Revenge in Restoration Tragic Drama
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2010 “The Last Dear Drop of Blood”: Revenge in Restoration Tragic Drama Misty Sabrina Krueger University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Krueger, Misty Sabrina, "“The Last Dear Drop of Blood”: Revenge in Restoration Tragic Drama. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2010. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/719 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Misty Sabrina Krueger entitled "“The Last Dear Drop of Blood”: Revenge in Restoration Tragic Drama." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Misty G. Anderson, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: John P. Zomchick, Jenn Fishman, Christine A. Holmlund Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Misty Sabrina Krueger entitled “‘The Last Dear Drop of Blood’: Revenge in Restoration Tragic Drama.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Misty G. Anderson, Major Professor ______________________________ We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: John P. Zomchick ________________________ Jenn Fishman ________________________ Christine A. Holmlund ________________________ Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges ______________________________ Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) “The Last Dear Drop of Blood”: Revenge in Restoration Tragic Drama A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee Misty Sabrina Krueger May 2010 ii Copyright © 2010 by Misty Sabrina Krueger All rights reserved. iii Dedication I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my parents and sister, who have always believed in me and given me their unconditional love and support. iv Acknowledgments Thank you to my dissertation committee, faculty members at The University of Tennessee and Texas A&M University, my fellow graduate students from The University of Tennessee, and my family for their inspiration, advice, and support as I worked on this project. I would like to thank Dr. Misty Anderson, the chair of my committee, for helping me shape my ideas about Restoration drama and culture. Thank you, Dr. Anderson, for lending your ear time and time again as I talked through my ideas, and thanks to Dr. John P. Zomchick, Dr. Jenn Fishman, and Dr. Christine A. Holmlund for reading my dissertation and for offering feedback. I also would like to thank Dr. Margaret J.M. Ezell, professor of English at Texas A&M University, for sparking my interest in Restoration literature so many years ago. I am also grateful to Dr. Heather Hirschfeld for allowing me to audit her Jacobean drama course at The University of Tennessee; this course introduced me to the wonders of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy and inspired me to investigate in revenge in Restoration drama. I would like to extend an additional thank you to Dr. Anthony Welch for reading my first chapter and directing me to read source material that helped my chapter progress. I am also grateful to the attendees of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Southeastern Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Aphra Behn Society conferences who heard me read portions of my project and offered helpful feedback in regard to my ideas. v I would like to recognize the many graduate students currently at The University of Tennessee and those who once attended the university who took the time to listen as I discussed my project and who offered me the emotional support that helped me continue working on the dissertation. I especially thank Christopher Kilgore, Teresa Saxton, Lauren Holt Matthews, and Caitlin Kelly for their advice and support. Thank you, too, to Adam for always pushing me to have a positive attitude about all aspects of my life. Finally, I am eternally indebted to my wonderful family—Dad, Mom, and Lacy—for encouraging me to pursue my love of literature and teaching and to persevere through tough times. vi Abstract Revenge on the English stage has long been associated with Elizabethan and Renaissance revenge tragedies and has been all but ignored in Restoration theater history. While the shortage of scholarly work on revenge in Restoration drama might seem to indicate that revenge is not a vital part of Restoration drama, I argue that revenge on stage in the Restoration is connected with important late seventeenth- century anxieties about monarchy and political subjecthood in the period. This dissertation examines how Restoration tragic drama staged during Charles II’s reign (1660-1685) depicts revenge as a representation of an unrestrained passion that contributes to the ‘seditious roaring of a troubled nation’ of which Thomas Hobbes writes in Leviathan. This dissertation suggests that we need to assess Restoration tragic drama’s employment of acts of vengeance in order to better understand how tragic drama of the period narrates crises of kinship, kingship, and political subjecthood. In chapters addressing blood revenge, rape, female passion, and personal ambition, I examine revenge in a number of Restoration tragic dramas written for the stage between 1660 and 1685. This project shows that characters’ claims to redress wrongs committed against the civil notion of justice collapse into private, individual desires that are pathological and destructive of the state. This project on revenge has the potential to shape the way we think about revenge on stage by calling attention to revenge as a sign of self-interest at the end of the seventeenth century, an age in vii which a shift in thinking about monarchy and personhood was taking place. Just as Hobbes warns against the “excessive desire of Revenge,” this dissertation shows how playwrights stage revenge as a warning about the potentially destructive consequences of revenge: revenge puts not only private bodies in danger but also the public well being of the state. viii Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………....1 Chapter 1: Blood Revenge, Kin(g)ship, and the Problem of Justice………………………….…16 Chapter 2: The Ravished Nation: Corruption, Revenge, and the State………………………….57 Chapter 3: The Queen-Mother’s Revenge: Uncontrolled Passions and an Ambition to Rule…..92 Chapter 4: Self-Interest, Politics, and the Collapse of Revenge………………………………..127 Conclusion: Epilogue…………………………………………………………..………………...173 Notes……………………………………………………………………………......179 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………..….203 Vita……………….……………………………….……….……………………......231 1 Introduction Revenge / Does feed on Ruine. Ruines are / Its Food and Life. Elkanah Settle, Love and Revenge In Elkanah Settle’s 1674 play, Love and Revenge, Chlotilda, who has been raped by the prince Clotair, takes on the guise of a male Moorish slave, Nigrello, in order to murder both her rapist and the queen who murdered her family. Settle’s Chlotilda, who literally “blackens” revenge by taking on the form of a Moor and destroying a government, is an example of the interest and urgency with which the Restoration theatre dramatized the problem of revenge. In play after play, revenge is not merely a personal matter of justice, but a political danger that threatens the newly re-established monarchy from the inside. Revenge on the late seventeenth-century stage does both the cultural work of memory and of political pedagogy; it evokes memories of civil war and regicide and, at the same time, plays on fears of future political disorder. The restoration of Charles II to the English throne could not eradicate the trauma of the Civil Wars, the execution of a monarch, and the Interregnum—the final year of which was filled with political strife. After Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1659 Englishmen witnessed the rule of England falling into the hands of men ill-suited for leadership and then descending into anarchy; for this very reason Charles II was called out of exile. These events ushered in a new age of political anxiety, in which all regimes, monarchist or republican, were subject to change. Restoration theatre, with its elite audience and royalist affiliations, was a 2 place to work through some of the historical trauma of the seventeenth century performatively and pedagogically. In Settle’s play, as in a host of other dramas from the Restoration, revenge signals a problem of lawlessness and excess—an overindulgence in emotions of righteousness, grief, rage, jealousy, or pride. While revenge had long been a matter of interest for dramatists, what Michael McKeon calls the “devolution of absolutism” and the rise of a more individualist ideology made the independence of the revenger justified by a previous wrong into a new political concern.1 Instead of relying on divine vengeance or state law to condemn wrongdoers, revengers take matters into their own hands and plot to punish the men and/or women responsible for a transgression. Violating the Judeo-Christian God’s jurisdiction over retribution from Romans 12:19, “Vengeance is mine,” revengers also obstruct the state’s authority to control violence.