Few Canons in the Anglophone Literatures Are Quite As Notorious As That of Jacobean Tragedy
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INTRODUCTION Strictly, Elizabethan drama is experimental, expansive, sometimes ingenious, in fairly close touch with medieval tradition but energetic with Renaissance forces .... Jacobean drama is thought of as critical, sombre, disillusioned.1 Few canons in the Anglophone literatures are quite as notorious as that of Jacobean tragedy. With its bloody bombast, hyperactive emotionality and graphic violence, the tragic drama written and performed during the reign of King James I has become coterminous with the ruthless violation of the accepted rules of good taste, moral decency and aesthetic order. These are plays in which characters are mutilated and tortured with apparent gusto, in which intricate assassinations are planned and mercilessly executed (sometimes on stage) and in which protagonists, in fits of madness, dash out their own brains – or those of others. The decadent delight of such scenarios of excess has been read as a sign not only of the moral shortcomings of the playwrights who imagined them but also as an indicator of the overall chaos and confusion into which a whole society had been plunged with the death of Queen Elizabeth and the succession of the first Stuart king.2 My epigraph is illustrative of such a reading of Jacobean tragedy, which continues to loom large in early modern studies. According to this view, the nature of Jacobean theatre is intrinsically linked to the mentality of Jacobean England as a whole, a world apart from life during the reign of the last Tudor Queen. Used derogatorily, the term 1 “Jacobean”, in Bloomsbury Guide to the Renaissance, ed. Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 172. 2 See in particular F. P. Wilson, Elizabethan and Jacobean (1945; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). For a good survey of recent historical reassessments of James I, see Pauline Croft, “The Reign of James VI and I: The Birth of Britain”, History Compass, I/1 (2003). 10 The Theatre of Civilized Excess “Jacobean” serves to distinguish not only the Tudor and Stuart monarchies but also Shakespeare and his work from the majority of other early modern writers and dramatists. As a result of this anachronism (which squarely ignores the fact that a large part of Shakespeare’s oeuvre was written and performed during the reign of James I), Jacobean drama, and Jacobean tragedy in particular, has become a no-go area in academic study: the works of John Marston and Thomas Middleton, George Chapman and John Webster, Cyril Tourneur and John Fletcher rarely feature on the reading lists of English literature graduates. If they are lucky, they may encounter these authors in the work of later aficionados (my own initial encounter with seventeenth-century drama, for instance, came in the course of reading T. S. Eliot’s poetry). The absence of Jacobean dramatists in course curricula is symptomatic of the reductive image of early modernity taught students of English literature today, whose understanding of “the Renaissance”, even after long years of study, rarely extends beyond a half-hearted knowledge of a few select comedies and tragedies by a “Bard” forever associated with the Virgin Queen. This blind spot initially triggered my interest in Jacobean tragedy, which I began to explore with the conviction that there must be more to this maligned canon than the moral depravity for which critics had vilified it. What I encountered during my research was indeed a drama of excess – a surfeit of blood, skulls and swordfights, mixed with a not inconsiderable amount of psychological terror. However, it was a drama of excess that appeared nonchalant if not strangely self- confident about its own extremes. Rather than expressing the playwrights’ world-weariness and despair, the excess of Jacobean tragedy struck me as an obvious (and self-confident) aesthetic posture, which for precisely that reason deserved serious critical investigation. Moreover, I found that these plays contain plenty of those experimental, expansive and ingenious moments listed in the Bloomsbury Guide as characteristic elements of the Elizabethan style. Unsettlingly self-referential, many Jacobean tragedies surpass the experimentalism associated with Elizabethan drama to the extent that they anticipate much later aesthetic developments: as criticism has pointed out, it seems a small step from Marston to Brecht, from The Revenger’s Tragedy to Reservoir Dogs..