37 Diggers advocated economic communism, legal reform, universal suffrage, social leveling, and abolition of state religion, but opposed violent tyrant-resistance. And no single revenger espouses the whole radical agenda. But revengers share enough with other radicals to justify situating revenge plays on the canvas of Renaissance radicalism. Radical ideas, present in many plays, are central in revenge plays, with their class resentments and regicides, their thrusts against a ruling class which blocks equal access to justice. Like other radicalism, revenge rested on belief in equality. A commoner had a right equal to anyone’s, to preach the gospel or avenge a loved one. If his conscience indicted society as ungodly or unfair, a revenger, like a radical Christian, operated by the dictates of his own inner light. The ugliness of revenge reflects, in many plays, the ugliness of an inequitable society. Contrary to the received opinion that the horrors of stage revenge were meant to deter Christian playgoers from vengefulness, in a Such sects even repudiated original sin, which punished the innocent for ancestral offenses. But “while the Leveler programme did not call for the abolition of private property, it always demanded some sort of effective action so that no one would have to beg”; “Levellers, Diggers and Ranters shared a core of basic values and spoke a common language. All these radicals agree that men are by nature equal and free” (Goldsmith 74–75, 66).

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world of entrenched unfairness to even the score is a grand self-Â�actualizing stroke. Where the powerful can oppress and humiliate, revenge asserts honor and dignity; against oppressive authority, it asserts personal agency. In a world of inequityÂ€– economic, social, political, and legalÂ€– revenge is a blow for equality.

C h a p t e r 10

Quantification revisited: revenge and social equality

The desire for revenge Is in the children of a tender age.

Locrine

Why were revenge plays so useful for exploring egalitarianism? The answer returns us to mathematics and quantification. Enamored of systems in balanceÂ€– equations, double-entry bookkeeping, balance of trade, equally matched armies arranged in squares, the body’s balanced humors, architectural symmetryÂ€– the age was starting to identify fairness with equal-sidedness. And revenge was symmetrical. A perfectly executed condign revenge was beautiful, with the bilateral symmetry of high Renaissance architectureÂ€ – the Strozzi Palace in Florence, England’s Longleat. The medieval word for beautiful, “fair,” came also in the Renaissance to mean “free from … injustice; equitable, legitimate” (OED). Fairness in human conduct was beautiful; and injustice could be re-beautifiedÂ€– made symmetrical, equitableÂ€– by compensatory action:Â€an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Even such humble texts as William Scott’s Essay on Drapery idealized bilateral equality. Trade’s purpose was “the good of both parties,” a fair deal for buyer and seller:Â€“If the price exceed the worth of the thing, or the thing exceed the price, the equality of justice is taken away” (18). Fairness meant equal satisfaction:Â€ “In the buying and selling of commodities,” a price is “agreed upon between both parties,” reflecting “equality in the value of things” (Malynes, Lex 91). Like an equation, ledger, or symmetrical palace, a mutually satisfactory commercial transaction embodied an ideal of balance. Both the draper’s fair price and the revenger’s compensatory decapitation were steps toward Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” The Latinate “equal,” rare in medieval texts, became prominent in Elizabethan England. The equal sign first occurred in print in England in Recorde’s algebra text, 1557 (D. E. Smith i:Â€320).1 The OED draws early Recorde claims he derived it from parallel lines of equal length (Whetstone Sig. [ffï»¿iv]). Foster Watson traces the equal sign to John Widman in Mercantile Arithmetic (Leipzig, 1489).

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Quantification revisited

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examples of “equal” from mathematical disciplines, surveying and geometry. Its various meanings stemmed from its mathematical sense:Â€“identical in magnitude, number, value” (OED). The numeric basis of fairness is clear in Dee’s introduction to his translation of Euclid:Â€he applies to justice the geometric term “proportion” (Sig. ai).2 Dee enjoys equalization problems, and eight of Euclid’s nine axioms use “equal” (“things equal to one and the self-same thing are equal also the one to the other” [6]), as do many propositions. “Equal,” the foundation of geometry, was the very soul of algebra. Dee venerates that “art of equation” as the pinnacle of mathematicsÂ€ – “so profound … that man’s wit can deal with nothing more profitable” (Sig. [vi]v). In Mellis’ bookkeeping text, equality is the cornerstone:Â€after all parts of the ledger are “made even,” with “the debitor on the left side and the creditor upon the right sideÂ€– and … the sums of money be equal, then is the balance well rectified” ([c6]v–[c7]). Balance-of-trade theory valued “equality in buying and selling … that all things might equally pass by trade from one man to another” (Malynes, Lex 7); a king should seek “equality … betwixt his realm and other countries, not buying more than he selleth” (Malynes, Canker 2). Originating in mathematics and burgeoning in economic texts, “equal” also blossomed in drama:Â€the word, which made only rare appearances in earlier Tudor plays, became more common in later Tudor plays and during the Jacobean and Caroline period appeared 1,196 times in 348 plays.3 “Equal” reverberates in revenge plays, often referring to rank. Clermont in The Revenge of Bussy grapples with the morality of revenge:Â€“Shall we revenge a villainy with villainy?” “Is it not equal?”, Charlotte rejoins. In this play which challenges the status hierarchy (see Chapter 9), her “equal,” meaning “fair, equitable,” also savors of social leveling. Like a parent advising that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” the upright Clermont ponders, “Shall we equal be / With villains?” (3.2.96–98). But even this queasiest of revengers finally rationalizes vengeance by vowing to even the score exactly, not outdoing his foe:Â€ “wreak our wrongs / So as we take not more” (3.2.103–4). “Wreak” meant both “avenge” and “reckon, calculate.” He also relates justice to Christian reciprocity:Â€“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Sig. [xi]v). 3 Figures are from Chadwyck-Healey’s English Drama. A search of this database reveals that of the roughly 250 extant plays from the medieval period, only 3 percent use the word “equal”; of the 40-odd extant Tudor plays to 1557, 50 percent use the word “equal”; of 220-odd plays dating to 1558–1603, 55 percent use the word, and of the roughly 500 plays dating to 1604–41, 70 percent use the word. A similar increase is visible in English nondramatic poetry. 2

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Condign punishment means equality of crime and penalty, and condign revenge means equality of injury. Poisoned Julia forgives “this equal piece of justice you have done, / For I betrayed your counsel” (Duchess of Malfi 5.2.278–9). Leantio admits he got “equal justice” when his wife eloped, since he eloped with her (Women Beware Women 3.2.96). In The Jews’ Tragedy, officers are to let “equal valor strive / For equal honor”; a soldier outnumbered ten to one “maintains the unequal fight / With equal fury” (2.2.254–5; 4.1.56–57). A judge trying two Jews admits that they are “equal guilty,” but sentences only one:Â€ “Should both be banish’d, / Their equal strength … / May much endanger us” (1.2.261–3). The dramatis personae describes two men identically as “seditious captain of the Jews”; both claim “equal terms of honor” (4.1.140–3, 153). The Duke of Milan’s Mariana and Marcelia, equated by echoing names, jockey for social preëminence. One warns, “her idolater, / … being not by now to protect her, / I am her equal”; the other spits back, “I had rather be a slave unto a Moor, / Than know thee for my equal” (2.1.107–9, 167–8). Sforza’s devotion to his wife “was never equaled ” (3.3.146). She has no “equal,” “no parallel” (4.3.36, 40).4 His applying the commensurating “ne’er equaled ” (1.3.330) to her chastityÂ€– surely an all-or-nothing conditionÂ€– registers a quantifying mindset. Marcelia brands a would-be seducer “equal with the Devil” (2.1.411); Eugenia, waiting for Francisco to avenge her, accuses him of “forgetfulness equal with death” (5.1.69). The now obsolete meaning of “equal” in “We are like / To have an equal judge” (2.1.206–7)Â€– “fair, equitable, just, impartial” (OED)Â€– was central in the sixteenth century. In Measure for Measure (with its equalizing title), Isabella fears a judge will show class partiality:Â€ “Do not banish reason / For inequality” (5.1.64–65). Thomas Heywood’s civic pageant Londini Speculum celebrates Justitia, who gives lower orders a fair shake:Â€“In equal scale” she “balance[es] Justice. Truth needs not look pale, / Nor poverty dejected; th’ orphan’s cause / And widow’s plea find help; no subtle clause / Can make demur in sentence:Â€a fair hearing, / And upright doom [i.e., judgment] in every court” (Sig. [c4]–[c4]v). In revenge plays, “Justice holds her balance, equal poised” (Valentinian 5.8.4); the duchess of Malfi’s murder, for marrying a non-aristocratic man, is avenged by a commoner invoking “Parallel,” entering English in the 1530s via astronomy and Euclidian geometry, here means “an equal in worth”Â€– an application to human beings first noted by the OED a decade before this play. Suggesting an itch for ever more words denoting equality and balance, the verb “to parallel,” meaning “to make parallel, bring into conformity, equalize,” first appeared in 1598 (OED).

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Justitia:Â€“When thou kill’d’st thy sister, / Thou took’st from Justice her most equal balance, / And left her naught but her sword” (5.5.38–40). T h e Qua n t i f y i ng M i n d s e t a s L e v e l e r The practice of quantification, I argued in Chapter 3, fostered the insidious habit of measuring the unmeasurable:Â€“How much?” was asked even about love. Lear’s exchange of land for love reflects Renaissance treatment of unlikes in the same mathematical operation, reducing disparate things to one scale, as international traders converted currency. (And as metaphysical conceits yoked unlikes by violence together.) Quantifying emotion (wives “made equal moan” [Barnfield Sig. (f4)]) was a step toward commodifying people. But suppose we invert the whole moan-measuring scenario. Did quantifying people also have a leveling potential? Inverting my point in Chapter 5, that blind Justitia could represent not impartiality but indifference, I suggest that mathematics’ seeming indifference to human values could also be impartiality. Sir Thomas Elyot, adapting Aristotle, says commutative justice involves “mutual consent,” from “buying and selling” to “love,” which sounds commodifying. But such justice is also impartial, with “no regard to the person.” Encountering unequal parties, Justice “endeavoreth to bring them both to an equality” (159–60). “Equal,” meaning “on the same level in rank, dignity, power … having the same rights or privileges” (OED), needn’t be radical:Â€in a hierarchical society only those of equal rank got equal treatment. But thinkers from Müntzer to Winstanley, and revenge-play authors, posed a radical question:Â€ did only those of the same status merit “the same rights or privileges”? Was equal treatment still equal if it differed by rank? Peasant uprisings groped their way toward this question; but what enabled thinkers to formulate it clearly was the neutrality of mathematics. In Euclid’s electrifyingly flat terms, things equal to equal things are equal to each other. Modern humanists sniff at number-crunching and bean-counting; but Renaissance humanists had a lofty opinion of numbers. To Pico della Mirandola, they open a way to the “understanding of everything able to be known” (Dee Sig. [v]v). In his accounting manual, James Peele sees a capacity for mathematics and bookkeeping as humanity’s defining attribute:Â€according to “wise and prudent philosophers, men chiefly differ from beasts only in numbering, accounting, or reckoning” (Preface). A prefatory poem denies that the manual applies only to merchants:Â€bookkeeping is a means to “faithfulness and right.” James Aho situates

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Â� double-entry’s symmetry within Renaissance aesthetics, citing the symmetry of painting and architecture (39–40); the Renaissance was struck by double-entry’s “beauty” (41). Pacioli was acquainted with Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci. One thinks of avengers’ aesthetic pleasure in gorgeously symmetrical revenges. To Dee, weights and measurements are godlike:Â€“Thou only knowest all things precisely (O God) who hast made the weight and balance thy judgement; who has created all things in number, weight, and measure, and hast weighed the mountains and hills in a balance [i.e., scale]” (Sig. biiiiv). This echo of Isaiah 40:Â€ 12 is closest to the Bishops’ Bible, published two years earlier:Â€“Who hath measured the waters in his fist? who hath measured heaven with his span, and hath comprehended all the earth of the world in three measures? who hath weighed the mountains and hills in a balance?” Dee turns Isaiah’s questions about puny mankind into declarations about God. Setting divine omnipotence against human incapacity, Isaiah’s verse works like folklore’s Impossible Task:Â€ no human has done this. It is a tall order even for God:Â€ a fist cannot contain water or mountains fit into a scale; a “span” (the distance between thumb-tip and little finger) can’t measure heaven. But mathematics makes all things possible, and Dee gives omnipotence a Renaissance twist by altering Isaiah’s “three measures” to “number, weight, and measure,” accessible to arithmetic, scales, and yardsticks. He casts God as not only measurer but author of measurement, decreeing the measurability of all things. Although numbers are not entirely value-free (see Poovey), I suggest that in the arena of social hierarchy, their neutrality promoted equality. This “knowledge system” which “privileges quantity over quality” (Poovey 4) opens a door to social radicalism. “One man, one vote” was a nineteenth-century slogan; but Elizabethans knew that number possessed no rank. To a revenger totting up body parts, arithmetic is a great equalizer.5 To Titus, two severed Gothic heads compensate for two Roman heads. The Spanish Tragedy’s score is even (five sent to Elysium, five to Hades), although the Hades-bound include a duke and a servantÂ€– one corpse is one corpse. As Katharine Maus notes, “Hieronimo’s strict talionÂ€ – son for son …Â€– ignores disparities between one person and another, insisting upon equivalence” between his “socially inferior son” and “the heirs This is a distinct departure from classical Greek philosophy. To Plato, as Bady shows, “when numbers are attached to material things they lose their equality:Â€‘two armies’ are not the same as ‘two oxen’ … There is no true equality to be found in the phenomenal world” (15). Not so for revengers.

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apparent” (101). To ignore rank is a tacit claim for equality:Â€revenge was a leveling discourse. Both mathematicians and avengers dealt with unlikes in one operation, interchanging time and distance, duke and peasant. Such status-stripped equivalents were enabled by a permeating consciousness of numbers. Anglo-Saxon law codes listed compensatory payments:Â€“A person who knocks out someone’s first teeth or incisors shall pay eight shillings in compensation”; molars “shall require fifteen shillings” (L. Wilson 20). The icy calculation reducing to a cash payment an arm, a molar, or even a life was a moral trade-off:Â€such payments averted protracted revenge.6 Elizabethans knew of these codes,7 and lists of compensation for maimed body parts recurred in insurance indemnification schedules (17 ff.)Â€ – another benign commodification of injury. Wilson thinks that the “list of equivalences,” a “menu or tariff of body parts and how much they’re worth” does not appear “between the early twelfth century and the late seventeenth” (21); but the revenger’s tally of body parts seems to me a related phenomenon. If, as A. W. B. Simpson held, cash restitution was meant to avert blood revenge, the economic diction of Renaissance blood vengeance is a return of the repressed. And treating unlike social classes in the same operation, a revenger’s enumerations efface unlikeness. If one hand is equivalent to another, no matter whose body they are detached from, and tears from duchess or seamstress can be measured in fluid ounces, then one human may “equal” another, whether nobleman or peasant. Bacon likened Aristotelian justice to Euclidian mathematics:Â€ “Is not the rule Si inæqualibus æqualia addas, omnia erunt inæqualia an axiom as well of justice, as of the mathematics? And is there not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion?” (Advancement 77). Aristotle himself imagined justice in geometric and numeric terms. The just: is a species of the proportionate (proportion being … a property … of number in general). For proportion is equality of ratios, and involves four terms at least … e.g., “as the line A is to the line B, so is the line B to the line C” … This species of the just is intermediate, and the unjust is what violates the proportion; On this view, a cash payment was “compensation for not retaliating with violence, simply the price that would persuade someone not to retaliateÂ€– a price equivalent to the loss of face associated with failure to take revenge” (L. Wilson 26; see also A. W. B. Simpson 15). 7 Elizabeth’s first archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, sponsored a collecting of manuscripts, many from libraries of dissolved monasteries (Aelfric Sig. aiii). Alfred’s law codes were among the recovered texts. Some were printed (e.g., in William Lambarde’s law compilation Archaionomia, 1568). 6

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for the Â�proportional is intermediate, and the just is proportional. (Nicomachean Ethics 113)

“The proportional is intermediate” unifies Nicomachean Ethics, which situates virtuous action as a mean between extremesÂ€– such bilateral symmetry was music to Renaissance ears. Justice was geometry, when a judge “restores equality; it is as though there were a line divided into unequal parts, and he took away that by which the greater segment exceeds the half, and added it to the smaller segment” (Nicomachean Ethics 115–16). Aristotelian justice treated equally only those of equal rank:Â€acknowledging “disparities in position and wealth,” Greeks mostly advocated “equity, rather than equality” (C. Burnett 82).8 Cardano favored equal rank among gamblers:Â€ one should no more gamble than duel with the low-born. “To play with professional gamblers is most disgraceful.” (Also, they tend to win.) Gambling, he decreed, requires “equal conditions, e.g. of opponents, of bystanders, of money, of situation, of the dice box, and of the die itself”; if you “depart from that equality, if it is in your opponent’s favor, you are a fool, and if in your own, you are unjust” (Games of Chance 187–9). He does construe equal opponents in class terms; but his mathematician’s mind begins to see that playing with those of equal ability makes more sense. In uniting unlikes, Renaissance mathematics went beyond the Greeks, enabling an idea of equality beyond Aristotle’s, encompassing unlike social ranks. Several cultural conditions put pressure on the social meanings of “equal.” Social boundaries were eroding, as merchant families floated up into the gentry on billows of cash. A protocapitalist sense of contingency, of vulnerability to capricious market forces, had a leveling effect:Â€ all ranks were subject to Fortune. In their ambiguous blindness, Justitia and Fortuna were leveling goddessesÂ€– blind to individual deserving, but also (theoretically) to noble birth. And the devotion to bilateral symmetryÂ€– balanced books, balanced trade, equivalent retaliationsÂ€ – comprised a mindset congenial to balanced treatment. In an age preoccupied with just deserts, fairness became identified with equal treatment.9 Milles’ treatise on exchange speculation glides effortlessly from economics, “equality in the prices of all things vendible” (13), However, some Greeks argued in a more leveling vein. Although oligarchs and aristocrats regarded justice as proportionateÂ€ – classes receiving benefits befitting their statusÂ€ – democrats identified justice with simple equality, granting each citizen equal benefits and obligations. 9 Only beginning in sixteenth-century parlance was fairness regularly equated with equality (see examples under the OED’s definition 3a of “equality” meaning “fairness, impartiality, equity” in persons). 8


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to general fairness. Stabilizing monetary value across international borders will ensure “equality” (fairness to both parties) (10). The purpose of trade is “equality in supplying necessities … by some mids or means certain and indifferent to prevent advantage. The end therefore in traffic being equity” (Sig. b2). “Mids,” or “mean between extremes,” recalls Aristotelian justice. Jaundiced by four centuries of capitalism, we may doubt that capitalism promotes fairness; but Milles’ claim does valorize “equal” treatment. R e l at ion a l Fa i r n e s s Unlike an absolute model of fairness bestowing each person’s due (suum cuique), fairness as equal treatment is relational:Â€one person deserves the same as another. By the suum cuique model, a worker got paid a fair wage and a gossip’s tongue got bridled. By the relational model, one hard worker deserves the same wage as another; if Joan’s tart tongue isn’t bridled, neither should Jane’s be. More radically, why shouldn’t a wealthy mercer build a manor house, or a husbandman live like a landlord?10 That revenge plays endorse relational fairness, re-balancing the disequilibriums of class privilege, helps explain their appeal. In the relational model, Justitia weighed one person’s deeds against another. Changing iconography of justice hints at a shift from absolute to relational. Consider early metaphoric representations of scales: used as a symbol of a decisionmaking device since earliest times. In the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” (ca. 1400 b.c.), the soul of a dead person is shown being weighed in a balance. One pan holds a heart-shaped vase symbolizing all of the actions of the dead person; the other pan contains a feather, symbolizing Right and Truth. The Old Testament refers to scales:Â€“Let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity” (Job 31: 6). Weighing as a symbol of Divine Judgment is also found in the Koran … In the Iliad, the gods weigh to foretell the results of human events:Â€“Then Jove his golden scales weighed up, and took the last accounts of Fate for Hector” … In early Christian representations, the “weighing of the soul” occurs in numerous Last Judgment scenes. (Curtis/Resnik 1741) The radical John Ball (see Chapter 9) preached relational fairness:Â€all will not be well in England:

10

until everything be common, and that there be no villeins nor gentlemen, but that we be all as one, and that the lords be no greater than we be. What have we deserved, or why should we be thus kept in servitude and bondage? We be all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve. Wherefore can they say or show that they are greater lords than we be? … They are clothed in velvet … and we be clad with the poorest sort of cloth. They have their wines, spices, and fine bread; and we have the drawing out of the chaff, and drink water. They dwell in fair houses, and we in homely cottages” (Grafton 330–1, an account apparently borrowed from FroissartÂ€ – see Hobday 64).

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All of these weigh a person against an absolute standard. This is how a scale works:Â€one pan holds the object to be weighed and the other, standard weights. But the Renaissance imagined one person in each pan:Â€“A mote will turn the balance, which Pyramus, which Thisbe is the better” (MND 5.1.306–7). John Phillip[s], bestowing Justitia’s scales on Fortuna, gives the image an economic and class spin:Â€“Life we see in Fortune’s balance stands”; death does not care about “possessions, goods nor lands, / The rich and poor to him are all alike” ([2]–[2]v). The king in All’s Well, outraged when Bertram rejects low-born Helen, reminds him that kings can augment rank by fiat. Positing Bertram in one pan of a scale, his noble birth outweighing Helen in the other, the king adds himself to Helen’s pan:Â€“Poising us in her defective scale, / Shall weigh thee to the beam” (2.3.150–1)Â€– that is, raise Bertram to the scales’ cross-beam, a lightweight against Helen. At the dawn of Renaissance drama, Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucrece weighed one person’s merit against another’s. High-born Lucrece has two suitorsÂ€– one nobly born, the other a self-made man. Public opinion rates them equal except in rank (Part 1, 99–101). Will the people tolerate the choice of a non-noble suitor, “affirm that a churl’s [i.e., peasant’s] son / Should be more noble than a gentleman born? / Nay, beware, for men will have thereof great scorn” (Part 1, 131–3). But Lucrece’s father advises her to choose “indifferently” (Part 1, 466). The self-made man rebuts the gentleman: First, of your ancestors ye allege the noble gests [i.e., deeds]; Secondly, the substance [i.e., worldly goods] that ye have of their bequests. In the which things only, by your own confession, Standeth all your nobleness … Whereunto this I say … … that ye are never the more Worthy, in mine opinion, to be called noble therefor, And without [i.e., unless] ye have better causes to show than these, Of reason ye must the victory of this matter leese [i.e., lose] … If ye will the title of nobleness win, Show what have ye done yourself.

(Part 2, 603–19)

Echoing the rallying cry “when Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?”, he concludes, “both he and I came of Adam and Eve. / There is no difference … / Which maketh one man another to excel / So much as doth virtue” (Part 2, 663–6). The republican watchword “virtue” suggests that Lucrece’s name deliberately evokes the Roman


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overthrow of tyrants and founding of a republic. (The play is set in ancient Rome.) And this Lucrece chooses the non-noble suitor. S h a k e spe a r e A s s a i l s D ou bl e S ta n da r d s Shakespeare put three stunning protests against inequality in the mouths of lower-status figuresÂ€ – a Jew, a woman, a bastard. Each exposes and denounces the double standard relegating him or her to second-class citizenship, staking a claim to equal rights. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice protests antisemitism; Emilia in Othello protests the gendered double standard in sexual behavior; and Edmund in King Lear protests bastards’ disqualification from property rights. All three, committed to equality, also justify revenge.

The Merchant of Venice 3.1.45–61 If [his flesh] will feed nothing else it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Othello 4.3.84–101 I do think it is their husbands’ faults If wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties, And pour our treasures into foreign laps, Or else break out in peevish jealousies, Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us, Or scant our former having in despite: Why, we have galls; and though we have some grace, Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know Their wives have sense like them. They see, and smell, And have their palates both for sweet and sour, As husbands have. What is it that they do When they change us for others? Is it sport?

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Social unfairness:Â€vengeance and equality I think it is. And doth affection breed it? I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs? It is so, too. And have not we affections, Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have? Then let them use us well, else let them know The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

King Lear 1.2.6–22 Why “bastard”? Wherefore “base,” When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us With “base”, with “baseness, bastardyÂ€– base, base”Â€– Who in the lusty stealth of nature take More composition and fierce quality Than doth within a dull, stale, tirèd bed Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops Got ’tween a sleep and wake? Well then, Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land. Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate.” Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall to[p] th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper. Now gods, stand up for bastards!

All pose a series of questions. Less confident of the answer than true rhetÂ� orical questions, these have a searching quality, grappling with incomprehensible unfairness. Shylock:Â€“Hath not a Jew eyes?” “If you prick us do we not bleed?” Emilia:Â€ “Doth affection breed it?” “Is’t frailty that thus errs?” Edmund:Â€“Why ‘bastard’? Wherefore ‘base’?” All reduce human beings to the lowest common denominator, the physical body, as interchangeable with other bodies as an equation’s “a” or “b.” Shylock:Â€“Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian.” Emilia:Â€wives “see, and smell, / And have their palates both for sweet and sour, / As husbands have.” Edmund:Â€“My dimensions are as well compact / … and my shape as true / As honest madam’s issue.” The same words keep arising:Â€Shylock and Edmund speak of similar “dimensions”; Shylock and Emilia mention similar “affection(s).” The last lines of two speeches are strikingly similarÂ€– Shylock:Â€“The villainy you teach me I will execute … I will better the instruction”; Emilia:Â€“The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.”


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Far from asserting self-worth against an absolute standard, all three make relational claims of equality. Jews and Christians experience “the same food … the same diseases,” are “healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer.” Emilia demands, “Have not we affections, / Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?” Edmund finds bastards not only equal to legitimates, but better:Â€while “dull, stale, tirèd” married sex begets only fops, the lusty fire of illicit fornication engenders a child of “fierce quality.” Such incandescent bastards should enjoy at least equal privileges with indolent legitimates. All three plot revenge. Shylock:Â€“If you wrong us shall we not revenge? … If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.” Emilia:Â€“Yet have we some revenge. / …The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.” Edmund does not use the word; it is Edgar who sees their father’s blinding as condign revenge for illicit sex:Â€“The dark and vicious place where thee he got [i.e., begot] / Cost him his eyes” (5.3.162–3). Edmund might simply want land and title. But that he also seeks revengeÂ€– on his father for publicly snickering about him (1.1.20–21) and on his brother as a loathed legitimateÂ€– is implicit in his wish to “top th’ legitimate,” in his exposing his father to torture, in his venomous expectoration of “‘baseness, bastardyÂ€– base, base”; “fine word, ‘legitimate’.” He allows Cornwall to take “revenges … upon your traitorous father” (3.7.6). He takes condign revenge for disinheritance by disinheriting his brother, and for his father’s feckless aristocratic sexuality by cuckolding two dukes. In the closely contemporary Revenger’s Tragedy, the duchess commiserates with the duke’s bastard, “Had he [the duke] cut thee a right diamond, / Thou hadst been next set in the dukedom’s ring … / What wrong can equal this? … / Who would not be revenged of such a father? … / Oh what a grief ’tis that a man should live / But once i’ the world, and then to live a bastard” (1.2.148–58). Replying “ay, there’s the vengeance that my birth was wrapped in; / I’ll be revenged for all,” he complies with her self-interested proposal of sexual revenge, making explicit what motivates Edmund’s cuckoldings.11 Shakespeare’s Jews, wives, and bastards embrace revenge, the resort of the underdog, in James Scott’s terms a “weapon of the weak.”12 Ideology Prejudice against bastardy was deeply ingrained:Â€ “In early modern thinking bastardy was as much a moral as a genealogical category”; they were likened to debased or counterfeit coinage (Neill, “Bastardy” 405). The Halletts believe that Spurio in The Revenger’s Tragedy lacks “stability of character” since he resents being abused as a bastard (227). 12 Shylock’s use of state power to pursue his revenge in the trial scene does not disqualify him as an underdog:Â€his access to state power is illusory. The duke (as judge) is openly against him from the start, and the Christians find ways to twist state power to their own uses. 11

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condemning revenge disarms the weak. Addressing Desdemona, Iago defines “a worthy woman” as one who “being angered, her revenge being nigh, / Bade her wrong stay and her displeasure fly” (2.1.154–5)Â€– denying worthy women the revenge he craves himself. It is arguably her accepting this Christian, turn-the-other-cheek philosophy, ideologically imposed on “good” wives, that costs Desdemona her life. Warned that she may be the victim of a vicious liar, Desdemona piously murmurs, “If any such there be, heaven pardon him.” Emilia prefers retribution:Â€“A halter pardon him, and hell gnaw his bones!” (4.2.139–40). Might not a shrewd, bustling, inquiring revenger have stood a better chance against Iago’s machinations? But because revenge has long been considered unchristian and repugnant, critics side with Iago, imposing a paralyzing ideology of forgiveness on a weaker member of society. Machiavelli provocatively held that Christianity “made the world weak,” handing it over “as a prey to the wicked who run it successfully and securely since they are well aware that the generality of men, with paradise for their goal, consider how best to bear, rather than how best to avenge, their injuries” (278). Shylock’s “I am a Jew” speech, onstage and in the classroom, often whips the sympathy from under his opponents. Emilia’s “Yet have we some revenge” speech, just before Desdemona’s murder, daringly challenges the premise on which the tragic hero has proceeded:Â€that wifely infidelity merits death.13 “A small vice,” she shrugs (4.3.67–68). These are scenes of dashing, risky dramaturgy. But because these figures advocate revenge, pious audiences have wished their speeches away. As Julie Hankey shows, Emilia’s speech has often been cut in performance. (The eighteenth century found her “quibbling dissertation on cuckold-making … contemptible to the last degree.”)14 And critics claim that these pleas for equality and fairness forfeit the sympathy they initially garner, because Shylock is narrowly legalistic, Emilia’s sexual frankness is coarse, Edmund schemes against his own family; andÂ€– cruciallyÂ€– because all advocate revenge. Martin Elliott, admiring Emilia’s lines insofar as they “plead implicitly for a pragmatic fairness in marriage,” calls her justification of sexual revenge “extreme … an excuse for adultery” (199). David Bevington, She “utters the basic heresy against the assumptions on which this play is built” (Burke 185), “negates … Othello’s great Cause” (Elliott 198). For Edward Pechter, her implying that “sex is just sex, marital fidelity is marital fidelity; they aren’t the essence and totality of experience” takes us “out of the claustrophobic intensity of the play’s world into the larger space of the real world” (117). 14 The words of the perfectly named Francis Gentleman, 1770 (Carlisle 181). 13


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introducing The Merchant in his widely used Complete Works, succinctly states a standard critical view: Modern productions find it tempting to portray Shylock as a victim of bigotry and to put great stress on his heartrending assertions of his humanity:Â€ “Hath not a Jew eyes? … If you prick us, do we not bleed?” … Shylock does indeed suffer from his enemies, and his sufferings add a tortured complexity to this playÂ€ … Because he stands outside Christian faith, Shylock can provide a perspective whereby we see the hypocrisies of those who profess a higher ethical code. Nevertheless, Shylock’s compulsive desire for vengeance according to an Old Testament code of an eye for an eye cannot be justified by the wrongdoings of any particular Christian. In the play’s control of an ethical point of view, such deeds condemn the doer rather than undermine the Christian standards of true virtue as ideally expressed. Shakespeare humanizes Shylock by portraying him as a believable and sensitive man, and he shows much that is to be regretted in Shylock’s Christian antagonists, but he also allows Shylock to place himself in the wrong by his refusal to forgive his enemies. (180–1)

Labeling the desire for revenge “compulsive” pathologizes it. Although Bevington ducks explicitly identifying opposition to revenge as Christian, calling it vaguely “an ethical point of view,” his ascribing revenge to the “Old Testament code of an eye for an eye” (which Shylock doesn’t mention) sets it up as the Jewish converse of Christian forgiveness. The inference is that any ChristianÂ€ – in fact, anyone with ethicsÂ€ – will oppose revenge. In another student text, the New Pelican Shakespeare, A. R. Braunmuller writes: One of the play’s most famous speeches, beginning “Hath not a Jew eyes?” is often taken out of context as Shakespeare’s declaration of a common humanity that joins us all, Jew and gentile, slave and free, male and female … Yet, in context, the common trait is simply the desire for revenge … The speech traces a reciprocity of wrong, an escalation of revenge. (289)

Stating that the speech begins “Hath not a Jew eyes?” ignores its first five lines, detailing how Antonio has abused Shylock in the belief that Jews are not the equal of Christians. And Braunmuller ignores everything else in Shylock’s speech except the lines on revenge. Dismissing Shylock as wickedly vengeful disarms his plea for equality:Â€neither Bevington nor Braunmuller mentions Shylock’s assertion of equality. Many quote the line “Hath not a Jew eyes,” but few cite Shylock’s hammering insistence on equality:Â€“we are like you”; “we … resemble you”; five uses of the words “the same.” Critics have labored to defuse this explosive speech on grounds of vengefulness at least since E. E. Stoll set out in 1927 to cut Shylock down to size. Shakespeare shows “that your Jew is no less than a man, and as

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such has a right, not to respect or compassion … but to revenge,” he acidly noted (252). But his cantankerous fulminations were reacting to an audience tendency to side with Shylock in all his vengefulness. Henry Irving and other Victorian actors easily created empathy for Shylock, even in a muscularly Christian period. Sympathy for Edmund is harder; but his bitter protest raises questions similar to those in Shakespeare’s King John, where the loyal, intelligent Faulconbridge loses his paternal lands and an annual income of £500 when his illegitimacy is revealed.15 Faulconbridge is more capable than anyone in the play; but a bastard cannot inherit power. Why shouldn’t any meritorious adult have as great a chance of power and worldly benefits as the well-born and legitimate? Emilia’s speech was cut as early as the first quarto. But when her part is restored to its Folio centrality, audiences can find her thrilling. On modern stages, she “add[s] vitality to otherwise dull productions” (Pechter 118). But her vengefulnessÂ€– advocating adultery in revenge for spousal abuseÂ€– has proved a bitter pill, even for feminists. Ruth Vanita praises her “magnificent … condemnation of the double standard of sexual morality” (347); but many feminists find her vengefulness an embarrassment like unto the unfortunate lapse with the handkerchief.16 They stress her growth, measuring her Act 5 heroics (smoking out the truth at the cost of her own life) against earlier hanky-pilfering and revenge advocacy. Even readers who find her speech “a fairly presented case put into the mouth of a sympathetic character” can’t help deploring the vengefulnessÂ€ – “understandable” but “self-mutilating”; revenge belongs to “Iago’s world” (G. Hutchings 71, 76). But from a mere hint in his source, Shakespeare developed Emilia into a crucial character, and Act 4, scene 3 is where she emerges. After discussing sex in prose, she shifts into blank verse to talk about revenge, underscoring the moment’s significance. She is the play’s third and most credible advocate of revenge. Othello’s grounds for revenge are wholly imaginary, and some of Iago’s also have the whiff of fictionÂ€– the belief Gaspar in the anonymous The Bastard also turns vengeful because of abuse based on his illegitimacy. Although the play presents him as villainous, it does expose the double standard fostering his resentment. His employer, generously allowing a fellow merchant to evade a 6,000-ducat debt, seems a man of true compassion. But he turns vicious when a bastard wants to marry his daughter:Â€“Make thee my fellow? … Thy tainted blood / Thinks to pollute mine?” (1.1.103–4). The bastard is allowed heartfelt protest:Â€“I am / A proper man. I’ve limbs enough”; but “I have a blemish in my blood” (1.6.125–7). 16 Often, feminists re-write Emilia’s advocacy of vengeful sexual infidelity as a defense of open marriage. Marguérite Corporaal, for example, elides revenge altogether:Â€“The injustice of the sexual double standard that Emilia exposes in her speech makes her acceptance of women’s adultery understandable” (102). 15


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that Othello and Cassio have cuckolded him, or that “great ones” have fruitlessly begged Othello to promote him. But Emilia’s grounds, abuse of wives, are hardly imaginary. She taxes husbands with “break[ing] out in peevish jealousies”Â€ – Iago and Othello do just that. “Say they strike us,” she instances, when Othello has just struck Desdemona. Lois Potter recalls those words spoken in one production:Â€the “air was heavy with the silence of two abused wives, each too ashamed to confide in the other” (Othello 182–3). On the sexual double standard, Emilia says first that wives cuckold in revenge for abuse; and second, that women’s sexual needs equal men’s and warrant an equal right to extramarital sex. Wife abuse can include a husband’s affair (“they slack their duties, / And pour our treasures into foreign laps” [e.g. fall into arrears on the marriage debt, exhausted by adultery]); jealousy; wife-beating; locking a wife up (“throwing restraint upon us”) or spitefully withholding her allowance (“scant our former having in despite”). Wifely adultery is condign revenge for a husband’s affair or for jealousyÂ€– if he suspects adultery anyway, she might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. It is not so apt a retaliation for beating, “restraint,” or curtailed allowance; but revenge is a weapon of the weak. A woman afraid to strike back, with no escape from a locked house or control over household money, takes revenge via the only object she controlsÂ€– her own body.17 Emilia’s justification of revenge leads directly to her assertion of wives’ equal sexual needs and rights:Â€men and women have the same sensory perceptions, desire for pleasure and recreation, emotions, problems of self-control; therefore adultery should be deemed only a minor transgression for women, as it is for men. She then returns to revenge; the threat “let them use us well”Â€– or elseÂ€– casts marriage as the kind of contract that resistance theorists posited. Like a king, a husband is primus inter pares. If he respects subjects’ rights, they agree to be governed; if not, all bets are off. Revenge is the signifier and logical consequence of a broken contract. The assertion of equality is inseparable from the justification of revenge. To argue that vengefulness invalidates Emilia’s radical assertion of sexual equality, that a thirst for revenge was meant to undercut Shylock’s, Emilia’s, and Edmund’s powerful advocacy of equality, makes sense only if Elizabethan audiences simply and unequivocally disapproved of revenge. I don’t think they did. Edmund too practices sexual revenge, although as a male with greater access to economic maneuvers, he also practices revenge involving property and social rank.

17

270


This book challenges the received opinion that Elizabethans recoiled in pious horror from revenge. That view renders many plays unintelligible. But the damage done to these three “equality” speeches by regarding revenge as simply evil is even worse than the normal wear and tear on revenge plays by pious reading. To write off these protests against inequality, assuming that audiences stopped their ears to any advocacy of revenge, is a serious loss. For these speeches are truly remarkable moments in Renaissance drama and culture. Challenging hierarchy itself, they are declarations of independence from society’s stultifying pecking orders. Is a Christian better than a Jew? Is a wife’s chastity earth-shakingly crucial while a husband’s peccadilloes are to be smiled at? Is marriage the only institution to be entrusted with transmitting property and power, and should those born outside wedlock be forever inferior? To take these questions seriously is to contemplate a new world order. Anabaptists held radically egalitarian ideas about property; resistance theorists held ruler and subject equally bound to obey the law. In three electrifying speeches by Shylock, Emilia, and Edmund, Shakespeare extends the radical thinking of his age into the realms of religious affiliation, ethnicity, gender equity, and legitimacy. Our blinkered dismissal of vengefulness castrates their radicalism. If we truly listen to these speeches, we’ll find that the urge to get even harbored the germ of the idea that all men are created equal. Generations of scholars have sidelined revenge plays as eccentric literary curiosities, waving away vengeance, however prevalent, as mere sensationalism, decadence. But these vengeful speeches recall the oratory of class wars. Robert Kett, leading dispossessed farm workers against landowners, sounded very like Shylock, Emilia, and Edmund:Â€ “Nature hath provided for us, as well as for them; hath given us a body and a soul … While we have the same form, and the same condition of birth together with them, why should they have a life so unlike unto ours?” (Neville, Norfolk’s Furies Sig. b2v). And Kett too demanded revenge:Â€“How long shall we suffer so great oppression to go unrevenged?” (Sig. b2). With its book-balancing devotion to equality, revenge fed into the broad stream of Renaissance egalitarianism. Revenge was never pleasant or morally uplifting. But audiences understood it and emotionally validated it. And I propose that the ubiquitous Renaissance writings about revenge, the audience zest for revenge, are inextricable from the political, economic, and social radicalism of the age.

Conclusion

Now I have kept my word; torments I scorn. I leave the world with glory. They are men And leave behind them name and memory, That wronged do right themselves before they die.

The Duke of Milan

Historically, one resonant use of “equal” has been “we hold these truths to be self-evident:Â€ that all men are created equal.” The Declaration of Independence also calls on American colonies to “assume among the Â�powers of the earth” a “separate and equal station.” When its author, Thomas Jefferson, reflected in 1826, fifty years after its signing, what stood out for him was the Declaration’s passion for equality:Â€ ten days before his death he wrote, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately.”1 He must have been thinking of the seventeenth century as he lay dying, for he borrowed these words from a New Model Army radical, Richard Rumbold, who affirmed on the scaffold that “no man [was] born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him” (3). Helping to hatch the Rye House plot to assassinate Charles II and finally executed for plotting a revolt against James II, Rumbold was once an army dissident, petitioning General Fairfax to reinstate soldiers’ elected representatives. On the scaffold he called monarchy a contract between king and people, declaring it “absurd” that if “one party of this contract breaketh all conditions, the other should be obliged to perform their part” (2). It is fitting that Jefferson echoed a seventeenth-century revolutionary, for roots of his egalitarian and resistant thinking lay in that century, especially in John Locke, architect of social contract Â�theory, whose father was a captain of Parliamentary forces during the Civil â•‡ Letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826.

1

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Conclusion

War.2 John Locke had fled under suspicion of involvement in the Rye House plot. The justification of revolution in his Second Treatise of Government owes much to English resistance writing. Equality implied resistance. Rumbold’s egalitarian denial of one man’s right to “saddle” another underlay his plots to overthrow the government. Locke’s anti-monarchism and belief in obligatory revolt against tyranny rested on desire for government as “a state of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal … there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank … should also be equal” (101).3 And for Jefferson too, equality and resistance were inseparable:Â€by “all men are created equal” and assertion of “equal” status with other nations, he justifies armed revolution. As Allen Jayne notes, “exalting the status of each man to one equal to that of any other … gave the common man a basis to reject and resist anyone who claimed authority over him without his consent” (109). Egalitarianism and resistance are mutually sustaining. And if Jefferson didn’t identify resistance with revenge, others did:Â€Thomas Paine sneered at a speech by George III as so full of “bloody mindedness” that “men read by way of revenge. And the speech instead of terrifying, prepared a way for the manly principles of independence” (293). The footprints of English radicalism are all over early American history. John Adams declared that Ponet’s Treatise of Politic Power “contains all the essential principles of liberty” (vi:Â€4). Plymouth settlers, although they soon abandoned communal farming, continued to share equally the proceeds of communal hunting and fishing (W. Bradford 120–3). Cotton Mather later noted a strong Anabaptist component in their thinking (105)Â€ – perhaps they encountered Anabaptists during their Leyden exile, or drew on English Anabaptism. Later in the seventeenth century, English authors of A Serious Manifesto and Declaration of the Anabaptist … Churches pledged “our lives and fortunes,” anticipating the Declaration’s pledge of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” The road to the Declaration passed through Renaissance radicalism. Over half the Declaration’s words comprise a list of twenty-seven grievancesÂ€– an inventory of injury highly reminiscent of English Civil War remonstrances, and of revenge tragedies. The Declaration lists as a grievance that the king “has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for And insofar as equality was conceptually linked with Renaissance bilateral symmetries and ideals of mathematical proportion, it is not without significance that Jefferson was a classically trained architect. 3 Locke’s qualifying his egalitarianism by “rank” must of course give us pause. 2

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opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people” and has “refused for a long time … to cause others to be elected”; the Grand Remonstrance of 1641 condemns “the dissolving of Parliament” and failure to re-summon it (6). The Declaration charges the king with “imposing taxes on us without our consent,” the Grand Remonstrance with “an unjust and pernicious attempt to extort great payments from the subject, by way of excise” (6), and Thompson’s England’s Standard Advanced with “unjust barbarous taxes” (Sig. [a1]). The Declaration charges, “He has obstructed the administration of justice … made judges dependent on his will alone,” depriving citizens of “the benefits of trial by jury”; the Grand Remonstrance charges, “judges have been put out of their places … Judicial places … have been sold for great sums” (10); and England’s Standard Advanced charges, “the lawful trial by twelve sworn men of the neighborhood subverted and denied, bloody and tyrannical courts … erected, the power of the sword advanced and set in the seat of the magistrates, the civil law stopped and subverted” (Sig. [a1]). The Declaration charges, “standing armies” are maintained “in times of peace” and the king has “render[ed] the military independent of and superior to civil power”; England’s Standard Advanced is aggrieved that “petitioners for common freedom [are] suppressed by force of arms,” that “blood of war” has been “shed in times of peace … and the military introduced, even to the hostile seizure, imprisonment, trial, sentence, and execution” of “free people of this nation … usurping the … authority of Parliament” (Sig. [a1]). And although revenge tragedy displaces some abuses into the safer realm of sexual tyranny, the above grievances do also crop up in revenge plays. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, serial tyrants ride roughshod over Parliament and “make a shambles of the Parliament House” (3H6 1.1.71), and many revenge-play tyrants rule without consent. The Rebellion of Naples features a popular tax revolt. Revenge tragedies specialize in legal abuses, such as the kangaroo trial of Titus’ sons or of The White Devil’s Vittoria Corombona. Martial law is imposed in Marcus Tullius Cicero, as goon squads terrorize civilians. The Declaration adopts the tripartite structure of seventeenth-century petitions, remonstrances, and revenge plays:Â€(1) statement of grievances; (2) claim that legal recourse is blocked; and (3) commitment to revenge or revolt. It despairs of legal recourse in a petitioner’s idiom:Â€“We have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms:Â€our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury” recalls Civil War titles such as The Humble Remonstrance … of Diverse Officers and Soldiers, An Humble Petition of the Distressed and Almost Destroyed Subjects of England, The

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Humble Petition of Several Colonels. Jefferson rehearses good-faith efforts to deal with the British:Â€ “We have warned them … reminded them… We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity”; all avenues exhausted, “We must … hold them … enemies in war.” Like revenge, this military action is extra-legal:Â€as Paine explains (in a self-defense rationale going back to Roman jurists), “We view our enemies in the character of highwaymen and housebreakers, and having no defense for ourselves in the civil law, are obliged to punish them by the military one” (302). A gaping hole in the Declaration’s idealism was its exclusion from “all men” of slaves and women, who would one day achieve equality only through resistance, sometimes violent. As early as 1776 Abigail Adams urged her husband John, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular … attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice” (B. Ford 175). As late as the 1960s, Malcolm X, opposing Martin Luther King’s non-violent resistance, would find in the Declaration “a model for violent upheaval”; it “legitimated violence,” provided “a precedent for armed struggle” (Miller 168). Abigail Adams and Malcolm X joined a great roll call of principled resisters:Â€ Ponet, Goodman, Buchanan, Knox, Languet, Mornay, Sexby, Milton, Locke, Jefferson, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Marston, Middleton, Fletcher, Chapman, Daniel, Massinger, Webster. Flooding the stage with tyrants and aggrieved subjects, revenge plays inspired ordinary people to take arms against a sea of grievances. To later ages of tyranny and inequity, they bequeathed hope:Â€equality was real, and resistance was possible. T h e B ox Of f ic e ; a n d a J e s t of G od The taste for revenge responded to grievances:Â€against inflation, an unfair judicial system, economic and social inequity. These are serious issues, and by linking the plays with progressive movements in their own and later times I hope to help restore revenge drama, now dismissed as a decadent, grotesquely comic backwater of literary history, to a respected place in the history of progressive thought and action. But the fact remains that revenge plays were often grotesquely comic. And in finding them more than sensationalistic popular entertainment, I do not deny that they were exactly that. Modern minds keep hilarious stage blood in separate compartments from sober political commentary. But the Renaissance remembered mystery plays, knew that devils could

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be comic, and that satiric laughter could belittle an enraged tyrant like Herod at the same moment that his discomfiture exemplified the triumph of the Lord. Sometimes the Lord’s triumph was funny too. That blackly comic tyrant play Richard III envisions GodÂ€ – like many revenge heroesÂ€ – as a vengeful prankster, a lethal practical joker. Buckingham swears a solemn oath to the queen, inviting condign punishment. If he proves a faithless friend, so may a friend betray him: Whenever Buckingham doth turn his hate Upon your grace, but [i.e., nor] with all duteous love Doth cherish you and yours, God punish me With hate in those where I expect most love. When I have most need to employ a friend … Deep, hollow, treacherous, and full of guile Be he unto me. This do I beg of heaven, When I am cold in love to you or yours.

(2.1.32–40)

He should take care what he wishes for. After he switches his allegiance to Richard, duke of Gloucester, Richard sends him to his death. Like an equivocating three-wish fairy in folk tales, a sprightly, vengeful deity takes Buckingham up on his rash wish: This is the day which, in King Edward’s time, I wished might fall on me, when I was found False to his children and his wife’s allies. This is the day wherein I wished to fall By the false faith of him whom most I trusted … That high all-seer which I dallied with Hath turned my feignèd prayer on my head, And given in earnest what I begged in jest. Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points in their masters’ bosoms.

(5.1.13–29)

Such recoils of ill-cast and ill-charged ordinances appeal to the Deity’s sense of humor. If Buckingham swears “in jest,” God goes him one betterÂ€ – Buckingham is beheaded. Tit for tat is the essence of both vengeance and jest. In a play abounding in stichomythia, the ultimate riposte is to betray a betrayer. And God orchestrates it, luxuriating in a divinely comic “Gotcha!” The grotesquely comic Revenger’s Tragedy imagines God as audience of a revenge tragedy. Thunder is God’s voice, a thunderclap His

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applause:Â€ “When thunder claps, heaven likes the tragedy” (5.3.48). (In Antonio’s Revenge, too, a revenger declares, “Heaven sits clapping of our enterprise” [5.3.15].)4 I think heaven applauds The Revenger’s Tragedy not only because justice is done but because heaven appreciates blood, gore, and a good joke. The play’s condign recoil must have amused heaven:Â€Vindice, who deprives the duke of his tongue, is undone by inability to control his own tongue, as he brags about his murders (Simmons 56). In appropriating vengeance for Himself, was a jealous God relishing sole possession of its dark hilarity? One is tempted to object to “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” by observing that the Lord doesn’t enjoy revenge the way human beings do. But maybe He does. Thomas Heywood’s imagining of God as audience seems to conflate Jehovah and Jove:Â€“If then a world a theater present, / As by the roundness it appears most fit, / Built with star-galleries of high ascent, / In which Jehove doth as spectator sit” (Apology Sig. [a8]v).

4

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Index

Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, A, 169 Alleyn, Edward, 188n.35 Allman, Eileen, 16, 19n.24, 51, 177n.16, 181, 185 All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare), 126, 262 Altman, Joel, 30n.15 Alured, Matthew: The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army, 205, 274 Ames, William, 117, 120 Amman, Jost, 65n.8, 111 Anderson, Judith H., 13n.18 Anderson, Linda, 17n.22, 47 Annals of English Drama, 215n.27 Anne, Queen, 9 Answer to a Great Number of Blasphemous Cavillations written by an Anabaptist, An (Knox), 230–31, 231n.14 Answer to the City’s Representation … by some Ministers of the Gospel, An, 192 antitheatricalism 34–35, 63 antithesis (rhetorical figure) 78–79 Antonio’s Revenge (Marston), 3n.1, 4n.4, 4n.5, 5, 18, 24n.6, 31n.19, 31n.22, 167, 246n.30, 276 comedy in, 47 lack of divine justice in, 39 madness in, 43, 44 moral ambiguity in, 42 resistance in, 172–73 therapeutic revenge in, 24 tyrannicide in, 168 and unchristian revenge, 32, 33–34 Antony, 219 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 10–11, 16n.20, 66n.10, 123, 126 accounting terms used in, 70, 74 and Fortuna, 125 gambling in, 117, 119–22 undeserved punishment in, 39

Abel, 193 accounting language in revenge plays 62 Acts and Monuments (Foxe), 25, 49, 143 Adams, Abigail, 274 Adams, John, 272, 274 Adams, Simon, 162n.52 Adamson, Henry: Muses’ Threnody, 56n.68 Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon), 259 Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 53 Eumenides, 52 Libation Bearers, 52, 57 aesthetics and numericity 257–58 Agag, 208 Agamemnon, 172 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 53 Agamemnon (Seneca, trans. Compton), 212n.22 Agamemnon (Seneca, trans. Studley), 11, 34, 52–53, 57, 130, 130n.3, 131, 136, 152, 153, 164 tyranny in, 137–38 Aglaura (Suckling), 201 Agreement of the People, An, 200, 249 Ahab, 141, 147 Aho, James, 68n.13, 257–58 Airs and Dialogues (Gamble), 56n.68 Alaham (Greville), 91, 184 Alberti, Leon Battista, 258 Albertus Wallenstein (Glapthorne), 201, 217 Albovine (D’Avenant), 201 Alcestis (Buchanan), 132n.6 Alchemist, The (Jonson), 251n.35 Alexander the Great, 207n.18 Alfred the Great, 259n.7 Alfred, or Right Re-enthroned, 212n.22 algebra 62, 65, 83, 255 All Fools (Chapman), 93, 111 Allen, Frances, 143 Allen, William, 170

311

312

Index

Apology for Actors, An (Heywood), 162n.51, 276n.4 Apology for Poetry, An (Sidney), 39, 47, 161n.49, 161–62, 168 Appellation of John Knox from the Cruel and Most Injust sentence pronounced against him by the false bishops and clergy of Scotland, The (Knox), 147 Appius and Virginia (R. B.), 109, 165 Aquinas, Thomas, 107 Summa Theologiae, 35n.30 Arcadia (Sidney), 162 Archaionomia (Lambarde), 259n.7 Archipropheta (Grimald), 159 Aristotle, 50, 51, 67, 107, 107n.3, 111, 206, 257 Nicomachean Ethics, 40–41, 61, 107, 259–60 Rhetoric, 40 Arithmetical Military Treatise (Diggeses), 65–66 Arnold, Matthew, 47 Arnold, Richard, 200–01 Art of English Poesy (Puttenham), 69 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 70, 112, 199 Ashton, John, 117, 120, 121 Aston, T. H., 232n.17 Athaliah, 141, 145, 147, 169, 192, 207, 208n.19 Atheist’s Tragedy, The (Tourneur), 4n.5, 19, 31, 31n.19, 31n.22, 32, 33, 33n.26, 106n.1, 123n.21, 167, 185, 186, 196 debt in, 93 lack of divine justice in, 39 social equality in, 247 tyrannicide in, 168, 179 Auden, W. H., 14n.19 Augustine, St., 113, 185n.30 avenger: SeeÂ€revenger Averell, William: Charles and Julia, 56n.67 Ayres, Philip J., 24n.6, 33 B., R.: Appius and Virginia, 109, 165 B., T.: The Rebellion of Naples, or the Tragedy of Massenello, 212–13, 221, 273 Bacon, Francis, 17n.22, 22, 22n.1, 40, 62n.2, 113 The Advancement of Learning, 259 Bady, David, 16n.21, 65, 70, 107n.3, 258n.5 Bailey, F. G., 85 Baines, Richard, 180 Baker, Humphrey, 64, 92 The Wellspring of Sciences, 63 Baker, Sir Richard, 47n.52, 130n.3 balance 62, 106–08 in ledgers 74–75 of trade 74–75, 80–81 Baldwin, William, 130n.3 A Mirror for Magistrates, 114, 154–57, 162, 190, 231–32

Bale, John, 25, 49, 152n.37 Ball, John, 228, 261n.10 Balmford, James, 117, 120 Baptistes sive Calumnia (Buchanan), 136, 159–61, 160n.48, 163, 163n.53, 168, 171n.7, 189, 201 Barbour, Violet, 121n.16 Barish, Jonas, 25n.8, 25n.9, 51n.61 Barker, Richard, 176n.14 Barkstead, William: The Insatiate Countess, 107 Barnes, Barnabe, 112 Barnfield, Richard, 257 Baron, Hans, 41 Baron, Robert: Mirza, 214–15 Barroll, Leeds, 165n.59 Barston, John, 139n.16 Bartholomew Fairing, A, 204 Bashar, Nazife, 9 Bastard, The (anon.), 10n.16, 34n.28, 104n.20, 201–02, 268n.15 accounting terms used in, 62 comedy in, 46 Bastingius, Jeremais, 84n.1, 86n.5 Bate, Jonathan, 9n.15 Battle of Alcazar (Peele), 5n.6, 114n.11, 124n.22 Baxter, Richard, 117 Beard, Thomas, 17 Beaumont, Francis, 183 Bonduca, 181 Cupid’s Revenge, 4n.4, 4n.5, 181 A King and No King, 181, 183 The Maid’s Tragedy, 4n.4, 4n.5, 176n.15, 179, 181, 183, 188n.33 Philaster, 181, 183 Becon, Thomas, 29–30 Beer, Barrett L., 143 Behn, Aphra: The Roundheads, 217n.28 Believe as You List (Massinger), 182, 201 Bellamira her Dream, Part 1 (Killigrew), 213, 214 Bellamira her Dream, Part 2 (Killigrew), 213 Bellany, Alistair, 11n.17 Belsey, Catherine, 42 benefit of clergy 9 Benese, Richard: Book of Measuring Land, 71 Berkowitz, Steven, 159, 161, 161n.49, 163, 163n.53, 163n.55 Bernstein, Peter L., 115n.12, 121 Bernthal, Craig A., 221 Berry, Herbert, 66n.11 Berry, Ralph, 234, 243, 244 Berthelet, Thomas, 153 Bevington, David, 238, 266–67 Beza, Theodore, 141

Index Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, The (Chettle and Day), 7n.11, 92 Blisset, William, 172 Boehm, Christopher, 16n.20 Boethius, 113 Bond, Christopher, 35n.30 Bondman, The (Massinger), 182 Bonduca (Beaumont and Fletcher), 181 bookkeeping, double-entry 15, 62, 63 and control over circumstance 68 language of, in revenge plays 15 practices in revenge plays 75–80 “Book of the Dead,” 261 Book of Martyrs (Foxe), 169, 228n.9, 229n.10 Book of Measuring Land (Benese), 71 Book on Games of Chance, The: Liber de Ludo Aleae (Cardano), 115, 260 Borkenau, Franz, 70n.16, 71 borrowing, etiquette governing 100–01 Bossy, John, 170, 179 Bowers, Fredson, 5, 5n.7, 29, 30, 30n.17, 31, 33, 176n.14, 179n.18, 242n.27 Boyle, A. J., 136n.12 Bracton, Henry de, 17 Braden, Gordon, 19, 24n.7, 25, 31, 41, 46, 130n.2, 130n.3, 132, 153, 170n.6, 240, 240n.23 Bradford, Alan, 4 Bradford, William, 272 Braithwait, Richard, 56 Braunmuller, A. R., 267 bribery 9, 109 Briggs, W. D., 179n.19 Britnell, R. H., 13 Brockliss, L. W. B., 8n.14, 85n.3 Brooke, Nicholas, 44, 44n.44, 46n.50 Broude, Ronald, 5, 9, 9n.15, 16, 20, 124n.22, 170n.6 Brown, Penelope, 100–01, 102 Brown, Richard, 67 Bruno, Giordano: The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 111, 113, 115 Brutus, 138, 139n.16, 161, 163n.54, 190, 206, 207, 209, 217, 218 Bucer, Martin, 144 Buchanan, George, 135n.9, 149, 157, 163, 168, 168n.3, 179, 190, 190n.2, 274 Alcestis, 132n.6 Baptistes sive Calumnia, 136, 159–61, 160n.48, 163, 163n.53, 168, 171n.7, 189, 201 De Jure Regni apud Scotos, 157–59, 157n.45, 163, 163n.53, 168, 170 Detection of the Actions of Mary Queen of Scots, 190 Medea, 159

313

Rerum Scoticarum Historia, 158n.46 Tyrannical-Government Anatomized, 150n.31, 160n.48, 163, 189, 189n.1 Buckingham, duke of, 182, 183, 190 Buckley, G. T., 179n.19 bullionism 81 Bullough, Geoffrey, 130n.3 Burbage, Richard, 188n.35 Burgess, Glenn, 181n.22 Burke, Kenneth, 266n.13 Burks, Deborah G., 201 Burnett, Anne Pippin, 3, 11, 19n.24, 22, 24n.6, 32, 32n.24, 40, 41n.39, 50, 51, 85 Burnett, Cathleen, 260 Burton, Kathleen M., 140 Burton, Thomas, 194 Burton, William, 87, 88, 89, 139 Bushnell, Rebecca, 165, 167, 171n.7, 181n.22, 182, 185 Bussy D’Ambois (Chapman), 18, 39n.36, 41 Cade, Jack, 221, 226n.4, 229, 232, 232n.17, 234n.18, 252 in Henry VI, Part 2, 225, 226n.3, 232–36, 242 Caesar and Pompey (anon.), SeeÂ€Caesar’s Revenge Caesar and Pompey (Chapman), 180 Caesar’s Fall (Webster), 184 Caesar’s Revenge (anon.) 4n.4, 4n.5, 23, 24, 113, 114n.11, 135n.11, 157n.44, 191n.4 as vendetta play, 26, 165 Cain and Abel, 142 Calderón, 186 Caldwell, Ellen C., 221n.33, 232 Caligula, 141, 152, 157 Callaghan, Dympna, 73n.18 Calvin, John, 139n.17, 141, 169, 228n.8, 231n.14 Homilies on the First Book of Samuel, 141 Institutes of the Christian Religion, 142 Cambyses (Preston), 108–10, 165, 171n.7 Campbell, Danny, 19n.25 Campbell, Lily Bess, 29 Campion, Edmund, 150, 169 Camporesi, Piero, 227 Canker of England’s Common Wealth, The (Malynes), 74n.23, 232n.16, 255 Canterbury His Change of Diet (Overton), 208n.20 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 45 capital punishment 10 capitalism, venture 8, 115–16, 118–19 Cardano, Girolamo, 67 The Book on Games of Chance: Liber de Ludo Aleae, 115, 260 Cardinal, The (Shirley), 38, 40n.38, 43n.42, 44, 93, 126, 167, 201

314

Index

Carlisle, Carol Jones, 266n.14 Carr, Robert, 180, 183 Carruthers, Bruce G., 95, 96, 98 Cartelli, Thomas, 224, 226n.3, 248n.32 Cary, Elizabeth: The Tragedy of Mariam, 159 Case of the Army Truly Stated, The, 199–200, 221, 249 Cassirer, Ernst, 113 Cassius, 139n.16 Castalio, Sebastian, 231n.14 Caxton, William, 53 censorship 131, 154n.39, 176, 187n.32 Center of the Circle of Commerce, The (Malynes), 81n.26, 81n.27, 82 Changeling, The (Middleton and Rowley), 68, 202, 202n.15 Chapman, George, 178, 180, 274 All Fools, 93, 111 Bussy D’Ambois, 18, 39n.36, 41 Caesar and Pompey, 180 The Charge of the Army and Council of War against the King, 195 The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron, 180 Eastward Ho, 180, 250n.35 Monsieur D’Olive, 180 The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, 6, 19, 24, 31n.19, 39n.36, 41, 96, 126, 167, 168, 251 Sir Giles Goosecap, 250n.35 The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France, 180 The Widow’s Tears, 180 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, The Charge of the Army and Council of War against the King, The (Chapman), 195 Charles I, King, 26n.11, 145, 163, 181n.22, 182, 183, 184, 189, 190, 191–92, 193, 195–96, 203n.16, 204, 208, 209, 210, 211, 211n.21, 212, 214, 218 and Eikon Basilike, 198 Charles II, King, 188n.33, 211, 217n.28, 271 Charles, Prince, 183, 190, 210, 211, 214 Charles and Julia (Averell), 56n.67 Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Middleton), 68 Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales, 45 Cheke, Sir John, 67 Chettle, Henry: The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, 7n.11, 92 The Danish Tragedy, 39n.36 The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, 70, 91 The Tragedy of Hoffman, 7, 10, 18, 24, 39n.36, 95, 126, 137, 143, 199, 247, 251 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Hoffman, the Tragedy of Chew, Samuel, C., 111

Christianity: and deaths of revengers, 25 and debt, 84n.1, 86–91, 92, 101, 104 and fairness, 37 and fair prices, 13 and gambling, 118–19, 120 and justice, 107–08 and legal system, 89–91 and martyrs, 25 and opposition to revenge plays, 29–36 and resistance writing, 139–49, 179–80, 192–98, 207–08 and revenge drama, 5 revengers against, 36–40 and social equality, 227–28, 249, 251 as vendetta, 35 Cicero, 85, 139n.17, 181 De Officiis, 138–39 Cicilia and Clorinda, Part 1 (Killigrew), 213–14 Cicilia and Clorinda, Part 2 (Killigrew), 213 Circle of Commerce, or the Balance of Trade, in Defense of Free Trade, The (Misselden), 81n.26, 82 Clare, Janet, 176, 201, 203n.16, 212 class, terminology 226 class conflict 145, 225–53 Clement, Francis, 69 Cleopatra, 210 Clover, Carol, 49n.58 Cockburn, J. S., 9 Cockerell, H. A. L., 121n.16 Cogswell, Thomas, 183 Cohn, Norman, 251 Collier, T., 22, 26n.11, 34 A Vindication of the Army Remonstrance, 194–95 Collinson, Patrick, 139n.16 Colwell, Thomas, 153 comedy, 44–48, 274–76 and sensationalism, 48–49, 274 comedy, black, in revenge tragedies 42, 44, 48, 275 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare), 3n.2 commercial language and thinking in plays 63–64, 68 commodification 70, 70n.16, 71n.17, 73, 257, 259 communism, economic 144, 148n.27, 225, 227, 227n.6, 228n.8, 230, 231n.14, 232n.16, 249, 252 Compton, James, 212n.22 condign punishment 6, 17–18, 36, 40, 51, 133, 194, 196, 197, 208n.19, 213, 256, 275 condign revenge 6, 17n.23, 40, 125, 136, 147, 196, 208, 211, 213, 241, 254, 256, 265, 269

Index conditions, legal 89 Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, A (Parsons and Allen), 169 Confession Amantis (Gower), 53n.64, 54, 203n.25 Confession and Apology of the Pastors of the Church at Magdeburg, 146, 146n.24 Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, The (More), 140 Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron, The (Chapman), 180 Contarini, Gasparo, 139n.16 Coogan, Michael D., 86n.4 Cooke, J.: Greene’s Tu Quoque, 89 Corbett, Richard: The Times’ Whistle: Or A New Dance of Seven Satyrs, 56n.68 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 39, 102, 116, 248 Corporaal, Marguérite, 268n.16 corruption 136, 140, 156, 177, 217, 240 judicial 9n.15, 9–12, 17n.23, 108–11, 109n.5, 125n.24, 155, 165, 196, 222n Court of Venus, The (Wyatt), 112 Cousins, A. D., 140n.19 Coward, Barry, 192n.6, 199 Crafty Cromwell, or Oliver Ordering our New State (Mercurius Melancholicus, pseud.), 203 Craig, Hardin, 148 Cranmer, Thomas, 147, 150 Cressy, David, 212n.23, 226n.3 Crewe, Alice, 120 Cromwell, Oliver, 190, 204, 205–08, 209–10, 214, 251 republican resistance to, 218–20 Cromwell, Thomas, 129 Crook, Samuel, 86n.5 Crouch, John (probable author): New-Market Fair, or A Parliament Out-cry of State Commodities, 203, 204 The Second Part of The Tragicomedy, called New-Market Fair, 203–04 Crowley, Robert, 230 Cunliffe, J. W., 130n.3 Cupid’s Revenge (Beaumont and Fletcher), 4n.4, 4n.5, 181 currency conversion 67 curses 19, 28–29, 49, 61n.33, 78, 79, 134, 137n.14, 172, 235 in Edward II, 172 in Richard III, 28, 78, 79 in Troas, 134 Curtis, Dennis E., 107, 108, 109n.4, 111n.9, 261 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 69n.15

315

Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 65, 116, 187 Cynthia’s Revenge (Stephens), 38, 179 D’Avenant, William: Albovine, 201 da Porto, Luigi, 226 da Vinci, Leonardo, 258 Daniel, Samuel, 181, 274 Sonnets to Delia, 112 The Tragedy of Philotas, 178–79, 181 The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, 106 Danish Tragedy, The (Chettle), 39n.36 Daube, David, 107, 107n.2, 108n.4 David, 145 David and Bethsabe (Peele), 37–38, 70 Davidson, Nicholas, 180n.20 Davies, Thomas, 183 Davis, Natalie, 37n.33, 85n.2 Dawson, Jane E. A., 144, 146n.24, 146n.25, 231 Day, John: The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, 7n.11, 92 Humor out of Breath, 184 Isle of Gulls, 184 Law Tricks, 184 The Travails of Three English Brothers, 184 De divina proportione (Pacioli), 68 De Jure Regni apud Scotos (Buchanan), 157–59, 157n.45, 163, 163n.53, 168, 170 De Officiis (Cicero), 138–39 De Republica Anglorum (Smith), 161n.50, 181n.22 De Roover, Raymond, 8, 14, 15, 74, 116, 118 De Vocht, Henry, 150n.31 Dean, David M., 13 debt 10, 84–105, 232 abstractness of 95 alliance through 95 analogous to revenge 96 culture of credit 84–85 and economic idiom, 11 to God, 84n.1, 86–91, 92 imprisonment for 10 and legal system, 89–91 litigation 89–90, 95, 103 in Lord’s prayer commentaries 86 revenge as, 84–105 revenge’s language of 91–94 serial defaults 95 sins as 87–88 in The Merchant of Venice, 96–105 theological meaning, 40n.37 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€economics SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ gambling Declaration of Independence, The (Jefferson), 254, 271, 272–74

316

Index

Declaration of the Engagements, Remonstrances, Representations, Proposals, Desires and Resolutions from His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the General Council of the Army … Also Representations of the Grievances of the Kingdom, A, 199n.13 Dee, John, 67n.12, 255, 257, 258 Dekker, Thomas: The Wonderful Year, 15 Delapeend, Thomas, 153 Deloney, Thomas: Jack of Newberry, 226n.3 Denham, Henry, 153 Derrida, Jacques, 30n.18, 86 Descartes, René, 71 deserving 5–7, 19, 103, 112, 115, 123–24, 134, 245 Detection of the Actions of Mary Queen of Scots (Buchanan), 190 Devout Treatise upon the Paternoster (Erasmus), 87 Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, A (Starkey), 18, 140, 230 Dietrich, Julia, 34 Digges, Leonard and Thomas: Arithmetical Military Treatise, 65–66 Diomedes, 207n.18 Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, A (Smith), 74n.23 Discourse of Trade (Mun), 82 Disease of the House: or, the State Mountebank, Administering Physic to a Sick Parliament, 204 Distracted State, The (Tatham), 215–17 Dobson, R. B., 228 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 44, 70, 180 Dolce, Lodovico: Giocasta, 164 Dollimore, Jonathan, 19n.24, 31n.22 Donne, John, 113, 151 Pseudo-Martyr, 151n.34 Double Marriage, The (Fletcher and Massinger), 23n.5, 181, 182, 182n.24, 247 Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington (Chettle), 70, 91 Dózsa, György, 226 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), 4n.5, 7n.11, 24, 93, 137, 184, 199 justice in, 106, 256–57 social equality in, 247 undeserved punishment in, 39–40 Dudrap, Claude, 4 Duke of Milan, The (Massinger), 4n.5, 19, 30, 182, 185, 271 balanced revenge in, 82, 83 social equality in, 247, 256 Dunn, Alastair, 232n.17 Dutch Courtesan, The (Marston), 250n.35

Dutton, Richard, 150, 176, 180, 180n.21, 181, 182, 182n.23, 183, 184, 187, 188n.35 Eastward Ho (Chapman, Jonson, and Marston), 180, 250n.35 Eccles, Mark, 180n.21 economics: and accounting, 63–68 and balance of trade, 74–75, 80–83, 254, 255 economic instability 8 and failed regulation, 7–8, 7n.12 and fair prices, 12–16 language of revenge plays 10–11 in literature, 68–71, 112–13 in mature Shakespearean tragedy, 71–74 and revenge tallies, 61–62, 70–71, 75–80 and social equality, 254–61 and unfairness, 10–12 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€debt SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ equality, social SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ gambling Edward I (Peele), 69, 70 Edward II (Marlowe), 171–72 Edward II, King, 141 Edward IV, King, 186 Edward VI, King, 138, 141, 153 Edwards, Philip, 38, 182, 183 Edwards, Thomas: Gangraena, 205n.17 egalitarianism 229–32, 234–36, 248–49, 254–70 Egerton, Sir Thomas, 120 Eglon, 207 Ehud, 141, 142–43, 148, 207 Eikon Basilike: the Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, 198 Eikonoklastes (Milton), 198 Einzig, Paul, 74n.23, 116 Electra (Euripides), 24n.6, 57, 211 Electra (Sophocles), 24n.6, 52, 54, 213n.25 Electra (Sophocles, trans. Wase), 57, 210–12 Eliot, T.S., 43n.42, 130n.2, 132n.8 Elizabeth I, Queen, 8, 9n.15, 56, 74n.23, 112, 131n.4, 132, 134, 138, 146, 150, 152, 161n.50, 162, 163, 164, 165, 169, 170, 170n.5, 179, 181, 183, 184, 185n.31, 188, 190, 259n.7 Elizabeth, Princess, 210, 211 Elliot, J. H., 8n.14, 85n.3 Elliott, Martin, 266, 266n.13 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 107, 257 The Governor, 230, 230n.13 Empson, William, 124, 238 England’s Standard Advanced in Oxfordshire (Thompson), 220, 273

Index Engle, Lars, 96n.13 Epicoene (Jonson), 68, 251n.35 Epieikeia (Perkins), 35n.30 Epistle of the Persecution of Catholics in England (Parsons), 169 Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (Turberville), 56n.67 equality 6, 13, 18, 20, 20n.25, 74–75, 82–83, 99, 100, 164, 225–70, 271, 272, 272n.2, 274 equality, social, 225–53, 254–70 in The Atheist’s Tragedy, 247 and Christianity, 227–28, 249, 251 in the Civil War era, 248–52 in The Duchess of Malfi, 247 in The Duke of Milan, 247, 256 and economics, 254–61 in Henry VI, Part 2, 232–36, 239, 240 in The Jew of Malta, 246 in King Lear, 263–66, 268, 269, 270 in The Merchant of Venice, 263–68, 269, 270 in Othello, 240–46, 263–66, 268–69, 270 in The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, 246, 255 in The Revenger’s Tragedy, 265, 265n.11 in The Spanish Tragedy, 237–40 in Tamburlaine, 248, 248n.32 in Women Beware Women, 246–47 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€economics SeeÂ€alsoÂ€fairness SeeÂ€alsoÂ€justice equations 62 equity 20, 20n.6, 35n.30, 37, 54, 108, 109, 149n.30, 158, 221, 230, 260, 260n.9, 261 defined 20 distinguished from fairness 5–7, 10, 12, 13, 20–21n.26, 33, 37, 54, 81n.25, 107, 111, 164, 190, 209, 222, 254–55, 260–61, 260n.9, 261n.10, 266 relational 261 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€equality, social SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ fairness SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ justice Erasmus, Desiderius, 132n.6 Devout Treatise upon the Paternoster, 87 Erne, Lukas, 3, 4, 29, 39n.36, 124, 130, 130n.3, 179 Essay on Drapery, An (Scott), 254 Essex, earl of, 165, 180, 181, 182 Euclid, 255, 257, 259 Eumenides (Aeschylus), 52 Euripides, 203 Electra, 24n.6, 57, 211 Hecuba, 132n.6 Iphigenia at Aulis, 132n.6 Orestes, 32, 52, 54–55

317

Everard, William, 251 Everett, Barbara, 3 Ewald, François, 121n.16 execution, 9–10, 23, 25 Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, An (Perkins), 88, 89, 90 Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, The (Bruno), 111, 113, 115 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 7n.10, 56n.67, 228n.8 Fairfax, General Thomas, 271 fairness, 5, 33 and Christianity, 37 definition of, 20 and playgoers, 6 of prices, 12–16 of punishment, 84 relational, 261–63, 265 and revenge tallies, 61–62, 70–71, 75–80 in The Spanish Tragedy, 61, 123–26 in Titus Andronicus, 61 and violations of fair payment, 7–10, 11 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€equality, social SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ equity SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ justice SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ legal system SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ unfairness Family of Love (anon.), 250n.35 Famous Tragedy of King Charles I (anon.), 209–10, 250 Fatal Dowry (Massinger), 247n.31 favorites, royal 8 felony 10 Feltham, Owen, 190 Felton, John, 190–91 Ferne, Henry: Resolving of Conscience, upon this question, whether … [if a king] is bent or seduced to subvert religion, laws, and liberties, subjects may take arms and resist? and whether that case be now?, 191n.5 Ferrers, George, 156 feud cultures 5 Field, Richard, 69 Finkelstein, Andrea, 75 First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, The (Knox), 146–47, 162n.51, 169 First Book of the Preservation of King Henry VII (anon.), 56n.67 Fisher, Barbara, 73n.21 Fitter, Chris, 235n.20 Fletcher, Giles, 182

318

Index

Fletcher, John, 181–82, 210, 274 Bonduca, 181 Cupid’s Revenge, 4n.4, 4n.5, 181 The Double Marriage, 23n.5, 181, 182, 182n.24, 247 A King and No King, 181, 183 The Maid’s Tragedy, 4n.4, 4n.5, 176n.15, 179, 181, 183, 188n.33 Philaster, 181, 183 Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, 181, 183n.26 Valentinian, 7n.10, 18, 24, 181, 256 A Wife for a Month, 181 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Valentinian Flynn, Dennis, 150n.31, 150n.32, 151, 151n.34, 153 Foakes, R. A., 24n.6 Ford, Bonnie L., 274 Ford, John: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 24 forgiveness, Christian 33, 35–37, 42n.40, 87–91, 194, 198, 266–67 Forman, Simon, 6 Fortier, Mark, 9n.15, 10, 20n.26, 149n.30 Fortuna, 14, 15, 53, 106–26, 111–15, 129, 157, 176n.15, 251, 260, 262 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Justitia fortune, 8n.13, 10, 53, 58, 106–26, 129, 156–57, 157n.44, 246–47, 251, 260, 262 Foxe, John, 182, 222n.34 Acts and Monuments (the Book of Martyrs), 25, 49, 143, 169, 228n.9, 229n.10 Free Trade or the Means to Make Trade Flourish (Misselden), 81 Freedman, Penelope, 98, 98n.15, 102n.19 Freeman, Arthur, 179n.19 Freeman, Thomas S., 25, 25n.9, 139, 222n.34 French, Peter A., 11, 17n.23, 22, 22n.2, 23n.5, 42, 42n.40, 49n.57 Friar Francis (anon.), 188n.34 Froissart, Jean, 261n.10 Fulgens and Lucrece (Medwall), 262–63 G., I., 34 G., W., 211, 211n.21 Gairdner, James, 221 Gamble, John: Airs and Dialogues, 56n.68 gambling, 115–22, 125–26, 260 in Antony and Cleopatra, 119–22 defended by Anglican clergy, 117–19 venture capitalism as, 115 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€debt SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ economics Game at Chess, A (Middleton), 183, 184 Gangraena (Edwards), 205n.17 Gardner, Helen, 42 Garnett, George, 169 Garrett, C. H., 179

Gascoigne, George: Jocasta, 164–65 Geller, Sherri, 154n.39 Gentleman, Francis, 266n.14 George III, King, 272 Geremek, Bronislaw, 227 Gest Historical of the Destruction of Troy, The (anon.), 53n.63, 54, 213n.25 ghosts in revenge tragedy, 21, 155 Gibson, Colin, 183 gifts 8, 85–86 Giocasta (Dolce), 164 Girard, René, 51 Glapthorne, Henry: Albertus Wallenstein, 201, 217 Revenge for Honor, 4n.5, 17n.23, 43 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Revenge for Honor Glassey, Lionel K. J., 146n.25 Godelier, Maurice, 85n.2 Godly and Short Treatise upon the Lord’s Prayer, A, 90 Godly Treatise Concerning the Lawful Use of Riches (anon.), 13 Goffe, Thomas, 203, 210 Orestes, 24, 29, 30, 40, 52n.62, 55, 56–57, 58, 210 Goldingham, William: Herodes, 159 Goldsmith, Maurice, 252n.37 Goodman, Christopher, 25, 36, 146n.25, 146n.26, 147, 148n.27, 149, 154, 156, 157, 159, 162n.52, 163, 168n.1, 169, 174, 179, 192, 222, 274 How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed of their Subjects, and Wherein They may Lawfully by God’s Word be Disobeyed and Resisted, 144–45, 145n.22, 146, 155 Gorboduc (Norton and Sackville), 168n.1 Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, A (Procter), 112 Gosse, Edmund, 130n.2 Gosson, Stephen, 34 Governor, The (Elyot), 230, 230n.13 Gower, John, 53 Confessio Amantis, 53n.64, 54, 213n.25 Grafton, Richard, 261n.10 Green, Edwin, 121n.16 Greenblatt, Stephen, 31, 234n.19 Greene, Robert: James IV, 68 The Tragedy of Selimus, 91 Greene’s Tu Quoque (Cooke), 89 Greville, Fulke, 184 Alaham, 91, 184 The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 184 Mustapha, 184 Grévin, Jacques: Jules César, 161

Index Grey, Lady Jane, 147 grievances 11, 27, 27n.13, 27n.22, 151, 165, 191, 199n.13, 200–01, 206, 220–22, 220n.31, 221n.32, 222n.34, 233–34, 239, 241n.26, 242, 247, 272–74 Grimald, Nicholas: Archipropheta, 159 Grindal, Edmund, 148n.28 Griswold, Wendy, 4n.3, 19n.25, 32n.23, 48n.54, 165n.56, 226n.5, 246 Gross, Allen, 182n.25 Ground of Arts (Recorde), 67n.12 Grove, Matthew: Pelops and Hippodamia, 56n.67 Groves, Reg, 228 grudge-bearing 42, 50 Guépin, Jean-Pierre, 27n.13, 51 guilt, unpunished 9 Guise, duke of, 170 Gurr, Andrew, 187n.32 Hackenbracht, Ryan, 174n.10 Hadden, Richard W., 67, 70n.16, 71 Hadfield, Andrew, 139, 139n.16, 172, 173, 228n.8, 232 Hall, Dennis R., 50n.59 Hall, Joseph, 35 Hallett, Charles A. and Elaine S., 3n.1, 5, 6n.9, 11n.17, 18, 24, 24n.7, 29, 31n.22, 33, 34n.27, 35n.29, 37, 38, 39n.36, 42n.41, 43n.43, 110, 110n.7, 178, 265 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 3, 3n.1, 4n.4, 4n.5, 5, 7n.10, 11, 11n.17, 15, 18, 19, 21, 51n.61, 95, 125, 130n.3, 133, 158, 159, 167, 168n.1, 178, 188n.34, 189, 213 accounting terms used in, 65, 70, 74 betting in, 116–17 comedy in, 44, 47, 47n.53 debt in, 93 filial duty in, 91, 92 grievances in, 220 madness in, 43 martyrdom in, 25 mercenary revenge in, 86 recoil in, 196 regicide in, 168 resistance in, 174–75 revenge partnership in, 96 tyranny in, 130, 174–75 and unchristian revenge, 30n.19, 32, 34, 35n.29, 36–37, 104 Hammond, Antony, 185 Hankey, Julie, 266 Hans the Piper, 226n.4 Harding, Robert, 8n.14 Harriot, Thomas, 180

319

Harris, Jonathan Gil, 22, 51 Harvey, I. M. W., 232n.17 Hattaway, Michael, 44, 110, 172, 226, 248 Hawkes, Terence, 70, 74n.22 Hayward, Sir John: History of Henry IV, 181 Hecuba (Euripides, trans. Erasmus), 132n.6 Hedrick, Donald, 47 Heinemann, Margot, 183n.28, 208n.20 Helgerson, Richard, 186, 233, 234n.19 Heliogabalus, 185n.31 Hell’s Broke Loose (Rowlands), 231, 248 Hemming, William: The Jews’ Tragedy, 82–83, 221, 256 Hengist, King of Kent (Middleton), 184n.29 Henkel, Arthur, 111n.9 Henri IV, King, 180, 181 Henrietta Maria, 211n.21 Henry III, King, 198 Henry IV, 156 Henry IV, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 11, 92 accounting terms used in, 63, 65 debt in, 93 Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare), 68, 106 debt in, 93 Henry V (Shakespeare), 69n.14, 80, 105, 111n.8, 181 Henry VI, King, 156 Henry VI, Part I (Shakespeare), 4n.4, 4n.5, 77, 80, 83, 124n.22, 136n.13 Henry VI, Part 2 (Shakespeare), 4n.5, 17, 19, 80, 124n.22, 125, 165 balanced revenge in, 76–77, 83 lack of divine justice in, 39 social equality in, 225, 226n.3, 232–36, 239, 240, 242 therapeutic revenge in, 23 vendetta in, 233, 236 Henry VI, Part 3 (Shakespeare), 4n.5, 80, 84, 124n.22, 273 balanced revenge in, 76–78, 79, 80, 83, 124n.22 and Fortuna, 114 as vendetta play, 26–28, 233 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 110, 221n.32 Henry VIII, King, 129, 131n.4, 139, 140, 140n.18, 161, 185, 226n.4 Henslowe, Philip, 4n.4, 39n.36 Hercules Furens (Seneca, trans. Heywood), 130n.3, 131, 137, 153 rape in, 133 tyranny in, 133–34 Hercules Oetaeus (Seneca, trans. Studley), 131, 136, 138n.15, 153n.38 Hercules, 113 tyranny in, 138

320

Index

“Hero and Leander” (Marlowe), 180 Herod, 144, 159 Herod and Antipater (Markham), 159 Herodes (Goldingham), 159 Heywood, Elizabeth, 150 Heywood, Ellis, 150, 153 Heywood, Jasper, 57, 130n.3, 131, 150n.31, 150n.32, 150–51, 151n.35, 152, 153, 153n.38, 154, 164, 169, 179, 212 Heywood, John, 150 Heywood, Thomas, 6, 16, 188n.34 An Apology for Actors, 162n.51, 276n.4 The Iron Age, Part 2, 55, 56, 57 Londini Speculum, 256 The Rape of Lucrece, 41 The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth, 18 Troia Brittanica, 56n.68 Hick Scorner (anon.), 111n.8 Highlights for Children, 46n.51 Hill, Christopher, 184, 184n.29, 187n.32, 190n.2, 228n.8 Hill, Robert, 87, 88, 89, 90, 104 Hilton, R. H., 232n.17 Hippolytus (Seneca, trans. Studley), 30n.16, 131, 136, 137, 153n.38 Hirschauer, Gretchen, 85 His Majesty’s Declaration to all His Loving Subjects, Concerning the Remonstrance of the Army, 196 History of Henry IV (Hayward), 181 Histriomastix (Prynne), 35 Hobday, Charles, 225, 226n.4, 228n.8, 229n.12, 234n.19, 261n.10 Hodges, Richard E., 212 Hoffman, the Tragedy of â•›(Chettle), 7, 10, 18, 24, 39n.36, 95, 126, 137, 143, 151, 199, 247 accounting terms used in, 62 comedy in, 45–46 and Fortuna, 114 madness in, 43 revenge partnership in, 96 and unchristian revenge, 32, 33 unfairness in, 84 Holderness, Graham, 22 Holinshed, Raphael, 162, 228 Holstun, James, 143, 190, 190n.3, 191, 200, 207, 214 homeopathic cures and revenge 51 Homer: Iliad, 261 Homilies on the First Book of Samuel (Calvin), 141 Honest Lawyer, The (S. S.), 89 Honigmann, E. A. J., 243, 244 Hope, Jonathan, 98, 245n.29

Hopkins, Lisa, 72, 73n.18 Horestes (Pickering), 55, 57–58, 165 Horne, David H., 69 Horst, Irvin Buckwalter, 229 Houliston, Victor, 170 How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed of their Subjects, and Wherein They may Lawfully by God’s Word be Disobeyed and Resisted (Goodman), 144–45, 145n.22, 146, 155 How to Get Even with Anybody, Anytime, 49n.58 How to Keep a Perfect Reckoning after the … Account of Debitor and Creditor (Peele), 65, 257 How to Keep Books of Accounts after the Order of Debitor and Creditor (Mellis), 65, 255 Howard-Hill, T. H., 181 Hudson, Winthrop S., 129n.1, 139, 141, 147, 148, 189 Hughes, Paul L., 148 Hughes, Thomas: The Misfortunes of Arthur, 137n.14 humanism, 40–42 Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army, The (Saunders, Alured, and Okey), 205, 274 Humble Petition of the Distressed and Almost Destroyed Subjects of England, An, 273 Humble Remonstrance … of Diverse Officers and Soldiers, The, 273 Hume, Robert D., 188n.33 Humor out of Breath (Day), 184 Hunter, G. K., 9, 27n.12, 32, 38, 130n.3 Hus, Jan, 25, 228, 228n.9 Hustler, 50n.59 Hutchings, Geoffrey, 268 Hutchings, Peter, 49n.58 Hyde Park (Shirley), 116 Iconologia (Ripa), 106, 108 Iliad (Homer), 261 inequality: SeeÂ€equality SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ unfairness inflation, monetary 7, 8, 94, 105, 143, 222, 274 injustice 6, 12, 39, 42, 51, 143n.21, 144, 192, 197, 200, 208, 254, 268n.16 and social class 126, 229, 237, 252 inner light, political implications 143, 195n.8, 252 Inner-Temple Masque, The (Middleton), 250n.35 Insatiate Countess, The (Marston and Barkstead), 107 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 142 insurance 71, 103, 121, 121n.16, 259 inventories of injury 220–22, 272–74 investment diversification 121

Index Iphigenia at Aulis (Euripides, trans. Erasmus), 132n.6 Ireton, Henry, 249–50 Iron Age, The, Part 2 (Heywood), 55, 56, 57 Irving, Henry, 268 Isle of Gulls (Day), 184 Jack Bull, The, 17n.23 Jack of Newberry (Deloney), 226n.3 Jack Straw (anon.), 247–48 Jackson, J. G. C., 62 Jacobs, Henry E., 31 Jacoby, Susan, 22n.1, 23n.3, 23n.4, 37 Jael, 141, 148 James I, King, 11n.17, 85n.3, 148, 163, 176, 180, 181, 181n.22, 182, 183, 184, 188, 190 James II, King, 271 James IV (Greene), 68 James VI, King, 161 James, Mervyn, 156n.42, 229 Jayne, Allen, 37n.33 Jed, Stephanie, 62 Jefferson, Thomas, 272, 272n.2, 274 The Declaration of Independence, 254, 271, 272–74 Jesus Christ, 22, 25, 36, 40, 87, 88, 92, 110, 144, 179, 193, 195, 227, 251 Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 4, 11, 19, 63, 121n.17, 167 accounting terms used in, 62 comedy in, 44 financial revenge in, 86 social equality in, 246 and unchristian revenge, 30n.16, 32 Jews’ Tragedy, The (Hemming), 82–83, 221, 256 Jezebel, 141, 145, 147, 213n.25 Jocasta (Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe), 164–65 John (New Testament), 144 John, King, 198 John the Baptist, 189 Johnson, Robert Carl, 150n.33 Jones, Richard, 87n.5 Jonson, Ben, 43n.42, 203, 210 The Alchemist, 251n.35 Eastward Ho, 180, 250n.35 Epicoene, 68, 251n.35 Sejanus, 130n.3 Staple of News, 85n.2, 251n.35 Volpone, 106n.1, 210 Jorgensen, Paul, 6n.8, 50 Jovial Crew, or The Devil turned Ranter (Sheppard), 204–05, 250n.35 judicial corruption, seeÂ€corruption judicial system, 9, 90–91 revenge as twin to 90, 104 Judith, 141

321

Jules César (Grévin), 161 Julius Caesar, 138, 139n.16, 163n.54, 207, 217, 219 Julius Caesar (Muret), 161 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 126, 139n.16, 166 Just General (Manuche), 202n.14 just price 12–14, 13n18, 14n.19, 377 justice, 15, 26, 106–08, 107n.2, 108n.4, 111–12, 115, 123–24, 126, 221, 256–57, 260, 261, 262 and Christianity, 107–08 corruption of, in drama, 108–11 in The Spanish Tragedy, 123–26 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€equality SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ fairness SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ legal system SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ unfairness Justice upon the Army Remonstrance (Sedgwick), 193–94 Justinian, 168 Justitia, 106, 107n.2, 108, 108n.4, 111–15, 123, 124, 126, 256, 257, 260, 261, 262 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Fortuna Jütte, Robert, 7n.12 Karpinski, Louis Charles, 92 Kawachi, Yoshiko, 4n.4 Keefer, Michael, 180 Kerrigan, John, 24n.6, 47, 50, 51, 75, 85, 85n.2, 87, 88, 170n.6, 220n.31 Kett, Robert, 233n.17, 270 Keyishian, Harry, 3, 6, 23, 23n.4 Kiefer, Frederick, 111, 113, 114, 114n.11, 115 Kill Bill, 49n.58 Killigrew, Thomas: Bellamira her Dream, Part I, 213, 214 Bellamira her Dream, Part 2, 213 Cicilia and Clorinda, Part 1, 213–14 Cicilia and Clorinda, Part 2, 213 The Pilgrim, 213 Thomaso, Part 1, 213 Thomaso, Part 2, 213 Killing No Murder (Sexby), 206–08 King, Dr. Martin Luther, 274 King and No King, A (Beaumont and Fletcher), 181, 183 King and the Subject, The (Massinger), 182 King John (Shakespeare), 268 King Lear (Shakespeare), 6, 12, 90, 175n.11, 175n.12 accounting terms used in, 71–74, 257 filial duty in, 91, 92 madness in, 43 resistance in, 175 social equality in, 263–66, 268, 269, 270 undeserved punishment in, 39

322

Index

King Leir (anon.), 91 Kinwelmershe, Francis: Jocasta, 164–65 Kiss, Attila, 38 Kissel, Otto, 111n.9 Klassen, Peter James, 149, 227, 227n.6, 228n.8 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 191 Knowles, Ronald, 236n.22 Knox, John, 143n.21, 144, 146n.25, 146n.26, 149, 154, 156, 157, 159, 163, 168n.1, 174, 179, 192, 227, 274 An Answer to a Great Number of Blasphemous Cavillations written by an Anabaptist, 230–31, 231n.14 The Appellation of John Knox from the Cruel and Most Injust sentence pronounced against him by the false bishops and clergy of Scotland, 147 The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, 146–47, 162n.51, 169 Kott, Jan, 73n.18 Kronenfeld, Judith, 228n.8 Kunzle, David, 85 Kyd, Thomas, 30n.17, 43n.42, 179–80, 274 The Spanish Tragedy, 3, 3n.1, 4, 4n.4, 4n.5, 5, 8, 9, 9n.15, 11, 11n.17, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 26, 39n.36, 63, 83, 95, 105, 130, 130n.3, 137n.14, 167, 191, 220, 222, 232 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Spanish Tragedy, The Laird, David, 124n.23 Lambarde, William: Archaionomia, 259n.7 Lambert, John, 210 Lancashire, Anne, 24, 49, 175n.13 Languet, Hubert, 274 Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 168–69, 178, 189 Larkin, James F., 148 Latimer, Hugh, 147, 150 Laud, Archbishop, 208n.20 Law Tricks (Day), 184 Lawless, Donald S., 183 Leedham-Green, Elisabeth, 162 LeFever, Raoul: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy, 53n.64 legal system: and Christianity, 89–91 and condign revenge, 40 corruption of, 11 and debt, 89–91 harshness of, 9–10, 9n.15, 90 litigious nature of, 12, 89–91 and unfairness, 10–12, 106 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€justice SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ equality, social

SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ equity SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ unfairness legal unfairness 12 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€judicial corruption Leicester, earl of, 162, 162n.52, 169n.5, 185n.31 Leicester’s Commonwealth (anon.), 169n.5 Leigh, Valentine: The Most Profitable and Commendable Science of Surveying, 71 Leinwand, Theodore B., 8n.13, 103, 104 Leonard, E. M., 10 Levelers 214, 252, 252n.37 leveling, social 19, 222, 225, 227, 228, 230, 233, 247, 250, 252, 252n.37, 255, 257, 259, 260, 260n.8 Lever, J. W., 27n.12, 48, 138, 172, 189 Lever, Thomas, 87 Levin, Michael Henry, 25, 31, 170n.6 Levinson, Stephen, 100–01, 102 Lewinski, Monica, 185 Lewis, C. S., 130n.2, 230 Lewis, Cynthia, 65n.7 Lex Mercatoria (Malynes), 254, 255 Leyden, John, 231, 248 Libation Bearers (Aeschylus), 52, 57 Liberty and Prodigality (anon.), 5 Life of Sir Philip Sidney, The (Greville), 184 Limon, Jerzy, 183 Linche, Richard, 114n.11 Lindsay, Philip, 228 Livy, 139n.16 Lloyd, Michael, 125 Locke, John, 271–72, 274 Second Treatise of Government, 272, 272n.3 Lockyer, Robert, 200–01 Locrine (anon.), 5n.6, 22–23, 114n.11, 124n.22, 254 Londini Speculum (Heywood), 256 Lord’s prayer commentaries 86–89 lotteries 120–21 Love’s Labor’s Lost (Shakespeare), 3n.2, 6, 70 Lovelace, Richard, 218 Lucan: Pharsalia, 139n.16, 172, 190, 191n.4 Lucas, Scott, 154n.39 Lucrece, 185, 186, 187 Lupset, Thomas, 140 Luther, Martin, 141, 169, 227, 228, 228n.8 Lydgate, John: Troy Book, 53n.64, 54, 56, 213n.25 Lyle, Helen M., 232n.17 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 55, 130n.3, 158 comedy in, 44 lack of divine justice in, 39 therapeutic revenge in, 23 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 229

Index Machiavelli, 113, 206, 266 Mack, Maynard, 37 MacNeill, Duncan, 157, 158, 170 Madan, Francis Falconer, 198 madness, 29n.33, 42–44, 42n.41, 43n.42, 43n.43, 44n.44, 54, 56, 56n.68, 57, 110n.7, 124, 133–34, 173, 179 in Orestes story, 43, 54, 56, 57 magistrates, lesser 20, 139n.17, 141, 143, 143n.21, 144, 147, 154n.39, 154–55, 165n.58, 170, 170n.6, 195 Magnificence (Skelton), 34, 111n.8 Magnusson, Lynne, 243 Maid’s Revenge, The (Shirley), 44 Maid’s Tragedy, The (Beaumont and Fletcher), 4n.4, 4n.5, 176n.15, 179, 181, 183, 188n.33 Maintenance of Free Trade, The (Malynes), 81, 81n.27, 82 Maitland, Thomas, 157–59 Malcolm X, 274 Malcontent, The (Marston), 19n.25 Malynes, Gerard de, 8, 12, 13, 13n.18, 81, 113 Canker of England’s Common Wealth, The, 74n.23, 232n.16, 255 The Center of the Circle of Commerce, 81n.26, 81n.27, 82 Lex Mercatoria, 254, 255 The Maintenance of Free Trade, 81, 81n.27, 82 Man in the Moon, The, 203n.16 Manifest Detection of Dice-play, A (Walker), 116 Manuche, Cosmo, 202n.14 Just General, 202n.14 market, instability and uncertainty of 7–8, 14–15, 53, 68, 112–13, 126, 260 Markham, Gervase, 6 Herod and Antipater, 159 Marlowe, Christopher, 68–69, 179–80, 274 Doctor Faustus, 44, 70, 180 Edward II, 171–72 “Hero and Leander,” 180 The Jew of Malta, 4, 11, 19, 63, 121n.17, 167 The Massacre at Paris, 172 Tamburlaine, 44, 47, 126, 172, 210 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€specific works Marotti, Arthur, 6, 112 Marsh, Thomas, 153n.38, 229 Marshall, Cynthia, 25 Marston, John, 24n.6, 274 Antonio’s Revenge, 3n.1, 4n.4, 4n.5, 5, 18, 24n.6, 31n.19, 31n.22, 167, 246n.30, 276 The Dutch Courtesan, 250n.35 Eastward Ho, 180, 250n.35 The Insatiate Countess, 107 The Malcontent, 19n.25 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Antonio’s Revenge

323

Marti, Marcus, 61 martyrs and martyrdom 25–26, 25n.9, 48–50, 49n.57, 144–45, 169, 222n.34 Marx, Karl, 70n.16 Mary, Queen of Scots, 157, 159, 161, 179, 185 Mary Tudor, Queen, 36, 131n.4, 132, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 153, 154, 154n.39, 155, 162, 164, 179, 181, 182, 184, 188, 222 Masaniello, 212n.24 Mason, John, 14 Mason, Roger A., 143n.21, 147, 149, 157, 158, 158n.46, 159, 161, 163, 163n.53, 168, 179 Massacre at Paris, The (Marlowe), 172 Massinger, Philip, 182–83, 274 Believe as You List, 182, 201 The Bondman, 182 The Double Marriage, 23n.5, 181, 182, 182n.24, 247 The Duke of Milan, 4n.5, 19, 30, 182, 185, 271 The Fatal Dowry, 247n.31 The King and the Subject, 182 A New Way to Pay Old Debts, 182 The Roman Actor, 182, 201 Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, 181, 183n.26 The Tyrant, 201 The Unnatural Combat, 33 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Duke of Milan, The Mather, Cotton, 272 Maus, Katherine, 38n.34, 258 Mayer, T. F., 140 McMillin, Scott, 125 McMullan, Gordon, 182 McRae, Andrew, 11n.17 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 109–10, 256 Medea (Buchanan), 159 Medea (Seneca, trans. Studley), 130, 130n.3, 131, 132n.6, 153, 154, 164 tyranny in, 136–37 Medici, Alessandro de, 184 Medley, William, 251 Medwall, Henry: Fulgens and Lucrece, 262–63 Melanchthon, Philipp, 139n.17, 141, 228n.8 Mellis, John, 63, 63n.4, 71, 74 How to Keep Books of Accounts after the Order of Debitor and Creditor, 65, 255 Mendoza, Bernardino de, 150 Mercer, Peter, 5, 19, 19n.24, 24n.6, 30n.15, 37, 38, 48, 125, 240 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 4n.4, 4n.5, 10, 14n.19, 19, 68, 80, 109n.6, 118, 120n.15, 121, 121n.17, 245 accounting terms used in, 70 debt in, 89–90, 92, 96–105 social equality in, 263–68, 269, 270

324

Index

Mercurius Melancholicus (pseudo.): Crafty Cromwell, or Oliver Ordering our New State, 203 Mercury, 111, 111n.10 merit, unrewarded, 7–8 metadrama, 50–51 Metzger, Bruce M., 86n.4 Michelangelo, 138, 184 Middleton, Edward, 184 Middleton, Thomas, 183–84, 274 The Changeling, 68, 202, 202n.15 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 68 A Game at Chess, 183, 184 Hengist, King of Kent, 184 The Inner-Temple Masque, 250n.35 The Nice Valor, 116 The Revenger’s Tragedy, 4, 4n.5, 11, 12, 19, 19n.24, 25n.8, 26, 31n.20, 44n.45, 84, 95, 126, 138, 143, 167, 176, 183, 185, 252, 275–76 A Trick to Catch the Old One, 68 The Widow, 250n.35 Women Beware Women, 4, 10, 19, 24, 95, 167, 179, 183, 185, 256 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€specific works Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 238, 262 Miller, Keith D., 274 Milles, Thomas, 14, 81, 81n.25, 260–61 Milton, John, 188, 274 Eikonoklastes, 198 Paradise Lost, 19n.25, 189 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 195, 195n.8, 218 Miola, Robert, 33n.25, 38, 130n.3, 174 Mirandola, Pico della, 257 Mirror for Magistrates, A (Baldwin), 114, 153n.38, 154–57, 162, 190, 231–32 Mirza (Baron), 214–15 Misfortunes of Arthur, The (Hughes et al.), 137n.14 Misselden, Edward, 8, 15, 74 The Circle of Commerce, or the Balance of Trade, in Defense of Free Trade, 81n.26, 82 Free Trade or the Means to Make Trade Flourish, 81 money: See debt See economics monopolies 8, 118, 180, 182, 191, 200, 220 Monsieur D’Olive (Chapman), 180 Montaigne, Michel de, 41 morality and revenge 3, 5, 11n.17, 21n.26, 23, 24n.6, 24n.7, 28–32, 30n.15, 30n.16,

30n.19, 31n.20, 38, 42, 42n.40, 46, 47n.53, 50, 52, 54, 134, 168n.2 More, Sir Thomas, 129, 140, 140n.19, 150, 153, 161, 186 The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, 140 Utopia, 10, 229–30, 232n.16 Mornay, Philippe du Plessis, 274 Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 168–69, 178, 189 Moses, 207 Most Profitable and Commendable Science of Surveying, The (Leigh), 71 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 11, 105 Muir, Edward, 5n.7, 27n.12, 41, 50, 61, 62, 71, 84, 213n.25, 226, 235 Mulcaire, Terry, 15 Muldrew, Craig, 8n.12, 11, 13, 84, 89, 95, 104 Mulleases the Turk (Mason), 4n.5, 61, 106 balanced revenge in, 75, 83 parody in, 45–46 Mun, Thomas, 81 Discourse of Trade, 82 Müntzer, Thomas, 227, 228, 229, 231, 257 Murder of Gonzago, The, 188n.34 Muret, Marc-Antoine: Julius Caesar, 161 Murphy, Stephen, 85n.2 Muses’ Threnody (Adamson), 56n.68 Mustapha (Greville), 184 Naboth, 147 Nash, Thomas: The Unfortunate Traveler, 231 Nedham, Marchamont (probable author): A Plea for the King and Kingdom, by way of Answer to the late Remonstrance of the Army, 197–98 Neill, Michael, 21n.27, 49n.56, 265n.11 Nero, 139, 141, 143, 152, 158, 163, 169n.5, 176, 185n.31, 195, 210 Neville, Alexander, 114, 131n.5, 151–52, 162 new historicism 31–32 New Way to Pay Old Debts, A (Massinger), 182 Newman, Arthur, 112 New-Market Fair, or A Parliament Out-cry of State Commodities (Crouch, probable author), 203, 204 Newstead, Christopher, 112 Newton, Thomas, 131, 132n.8, 153, 162 Nice Valor, The (Middleton), 116 Niclaes, Henrik, 227n.7 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 40–41, 107, 259–60 Noonan, John T., Jr., 12, 14 Norbrook, David, 139n.16, 190 Norfolk’s Furies, or a View of Ket’s Camp (Neville), 151, 229, 270 North, Thomas, 163n.54 Northbrook, John, 116, 120

Index Norton, Thomas: Gorboduc, 168n.1 Nuce, Thomas, 131, 152, 162, 164 numbers and numericity 67–71, 69n.15, 73n.18, 249–50, 254–55, 257–60, 258n.5 numeric equivalence in revenge 61 obligation 85–86, 85n.2, 89, 91–93, 96, 102, 105, 122 O’Brien, Mark, 232n.17 O’Day, Rosemary, 67 Octavia (Seneca, trans. Nuce), 131, 153, 162, 164 tyranny in, 135–36 Octavius, 219 Oedipus (Seneca, trans. Neville), 114, 131, 136, 153 tyranny in, 134–35 Okey, John: The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army, 205, 274 Oldcastle, Hugh, 25, 63, 63n.4 Ore, Oystein, 62n.3 Orestes (Euripides), 32, 52, 54–55 Orestes (Goffe), 24, 29, 30, 40, 52n.62, 55, 56–57, 58 Orestes story, 37, 52–58, 172, 203 madness in, 43, 54, 56, 57, 96 as test case for revenge plots, 52–58 vigilantism in, 58 Orgula (Willan), 44n.44 Ornstein, Robert, 30n.19, 31n.20, 110 Othello (Shakespeare), 4n.4, 4n.5, 6, 19 accounting terms used in, 65, 65n.9, 66, 70 betting in, 116 condign punishment in, 51 and Fortuna, 113 justice in, 106 resistance in, 145n.23 social equality in, 240–46, 263–66, 268–69, 270 undeserved punishment in, 39 Overton, Richard: Canterbury His Change of Diet, 208n.20 P., H., 211 Pacioli, Luca, 15, 63, 258 De divina proportione, 68 Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita, 67–68, 115n.12 Paine, Thomas, 272 Painter, William: The Palace of Pleasure, 20 Palace of Pleasure, The (Painter), 20 parody 24n.6, 43, 44, 45, 55, 213 Pallingenius, Marcellus: The Zodiac of Life, 56n.67 Palliser, David M., 8n.12, 14 Paradise Lost (Milton), 19n.25

325

Parker, Matthew, 145, 259n.7 Parker, Robert, 51 Parsons, Robert, 25, 146, 150, 169–70, 179 Certain Reasons why Catholics Refuse to Go to Church, 169 A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, 169 Epistle of the Persecution of Catholics in England, 169 A Treatise of Three Conversions of England from Paganism to Christian Religion, 169n.5 Patch, Howard R., 115 Pathway to Knowledge (Recorde), 71n.17 Patterson, Annabel, 151n.36, 175n.12, 181, 182, 233n.17 Paul, St., 149, 180, 198 Peardon, Barbara, 141, 142n.20, 252 Pears, S. A., 168 Pechter, Edward, 30n.18, 268 Peck, Linda Levy, 8n.14, 85n.2 Peddler’s Prophecy, The (anon.), 109n.5 Peele, George: The Battle of Alcazar, 5n.6, 114n.11, 124n.22 David and Bethsabe, 37–38, 70 Edward I, 69, 70 Peele, James, 69 How to Keep a Perfect Reckoning after the … Account of Debitor and Creditor, 65, 257 Peend, Thomas, 55 Pelops and Hippodamia (Grove), 56n.67 Peltonen, Markku, 139n.16, 158, 182 Pembroke, earl of, 188n.35 Percy, William: Sonnets to the Fairest Coelia, 112 Perkins, William, 87, 117, 149n.30 Epieikeia, 35n.30 An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, 88, 89, 90 The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, 120 Perng, Ching-hsi, 100n.17 Petegorsky, David W., 205n.17, 209 Peter, John, 24n.6 Peter, St., 144, 149 Peters, Hugh, 209, 210 Pettegree, Andrew, 148n.28, 228n.8 Petty, Sir William, 70n.16 Pharsalia (Lucan), 139n.16, 172, 190, 191n.4 Philaster (Beaumont and Fletcher), 181, 183 Philip II, King, 170, 222 Phillip[s], John, 262 Phillips, J. E., 146n.26, 162, 162n.52 Piccolomini, Manfredi, 129, 138, 139 Pickering, John: Horestes, 55, 57–58, 165 Pilgrim, The (Killigrew), 213 Piroyansky, Danna, 25n.9 Plato, 13n.18, 40, 50, 171, 185, 206, 258n.5

326

Index

Plea for the King and Kingdom, by way of Answer to the late Remonstrance of the Army, A (Nedham, probable author), 197–98 Plutarch, 111 Pole, Reginald, 139, 140, 150 Poley, Robert, 180 Pompey, 139n.16 Ponet, John, 10, 17, 25, 36, 135n.9, 140–43, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 148n.27, 149, 154, 156, 159, 163, 168n.1, 174, 188n.35, 252, 274 A Short Treatise of Politic Power, and of the True Obedience which Subjects Owe to Kings, 141–43, 185, 189, 251, 272 Poole, Kristen, 148n.29 Poovey, Mary, 16, 68, 70, 258 Pope, Alexander, 70 Poppea, 210 Potter, Lois, 201, 212n.22, 269 Powell, Thomas, 153 predestination 37, 37n.33, 231n.14, 252 Preston, Thomas: Cambyses, 108–10, 165, 171n.7 primogeniture 18, 230 Prince, Stephen. 49n.58 Procter, Thomas: A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, 112 pronouns as class markers 98–100, 244–46, 245n.29, 250 proportion 13, 16n.20, 18, 20n.26, 68, 71n.17, 88, 92, 255, 259–60, 260n.8, 272n.2 Prosser, Eleanor, 5, 16, 17n.22, 22, 24n.6, 29, 29n.14, 30n.15, 30n.16, 31n.21, 31n.22, 37n.32, 46, 47n.53, 49, 168n.1 Prynne, William, 208 Histriomastix, 35 Pseudo-Martyr (Donne), 151n.34 Pugliatti, Paola, 234n.19 punishment: capital, 9–10 condign, 6, 17–18, 36, 40, 51, 53, 61, 133, 194, 196, 197, 208n.19, 213, 256, 275 fairness of, 84 harsh, 90 monetary terms applied to, 10–12 of tyrants, 141–49 undeserved, 7, 9–10, 37, 39–40, 112 Puritan, The (anon.), 92 Puttenham, George: Art of English Poesy, 69 quantification 57, 70–74, 74n.22, 87, 254, 256–61 radicalism 9n.15, 19, 20n.26, 31, 36, 37, 129n.1, 131n.4, 140, 141, 143, 147, 148, 149n.29, 149, 154, 163, 168, 179, 180, 187n.32, 188, 189,

190, 192n.6, 195, 200, 201, 205n.17, 214, 218, 222, 227, 228, 230, 231n.14, 235n.20, 247, 248–52, 252n.37, 258, 261n.10, 269, 270, 272 Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, 85 Rainborough, Colonel Thomas, 200, 209, 249–50 Rainolds, John, 17, 30n.16, 34, 188n.34 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 7n.10, 117, 129, 180 Randall, Dale B. J., 181, 189, 201, 212, 214, 215n.27, 219 Randolph, Thomas, 163n.53 rape, 9, 9n.15, 11, 37, 48, 48n.55, 49, 135, 167 in Hercules Furens, 133 in Titus Andronicus, 9, 44, 50, 167, 187 and tyranny, 185–88 in Valentinian, 26, 185 Rape of Lucrece, The (Heywood), 41 Rape of Lucrece, The (Shakespeare), 3n.2, 116 Rappaport, Steve, 14 Rastell, William, 153 Ratliff, John D., 30n.17, 124–25 Rawlins, Thomas: The Rebellion, 4 Rebellion, The (Rawlins), 4, 44n.44, 48n.55, 50n.60 Rebellion of Naples, or the Tragedy of Massenello, The (T. B.), 212–13, 221, 273 reckoning schools 67 recoil 24n.7, 196–97, 199, 275–76 Recoil of Ill-cast and Ill-charged Ordinances (anon.), 196–97, 199 Recorde, Robert, 69, 113 The Ground of Arts, 67n.12 The Pathway to Knowledge, 71n.17 The Whetstone of Wit, 65, 67, 254, 254n.1 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy (LeFever), 53n.64 Rees, B. R., 130n.2 regicide: 5, 145–47, 159, 168, 176, 179, 181, 188, 188n.33, 189–222 Reidemann, Peter, 228 Remonstrance of His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax, Lord General of the Parliament’s Forces, and of the General Council of Officers (the Army Remonstrance), 191–92, 193–94, 195, 196, 197 Remonstrance of the State of the Kingdom, A, (the Grand Remonstrance), 191, 192, 220, 273 Report of the Royal Commission on Exchanges, 74n.23 republicanism 138–39, 139n.16, 139n.17, 158, 166, 174, 177, 178, 178n.18, 189, 189n.1, 190, 199, 209, 231–32, 252, 262–63 Rerum Scoticarum Historia (Buchanan), 158n.46

Index resistance: to Christian dogma, 36–40, 179–80 covenantal theory in 147, 191–92 and playwrights, 179–85 private law argument in146 and tragedy, 161–66 writing, 129, 129n.1 writing, of the Civil War era, 191–222 writing, early Tudor, 131–66, 168–70 writing, later Tudor, 170–88 writing, secular, 154–61 Resnik, Judith, 107, 108, 109n.4, 111n.9, 261 Resolving of Conscience, upon this question, whether … [if a king] is bent or seduced to subvert religion, laws, and liberties, subjects may take arms and resist? and whether that case be now? (Ferne), 191n.5 revenge: and algebra 62 ancient roots 51 aristocratic nature of 19, 41, 41n.39, 85, 86, 213–14 and bookkeeping 61–83 as brutalizing 23 and civic humanism 41 and closure 23 as debt 84–85 definitions 20–21 excessive, 16, 84 and Greek and Roman philosophy 40–41 and homeopathic cures 51 and Judaeo-Christian belief 25, 29–40, 82, 124–25, 252–53 and laughter 44, 48 modern disapproval of 3 morality of 30–32 opposed by Tudors 16–17 prevalence of in plays 5 psychological damage caused by 22 as redress for the dispossessed 19 and revival of classical literature 52 spectator response to 30 therapeutic benefits of 22–23 as a weapon of the weak 18–19, 122, 265, 269 Revenge for Honor (Glapthorne), 4n.5, 17n.23, 43 death of revenger in, 26 resistance in, 217–18 Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, The (Chapman), 6, 19, 24, 31n.19, 39n.36, 41, 96, 126, 167, 168, 251 resistance in, 177–78, 180 social equality in, 246, 255 revenge plays: accounting language in 62 bookkeeping practices in 75–80

327

popularity of, 4 prominence in Shakespeare canon 80 vendetta vs. individual grievance types 26–29, 62, 165 revenge tragedy: and the comic 42–48 as displacement of prayers for the dead 21 as a genre 5 madness in 42–44 and morality 47 and parody 45 political orientation of 31 revenger: accounting terms used by, 61–62, 70–71, 75–80, 82–83, 84, 222 against Christianity, 36–40 agency of, 32 confidants of, 96 death of, 23–26 and Fortuna, 113–15 madness of, 42–44 required to die, 23–25 sympathy for, 30–32 Revenger’s Tragedy, The (Middleton), 4, 4n.5, 11, 12, 19, 19n.24, 25n.8, 26, 31n.20, 44n.45, 84, 95, 126, 138, 143, 167, 176, 183, 185, 252, 275–76 accounting terms used in, 71 balanced revenge in, 75, 83 death of revenger in, 23–24 madness in, 43 metadrama in, 50 parody in, 45–46 social equality in, 265, 265n.11 tyrannicide in, 168, 179 tyranny in, 130, 165 and unchristian revenge, 32, 33 reward: definition of, 10n.16 monetary terms applied to, 10–12 salvation as, 36 in The Spanish Tragedy, 123 unfairness of, 84 unmerited, 7–8, 37, 112 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 40 Richard II, King, 141, 165 Richard II (Shakespeare), 155, 165, 165n.58 Richard III, King, 186, 209 Richard III (Shakespeare), 19, 23, 80, 123n.21, 130n.3, 155 balanced revenge in, 75–76, 77, 79, 80 comedy in, 275 curses in, 28, 78, 79 lack of divine justice in, 39 Margaret in, 28, 75–76

328

Index

Richard III (Shakespeare) (cont.) regicide in, 168 resistance in, 174 tyranny in, 174 as vendetta play, 28–29, 174 Richards, Nathanael, 4 Ridley, Nicholas, 147, 150 Ripa, Cesare: Iconologia, 106, 108 risk 8n.13, 94, 101–02, 103, 112, 113, 115n.12, 116, 118–19, 121–22 Rist, Thomas, 21n.27 Roberts, Lewes, 67 Rogers, Daniel, 163n.53 Roman Actor, The (Massinger), 182, 201 Roman de Troy (Sainte-Maure), 53n.64 Romans 12:19, 21, 30, 34, 36, 124, 198, 276 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 4n.5, 39, 226 Ross, Alexander, 250 Rowlands, Samuel: Hell’s Broke Loose, 231, 248 Rowley, William: The Changeling, 68, 202, 202n.15 royalist revenge plays of Civil War era: full-length 209–18 short 201–05 Rubinstein, Nicolai, 107 Rumbold, Richard, 271, 272 Rump, The (Tatham), 217n.28 Rushdie, Salman, 129 S. S.: The Honest Lawyer, 89 Sackville, Thomas: Gorboduc, 168n.1 sacrificial atonement 37, 40n.37, 87, 88 Sainte-Maure, Benoît de: Roman de Troy, 53n.64 Salisbury, John of, 129n.1 Salmon, Eric, 217n.28 Sampson, Joyce, 194 Samson, 207, 208 Samuel, 208 Sanderson, Robert, 118 Sardanapalus, 141, 185n.31 satire 47, 183, 217n.28 satisfaction 18, 19n.24, 21n.26, 23–24, 26–28, 40, 47, 54, 56, 78, 81, 82, 87, 88, 93, 94, 96, 97n.14, 125n.24, 137n.14, 176, 192, 199, 199n.12, 200, 208, 240, 249n.33 Saul, 145 Saunders, Thomas: The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army, 205, 274 Savorgnan, Antonio, 226 scales for balance 65n.8, 106–08, 107n.2, 108n.4, 111, 115, 228n.8, 256, 258, 261–62 Schaff, Philip, 92 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 176n.14, 183n.27 Schöne, Albrecht, 111n.9

Sconce, Jeffrey, 49n.58 Scott, James, 18, 265 Scott, William: An Essay on Drapery, 254 Second Maiden’s Tragedy, The (anon.), 24, 26, 49, 167, 175–76, 180n.21, 181, 186 Second Part of King Edward the Fourth, The (Heywood), 18 Second Part of The Tragicomedy, called NewMarket Fair, The (Crouch, probable author), 203–04 Second Treatise of Government (Locke), 272, 272n.3 Second View of the Army Remonstrance, A (Sedgwick), 194 Sedgwick, William, 26, 26n.11, 34 Justice upon the Army Remonstrance, 193–94 A Second View of the Army Remonstrance, 194 Sejanus (Jonson), 130n.3 Seneca, 22, 32n.23, 41, 48n.54, 75, 111, 114, 125, 138, 152, 163, 165n.56, 166, 203, 241n.24 Agamemnon, 11, 34, 52–53, 57, 130, 130n.3, 131, 152, 153, 164, 212n.22 Hercules Furens, 130n.3, 131, 137, 153 Hercules Oetaeus, 131, 153n.38 Hippolytus, 30n.16, 131, 153n.38 Medea, 130, 130n.3, 131, 153, 154, 164 Octavia, 131, 153, 162, 164 Oedipus, 114, 131, 153 Thebais, 131, 153, 153n.38 Thyestes, 16, 52, 57, 130n.3, 131, 153, 154, 159 Troas, 131, 150, 153, 153n.38 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€specific works Senecan translations of 1550s-1560s, 131–38, 152–54 printers of, 153 Senecan translators: biographies of 149–52 political connections of 162–63 sensationalism 3, 25, 42, 48–50, 49n.56, 49n.58, 130n.2, 166, 167, 168, 176, 185, 185n.30, 187, 187n.32, 188, 219, 270 Serious and Faithful Representation of the Judgments of Ministers of the Gospel within the Province of London, A, 192–93 Serious Manifesto and Declaration of the Anabaptists and Other Congregational Churches, A, 205n.17, 272 Sexby, Edward, 181n.22, 206, 208n.19, 214, 274 Killing No Murder, 206–08 Shakespeare, William, 183, 203, 210, 274 All’s Well that Ends Well, 126, 262 Antony and Cleopatra, 10–11, 16n.20, 66n.10, 123

Index As You Like It, 70, 112, 199 The Comedy of Errors, 3n.2 Coriolanus, 39, 102, 116, 248 Cymbeline, 65, 116, 187 Hamlet, 3, 3n.1, 4n.4, 4n.5, 5, 7n.10, 11, 11n.17, 15, 18, 19, 21, 51n.61, 95, 125, 130n.3, 133, 158, 159, 167, 168n.1, 178, 188n.34, 189, 213 Henry IV, Part 1, 11, 92 Henry IV, Part 2, 68, 106 Henry V, 69n.14, 80, 105, 111n.8, 181 Henry VI, Part 1, 4n.4, 4n.5, 77, 80, 83, 124n.22, 136n.13 Henry VI, Part 2, 4n.5, 17, 19, 80, 124n.22, 125, 165 Henry VI, Part 3, 4n.5, 80, 84, 124n.22, 273 Henry VIII, 110, 221n.32 Julius Caesar, 126, 139n.16, 166 King John, 268 King Lear, 6, 12, 90 Love’s Labor’s Lost, 3n.2, 6, 70 Macbeth, 55, 130n.3, 158 Measure for Measure, 109–10, 256 The Merchant of Venice, 4n.4, 4n.5, 10, 14n.19, 19, 68, 80, 109n.6, 118, 120n.15, 121, 121n.17, 245 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 238, 262 Much Ado About Nothing, 11, 105 Othello, 4n.4, 4n.5, 6, 19 The Rape of Lucrece, 3n.2, 116 Richard II, 155, 165, 165n.58 Richard III, 19, 23, 80, 123n.21, 130n.3, 155 Romeo and Juliet, 4n.5, 39, 226 The Sonnets, 3n.2 The Taming of the Shrew, 91n.9, 116 The Tempest, 80, 104, 116, 148 Timon of Athens, 7n.11, 92, 121 Titus Andronicus, 3, 4n.5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9n.15, 11, 12, 15, 19, 23, 26, 80, 95, 109, 109n.6, 130n.3, 132n.7, 137, 158, 199, 218, 219, 219n.29, 251, 273 Twelfth Night, 3, 100n.16, 105 The Two Noble Kinsmen, 3n.2 The Winter’s Tale, 39, 110 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€specific works Sharp, Buchanan, 229 Sharpe, J. A., 10 Sheldon, Garrett Ward, 177n.17 Shell, Marc, 70 Sheppard, Samuel: Jovial Crew, or The Devil turned Ranter, 204–05, 250n.35 Shirley, James: The Cardinal, 38, 40n.38, 43n.42, 44, 93, 126, 167, 201 Hyde Park, 116

329

The Maid’s Revenge, 44 Shore, Jane, 186 Short Treatise of Politic Power, and of the True Obedience which Subjects Owe to Kings, A (Ponet), 141–43, 185, 189, 251, 272 Sibbett, Trevor, 121n.16 Sidney, Sir Philip, 162, 162n.52, 163, 168, 178 An Apology for Poetry, 39, 47, 161n.49, 161–62, 168 Arcadia, 162 Sidney, Robert, 180 Siemon, James R., 237 Sigismund, King, 228n.9 Simkin, Stevie, 202n.15 Simmons, J. L., 276 Simpson, A. W. B., 259, 259n.6 Simpson, Percy, 23 Sindercombe, Miles, 206 Sinfield, Alan, 180 Sir Giles Goosecap (Chapman), 250n.35 Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (Fletcher and Massinger), 181, 183n.26 Sir Thomas More (anon.), 182n.23 Sir Thomas Wyatt (Webster), 184 Sizka, John, 228n.9 Skelton, John: Magnificence, 34, 111n.8 skepticism, religious, in revenge plays 37–40, 135, 135n.11, 164, 179, 210, 252 Skinner, Quentin, 25, 139, 139n.17, 141, 142, 143, 143n.21, 146, 147, 168n.4, 190, 207 Smith, Bruce, 114, 132n.6 Smith, D. E., 254 Smith, Martin S., 143n.21, 147, 149, 157, 158, 158n.46, 159, 161, 163, 163n.53, 168 Smith, Thomas, 8 Smith, Sir Thomas: A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, 74n.23 Smith, Sir Thomas: De Republica Anglorum, 161n.50, 181n.22 Sodom and Gomorrah, 144 soldier, neglected and unrewarded 7, 84, 135, 137, 190, 199, 247 Somerset, duke of, 190 sonnets: economic language in, 112 mistress, 112 Sonnets (Shakespeare), 3n.2 accounting terms used in, 63, 65, 112 Sonnets to Delia (Daniel), 112 Sonnets to the Fairest Coelia (Percy), 112 Sophocles, 203 Electra, 24n.6, 52, 54, 57, 210–12, 213n.25 Sotherton, Nicholas, 151, 151n.36

330

Index

Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 3, 3n.1, 4, 4n.4, 4n.5, 5, 8, 9, 9n.15, 11, 11n.17, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 26, 39n.36, 63, 83, 95, 105, 130, 130n.3, 137n.14, 167, 191, 220, 222, 232 accounting terms used in, 70 comedy in, 44 death of revenger in, 23, 26 fair payment in, 61, 123–26, 258–59 lack of divine justice in, 38 madness in, 43, 43n.42 martyrdom in, 25 metadrama in, 50, 50n.60 resistance in, 170, 179 revenge partnership in, 96 reward in, 123 social inequality in, 237–40, 251 therapeutic revenge in, 23 and unchristian revenge, 29, 30, 30n.17, 31–33, 40 Spearing, Evelyn, 130n.2, 131n.5, 152n.37 Speed, John: The Theater of the Empire of Great Britain, 121 Spencer, Eric, 70n.16 Spenser, Sir Edmund: The Faerie Queene, 7n.10, 56n.67, 228n.8 Spivack, Charlotte, 180, 180n.21 Sprinchorn, Evert, 117 Staple of News (Jonson), 85n.2, 251n.35 Stapleton, M. L., 130n.3, 136n.13 Starkey, Thomas, 10, 148 A Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, 18, 140, 230 Stayer, James M., 227 Stephens, John: Cynthia’s Revenge, 38, 179 Steppat, Michael, 111, 113, 114n.11, 116 stichomythia (rhetorical figure) 79, 275 Stoll, E. E., 267 Stoner, Jean, 67 Stow, John, 141 Strange, Susan, 115 Straw, Jack, 228, 232n.17 Strier, Richard, 175 Strype, John, 145 Studley, John, 34, 52, 53, 57, 130, 130n.3, 131, 152, 154, 162, 212 Suarez, Francisco, 146 Subject of Supremacy, The (anon.), 191n.5 Suckling, Sir John, 203 Aglaura, 201 Suffolk, duke of 156 Sullivan, Garrett, 71n.17 Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (Pacioli), 67–68, 115n.12 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas), 35n.30 Supple, Barry, 121n.16

Swetnam the Woman-hater Arraigned by Women (anon.), 110 Swift, Jonathan, 206 symmetry, bilateral 15–16, 61, 74–80, 106, 164, 254, 257–58, 260, 272n.2 Tacitus, 206 talionic chains 27n.13, 34, 49n.57, 54, 57, 95, 138n.15, 197, 217 analogous to serial defaults on debt 95, 103 Tamburlaine (Marlowe), 44, 47, 126, 172, 210 social equality in, 248, 248n.32 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), 91n.9, 116 Tartaglia, Nicolò, 62n.3, 67 Tatham, John: The Distracted State, 215–17 The Rump, 217n.28 Taylor, Gary, 183–84 Taylor, Jeremy, 117, 118 Taylor, John, 116 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 80, 104, 116, 148 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (Milton), 195, 195n.8, 218 Theater of the Empire of Great Britain, The (Speed), 121 theaters, closing of 250 theatricality and metatheatricality 50–51 Thebais (Seneca, trans. Newton), 131, 153, 153n.38 Thomas, Lord Cromwell (anon.). 4n.5, 86, 111n.8 Thomaso, Part 1 (Killigrew), 213 Thomaso, Part 2 (Killigrew), 213 Thompson, William, 201, 220 England’s Standard Advanced in Oxfordshire, 220, 273 Thorndike, A. H., 5 Three Proclamations Concerning the Lottery for Virginia, 121n.19 thunder and lightning as signs 33, 33n.26, 39, 143, 169, 241, 275–76 Thyestes (Seneca, trans. Heywood), 16, 52, 57, 130n.3, 131, 153, 153n.38, 154, 159 tyranny in, 132–33 Tide Tarrieth No Man (Wapull), 111 Tierney, Brian, 129n.1 Tillyard, E. M. W., 17, 31 Times’ Whistle: Or A New Dance of Seven Satyrs, The (Corbett), 56n.68 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 7n.11, 92, 121 Tipton, Alzada, 165n.58 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford), 24 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 3, 4n.5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9n.15, 11, 12, 15, 19, 23, 26, 80, 95, 109, 109n.6, 130n.3, 132n.7, 137, 158, 199, 218, 219, 219n.29, 251, 273

Index comedy in, 48 fair payment in, 61, 125, 258 ‘individual-grievance’ structure of, 27n.13, 165, 220–21 madness in, 44 martyrdom in, 49 rape in, 9, 44, 50, 167, 187 resistance in, 173–74 tyrannicide in, 168 tyranny in, 130, 173–74 and unchristian revenge, 32 unfairness in, 84 Tomkys, John, 87, 89, 90 Tongiorgi Tomasi, Lucia, 85 Tottel, Richard, 153 Tourneur, Cyril: The Atheist’s Tragedy, 4n.5, 19, 31, 31n.19, 31n.22, 32, 33, 33n.26, 106n.1, 123n.21, 167, 185, 186, 196 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Atheist’s Tragedy, The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France, The (Chapman), 180 Tragedy of Mariam, The (Cary), 159 Tragedy of Philotas, The (Daniel), 178–79, 181 Tragedy of Selimus, The (Greene), 91 Tragedy of that Famous Roman Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (anon.), 218–20, 273 Travails of Three English Brothers, The (Day), 184 Treatise of Three Conversions of England from Paganism to Christian Religion, A (Parsons), 169n.5 Trick to Catch the Old One, A (Middleton), 68 Troas (Seneca, trans. Heywood), 131, 150, 150n.31, 153 tyranny in, 134 Troia Brittanica (Heywood), 56n.68 Troy Book (Lydgate), 53n.64, 54, 56, 213n.25 True Tragedy of Richard III (anon.), 167 Turberville, George: Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets, 56n.67 Turner, J. G., 46n.49, 50, 185n.30, 212n.24 Turner, Robert Y., 181 Tuvil, Daniel, 30, 49 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 3, 100n.16, 105 accounting terms used in, 65, 105 Two Noble Kinsmen, The (Shakespeare), 3n.2 Tyler, Wat, 228 Tyndale, William, 140, 227 Tyrannical-Government Anatomized (Buchanan), 150n.31, 160n.48, 163, 189, 189n.1 tyrannicide 17, 139n.16, 144, 147, 148, 159, 163n.54, 165, 176 punishment of, 141–49 in revenge tragedy, 170–79

331

in Senecan tragedy, 131–38 sexual, 185–88 tyranny 16, 23n.5, 25, 26, 27n.12, 40n.38, 41, 47, 49, 106, 126, 129, 131–49, 150, 151, 152, 154–222, 231, 232, 234, 240n.23, 247, 248, 252, 263, 272–74 Tyrant, The (Massinger), 201 unfairness, 6, 22 economic and legal, 10–12 and forgiveness, 37 and madness, 43 political, 16–18 revenge plays fueled by, 37 of reward, 84 social, 18–19 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€equality, social SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ equity SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ fairness SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ justice SeeÂ€alsoÂ€ legal system Unforgiven, 16n.20 Unfortunate Traveler, The (Nash), 231 unlikes, treated in same mathematical operation 67, 72, 257, 259, 260 Unnatural Combat (Massinger), 33 usury, 8, 8n.13, 65, 92, 102, 104, 112, 116, 118, 151 Elizabethan hatred of, 8 in The Merchant of Venice, 102, 104 procreative sex as, 65 in The Spanish Tragedy, 123 Utopia (More), 10, 229–30, 232n.16 V for Vendetta, 49n.58 vagrancy 10 Valentinian (Fletcher), 7n.10, 18, 24, 181, 256 rape in, 26, 185 resistance in, 176–77 tyranny in, 176–77 Valiant Scot, The (J. W.), 86 Vanita, Ruth, 268 Vautrollier, Thomas, 163, 163n.54 Vega, Lope de, 186 vendetta 3, 16, 21, 26, 27, 27n.12, 29, 35, 49n.58, 50, 61, 62, 78n.24, 80, 113, 122, 124n.22, 165, 165n.57, 174, 197, 222, 226, 233, 235, 236 plays, 26–29, 62, 165 in Romeo and Juliet, 50, 80, 112 in Shakespeare’s history plays, 61–62, 78n.24, 165, 174, 233, 236 vs. individual-grievance plays 26–29, 62, 165 Venner, Thomas, 251 venture capitalism 8, 115–16, 118–19 vice figure 46, 46n.51, 83, 109, 111

332

Index

vigilantism, 7, 41, 113, 143, 196, 207, 220 and fair prices, 15 in Orestes story, 58 vindication 21, 168, 192, 199n.12 Vindication of the Army Remonstrance, A (Collier), 194–95 Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (Languet and Mornay), 168–69, 178, 189 Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (Daniel), 106 Volpone (Jonson), 106n.1, 210 W., J.: The Valiant Scot, 86 W., T., 118, 120 Walker, Gilbert: A Manifest Detection of Diceplay, 116 Walker, Greg, 129, 131n.4, 140, 140n.18, 229n.11 Walker, Simon, 25n.9 Wallace, John M., 215n.27 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 162, 163n.53 Walter, John, 229 Wapull, George: The Tide Tarrieth No Man, 111 Warning for Fair Women (anon.), 4, 162n.51 Wase, Christopher, 57, 210–12, 212n.23 Watson, Foster, 67, 254n.1 Watson, Lindsay, 19 Watson, Robert, 21n.27 weapons of the weak 18–19, 122, 265, 269 Webster, John, 184–85, 189, 203, 274 Caesar’s Fall, 184 Duchess of Malfi, The, 4n.5, 7n.11, 24, 93, 137, 184, 199 Sir Thomas Wyatt, 184 The White Devil, 110, 184, 247, 273 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Duchess of Malfi, The Weightman, Roger C., 271 Weimann, Robert, 46 Wellspring of Sciences, The (Baker), 63 Wentworth, William, 9n.15 Wertheim, Albert, 214 Wharton, T. F., 24n.6 Wheeler, John, 81 Whetstone of Wit, The (Recorde), 65, 67, 254, 254n.1 White Devil, The (Webster), 110, 184, 247, 273 Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, 162, 163 Whitney, Charles, 30n.16, 139n.16 Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, The (Perkins), 120

Widman, John, 254n.1 Widow, The (Middleton), 250n.35 Widow’s Tears, The (Chapman), 180 Wife for a Month, A (Fletcher), 181 Wilkes, Gerald A., 184 Wilks, Michael, 129n.1 Willan, Leonard: Orgula, 44n.44 William of Orange, 143n.21 Williamson, Marilyn L., 120 Wilson, Luke, 71, 101, 259, 259n.6 Wilson, Thomas, 13, 103 Winstanley, Gerard, 209, 248–49, 251, 257 Winston, Jessica, 114, 131n.4, 151n.35, 154n.39, 155n.40, 156n.43 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 39, 110 madness in, 43 undeserved punishment in, 39 Wizeman, William, S. J., 49n.57 Wollman, David H., 141, 146 Wolsey, Thomas, 129 Women Beware Women (Middleton), 4, 10, 19, 24, 95, 167, 179, 183, 185, 256 metadrama in, 50–51 social equality in, 246–47 Wonderful Year, The (Dekker), 15 Wood, Anthony à, 179 Wood, Diana, 228 Wood, H. Harvey, 24n.6 Wood, Thomas, 117, 118 Woodbridge, Linda, 46n.49, 67, 121n.18, 187 Woodruff, C. E., 69 Woolrych, Austin, 249n.34 Woolton, John, 17 Worden, Blair, 162, 176n.15, 187, 188n.35 world-upside-down trope 85 Wrightson, Keith, 226n.3 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 6, 141, 146, 154n.39 The Court of Venus, 112 Wyclif, John, 129n.1, 143, 169, 228 xenophobia 81 Yamey, Basil S., 65n.8, 68, 111 Zimmerman, Susan, 49 Zizka, Jan, 25 Zodiac of Life, The (Pallingenius), 56n.67 Zwingli, Ulrich, 139n.17, 228n.8

English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality

Equality

Equality

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Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama

English Renaissance Drama (Blackwell Guides to Literature)

Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English

Resistance

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Revenge

Revenge

Revenge

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Resistance

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Resistance

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English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality

Equality

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Equality

Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama

English Renaissance Drama (Blackwell Guides to Literature)

Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English

Resistance

Resistance

Resistance

Resistance

Resistance

Resistance

Resistance

Resistance

Resistance

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Revenge

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Revenge

Revenge

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Resistance

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