Carnival's Dance of Death: Festivity in the Revenge Plays of KYD, Shakespeare, and Middleton

Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English Spring 5-5-2012 Carnival's Dance of Death: Festivity in the Revenge Plays of KYD, Shakespeare, and Middleton Benjamin O. Rollins Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Recommended Citation Rollins, Benjamin O., "Carnival's Dance of Death: Festivity in the Revenge Plays of KYD, Shakespeare, and Middleton." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2012. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/79 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CARNIVAL’S DANCE OF DEATH: FESTIVITIY IN THE REVENGE PLAYS OF KYD, SHAKESPEARE, AND MIDDLETON by BENJAMIN ROLLINS Under the Direction of Paul Voss ABSTRACT Through four hundred years of accumulated disparaging comments from critics, revenge plays have lost much of the original luster they possessed in early modern England. Surprisingly, scholarship on revenge tragedy has invented an unfavorable lens for understanding this genre, and this lens has been relentlessly parroted for decades. The all-too-familiar generic approach that calls for revenge plays to exhibit a recurring set of concerns, including a revenge motive, a hesitation for the protagonist, and the revenger’s feigned or actual madness, imply that these plays lack philosophical depth, as the appellation of revenge tends to evoke the trite commonalities which we have created for the genre. This dissertation aims to rectify the provincial views concerning revenge tragedies by providing a more complex, multivalent critical model that makes contemporary outmoded approaches to this genre. I argue that Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, and the ways in which it engages with new historical interpretations of early modern drama, functions as a discursive methodology to open up more creative interpretative possibilities for revenge tragedy. Carnival readings expose gaps in new historicism’s proposed systems of omnipresent power, which deny at every turn the chance for rebellion and individuality. Rather than relegating carnival to an occasional joke, quick aside, or subplot, revenge plays explore carnivalesque concerns, and revengers plot their vengeance with all the aspects of a carnival. In these plays, revengers define subjectivity in terms of the pleasure-seeking, self-serving urges of unofficial culture; negotiations for social change occur in which folk culture avoids a repressive, hierarchal order; and carnival play destabilizes courtly systems that track, classify, pigeonhole, and immobilize individuals. INDEX WORDS: Revenge tragedy, Mikhail Bakhtin, Carnival in literature CARNIVAL’S DANCE OF DEATH: FESTIVITIY IN THE REVENGE PLAYS OF KYD, SHAKESPEARE, AND MIDDLETON by BENJAMIN ROLLINS A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2012 Copyright by Benjamin O’Neal Rollins 2012 CARNIVAL’S DANCE OF DEATH: FESTIVITIY IN THE REVENGE PLAYS OF KYD, SHAKESPEARE, AND MIDDLETON by BENJAMIN ROLLINS Committee Chair: Dr. Paul Voss Committee: Dr. Wayne Erickson Dr. Paul Schmidt Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2012 Rollins iv DEDICATION To my wife Tiffany and my daughter Callaway, with love. Rollins v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all of my graduate professors at Georgia State University who had a direct or indirect impact on the completion of this dissertation, and more importantly, on honing my own work as a scholar and teacher. Paul Voss’s remarkable enthusiasm and classroom dynamism inspired my thinking about early modern drama, and his encouragement in my early graduate school years launched this dissertation. Furthermore, this project would not have come to fruition without his guidance and consistent availability. I hope to make as much of an impact with my own students as Paul made with me. I have also benefitted from Wayne Erickson’s careful editing and incisive comments. His sharp analysis contributed to the dissertation’s final form, and I am grateful he puts so much effort into his work. I am also thankful for Paul Schmidt’s comments that helped clarify my argument. I will remember Dr. Schmidt’s blend of pedagogy and good humor, and following his example, I remind myself daily how a carnival spirit can energize not only a dissertation but also a classroom. Rollins vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………v LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………….……….vii 1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………1 2 CARNIVAL’S LIBERATIING LICENSE AND THE LIMITS OF SUBJECTIVITY IN THE SPANISH TRAGEDY………....44 3 THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE: CARNIVAL UPHEAVAL IN TITUS ANDRONCIUS…………………….…….…81 4 SPACE, BODIES, AND CARNIVAL DEGRADATION IN THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY…...…………………………………..….….…110 5 CONCLUSIONS…………………………………………………………………. 147 6 REFERENCES........................................................................................................ 152 Rollins vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Hans Holbien, Woodcut X ........................................................................................ 59 Rollins 1 1 INTRODUCTION “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” “Vengeance is a vicious circle whose effect on primitive societies can only be surmised. For us the circle has been broken. We owe our good fortune to one of our social institutions above all: our judicial system, which serves to deflect the menace of vengeance. The system does not suppress vengeance; rather, it effectively limits itself to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a sovereign authority specializing in this particular function. The decisions of the judiciary are invariably presented as the final word on vengeance.” René Girard, Violence and the Sacred “It must be by some new-fangled weapon; for we wield the other weapons: that one wields us; it is not our hand that guides it: it guides our hand.” Montaigne, “On Anger” "The death of the individual is only one moment in the triumphant life of the people and of mankind, a moment indispensable for their renewal and improvement.” Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World Revenge tragedy and the spirit of carnival have coexisted since antiquity.1 The revenge tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides accompanied the frenzied festivals of Dionysus, a classical form of carnival that celebrated a release of inhibition through drunken dancing and orgiastic rites.2 During Roman times, the composition of 1 Though the following discussion focuses on Greek and Roman carnival, one might also acknowledge the Egyptian festival of Osiris as an early form of carnival. It shares with Greek and Roman festivities the element of violence that frames this dissertation's concern with revenge. Set, Osiris's brother, murders and dismembers Osiris, who is revived by his sister Isis to become lord of the dead. Thus, the celebration of Osiris was not only one of birth but also death and rebirth. The festival to Osiris involved the creation of effigies, elaborate processions that involved animals, and ritual sacrifice that echoes the themes of death and rebirth. 2 In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche famously calls for the rebirth of tragedy as a venue for cultural liberation through a celebration of Dionysian forces: "Not only does the bond between man and man come to be forged once more by the magic of the Dionysiac rite, but nature itself, long alienated or subjugated, rises again to celebrate the reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth offers its gifts voluntarily … The chariot of Dionysus is bedecked with flowers and garlands; panthers and tigers stride beneath his yoke. Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered. Man now expresses himself through song and dance as the member of a higher community" (1). In contrast to Dionysian ecstasy, Apollo tempers unrestrained Rollins 2 Senecan drama, whose influence on early modern tragedy is well-documented, coincided with the unabated expression found in the Bacchanalia, an extension of the wild revelry found in the earlier Dionysiac festivals.3 The imprudent and impetuous behaviors enacted under the auspices of Dionysus and Bacchus crossed currents in complex and dynamic ways with the origins of revenge tragedy. In The Laws, Plato reminds us of the possibility that carnival began as an act of revenge when he recounts “a secret stream of story” in which “the god Dionysus was robbed of his soul's judgment by his stepmother Hera, and that in vengeance therefor [sic] he brought in Bacchic rites and all the frenzied choristry, and with the same aim bestowed also the gift of wine” (672b). Plato, although he lauds carnival’s restorative properties in earlier parts of The Laws, positions vengeance at the center of Dionysus’s relationship with man, presenting, in effect, the indulgences to prevent the prospect of societal self-destruction, but the paradoxes of a Dionysian world articulated by Nietzsche resonate with Mikhail Bakhtin. In The Will

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