THE SUBJECTIVITY OF REVENGE: SENECAN DRAMA AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE TRAGIC IN KYD AND SHAKESPEARE JORDICORAL D.PHIL THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE SEPTEMBER 2001 But all the time life, always one and the same, always incomprehensibly keeping its identity, fills the universe and is renewed at every moment in innumerable combinations and metamorphoses. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you have risen already - you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it. Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness. But what is consciousness? Let's see. To try consciously to go to sleep is a sure way of having insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a beam of light directed outwards, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we do not trip up. It's like the head-lamps on a railway engine - if you turned the beam inwards there would be a catastrophe. 'So what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours, not anybody else's. Well, what are you? That's the crux of the matter. Let's try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? - No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation ofyourself that you come across your identity - in the work ofyour hands, in your family, in other people. And now look. You in others are yourself, your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life - your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. (Doctor Zhivago, III.iii) TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v ABSTRACT V1 PART I CHAPTER ONE The Question of Senecan Revenge in Modern Renaissance Criticism 1 A. The Criticism of Tragic Revenge 2 B. The Criticism of Senecan Influence: 'Senecanism' versus Seneca 29 C. Towards a New Public Seneca 60 CHAPTER TWO Senecan Drama 80 A. Stoicism and Revenge 81 B. The Revenge Plays: Medea and Thyestes 92 C. The Chorus 116 PART II CHAPTER THREE The Spanish Tragedy I . 125 A. The Community 126 B. The Machiavel 147 CHAPTER FOUR The Spanish Tragedy II 170 A. The Avenger 171 B. The Chorus 218 CHAPTER FIVE Titus Andronicus I 225 A. A Plausible Community 226 B. The Implausibility ofMachiavellism 242 CHAPTER SIX Titus Andronicus II 259 The Avenger 260 CONCLUSION 291 BIBLIOGRAPHY 297 Acknowledgments Writing this thesis would have never been possible without the financial support of the British Council and the Foundation La Caixa at Barcelona, the Batista i Roca Programme of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and the British Academy. But even more important, of course, has been the moral support, without which very little can be achieved. During my long stay in England I have been very fortunate in meeting the people who are now my friends. In particular I should like to thank Christopher James, who is coming to Barcelona, Luis Murillo, Maria Cubel, Ana Ag(lndez, Antonia Parera (Mado), from the sacred island of Mallo rca, Roberto Leon Gonz8.lez, Toni and Cassia Ramirez de Arellano, Enrique Alfonseca, Robert Arbuckle, David and Helena Alexander, for their warmth and hospitality, Michael Cordner, for many delightful and stimulating conversations, Geoffiey Wall, and Graham Parry, for helping me understand a bit more about his country. But, above all, my greatest debt of gratitude is to my supervisor, Jacques Berthoud, whose support and example have been invaluable. I have indeed learnt much more from him than a thesis can reflect. Abstract This thesis re-examines the relationship between Senecan drama and the emergence ofthe public tragedy of the 1580s and '90s. In criticism, this relationship has been understood as a continuation of the 'influence' Seneca had been exerting on the Universities and the Inns-of Court since the 1560s. This thesis challenges this established view on the grounds that it fails to explain the innovativeness of the public tragedies: the formative impact of Seneca could not be the same on conventional academic authors as on creative public dramatists. Chapter I of this thesis explores and formulates this unresolved problem. Challenging the established view depends on the possibility of a Seneca who could offer a tragic vision alternative to academic moralism. Chapter II is concerned with showing that the plays ofthis Seneca dramatize not moral certitudes but tragic contradictions~ the (tragic' Seneca is made possible by an unstable conception ofthe individual - who is simultaneously individual and social, or individual because social. The privileged tragic expression of this ambiguous selfhood is revenge. Essentially, this thesis attempts to demonstrate that Senecan revenge so understood was fundamental to the earliest masterpieces of public revenge tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, and that Kyd's and Shakespeare's new treatment of revenge was facilitated by a re­ discovery of Senecan tragedy as opposed to Senecan sensationalism. Chapters III and IV (on The Spanish Tragedy) and Chapter V and VI (on Titus Andronicus) attempt to show that this recognition has been impeded by the inadequate notion of revenge that has dominated modem criticism. Founded upon the orthodox pieties that Kyd and Shakespeare challenge, much of this criticism has obscured the distinctiveness ofthe Senecan avenger as against the Machiavel. This thesis conceives the would-be a-social Machiavel and the highly-socialized avenger in opposition to each other, but in order to reveal the inescapable social condition of the individual in both cases. At its moment of inception public revenge tragedy appears as a synthesis of tradition and modernity, social commitment and individual endeavour. VI PART I Chapter One The Question of Senecan Revenge in Modern Renaissance Criticism A. THE CRITICISM OF TRAGIC REVENGE I For a long time, a rare critical consensus has credited The Spanish Tragedy with a foundational role in Elizabethan drama. Few critics would deny that the play marked a watershed in the evolution of English dramaturgy. Barber judges the play 'nothing less than great, strategically great'i, while some go further, distinguishing it as 'quite the most important single play in the history of English drama'2. Kyd's revenge tragedy opened up a new dramatic age, and enjoyed an unprecedented popularity on the English stage. Equally, few critics would question that its popularity had something to do with its innovative treatment of revenge - a treatment that, as many would also agree, was distinctly Senecan. In fact, we know from the abundant quotations and parodies in the contemporary drama, and also from Ben Jonson's famous jibe in the' Induction' to Bartholomew Fair, that the only play in the period to rival The Spanish Tragedy in popularity was another revenge tragedy of Senecan facture, namely, Titus 3 Andronicus, with which Shakespeare launched his tragic career . Seneca and revenge, or rather, Senecan revenge, seems then to be the key to the new drama and its spectacularly successful start. However, neither revenge nor Seneca can be said to be foreign to the pre-Kydian stage. English revenge plays existed well before the year of The Spanish Tragedy, the Senecanized Gorboduc of 1556 having been aptly recognized as the first English revenge tragedy. This being so, it would seem that to the extent that Kyd and Shakespeare made an unprecedented impact with their revenge plays, there must have been something distinctly original about their avengers. And, clearly, the extraordinary appeal of Hieronimo and Titus was not achieved in imitation of their academic predecessors. The new element in revenge that Kyd and Shakespeare introduce into the English stage demands, then, an explanation. Something deeply appealing about the new public avenger extinguished the preceding generation of 1 C.L.Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy. The Theatre ofMarlowe alld Kyd, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1988, p.131. 2 T.McAlindon, English Renaissance Tragedy, Macmillan, Hong Kong, 1986, p.55. 3 For the context of Jonson's remark, see Ian Donaldson, 'Perishing and Surviving: The Poetry of Donne and Jonson', Essays ill Criticism, LI 1 (2001), pp.74-75. avengers. What this may be, however, remains unclear, for revenge criticism has tended to stress the continuity, rather than the creative leap, existing between pre- and post-Kydian drama. In the following discussion I intend to address this problem, arguing that the distinct nature of the public avenger was made possible by a re-discovery of Sene can tragedy on Kyd and Shakespeare's part, a re-discovery that gave rise to a different conception ofrevenge from that found in academic 'Senecanism,4. I also propose to show that if this has not been sufficiently recognized it is because of the inadequate conception of revenge that prevails in the criticism of Elizabethan drama, which is able to do justice only to the academic drama's treatment of revenge. In this thesis I shall try to articulate a theory of vengeance that explains both the orthodoxy of Elizabethan academic drama and the creativeness of the public drama. II The reductive idea of revenge that has dominated in criticism was established by Lily B. Campbell in 1931. Campbell's 'Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England' determined the modern approach to revenge tragedy by foregrounding, as the key to the interpretation of this tragedy, the Tudor-Stuart attitudes towards vengeful practice -- including the revenge of blood, the duel, and the blood feud.