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Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster and the Revenge

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Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster and the Revenge PHILOSOPHIES OF RETRIBUTION: KYD, SHAKESPEARE, WEBSTER AND THE REVENGE TRAGEDY GENRE by CHRISTOPHER JAMES CROSBIE A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Emily C. Bartels and approved by ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2007 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Philosophies of Retribution: Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster, and the Revenge Tragedy Genre By CHRISTOPHER JAMES CROSBIE Dissertation Director: Emily C. Bartels The first book-length attempt to set the generic parameters of early modern revenge tragedy was also the last. Since Fredson Bowers’ Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (1940), scholarship has interrogated literary and cultural issues within the genre. But it has left intact the prevailing assumption that such plays feature revenge as their principal focus, their very reason for existing as plays. Rather than privilege the retribution trajectory as the end point of critical inquiry, my dissertation argues that revenge proved a particularly apt vehicle for engaging with the highly contested philosophies of the period. For while critical discourse has read revenge as principally concerned with matters of justice and law, the retribution motif, unique among other early modern dramatic conventions, continually recalls to audience attention both the initiating forces behind current action and the fluid boundaries between the immaterial and material. By emphasizing the relationships between cause and effect, spirit and matter, and even idea and action, early modern revenge tragedies invite reconsideration, then, of a wider range ii of philosophies than the legal and religious injunctions overtly invoked within such plays. Indeed, early modern revenge drama takes on, with surprising sophistication, such variegated matters as class, perceptions of moderation, the essential composition of the material world, and the generation of political power through fabulist narrative. While my individual chapters draw attention to strains of intellectual history not traditionally associated with each play – an Aristotelian faculty psychology in The Spanish Tragedy, the ethical mean in Titus Andronicus, the Lucretian atomism of Hamlet, and the Baconian fabulism of The Duchess of Malfi – my project seeks to reveal a larger point about the dynamics of revenge drama. This dissertation contends that early modern revenge tragedy emphasizes the complex interplay between the noetic, or conceptual, and the phenomenological in order to imagine, often in radical ways, the natural, ethical, and political philosophies that shape early modern culture. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks go to the many people who have impacted – whether directly or indirectly – the development of this dissertation. In a very real sense, this project would never have materialized had I not met Russ McDonald during my earliest years in graduate school. His brilliant pedagogy and contagious delight in early modern drama shaped my thinking of the Renaissance stage and, as it turns out, set the trajectory for my career as a whole. Emily C. Bartels has provided countless hours of patient guidance, scrupulous and incisive editing, and enlightening conversation. For all these and for her direction of my graduate work at Rutgers University I am deeply grateful. I hope to repay her kindness, in part, by emulating her professionalism in my own work as scholar, teacher, and mentor. I have also benefited from Ron Levao, whose sharp analysis of intellectual history and its impact on early modern literature has continually caused me to rethink my own claims regarding the period. His humor, liveliness, and seemingly effortless mix of keen insight and unassuming demeanor have lightened many a conversation. Ann Baynes Coiro has provided invaluable advice at every stage of my dissertation and, indeed, throughout the whole of my graduate work. I greatly appreciate her attentiveness and generosity. The Mellon Dissertation seminars at Rutgers University, led by Meredith McGill and Michael McKeon respectively, provided space for invigorating collaboration and time to write. I gratefully thank the participants of the “Science and Religion in the Early Modern Period” seminar held during the Shakespeare Association of America Conference in 2006 for their contributions to my chapter on iv Hamlet. My work on The Spanish Tragedy benefited from the close attention of the readers at English Literary Renaissance, and I happily acknowledge their contributions here. The readers at Shakespeare Quarterly – and especially Gail Kern Paster – have offered many incisive critiques of my article on Titus Andronicus. They deserve much credit for its final form, and I appreciate the care with which they are bringing it to press. Many other scholars, teachers, and colleagues have added to this work, if not directly during the drafting process, then indirectly through their contributions to my intellectual and professional development. I consequently thank Christopher Hodgkins of The University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Jacqueline T. Miller of Rutgers University, Alastair Bellany also of Rutgers University, and Carlos Eire of Yale University for their engaging seminars on early modern literature and culture. I have also benefited from Paul Nisly and Clyde Ross, two of the finest professors from my undergraduate days at Messiah College. Brian Walsh, Christopher Warley, and Erin Murphy have graciously eased my transition into the professional world beyond our doctoral program, and I thank them for their kind generosity. Thanks also go to my family for their encouragement and support throughout the entire process, particularly Joan Graubit, whose advice to “just sit down and write” turned out, after all, to be exactly right. Finally, and most importantly, I thank Kelly Crosbie, who patiently read many drafts, endured rambling conversations, and kindly ignored book-littered tables, chairs, and floors. Her unfailing support, wit, and grace have made the periods of writing – and, more importantly, all the time in between – pleasant and worthwhile. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi Introduction 1 Chapter One: “Oeconomia and the Vegetative Soul: Rethinking Revenge 18 in The Spanish Tragedy” Chapter Two: “Fixing Moderation: Titus Andronicus and the Aristotelian 58 Determination of Value” Chapter Three: “‘A fine pate full of fine dirt:’ Hamlet and the Atomists” 100 Chapter Four: “Baconian Fabulism and the Politics of John Webster’s 140 The Duchess of Malfi” Conclusion 190 Bibliography 198 Vita 214 vi 1 Introduction “When we speak of ‘revenge tragedy,’ we are often unaware of the extent to which our approach to these important Renaissance plays has been conditioned by the name we have given them. Elizabethans themselves recognized no distinct dramatic type called revenge play. The term is a modern one…” ~ Ronald Broude, “Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England”1 “We should not adopt a term that answers the question before we ask it.” ~ Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates2 “[T]he most cerebral and perplexed of revenge plays cannot escape from action as a principle…There is a sense in which theatrical ‘doing’ gravitates, quite naturally, towards revenge…As any director knows, it is easier for a performer to respond to something than to create events ex nihilo. Meanwhile, revenge is a building-block, the seed from which something larger can grow…Revenge tragedies practically construct themselves at this level, and the problem for an author is to prevent the material ramifying endlessly…” ~ John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon3 “It is not, moreover, a question of bringing metaphysical ideas directly onto the stage, but of creating what you might call temptations, indraughts of air around these ideas…[I]t is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.” ~ Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty,” in The Theater and Its Double4 In 1902, A.H. Thorndike published “The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays,” a remarkable article that created the “revenge tragedy” genre in order to more rigorously examine retribution on the early modern stage. Linking works as diverse as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and other “revenge plays,” Thorndike’s essay constructed a list of conventions, a generic template, through which plays featuring retribution may be read, a project that in turn would shape over a century of literary criticism. In Thorndike’s own time, the article itself was, in many respects, rather bold. Situating Hamlet more directly within the context of its contemporaries, Thorndike asserts that Shakespeare created an “immortal work of art by transcendent genius” but also “in some considerable measure 2 by availing himself of the experience of others and by doing the same things which other men were doing at the same time.”5 To figure Shakespeare as, in some measure, akin to Kyd or Chettle, to make “transcendent genius” the beneficiary of what “other men were doing at the same time,” seems both remarkably prescient of later twentieth-century theories of authorship and notably liberated from (if still obviously influenced by) nineteenth-century
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