Revenge is a kind of wild justice.

[truepenny]

[The subject line is a quote from Francis Bacon, and "wild," in context, is NOT a compliment. --Ed.]

So my dissertation reading at the moment is Fredson Bowers's book Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, first published in 1940. Not surprisingly, I disagree with almost every interpretive move he makes, but he does provide at least a beginning of historical context for the question I posed on Friday, to wit: were there any real-life historical cases in England of the kind of revenge commonly practiced in revenge tragedy?

The short answer is still no.

The long answer is, as with most things, much more complicated. First, I have to say that I (and Eleanor Prosser, author of Hamlet and Revenge and, hey, most early modern Englishmen including George Chapman) distinguish between revenge and dueling. Dueling was a problem, particularly under James (Bowers blames this on the influence of the Scots, who were, he says, "nearer to barbarism" than the English (Bowers 32)), but dueling is not what happens in revenge tragedy. The duel in Hamlet is a case in point, actually, because (a.) it's not Hamlet's idea, and Hamlet is our principal revenger and (b.) Laertes, who is seeking revenge directly through the duel, is also not abiding by the code of dueling, but is abusing it in a distinctly Machiavellian fashion, and Bowers will be the first to tell you that Machiavellianism is not English. (I find Mr. Bowers rather tedious; you'll have to forgive me.) A stronger point is that Laertes is using the duel, not itself as revenge (i.e., a trial of arms), but as a cover for his revenge (poisoning Hamlet). A duel occurs, yes, but it is actually quite distinguishable from the actual actions of revenge.

Moreover, George Chapman's two revenge plays, The Tragedy of Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, go to great lengths to establish that dueling is not revenge. In the first play, Bussy duels for the typical Eliz/Jac reason (his honor has been called into question)--no revenge involved. And despite the fact that he and his seconds slaughter his opponent and his seconds (Bussy is in fact the only man left alive--I love these plays), there is no revenge taken for that. The revenge in this play is Montsurry's revenge on his wife Tamyra and Bussy for cuckolding him.

The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois is even more explicit, as the alleged revenger, Bussy's saintly prig of a brother Clermont (sorry, my editorializing), spends the entire play trying to get Montsurry to accept a challenge, which Bussy and Clermont's bloodthirsty sister Charlotte stigmatizes repeatedly as not being adequate revenge. It is in fact opposed to all Clermont's Stoic principles to revenge Bussy; a duel is the only thing he'll countenance, and it's quite clear that no one in the play conceptualizes the two as the same thing.

So dueling is similar to but not the same as revenge, and all Bowers's evidence about dueling is irrelevant.

The other problem with Bowers is that he uses the term "revenge" extremely loosely, so that the Countess of Essex murdering Overbury, he suggests, is "revenge for defaming her character" (Bowers 26). Other examples he cites are of a gentleman who murdered a fencing master in revenge for the accidental loss of an eye (and who was universally deplored in England, let me add), and the petty escalation of a quarrel from slander to attempted murder--which I wouldn't classify as revenge at all. The actual conditions of revenge as we see them in the plays--a revenger seeking revenge for the murder of a parent, sibling, or lover--still do not pertain in early modern England.

And no matter how hard Bowers tries to twist his evidence--he has a bee in his bonnet, common among critics of his generation, that if we do not find the "hero" of a revenge tragedy sympathetic and admirable, then that is a sign of serious defects in the play rather than of the fact that the playwright didn't mean us to find the "hero" particularly sympathetic--it's still perfectly clear that the behavior of revengers in revenge tragedy was abnormal and abhorrent in the Eliz/Jac ethical and moral system. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have found the plays entertaining (I watched and thoroughly enjoyed Ocean's Eleven last night, so the question's on my mind), just that there's no need to bend over backwards to argue that they could have approved of a revenger or felt his actions to be justified.

---
WORKS CITED
Bowers, Fredson. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy. 1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Comments

[marith.livejournal.com]

Question from the uneddicated peanut gallery? The revenge of which you speak seems to be murder in return for murder - as with mystery novels, anything less than the true crime is hock to champagne. But if Bussy is still alive, then why is Clermont supposed to revenge him? And how come he can't pursue his own vengeance, if it's called for?

*offers Eeyore a thistle*

This behaviour not acceptable--

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Really would tend to be sustained by the horrible fates met by most would-be revengers in E/J drama

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. (I have this terrible tendency to forget that not everyone reads the same stuff I do. Totally my fault.) Bussy is murdered by Montsurry at the end of The Tragedy of Bussy D'Ambois. However, his ghost is still around, pestering Clermont, in The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, which is how come the plays are in my dissertation. *g*

Eeyore says, chewing, Thistles. Don't see as many of them as you used to. Probably there's a Shortage. There Would Be.

Re: This behaviour not acceptable--

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, and Bowers even admits that they all have to be punished. He just can't get his head around the idea that that means that what they're doing is a priori and inarguably and always wrong, and that it's not even a matter of good people doing things for the wrong reasons. It's often a matter of not-very-nice people doing things for not-very-nice reasons. The New Critics and their predecessors don't deal very gracefully with this.

It's not until the 70s and 80s that you start to get critics who can really handle the idea of moral ambiguity and non-realistic psychology. Literary criticism has come a phenomenally long way in the last thirty years.

Re: This behaviour not acceptable--

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Which is odd.

You would think, understanding as we do that plays like The Jew of Malta and Titus Andronicus were *wildly* popular in their day (though considered unbearably depressing now) that critics would have more of a grasp on the shift in psychology that's occured in the last 400 years.

The audience of 1600 did not want to be told that good would triumph over evil and hero would bed heroine (okay, they did--but those are the comedies, and I think it's significant that they are more popular today than the tragedies and histories). The audience of 1600 wanted to be told that evil people would be punished, even if they thought they had reasons for what they did.

Re: This behaviour not acceptable--

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The problem with criticism before the New Historicists got going--and god knows New Historicism has its own problems, but that's a different rant--is that they really didn't have a grip on cultural relativism. Everything is judged from the perspective of the (intrinsically superior, please remember) Anglo-American middle-class intellectual men who were writing the criticism. So they're used to naturalism in drama (like Ibsen), and they try to apply that model to Shakespeare et al, when it simply doesn't and can't fit. They want the characters to be psychologically realistic and consistent. Which they aren't. They want the plays to have a clear and positive moral stance. Which they don't. These are critics who ignore metatheatricality like ostriches. They don't have the critical language to deal with it, any more than they have the language to talk about genre theory. (Bowers tries, and it's as sad as a puppy left out in the rain.) They're trying to put Shakespeare and the others into a box that is too small and too dark for them.

As I said, the great critical revolution of the 70s and 80s has changed that; the earlier critics now frequently look painfully naive. Also chauvinist, sexist, and patronizing, but we'll leave that lay.

Re: This behaviour not acceptable--

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't hold back.

The only way I can ever learn critical theory is by listening to people who disagree bitch about it *g*

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

So my dissertation reading at the moment is Fredson Bowers's book Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, first published in 1940. Not surprisingly, I disagree with almost every interpretive move he makes,

Okay, that last part almost makes up for the fact that I've been trying to find a copy of this book since 1995. Possibly it is not the whole grail of dissection of the common structures of revenge tragedies I always hoped it would be.

I am going to go off and sulk for a bit before I read the rest of the post.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oops.

Sorry, Mely.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Holy grail. Holy.

My brain never used to do this.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, of course you'd want a whole grail. A half-grail wouldn't be any use at all.

Re: This behaviour not acceptable--

[pameladean]

This sounds just exactly like Samuel Johnson. Well, I mean, yes, of course, he is a critic before the New Historicism, but I'm amused that things were so consistent for so long, insofar as that's true.

Pamela

Re: This behaviour not acceptable--

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The techniques had become more refined, but the attitude hadn't changed much. I think, really, much as I hate to say it, the watershed was Stephen Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets" and the idea that you can learn something about literature by looking at historical texts that aren't literary. I'm not very fond of Greenblatt's work--I have huge, howling problems with the way he reads Spenser, for one thing--but he did have a crucial insight. He came along, too, at about the same time the lit.crit. side of the academy sat up and took notice of people like Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner and especially Foucault: the idea of subversion in a text is essentially what everything since has been built on. We're not still stuck with the subversion-containment model, thank goodness, but once you learn to read against the text, or read under the text, the critical world suddenly opens up in a perfectly amazing way.

I probably sound brash and arrogant, spouting off like this, but I've been reading older critics for most of a week now, and I find them very frustrating. I think after Bowers it will be time to turn to Jonathan Dollimore and Radical Tragedy, and then I should get a lot happier.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know: better a half grail than no bread.

Hamlet -- SPOILERS

[papersky.livejournal.com]

My theory about Laertes and Hamlet and the duel is that in their universe, the appropriate reaction to your father being murdered is to go mad, but not everyone can go mad just like that. Ophelia does it beautifully, but Hamlet only half makes it (NNW) and Laertes can't cope at all with his own sanity in the face of his father's murder, so he starts to agree to any iniquity Claudius suggests to him because he thinks he ought to be mad. It's not even a duel, in form, it's a fencing match, but under that it's a duel (justified, arguably at least, I mean Hamlet did kill Polonius, who hadn't done anything worse to him than eavesdrop and nag) and under that it's revenge with the poison -- except while Laertes is seeking revenge, it's Claudius's plan, and Claudius isn't seeking revenge at all, he's just trying to cover up his previous crime.

I think all those dopey critics wanted to see it as a novel, and drama, especially of that era, is just fundamentally different when it comes to psychological roundness. In a novel, the most interesting character would be Claudius, because consider how he must have felt. Though I suppose that's Macbeth, really.

Re: Hamlet -- SPOILERS

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the correction. You're completely right. It's a murder attempt disguised as an exhibition fencing match, not a duel at all.

As Pamela says, Very sorry. No brain.