UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Playing With Lives: Theatricality, Self-Staging, and the Problem of Agency in Renaissance English Revenge Tragedy Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5tn4k6vq Author Condon, James Joseph Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Playing With Lives: Theatricality, Self-Staging, and the Problem of Agency in Renaissance English Revenge Tragedy A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by James Joseph Condon December 2009 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Deborah Willis, Chairperson Dr. John Ganim Dr. Stanley Stewart Copyright by James Joseph Condon 2009 The Dissertation of James Joseph Condon is approved: ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the patient and insightful guidance I enjoyed during my graduate studies at UC Riverside. I would very much like to thank professors John Briggs, Andrea Denny-Brown, John Ganim, and Stanley Stewart for their encouragement and active involvement in my development as a scholar of medieval and early modern literature. In particular, though, I would like to thank professor Deborah Willis, my dissertation committee chair, whose generosity, critical engagement, and tireless support have remained a constant source of inspiration and reassurance. Any success I enjoy is due in no small part to them. I am also eternally grateful to my friends, family, and peers, who have suffered patiently through my neglect as I worked on this project. Without their much needed perspective and unflagging affection, I would not have been able to emerge from this process unscathed. Relatively unscathed, at least. iv For my mother, who first set me on this path and will want to read this. For my father, who passed away before he got the chance. And for Kelly. Always. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Playing With Lives: Theatricality, Self-staging, and the Problem of Agency in Renaissance English Revenge Tragedy by James Joseph Condon Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, December 2009 Dr. Deborah Willis, Chairperson This project explores Renaissance revenge tragedy’s conspicuous theatricality in light of the genre’s primary concerns of personal transformation and the place of the self within an increasingly prescriptive society and cosmology. Specifically, its goal is to assert the essential dramaturgical role of theatricality in the early modern revenge play. Focusing primarily on the Kydian tradition of revenge begun with The Spanish Tragedy and continued in the work of William Shakespeare, John Marston, and Thomas Middleton, this study investigates the genre’s treatment of subjectivity and how the characters’ attempts at self-fashioning are mitigated—and at times, utterly thwarted—by the preexisting interpretive systems within which these characters move. This project vi argues that the revenger’s turn to theatricality affords him a means of destabilizing those associations by interfering with the court’s ability to identify, interpret, and classify effectively. In so doing, the revenger facilitates a transformation of self that will combat his original state of impotence and vulnerability, and ultimately, creates a fleeting opportunity in which he might appropriate those tools of political domination that had previously victimized him. The liberatory potential of such theatricalized agency is compromised, however, by its conspicuous exclusion of female subjects, who are either appropriated as spectacles to motivate masculine reprisal, or cast as monstrous agents whose grasp at revenge effectively robs them of their femininity. More generally, Playing With Lives explores how the genre’s theatricality undermines essentialist notions of subjectivity, and through its metadramatic conventions, essentially stages spectatorship to foreground issues of signification and voyeuristic reception to speak to the broader issues of how the individual semiotically constructs meaning and how those interpretations are situated within a political framework. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Setting the Stage for Revenge……………………….…………………………………….1 Chapter 1: Exile, Imprisonment, and Courtly Entertainments: The Tyranny of Spatial Control…....23 Chapter 2: Revenge as Rite of Passage: Liminal Theatricality and the Elision of Difference…..…..52 Chapter 3: Pretty as a Picture: Women, Spectacle, and Misogynist Theatricality…………………..99 Chapter 4: “But Words Will Never Hurt Me”: Rhetorical Violence and the Sovereign Tongue..…143 Conclusion: Jacobean Drama and the Demise of the Kydian Revenge Play……………………..….178 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………..………..193 viii Introduction: Setting the Stage for Revenge Francis Bacon’s famous description of revenge as “a kinde of Wilde Justice” suggests the ambivalence surrounding the very idea of personal retribution. The appeal of lex talionis, of taking eye for eye in response to an injury done to us or ours, is not only viscerally satisfying, but helps to combat those feelings of impotence that assault any victim; blood revenge lets us actively do something about our plight, and in that recovery of agency lies much of the prospect’s allure. At the same time, however, the consequences of such retaliation stretch beyond those individuals involved, for as Bacon reminds, “the Revenge of that wrong, putteth the Law out of Office.”1 Taking matters into one’s own hands as revenge requires directly challenges the state’s privilege of being sole arbiter and executor of its laws, thereby inevitably contextualizing even the most personal of conflicts amidst a broader political framework and putting the revenger at risk for reprisal from the state itself. As a result, any study of revenge becomes not only an exploration of those conflicting impulses within the individual that simultaneously demand and eschew vengeance but also an investigation of the tension that exists between the subject and his or her place within the larger socio-political setting. Even a cursory glance at those conventions most typical of early modern revenge tragedy similarly suggests that the genre’s interests surpass the plight of its protagonists alone, despite how much their personas might dominate their plays. While such staples as the madness and delay speak to the turmoil within the revenger’s mind, his consistently inferior social position to those who wrong him and the conspicuous misogyny within the genre itself both point to a broader concern with difference and the abuses that are routinely carried out through such social and gender systems that inherently hierarchize 1 their members based on that alterity. This theme is underscored by the very nature of revenge, one predicated upon a clear distinction between them and us, enemy and friend, which inherently leads to violence based upon that difference. My project is to explore this twofold focus of early modern revenge tragedy, namely the conflicted subjectivity of its avenging protagonist and those systems of categorization and difference through which these subjects move and against which, ultimately, they must contend if they wish to see their vengeance done. At the heart of the English revenge play lies the contemplation of individual agency’s place within social and theological strictures that appropriate the citizen’s nascent agency and reallocate it to the state or God. Specifically, the revenge tragedy asks as what point—if at all—can man ignore the dictates of state and church and instead follow the demands of personal desire. These plays foreground a very specific tension between the individual’s compulsion to see revenge done and an utter inability to satisfy this desire through any legitimate means. The revenger is blocked at every turn by an opponent more powerful and, at least at first, more cunning that he, and thus the avenger ultimately comes face to face with a stark realization that his current state is one fundamentally characterized by impotence and a vulnerability to both the hegemony at large and the specific individuals who preside over it. If his pursuit of revenge is to remain paramount, then, some other aspect of self must therefore change to compensate. The seemingly inevitable result of this existential dilemma, at least for the early modern revenger, is a gradual transformation from victim to victimizer; as John Kerrigan notes in Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, the inherent irony of the revenge play is that the revenger must ultimately become a murderer himself to see his quest fulfilled, 2 and in so doing, make his opponent into a victim, just as he himself once was.2 In other words, at the heart of every revenge play is a deliberate transformation of self. This concern with individual self-fashioning begins to explain the true presence of another generic convention besides those delays, bouts of madness, or social inequalities already discussed—its conspicuous and oft-noted theatricality. The powerlessness of the protagonist’s original situation prompts him to seek alternate means of controlling events, and thus the revenger often becomes increasingly theatrical throughout the course of the play,