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Introduction Anger Is an Enduringly Problematic Theme in Literature, A Introduction Anger is an enduringly problematic theme in literature, a rush of cognition concentrated through pain. This emotion can be understood as creation by negation: it comes into existence when its subject is belittled or negated. Anger builds its walls around the angry man or woman and blinds them with its power. The importance of studying anger comes from the fundamental role it plays in shaping critical reactions in daily experiences that either construct or destroy the lives of human beings. These reactions differ according to each individual. Sometimes, anger is equally an indiscriminate and an elective emotion. It is the desire to retaliate in response to an injury. It is a conspiracy against the self as much as against others, an emotion which richly furnishes the great body of literature and philosophy that is traditionally associated with it. The power of anger expresses itself as an obsessive dialogue between the voice of the injured, their injury, and that of the injurer. This thesis will provide a reading of anger in Elizabethan revenge tragedy which focuses on the relationship between the destructive and creative potentials of this emotion. In a sense, the choice of anger as an object of study is hardly voluntary. This subject selects its students as much as they select it. I am especially fascinated with the subject of anger due to its magnetic power, the authority that is connected to its dangerous and violent nature. The blind irrational feeling of self-righteousness that surges throughout the angry individual inspires the reader or writer of its narrative to wonder about the nature of this emotion. Much of the theatrical, narrative power of anger, I will argue, stems from the transformative nature of the emotion. The change in the attitude, the feeling of complete wholeness, accompanied by the 1 desire to annihilate this same entity, is one of the captivating characteristics of anger, like when Medea kills her children to avenge herself on her husband Jason1. Anger does not merely furnish the content of dramas, it is itself a theatrically shaped emotion; it creates and directs itself on the stage because it generates its own narrative. Anger also shapes the speeches and the actions of this genre. Seneca constructed the idea of anger in philosophy and on the stage long before the Elizabethans, and was crucial to the development of meta- theatrical elements in Elizabethan drama like the Murder of Gonzago in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Therefore Seneca, and to a lesser extent Aristotle and Galen will be discussed in the first part of the thesis. They are essential to the project due to their impact on the studies of emotion in general, and their specific interest in analyzing anger in particular. Seneca is of particular use here because he was a theatre practitioner himself, so his theoretical discussion of “anger” in the abstract can be directly compared to the manifestation of this emotion in his plays, which will help to form a dramaturgical analysis of anger in the theatre. It is necessary to begin with a survey of how anger has been defined in ancient and early modern philosophies which impacted on the revenge tragedies under discussion here, in order to understand the obsessive dialogue between the voice of the injured, their injury itself, and the injurer which, according to the argument presented here, characterizes the way that anger is presented in revenge tragedy. For these characterizations, Seneca and Galen are chosen as the main sources of reference due to their immense influence on the theory of emotions during the Elizabethan period as well as the revenge tragedy tradition. 1Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca's Tragedies,trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917- reprinted 1961). 2 This project explores theatrical – staged -representations of anger in Elizabethan revenge tragedy. I will argue that conventions of representing anger are crucial to the rhetoric of production: that anger characterizes the speech and action of the plays considered here. Therefore, I suggest that revenge is not the only consequence of anger in early modern revenge plays. Revenge is but one of the results of anger. I argued that anger and the consequent revenge which results from it are not merely irrational and indiscriminate, and it can be the most calculated step of the process. The depiction of anger is also responsible for the artistry in the plot and action; it sometimes becomes the action itself in the Senecan creation as opposed to Aristotle’s definition of the action in tragedy as having a beginning, middle and an end: Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a whole that is wanting in magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles2. Aristotle’s definition is methodical exploration of the tragic structure which aims at emphasizing the resulting concept of catharsis due to the emotional build up. This definition is challenged by Seneca by transforming the action of the tragedy from events into depicting the emotion of anger. For him, anger explores the relationship between the self and the principles that change the self. It influences the creative structure of the plays accordingly. 2 Aristotle, Poetics. Trans. Gerald F. Else.: (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1970. First published 1967), 12. 3 Seneca is of particular use here because he was a theatre practitioner himself, so his theoretical discussion of “anger” in the abstract can be directly compared to the manifestation of this emotion in his plays, which will help to form a dramaturgical analysis of anger in the theatre. Galen’s work provides a useful contrast to Seneca’s, because he views emotions as “materialistic” phenomena, “parts of the body” with an immediate impact on the mind-body, and nature relationship3. Seneca, by corollary, sees anger rather as an error in judgment. His views on anger are at some distance from Galen’s materialistic or medical approach. His analysis does not involve comparison or contrast with the other emotions whereas Galen’s analysis is tangible and more compatible with the human body. Seneca directly dramatizes anger. He thinks about anger in terms of its theatrical discourses. He depicts its cognitive travesty and violence on the stage in rhetorical outbursts. In his dramatic texts, Seneca’s anger hijacks reasoning by camouflaging itself as logic. In Thyestes, we see Atreus going over his brother’s injuries against him and obsessively ruminating on his revenge. Atreus sounds calm and calculating while planning the most hideous of acts. Seneca’s dramatization of anger heavily depends on the rhetoric of anger and the Stoic rhetoric of the injured, with which Seneca sometimes concludes his plays. Generally, the engagement with the philosophy of anger is more vibrant in revenge tragedy than in other genres due to the disequilibrium of this genre’s universe. The philosophy of anger is intense; it suits the emotional strain of revenge tragedy. Senecan revenge tragedy can represent anger without the quest for justice because the genre is able to sweep up the audience in the emotion rather than engage them with the question of justice. In a different genre, anger would be presented in moral terms and involve a demand for justice, but in revenge tragedy the desire 3 Peter Brain, Galen on Bloodletting: A Study of the Origins, Development, and Validity of His Opinions, with a Translation of the Three Works(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 8. 4 to reciprocate the injury is more powerful than the desire to achieve impartiality. Stichomythia, a technique Seneca uses in his tragedies, is an appropriate example in showing how anger can control language, and is used in Elizabethan tragedies like The Spanish Tragedy. Seneca’s revenge tragedies focus on this emotion through description. Not only was Seneca’s – Latin – language an important part of shaping the rhetoric of Elizabethan revenge tragedy, but also the power of his imagery, and the way that he used tragedy to communicate a political position, was highly influential in forming the English art-form. His influence on early modern theatrical conventions is also seen in the figure of the Ghost and the five act structure. To fully understand the importance of Seneca for the early modern revenge tradition, we need to focus on Senecan ethics and inspect Senecan drama. For Seneca, anger is an erroneous judgment that has no true correspondence to reality. For Galen however, anger is a natural emotion that recognizes its objective and corresponds to reality because he accepted the fact that the mastery of anger is a matter of habit4. These philosophers talk about anger in some detail. Their works anatomize the nature of anger from cultural, medical, philosophical, and theatrical perspectives. Arguably, Seneca turns to the theatre not just to illustrate his views on anger but also to release his own anger. It should be mentioned that his plays are based on Greek texts. He empties the Greek characters of their depth and roundedness in order to turn them into exemplars of anger and its effects or consequences. Seneca wants his audience to experience the horror of anger directly.
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