The Paradox of Elizabethan Revenge
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THE PARADOX OF ELIZABETHAN REVENGE FROM HORESTES TO HAMLET ANTON CHARLES ARULANANDAM MASTER OF ARTS - HONOURS 1995 THE UNVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES THE PARADOX OF ELIZABETHAN REVENGE FROM HORESTES TO HAMLET CONTENTS Acknowledgement Page 2 List ofIllustrations Page 3 Abstract Page 4 Introduction Page 5 Chapter One Page 33 Chapter Two Page 55 Chapter Three Page 75 Chapter Four · Page 93 Chapter Five Page 112 Conclusion Page 142 ACKNOWLEDGMENT I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to my Supervisor, Dr. Richard Medelaine, and Co-Supervisor, Professor Mary Chan, who not only awakened my serious interest in the drama of the English Renaissance, but tolerated and encouraged this graduate student in the preparation of this thesis. I also wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Bruce Johnson, Professor Michael Hollington, Associate Professor Roslyn Haynes and Associate Professor Peter Alexander, Head, School of English, the staff of the School of English and my colleagues, Pauline Byrnes and Brian Couch, and my wife, Edith, for their assistance and encouragement. A significant debt is owed to the numerous critics mentioned in the footnotes and Bibliography for their scholarly discourse on the revenge genre. Anton C. Arulanandam 2 December 1995. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Gratefully Acknowledged The Revenge of Orestes From Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris, Ulm, 1473, fol.xxxv verso, p. 32. The Murder of Horatio in The Spanish Tragedie From the edition of 1633, p. 54. The Revenge of Titus Andronicus From The Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus, a ballad ( British Museum, Huth 50 - 69). p. 74. ( By kind courtesy of Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage ofElizabethan Tragedy, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1963, ps. 263, 393 & 397). ABSTRACT THE PARADOX OF ELIZABETHAN REVENGE From Horestes to Hamlet The thesis investigates the legitimacy of revenge m five different Elizabethan plays in which revenge is paradoxically transformed into justice. The search for justice becomes a search for the legitimacy of revenge on the part of the victim. My discussion is centred on the victim's search for the legitimacy of revenge in a society in which the avenger has no personal authority to carry out his vendetta because the power is vested in the sovereign. The sovereign was considered the legitimate authority on earth as the sovereign was believed to derive the authority from God himself according to the Divine Right of kings or queens. Given the nature of the sovereigns who usurp their powers, I seek to demonstrate that revenge constitutes a vicious metaphor for the social conflict between the legitimate authority and the individual such as Hieronimo or Titus, who takes the law and justice illegally into his own hands. Although there is the Biblical injunction against taking revenge (Romans 12 : 19), culturally revenge was still considered a moral duty in the Elizabethan scheme of order. Paradoxically in Hamlet, the Prince is perceived both as the villain and the victim in coming to grips with the legitimacy of his sacred duty to avenge his father's death. Yet a killing motivated by revenge was, under Elizabethan law, regarded as murder. Revenge was also condemned as a sin by the ecclesiastical authorities who regarded vengeance, justice and mercy as belonging to God. This injunction against revenge provided a further basis for conflict in plays which examine the nature and possibility of revenge and retribution. Paradoxically, cruelty is counted justice in Titus Andronicus. For those plays which have a pagan setting such as Horestes, The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, a conflict is set up between the legitimising of revenge by social code within the plays and the plays' wider implications for their Christian audiences. A cruel paradox is developed in The Merchant of Venice, as Antonio mercilessly exacts revenge on Shylock in the semblance of offering mercy to him in a reversal of roles. In conclusion, the paradox of revenge exposes the controversial search for interpretation between the quest for justice and the need for reconciliation rather than malice. THE PARADOX OF ELIZABETHAN REVENGE From Horestes to Hamlet INTRODUCTION The search for the legitimacy of revenge leads to contradictory responses in the English Renaissance plays as they propound paradoxes. In the Elizabethan sense, a paradox implies a notion contrary to received opinion or rational explanation. 1 This thesis investigates the legitimacy of revenge in five different plays in which revenge is paradoxically transformed into justice in the case of the protagonist. Legitimacy is defined as the condition of being in accordance with law or principle; conformity to rule or principle, or to sound reasoning. 2 To search for justice is to search for legitimacy, as the quest embodies puzzling ambiguities and contradictory viewpoints apropos the Biblical injunction against private vengeance. Justice is a lawful concept but the volition and achievement of revenge is a crime punishable by law. The contradiction arises because the sovereigns assume that they are God's appointed agents who derive legitimate authority from God. The avenger has no personal authority to carry out his or her vendetta because the power is vested in the sovereign. The consequences of this contradiction are manifested in the development of revenge in the five different plays considered - Horestes (1567), The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Titus Andronicus 1594?), The Merchant of Venice (1597) and Hamlet (1601) in which the Elizabethan audiences 1 • See footnote by Harold Jenkins in Hamlet, The Arden Edition of The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Harold Jenkins, Methuen, London and New York, 1982, p. 282. For further discussion on paradox, please seep. 7 & the Chapter on Hamlet, p 113. 2 . Oxford English Dictionary. could identify with lawlessness and obviously find emotional satisfaction in retribution and poetic justice. Poetic justice implies appropriate reward and punishment, but in real life, it seldom occurs that good deeds are rewarded in just measure and evil deeds fittingly punished. Such an outcome also suggests the classical notion of a just Nemesis. Not only is retribution exacting just desert or appropriate recompense for evil extorted, but it entails divine reward or punishment assigned to the offender. There is hardly any distinction between the two concepts - revenge and retribution. 3 Advocates of punishment for criminal offences prefer the usage of the word, 'retribution', that connotes the consolation of euphemism, although it is synonymous with 'revenge'. To revenge is to satisfy oneself with retaliation or to take vengeance or exact retribution for an offence against the avenger. The word revenge meant not only personal retaliation for an injury, but legal justice and God's judgments.4 In considering the moral responsibility for retribution, the dilemma hinges on whether a man or woman can be held responsible for committing a crime ordered by the sovereign, and whether the punishment of the subject can be justified for that crime ? The process of retribution implies that the universe is governed by moral law and order, and that any transgression ensures the punishment of the guilty accordingly. 5 While the concept of retribution . In sixteenth-century English usage, revenge and vengeance had meanings roughly equivalent to the modem retribution or punishment. On the sixteenth-century meanings, see Ronald Broude, "Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England", Renaissance Quarterly, 28, 1975, p. 40 - 42. Also see Mary Mroz, Divine Vengeance, Catholic University Press, Washington D. C., 1941. In modem usage, vengeance is redressing the balance by an offender's being made to suffer more or less equivalent to his offence while revenge is the satisfying of the offended party's resentment by the same means. See H.W.Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Second edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968, p. 43 - 4. 4 . See Ronald S. Broude, 'Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England', Renaissance 'fuarterly 28, 1975, p. 38 -58 . See 'The Suppressed Edition of A Mirror for Magistrates', ed. Lily B.Campbell, Huntington Library Bulletin IV, 1934, p. 102. The complexity of retribution is revealed in A Mirror for Magistrates (1559) in which John, Earl of Worcester, admits that God may punish such a man as 5 does present a moral dilemma of what is just and unjust to the Elizabethan audiences, the plays offer also the exploration of the theatrical dynamics of the emotional experience itself, whether it be one of despair, or damnation. Though the vengeance of God might operate through the fortunes of the battlefield, the process of retribution is seldom portrayed as a direct process of justice followed by divine judgment and punishment. The Biblical viewpoint of God's inevitable vengeance for sin provided the cultural bases for most playwrights of the Renaissance. Nevertheless the notion of the Divine Right of kings provides a religious and political ground both for the prohibition of private revenge and the sanction of public revenge. This duality is reinforced by Lily Campbell who observes that, 'an usurper seizes the throne; God avenges his sin upon the heir through the agency of another usurper, whose sin is again avenged upon the third heir'. 6 The Elizabethan plays thus expose the contemporary inadequacies of the legal system - the frustrations and the blindness of justice as it operates in the Renaissance culture. By 1558, when Queen Elizabeth I ascended the English throne, the spirit of the Renaissance infused the playwrights with a renewed interest in classical drama, notably the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence, and specifically Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65), whose plays are marked by sensationalistic violence. These playwrights provided models for the young dramatists of the time such as Sackville and Norton, Thomas Kyd and Shakespeare to produce plays that belong to the so-called Elizabethan revenge-genre. 7 Nowhere is well as the king who commanded the crime. Also cited J.M.R.Margeson, The Origins of English Tragedy, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967, p.