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The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE CULTURE EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE CULTURE Reads Victorian literature and science as artful practices that surpass the theories and discourses THE ORIGINS OF supposed to contain them ARTFUL EXPERIMENTS What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? ENGLISH REVENGE Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating TRAGEDY what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds. Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to Philipp Erchinger the making of science. Philipp Erchinger is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Düsseldorf. Cover image: Louis Pasteur in his Study, Callot, 1850 © akg-images / De Agostini Picture Lib. / G. Dagli Orti Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk ISBN 978-1-4744-4171-1 George Oppitz-Trotman edinburghuniversitypress.com The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series Editor: Lorna Hutson Titles available in the series Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability James Kuzner The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth- Century French Literature John D. Lyons Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain Dale Shuger Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion William P. Weaver The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence Jennifer Higginbotham Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640–1705 Penelope Anderson Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400–1642 Andrea Ria Stevens Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600–1642 Bradley D. Ryner Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography and the French Wars of Religion Andrea Frisch Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England Allison Deutermann Theatrical Milton: Politics and Poetics of the Staged Body Brendan Prawdzik Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature Virginia Lee Strain The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy George Oppitz-Trotman Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ECSRC The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy George Oppitz-Trotman Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © George Oppitz-Trotman, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4171 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4173 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4174 2 (epub) The right of George Oppitz-Trotman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Illustrations vii Acknowledgements viii Series Editor’s Preface x Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 1. Verge 27 2. Points 64 3. A Brief Interlude of Vice 101 4. Servants 126 5. Figures 164 6. Bare Facts, Endless Tragedies 204 Bibliography 221 Index 249 vi The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy Illustrations I am, with you. Figure 2.1 ‘A prinse faut faire contreprinse, comme est icy monstré par ce Lieutenant au Prevost.’ Henry de Sainct Didier, Traicté contenant les secrets du premier livre sur l’espée seule (Paris, 1573), fol.64v. © The British Library Board: General Reference Collection 63.a.18. 78 Figure 2.2 ‘Es kompt aber manchmal, das ihr zwene zusammen kommen, die da geschwinde im Rappier sind.‘ Michael Hundt, Ein new künstliches Fechtbuch im Rappier (Leipzig, 1611), Sig. R3. © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: A: 31 Bell. (2). 84 Figure 4.1 Frontispiece, ‘A Horrible Creuel and Bloudy Murther, committed at Putney in Surrey on the 21 of Aprill last, 1614, being Thursday, upon the body of Edward Hall a Miller of the same parish, Done by the hands of John Selling, Peeter Pet and Edward Streater, his servants’ (London, 1614). © Bodleian Library: 4° G 29(5) Art. 144 Figure 5.1 Georges de la Tour, L’Apparition de l’Ange à Saint Joseph (c.1643). © Nantes-Métropole, Musée d’Arts. Photography: C. Clos. Inventory Nr 642. 179 Illustrations vii Illustrations Figure 2.1 ‘A prinse faut faire contreprinse, comme est icy monstré par ce Lieutenant au Prevost.’ Henry de Sainct Didier, Traicté contenant les secrets du premier livre sur l’espée seule (Paris, 1573), fol.64v. © The British Library Board: General Reference Collection 63.a.18. 78 Figure 2.2 ‘Es kompt aber manchmal, das ihr zwene zusammen kommen, die da geschwinde im Rappier sind.‘ Michael Hundt, Ein new künstliches Fechtbuch im Rappier (Leipzig, 1611), Sig. R3. © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: A: 31 Bell. (2). 84 Figure 4.1 Frontispiece, ‘A Horrible Creuel and Bloudy Murther, committed at Putney in Surrey on the 21 of Aprill last, 1614, being Thursday, upon the body of Edward Hall a Miller of the same parish, Done by the hands of John Selling, Peeter Pet and Edward Streater, his servants’ (London, 1614). © Bodleian Library: 4° G 29(5) Art. 144 Figure 5.1 Georges de la Tour, L’Apparition de l’Ange à Saint Joseph (c.1643). © Nantes-Métropole, Musée d’Arts. Photography: C. Clos. Inventory Nr 642. 179 viii The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy unstinting moral support and intellectual generosity have seen it through almost every incarnation. Much of the basic argumentation was worked out during long, con- tented nights in the second home I was given by Erika and Reinhold Oppitz. I will always remember what they did for me. It is only with appalling slowness that I have come to appreciate some of the sacrifices Acknowledgements made for me by my parents, Alex Schofield and John Trotman, and I know there will be many of which I still know nothing. Were it not for Gesine this work would never have been started, nor would it be what it is. But for Milly it would likely have languished in the shade; she fetched me into the light. Maud, Ned: this is what George was doing in the shed that summer. Research for this book was made possible by grants from the AHRC, I cannot give adequate thanks for the numberless acts of love, lessons Corpus Christi College and the University of Cambridge, the British both moral and intellectual, favours intended and haphazard, conces- Academy and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The research sions and gifts momentous and tiny, encouragements, rebukes and leading to these results has also received funding from the European examples that have shaped this work. It is common to note that such Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework debts cannot be added up, let alone expressed and repaid. Perhaps it is Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 617849. secretly possessive to address them as if they were obligational. Perhaps Various excerpts from this work were read to audiences in Cambridge I cannot thank you for this book because it is not completely mine, but and Norwich, and earlier drafts to symposia in Exeter, Oxford, ours. Rotterdam, St Andrews, Stratford-upon-Avon and York. Chapter 3 is based on research that was published in an early, compressed form as ‘Staging Vice and Acting Evil: Theatre and Antitheatre in Sixteenth- Century England’, in Peter Clarke and Charlotte Methuen (eds), The Church and Literature, Studies in Church History 48 (Woodbridge, 2012), 156–69. I owe thanks to friends, colleagues and teachers of all kinds. I should especially like to thank Gavin Alexander, Tom Day, Katherine Dow, Kathy Eden, Ben Etherington, Tony Gash, Priyamvada Gopal, Joel Halcomb, Rachel Heard, David Hillman, Rachel Holmes, Joe Jarrett, Mary Laven, Raphael Lyne, Tim Marshall, Drew Milne, Subha Mukherji, Josh Robinson, Toby Sleigh-Johnson, Simon Sandall, Jason Scott- Warren, Elizabeth Swann, Hillary Taylor, Eva Urban, Daniel Wakelin, Peter Womack, Andy Wood, Andrew Zurcher and my brother, Fred. I also thank Hillary Taylor and Keith Wrightson for allowing me to read and cite unpublished papers. James Dale, Ersev Ersoy, Michelle Houston, Rebecca Mackenzie and Adela Rauchova at Edinburgh University Press have been very accommodating and efficient. Two anonymous readers for the Press gave me perspective on this work at an important stage, and the vigilant copy-editing of Nicola Wood spared me countless mor- tifications. Lorna Hutson has been an inspiring editor and touchstone. John Kerrigan was there at the inception of this book a decade ago. His Acknowledgements ix unstinting moral support and intellectual generosity have seen it through almost every incarnation.
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