PRINCIPAL TYPES OF TRAGEDY - REVENGE TRAGEDY

 

          Revenge play or revenge tragedy signifies a tragic subgenre that became popular in England during the final years of the 16^th century. Brought into vogue by the success of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, it subsequently went on to become perhaps the most prominent variety of tragedy during the renaissance. Some of its most renowned specimens include John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.

 

    Revenge plays basically derive their inspiration from the plays of the 1^st century Latin politician and philosopher Lucius Seneca, which are noted for their rampant violence and obsessive preoccupation with the theme of revenge. In fact, virtually all facets that have invariably come to be identified as typical features characterizing revenge plays, have their basic source in the tragedies of Seneca. Senecan tragedies thus constitute the most influential factor as far as revenge plays are concerned, but they are not the only by any means. Over and beyond the influence exercised by the plays of Seneca, there is another circumstantial factor to consider. During the 16^th century, it was decreed that any serious crime inflicted on a subject of the English crown represented in effect an offense committed against the monarch itself, which naturally meant that it ought to be strictly dealt by law. Though the decree did not explicitly forbid the exacting of private revenges, it did successfully wean people away from it by blandishing the threat of legal justice. The ruling thus significantly brought down the number of casualties laid low by such reckless acts as dueling or feuding, but this fact did not make it popular by any means. Many continued to feel that the old method of settling scores through personal vengeance was more fulfilling, than instituting judicial measures which was largely viewed as cumbersome and disatisfying. The law nevertheless was stringently enforced, and the public were compelled to seek out other more viable means by which the lust for revenge could be quenched. Revenge plays with their characteristic emphasis on bloody vengeance, offered an ideal outlet in this regard as a vicarious mode of satisfaction. The enthusiasm for revenge plays hence was largely founded on the basis that they served as a kind of pressure release valve, by which the English public could let out their pent-up yearning for revenge. The point that unlike Senecan tragedies, English revenge plays were not recited but performed with no qualms for the frank depiction of violence on stage, considerably facilitated this cause.

 

    It is however noteworthy that despite the prominence they enjoyed during the renaissance, revenge plays went out of favour immediately after, and have not experienced any revival worth mentioning. In fact, until the early 20^th century, they were for the most part characterized as decadent plays, which meant that even those already written were mostly ignored for production. Though the indifference regarding their actual enactment persists till this very day, the stigma attached to them as decadent plays has been greatly dispelled by the proliferation of critical scholarship in recent times. One of the upshots of this latter development is that revenge plays have emerged as a distinct sub-genre of English drama with definitive characteristics to contend with , of which some of the key ones are discussed below.

 

REVENGE:  Revenge is such a pervasive universal theme that practically every third tragedy entails it as an element in its plot. The mere presence of revenge in a play therefore does not truly qualify it as a revenge tragedy. As far as the depiction of revenge in a revenge play is concerned, two criterias are to be met. The first which concerns its scope of importance mandates that revenge be attributed the prime significance in the play. A revenge play thus is so called not because revenge happens to be a concern in it, but the central concern that overshadows all others. The second that relates to the aspect of execution necessitates that revenge be exacted fundamentally as a personal vendetta and not a moral obligation. This is to say, the revenger in a revenge play is required to seek vengeance not with the ethical intent of upholding a wild kind of justice, but emotionally as a sacred duty owed to the memory of the dead person. It must be however noted that the ultimate purpose of a revenge play is not to motivate the audience towards revenge, but to wean them away from it. It is precisely for this reason that after exacting revenge the revenger is also portrayed as suffering an inevitable and painful death. The ultimate message conveyed is that revenge is a dangerous all-consuming passion, which one would do well to avoid.

 

VIOLENCE: Nowhere is the fragility of the human body so evident as in a revenge play, and nowhere is this point more emphasised than in the many acts of violence that permeate its plot. In fact, so frequently is the human body mutilated in a revenge tragedy, that one cannot but conclude that nothing more than a thin membrane is all that holds the entrails from spilling out. Perhaps the most illustrative in this regard is the spectacle of the stage during the final scene, which is typically overrun with dismembered corpses and punctured bodies. Revenge plays thus are certainly not meant for the squeamish or the sensitive, and we can probably characterize them as the renaissance counterpart of the slasher movies of the contemporary era.

 

GHOST: Though the narrative in a revenge play is very much anchored to the human world, it is often infused with ghostly presence. Such an infusion however for the Elizabethan or Jacobean audience did not make the world presented in the play anything less realistic or human. The renaissance audience firmly believed that restless souls of people who have suffered an unjust death, tend to make forays into the land of the living till their soul is appeased. Hence ghosts as they perceived represented an integral aspect of earthly life, which is why they are portrayed as not mere gothic trappings but agents with a definite purpose. This purpose attributed to ghosts in a revenge play eventually comes down to that of an instigator, which invariably takes two forms. The first is where the ghost directly impels the revenger into action as the apparition of the dead king in Hamlet, the second is one in which the ghost remains in the background as a chorus preciding over the action without actually participating in it, as the Spector of Don Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy.

 

CORRUPTION: The action in a revenge play invariably centres around a court setting, and the personages involved are predominantly of noble birth and bearing. However, noble as the milieu and the people are, they epitomize anything so in actuality. The royal surrounding for instance is represented as a vile place swarming with political and sexual intrigues of the basest kind, while the characters themselves are revealed to be literal cutthroats utterly given to the ideal of self-progress. Human nature as upheld in a revenge play is thus shown to be inexorably corrupt, and the court which is the most influential sphere is depicted as teeming with the worst representatives by far. Two interpretations are invariably offered as possible explanations for this aspect of court corruption. The first is that the plays typify a sort of smear campaign levelled at the enemies of the English state, which explains why they are mostly set in Italian and Spanish courts. The second which perhaps carries more credence is that they invoke an indirect indictment of the English court itself, which during the Jacobean era was allegedly rife with sexual promiscuity.

 

OTHERS: Beside those discussed above, which typify the most characteristic features of a revenge play, there are few others that could be identified as distinct yet minor in scope. The first of these is bombastic rhetoric, which is perhaps best borne out in the many set-speeches/soliloquys that fill the plot of a revenge play. It is however noteworthy that in the best revenge plays, these long monologues more than being just rhetorical excesses, serve as means that provide crucial insights into the mental workings of the characters. In view of the fact these speeches are likely to slow down the plot’s action, revenge playwrights often counterbalance them with a rapid exchange of one line dialogues known as stichomythia. The second minor feature to be highlighted with regard to revenge plays is the phenomenon of temporary madness that revengers often experience in the course of the plot. This madness however far from disabling the revenger, is often shown to abet him in the pursuit of revenge by serving as an ideal cover to conceal his true intentions. For this reason, it is never clear in most revenge plays if the madness suffered is genuine or feigned. The third minor characteristic to be reckoned with in a revenge tragedy is the aspect of play within a play. Play within a play basically denotes a short skit or a dumb show master minded by the revenger in the course of the plot, in which he either fulfils the exacting of revenge as in The Spanish Tragedy, or confirms himself of any lingering doubts as in Hamlet. Typically the story of the play within a play will echo a particular scenario within the overall plot, which underscores its scope as an integral rather than an independent entity within the play.