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Q: ( spoilers for A Companion to Wolves and the Doctrine of Labyrinths )
This question arose twice, in two different conversations, so I figured I should, you know, answer it.
What is revenge tragedy?
Revenge tragedy is a genre of plays that flourished in England between about, say, 1580 and 1642. The prototype of the genre is Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1582). Revenge tragedy is characterized by its Senecan aesthetic (blood and rhetoric, with or without love), its metatheatricality (self-awareness, and the tendency to comment on itself as theater: revenge tragedies love plays-within-plays, like Hamlet's Mousetrap) and by a plot arc which may or may not be followed, but which is always palpably present. There has been a wrongful death, which the law cannot or will not redress (e.g., Claudius kills the elder Hamlet, but since he promptly becomes king, nobody's going to prosecute). The revenger, who loves the victim (whether in a parent-child or sibling relationship or as a lover), sets out to GET REVENGE on the murderer. There is a lot of what we now call collateral damage. (In Hamlet, for example, Hamlet kills Polonius, which causes Ophelia's madness and death; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get caught in the machinations between Hamlet and Claudius; Gertrude drinks the poison Claudius means for Hamlet; Hamlet kills Laertes and is himself poisioned. Notice that Claudius, his target, is the last person killed.) The stage ends up strewn with corpses--and that's frequently a literal description. The revenger inevitably ends up mirroring his antagonist, becoming every bit as bad. Answering murder with murder merely causes more murder, like a contagious disease (disease and corruption imagery is everywhere in revenge tragedy, as is madness: Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy goes mad--Hamlet fakes madness--the B-plot of The Changeling is set in a madhouse--in The Revengers Tragedy, the characters remark that there's no way to tell if they've gone mad, because the world they live in is insane). Murder doesn't solve anything and creates more injustice than it ostensibly corrects. The Spanish proverb is, He who seeks revenge must first dig two graves, but in the English Renaissance, you needed a bigger grave than that.
As I said to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jonquil, I wrote my dissertation on revenge tragedies because I love them. So if you have questions or things you want to talk about, the comment thread of this post seems like an excellent place. (Caveat: if it looks like you're trying to get me to do your homework for you, I'm unlikely to give you a useful answer.)
This question arose twice, in two different conversations, so I figured I should, you know, answer it.
What is revenge tragedy?
Revenge tragedy is a genre of plays that flourished in England between about, say, 1580 and 1642. The prototype of the genre is Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1582). Revenge tragedy is characterized by its Senecan aesthetic (blood and rhetoric, with or without love), its metatheatricality (self-awareness, and the tendency to comment on itself as theater: revenge tragedies love plays-within-plays, like Hamlet's Mousetrap) and by a plot arc which may or may not be followed, but which is always palpably present. There has been a wrongful death, which the law cannot or will not redress (e.g., Claudius kills the elder Hamlet, but since he promptly becomes king, nobody's going to prosecute). The revenger, who loves the victim (whether in a parent-child or sibling relationship or as a lover), sets out to GET REVENGE on the murderer. There is a lot of what we now call collateral damage. (In Hamlet, for example, Hamlet kills Polonius, which causes Ophelia's madness and death; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get caught in the machinations between Hamlet and Claudius; Gertrude drinks the poison Claudius means for Hamlet; Hamlet kills Laertes and is himself poisioned. Notice that Claudius, his target, is the last person killed.) The stage ends up strewn with corpses--and that's frequently a literal description. The revenger inevitably ends up mirroring his antagonist, becoming every bit as bad. Answering murder with murder merely causes more murder, like a contagious disease (disease and corruption imagery is everywhere in revenge tragedy, as is madness: Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy goes mad--Hamlet fakes madness--the B-plot of The Changeling is set in a madhouse--in The Revengers Tragedy, the characters remark that there's no way to tell if they've gone mad, because the world they live in is insane). Murder doesn't solve anything and creates more injustice than it ostensibly corrects. The Spanish proverb is, He who seeks revenge must first dig two graves, but in the English Renaissance, you needed a bigger grave than that.
As I said to
jonquil, I wrote my dissertation on revenge tragedies because I love them. So if you have questions or things you want to talk about, the comment thread of this post seems like an excellent place. (Caveat: if it looks like you're trying to get me to do your homework for you, I'm unlikely to give you a useful answer.)
