In Our Time - Elizabethan Revenge

Episode Date: June 18, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Jonathan Bate, Julie Sanders and Janet Clare discuss Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. From Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy to Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Elizabethan stage was awash with the bloody business of revenge. Revenge was dramatic, theatrical and hugely popular. It also possessed a fresh psychological depth in the way vengeful minds were portrayed through a new dramatic device: the soliloquy. But these tales of troubled individuals, of family wrongs and the iniquities of power also spoke to an audience for whom the vengeful codes of medieval England were being replaced by Tudor legal systems, by bureaucracy and the demands of the state above those of the individual. Therefore, the heady brew of hatred, madness, violence, evil deeds and righteous anger found on stage reflected the passing of something off stage.Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick; Julie Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham; Janet Clare is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Hull.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in Thomas Kids Play, the Spanish tragedy, a father seeks redress for the murder of his son. He declares, revenge on them that murdered my son. Then will I rend and tear them thus, and thus, shivering their limbs in pieces with my teeth. He's called Hieronymo, and he wasn't alone, And from Hamlet to the changeling, the Spanish tragedy to Titus Andronicus, the Elizabethan and Jacobian stage was awash with the bloody business of revenge. Revenge was dramatic, theatrical, and hugely popular.

But also it reveals a world in which codes of medieval vengeance were being replaced by Tudor legal systems. And so the brew of hatred and madness, evil deeds and righteous anger found on stage mirrored and perhaps mourned the passing of something off stage. With me to discuss Elizabethan revenge, I'd Julie Sanchez. Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham. Janet Clare, Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Hull. And Jonathan Bate, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Worry.

Jonathan Bait, Thomas Kidd's Spanish tragedy seems to have set the whole thing off in the Elizabethan age around 1790. Can you explain what was new about that tale in the Elizabethan stage and then we can talk more about that? Yeah, hugely popular play. About 25 years later, there's a play by Ben Johnson, which begins by complaining that Hieronimo, the hero of the Spanish tragedy, is still the most popular character on stage after all those years. So it's massively influential. What was new about it was that it was really the first highly successful classical style revenge play, but for the public audience in the public theatre. It just seemed to strike a accord where we're in the period just after the Spanish Armada, probably 1589, 1590, it's first on. Kidd just seems to have found a style of drama that answered to the moment and it was massively successful and had hugely imitated. Can you tell people who haven't seen it, I can't bring it to mind quickly enough, can you give us a skeleton plot? Skeleton might be useful in this. Yeah, it'll be very much a skeleton. I mean, if I gave you the full plot of a Spanish tragedy,

that would be the end of the programme because it's very complicated. But in brief, It begins with a ghost of a man called Don Andrea, who's been dishonorably killed in a battle between the Spanish and the Portuguese. And he's accompanied by a character actually called revenge. So he wants revenge for his death. The Portuguese leader has been captured, and there was a bit of a dispute between Horatio and Lorenzo as to who gets credit for that.

Lorenzo turns out to be the villain, and he kills Horatio. stabs him, hangs his body up in the garden, where his body is discovered by his father, Hieronimo, and his mother, Isabella. Isabella, the mother, immediately runs mad, which kills herself. Hieronimo initially tries to bring his enemy Lorenzo to justice, but because it's a corrupt court, justice isn't achieved, so he decides to carry out revenge.

He feigns madness, puts on a play, and in the course of the play, instead of there being stage daggers, there are real daggers. So his enemies are killed. He bites out his own tongue, kills himself, and revenge is well satisfied. The context of this, you've mentioned the Spanish Armadi a year or two before,

and we also have a time of public executions, bear baiting, a very rough society by our standards. Well, yeah, it is. Anything else you can bring to bear on the context? Well, I think the really interesting thing about the context is this business of the character of Hieronimo. He's called the Knight Marshal, and Knight Marshall was a legal position.

The Knight Marshall was the person who solved legal disputes between members of the court. So one of the things the play is really interested in is whether if someone commits a terrible crime, justice is brought about by the state or by the person who has been wronged through a private act of vengeance. And I think that becomes one of the great sort of debates in the period.

And a few years later, Francis Bacon, lawyer, in an essay called revenge. She called it a kind of wild justice, and that amplifies what you said. Yeah, that's right. Bacon says revenge is a kind of wild justice that puts the law out of office. Now, Bacon, of course, is a very senior lawyer

in the Court of Queen Elizabeth. And, of course, this whole period of the Tudors, Henry VIII, then Elizabeth, the state is trying to sort of take full control of the legal, system. If you think back to medieval times, the old code of honour among the great barons is very powerful. If you do me wrong, then I do you wrong in return. And maybe, you know, we have a duel or something. As part of the sort of Elizabethan project of state building, they wanted to get rid of

those ideas of the private code of vengeance and say, if you've got a problem, then you bring it to court and the state will decide on it. So this is rippling underneath and confirmed by the that some lawyers were very successful playwrights, revenge playwrights. Why was it so popular this play? Before we move on, it was spectacularly popular. I think it's two things. One is the language, because

Hieronimo responding in his grief to the son's death, he has these great formal rhetorical speeches calling on the gods for revenge and beating his breast. So it's partly this very barnstorming kind of language.

And then secondly, the sheer theatricality, of it, particularly the idea of solving the problem through a play within the play and the theatrical coup where in the play within the play a character stabs another with a dagger and it turns out to be a real dagger. And the theatre was opening up to much bigger audiences at the time. We had the beginnings of popular theatre. When we come to Titus and Dorcas one male in two in London, I don't know how supposed to have seen that. So there's that as well.

Julie Sanders, revenge was sensationally theatrical. Let's move to Shakespeare's first intervention, which was Titus Andronicus, and how he took this on. Can you maybe tell the listeners a bit about the end of the play, which gives us some idea of what these plays are capable of? Well, the huge coup de teutre, I suppose, of Titus Andronicus is what he does to the sons of Tamora, his great enemy. There's been a sort of complex rivalry between these two in the play. also starts with a battle before the play starts. It's Romans versus Goths. But Tamara's sons who have committed horrendous crimes

against Titus' family are both baked in a pie. And in fact, he has presented this up to Tamara at a banquet. He rather chillingly tells her this. You know, they are, where are my son, she asks, both baked in this pie, where on their mother daintily hath fed. And it's the kind of, it's so macabre, it's so grim. And yet there's a sense in which this,

this journey we've been on. I think the audience has a journey with Titus akin to the one with Hieronimo where we've watched the suffering and we've watched the endurance that described boardly like that sounds ridiculous and appalling and you would simply be repulsed.

But there's a kind of sense in which we're dragged along by this as an audience. That's part of the theatricality. We're bound up in this moment. And also there would be a feeling in the audience of get them because they'd raped his daughter, they'd cut out her tongue, they'd chopped off her hands

to trying to make sure that she wouldn't tell them. anybody who'd done this deed and he was out to get his own back. You can see a lot of people baying themselves for blood, can't you? And you've got this strange mix I think. It's very hard to kind of think about an audience, moving, shifting in and out of positions

of this kind of baying for blood, this world of bare baiting and public executions, a kind of strange attraction to display of violence, but also all these moral and ethical questions that are being posed at the same time. So I think you've got a very rapid

movement in and out of different kinds of responses and different kinds of thinking, really, in response to these plays. And the thing is deeply bedded, because he has sacrificed the Queen of the Gothamora's son, eldest son, and so she is after him, and then he turns against her and so on. As so often

with the plays, what we have a kind of chain of instance and multiple revenges going on. It's the start of the play. Tomora and her sons have been captured, and Alabas, her son is executed off stage, dismembered, his body parts, fed to the fire. And she has been begging in front of the audience's eyes for

sweet mercy is her phrase. Titus refuses that. So Titus is a very flawed, very complex hero, but nevertheless he endures so much, as you described, in the course of the play, that the audience can't help but travels some of the emotional way with him. Do we have any audience records? Has there any evidence? Diaries kept and so on and so on what

they thought of, let's say, just of Titus andronicus or of the Spanish tragedy. As ever with the audience, we have very partial responses, and of course, what you always get in... What about the old Venetian ambassador? He usually turns up Trump. Yes, and it's the moment of spectacle. It's the moments of of horror. It's the moments of surprise that are always

what to remember. People don't tend to record in their journal where they have responded to these long rhetorical speeches. And so what we know is that the thing that did clearly draw people in were these moments of high drama, high spectacle, the grim comedy, the macabre, horrid laughter

that this play Titus in particular provokes. So we've had, we've gone quite quickly on the train at a moment, we've had the Spanish tragedy, we've had Titus and Drony Because what things are coming out of this that we become characteristic of revenge tragedies? Well, I suppose there's a number of things that... I mean, Jonathan referred to them.

Can't we just go through them again, maybe? Yeah, the Spanish tragedy clearly sets up and it becomes, I mean, some people refer to it as a kind of kiddian formula, but nevertheless it's clearly something other dramatists refer to. You have ghosts, you have figures of the dead come back to haunt people, to make demands on people in some way. We have these horrors, heaps on horrors.

I mean, I think the crimes, and the staging of those crimes become ever more extravagant as we continue on. But we also have these ethical moments of debate with these long rhetorical speeches. Much of this, of course, coming from Seneca, but being reworked, I think, by Kid and Shakespeare and others, in really exciting ways that speak to the time. You, of course, have to have the big climax, often through theatre, often through masks, through bloody banquets, through plays within plays.

And it's interesting that theatre kind of has recourse to itself in the kind of working out of revenge. Revenge seems to be essentially a performative thing. And madness is there, isn't it? And madness, too. Famed and real? Famed and real, exactly. That kind of thin line between true insanity and kind of partial awareness.

Titus is a classic example. I mean, Tamara and her sons, when they come to this banquet, are disguised, the ultimate fancy dress outfits, as revenge and rapine and murder. And they seem to assume he's gone mad. He's been so unhinged by grief. that he won't understand this. But of course he has these little moments with the audience

where he indicates to us that actually he's moving in and out of positions of awareness. That, of course, will take us forward to Hamlet and the antic disposition. Before that, Jeanette Claire, Julie mentioned Seneca then. Can you develop the influence of, and tell us how it came about the influence of the Roman poet and playwright Seneca?

Well, Seneca filters through to the popular Elizabethan drama via the academic tradition. There's a wave of academic and aristocratic Senecaanism in the mid-16th century. His plays are translated, they're recited, and there are plays written in imitation of Seneca,

plays such as Gorbadock, which was written by two lawyers and performed at the ends of court. So we can trace quite easily the impact of Seneca in the academic and aristocratic circles. He's admired for his moral seriousness, his lofty style,

and this kind of comes through in the popular theatre, but it's not so easily traceable in the popular theatre. We can see isolated influences. Titus Andronicus, of course, draws on a story from Seneca's Thaises, but the story is also there in Ovid as well. We can see, as Judy said, the influence of the ghosts, the ghosts in the underworld directing actions. Hieronymo isn't exactly a free agent.

He's scripting his, the tragedy is scripted for him by revenge. And I think, again, we get this from Seneca, the sense of these furies dictating revenge action. So there are isolated examples of Seneca, I think. But I think it's very difficult to trace a direct influence in the way that we can in the academic drama. Where Seneca is taken over is a notion of the crime, the revenge crime,

out surpassing the original crime. In Thaises, Atreus says at one point that crime should have limit, but not when it's repaid. And this, of course, is what happens in Titus Andronicus when Titus says that you use my daughter worse than prokney and my revenge will be greater. And, of course, Hieronimo's revenge

really exceeds the original, the innocent perish with the guilty. So this notion of the atrocious crime in revenge. out surpassing the original crime comes from Seneca. And as Jonathan also said, the notion of the rhetoric is very Seneca. Hieronimo's great outpourings, his great laments,

we can think of Hecuba in the Trojan women. So the language, the grief, the lamenting language is taken over from Seneca, is very, very powerful on the popular stage. And as undern... But wasn't there a particular translation in late 1580s of Seneca that was relevant?

Well, all the plays of Seneca are published in 1581, so they've all been translated and circulated. Someone assumes they would feed in, and of course the direct references in Titus andronicus, aren't they? Yes. What I think Seneca does is validate this popular theatre.

It gives cultural capital to this new commercial theatre, and yes, there are numerous quotations from Seneca in in Shakespeare in Kidd and later in Marston, where in fact these are rather kind of parodic references to Seneca. And it's not, as I understand it, its revenge comes to play,

but also anger, uncontrolled anger, is at the root, perhaps, of revenge, and this is very worrying. It is. Seneca, the stoic philosopher, counsels again and again against anger. He sees it as the most hideous, the most frenzied of the emotions.

It leads to destruction. It's a weapon which causes self-reuthers, destruction. It is, he calls, says, a temporary madness. And of course, we do see this translated to the Elizabethan revenging hero who is kind of transported by anger. So, yes, there is that sense that anger is very much a dangerous emotion. Jonathan Beck, Shakespeare returns to the revenge tragedy not many years later, with Andronicus is about 1592, so just eight to nine years later, We have Hamlet.

Excuse me, we have Hamlet. Now, is that a standard, it seems in many ways to be a standard revenge tragedy, so perhaps we can talk about that first, but then it isn't either, so we can talk about that second. Yeah, this is one of the great mysteries of the period because there was an old Hamlet play

that there were references to. It had a ghost, it had revenge, but the play is lost. Some people think it was actually by a kid. Some think it was an early version of Shakespeare's own play. You know, so many of Shakespeare's plays, he is reworking old plays that are there in the repertoire. So what we don't know is what the old Hamlet play that Shakespeare was reworking was like. But the hunch is that where the old Hamlet play would have been a sort of orthodox revenge play,

rather like Spanish tragedy like Titus, but that in reworking the story, around about 1599, 1600, for a new Hamlet play, Shakespeare really starts doubting, questioning the whole ethic of revenge, because the key to the character of Hamlet is his conscience, his recognition that in carrying out revenge for the murder of his father by his uncle, he will descend to the same moral level as his uncle, the villain. And that creates a crisis of conscience in Hamlet. We've talked about how the Revenger has these kind of big, long speeches.

They're often sort of ranting speeches. It's as if in this play Shakespeare says, yeah, I'll do the big long speeches, but instead of being great ranting speeches, they're going to be much more reflective and introspective. There is actually still that ranting element. There's one of Hamlet's soliloquies, a short one, now could I drink hot blood, he says,

where he does sound very like the traditional revenger. But the play seems to be a real kind of interrogation. of the ethic of revenge. Yes. And yet we have the ghost who comes and tells him take your revenge. We have the feigning madness. We have the play within the play. We have the soliloquers which were first established

by kid, weren't they? His play. So we have lots of things that he's taking on as well. People would go to it as a revenge tragedy. Lots of dead bodies on the stage at the end. Good sword fight. Absolutely. It's got all the elements but then it has this extra element. It's kind of interesting that round about the same time as Hamlet,

some grammatists were commissioned to write some extra bits for the Spanish tragedy. In the original text of the Spanish tragedy, Hieronimo is feigning his madness. But round about the time of Hamlet, these extra scenes get written in which he goes really mad. And it's as if this issue Julie was talking about of how the extreme events can drive you to the edge of madness. You might then want to pretend to be mad. Hamlet talks about putting on an antic disposition, but actually in pretending you might really become mad. That obviously became a really live issue at the time.

Nune, can we return to the soliloquy? Because in the deification of Shakespeare, in which I've been a contributor, one thought he invented, but Kid actually brought it in first. That's right. And so what did Kid do with it, and then what did Shakespeare do with it?

Well, I think the fact that the Spanish tragedy for so long is known as Hieronomo's play tells you how important those soliloquies are he gives Hieronymo these incredible soliloquies where he kind of unpacks his grief, unpacks the ethical and moral dilemma of revenge, rants and raves. I mean, he moves in and out, a huge rapidity, I think, of a whole series of emotions. And yet, again, we need to think about the audience here. This is about establishing a relationship between character and audience. John started off by telling us that that plays framed by this figure of the ghost of Andrea and

revenge, but even though they're there up there in the above, looking down on the stage. So much of the energy when this play is remembered and reworked is about what's going on on the main stage. It's about Hieronimo. It's about these speeches which are re-quoted and alluded to and reworked. There are moments when this relationship with the audience and this journey that we go on, if

revenge tragedy is partly about this kind of forensic search for something and answer, retribution, justice, the audience through those solid quizzes asked to kind of make those journeys, too, but also has questions posed of them. And that's, I think, what Shakespeare then carries to the next level with Hamlet,

the ethical dilemma, what would you do? What would you do in my position? And so many times where Hamlet, I suppose, is having an internal dialogue with himself, but it throws those questions out to the audiences. Is it always possible, Janet Clare, to tell a righteous revenger from a villain? Could you give us some examples?

Yes, that's an interesting question, because, as has been said, these revenge plays have multiple plots. So in the Spanish tragedy, you have the revenge of Lorenzo against Horatio because Horatio has dared to woo a woman. Sorry, let me get that. We said these plots are extremely complicated. There are the multiple revenge plots in the Spanish tragedy

at the beginning when Lorenzo kills Horatio because he's dared to woo Belimper. his sister. Then we have the righteous revenge of Hieronimo in revenge for the murder of his son, which he sees as an outrageous miscarriage of justice and he cannot get justice from the King of Spain. So there are these two dual plots. Often revenge takes place because the person cannot get justice, because the person against whom he wants to get revenge is in charge of justice. Absolutely. And this happens in the Spanish tragedy.

of course in Hamlet, when the rotten apple in the barrel is the king. So there's nothing that Hamlet cannot get justice other than through murdering Claudius and commit treason. Is there any sense in which Hamlet doesn't want to kill Claudius because to kill a king, to kill someone who had divine right on him, especially to do that in the Elizabethan-Jacquian age, was something that would hold him back. And so that was another factor.

I don't think that holds Hamlet back, but the ideology is certainly present in the play. Doesn't it hold him back when he's... When the king is praying? When the king is praying, yeah. Well, he says he doesn't want to kill Claudius there because he wants to inflict the most awful of punishments on him and to kill him praying wouldn't do that.

His soul would go to heaven. That's the reason he gives. Whether something else holds him back, of course, is open to question. The ideology of not killing the king is present in Hamlet and it is expressed, I think, is it by Rosencrantz or there's such a divinity that hedges a king. And that's there to remind the audience not to kill the king.

And at the end of the play, Hamlet is very keen that Horatio should report his cause a right so that it is reported as rightful revenge and not regicide. And Fortune Brousse confirms that, doesn't it? Yes, Haddie. I was thinking one of the areas in which Hamlet complicates this is there's a very strong Christian context. in Hamlet. I mean, Hamlet's been a student at Wittenberg,

which is the University of Martin Luther, you know, the heart of the reformation, those ideas of the divinity hedging the king, Christian ideas of conscience, which Hamlet explores. We've talked about Seneca, the classical pagan

influence on this genre. There's a sense that one of the things Hamlet seems to be about is the sort of conflict between classical codes and Christian codes. And of course, bound up with that, thinking about revenge is the whole distinction between an Old Testament idea.

Vengeance is mine. And, you know, an eye for an eye, and Christian notions of forgiveness. Turning the other tree. Yes. I was just going to return to the points that John was making towards the beginning about this new Tudor legal framework that had come in. But I think the important thing to remember with all of these plays is that the state in which these private revengers find themselves,

the reason they are taking justice into their own hands, is because that state is fallen. in some way. It is corrupt. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark being the obvious example in Hamlet. But it's the same for Hieronimo, even as Knight Marshall, he realizes that because he's not noble, there are different codes of justice for those kind of shared loyalties of the aristocracy. And that breaks the system down. So it's not a direct challenge to the state. It's a challenge to the state in its current condition. Can we bring the legal element in here, Jonathan, and Janet? We have playwrights, Middleton,

who are writing plays, performing plays in the inns of court. You've described as Johnson as the third university, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court, served as London's university in a way, plays were performed there, written there and so on. I said in the introduction, there was Francis Bacon. How big an intervention were the lawyers making

in what the playwrights were writing, and how were they treating it themselves when they wrote the play? I think this is massively important. I mean, if Hamlet's sort of 1599, 16,100, if we sort of go on from them, the next few years. There's dramatists like John Marston, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, they've all come out of this inns-of-court setting. It's also the case a lot of these plays

are being performed either as well as or instead of at the Globe and the public theatres on the South Bank. They're being performed in the smaller indoor theatres around the Blackfarras area, which is exactly in the middle of the legal district. So in terms of both dramatists and audiences, There's a huge connection with the law. And, of course, a lot of these things, you know, we're talking here about crime and punishment. We're also talking about arguments, the use of language, the rhetorical use of language,

to set up a debate, to make a case. I mean, these are concerns, absolutely the concerns of a lawyer. There's a real sense that the theatre is like a kind of law court. And in one of the revenge plays, the white devil, the kind of climactic scene takes place in a law court. Can we talk about a relationship with the history plays, with a vengeful society?

It seems to me that underneath what one or two of you said, there's still the throb of the Wars of the Roses, even though 1485, over 100 years ago, but it's still there. I mean, a lot of the barons are still there, the kings, the idea of the best way to get, you know, to change things is to murder somebody. That is still very much around. So in that sense, are they so new? Is it part of the venues that we see in the history plays or so on?

Yes, it's very interesting because these revenge plays that we have been discussing, of course, are all set abroad, they're not contemporary settings. So it's in the history play that we do get the most contemporary resonances about revenge. And when Shakespeare looks back to the medieval past in his first trilogy or tetrology of plays, Henry the Sixth plays and Richard III, we can see how these are actually structured on patterns, of revenge, the Yorkists and the

Lankastrians are killing in serial retaliation. And we get in Richard III, Margaret is lamenting, you know, your Richard killed my Edward, killed my Edward, and there's this great rhetorical outpouring, this pattern of retribution,

which kind of is underpinning these dynastic and factional clans. Julie? Yeah, I mean, exactly. And the ghosts, of course, that haunt Richard III. You're right. What you can see these kind of conventions, but being worked through in a different genre. I suppose where the kind of difference between the revenge genre

and the history genre is this extreme, that the revenge plays then take all of this too. Increasingly, particularly with these inns-of-court dramatists that we're talking about, a kind of glorification in a lack of constraint, not pinned down by kind of historical tales, and you push everything to a kind of breaking point, spectacle, heap to on spectral, ever more extravagant crimes.

And there I think they seem to, diverge actually a showmards. One of the interesting things is the three audiences really. It must have been an amazing high wire act for these dramatists. They're talking to the Southwark

folk and people pile in, ferried across the river, Penny, get in, shout and yell, we hope. We all like, as if it happened like that, and they're, that lot. We're packing the theatre, unprecedented numbers. Literally, that word works for once. It is unprecedented.

Then you've got, they go and do it at the ins of God, say the same play. they've got to be on their guard in case the Queen sends a messenger or a representative to say, is it fit for ourselves to see? And they've got to be very, very careful. It's a time when people get sent down, their heads are chopped off. So is there any evidence of them? Can you give us some evidence of the way, illustrations of the way they're trying to walk this tightrope?

Well, Hieronymo is a very good example of a hero who I think would appeal to the middle-class audiences at the Rose Theatre where we know the play was performed. He's a civil servant. He appeals to the king and he can't get justice. So that is in a sense the new popular theatre. Later on we do get more divisions of audiences. Marston's Antonio's Revenge, for example, is performed in the little indoor theatre

at exactly the same time as Hamlet is packing audiences into the globe. And there are clearly differences, I think, in the inflections of those two plays. Hamlet is a popular revenge play. Yes, it appeals. It has some kind of diluted Senecaan elements. It's also got these enormous ethical debates at the centre. Although probably when the play was performed in the Globe Theatre,

it was greatly abridged. So the Hamlet that we know with those long soliloquies were probably never spoken on the... Probably or really. Well, they couldn't be. The text of Hamlet would take five hours to act. Well, didn't they have five hours if they spent their pay? No, two hours. Two hours' stage traffic.

Trade Union. Three-hour three, three-minute pop song. So the wonderful soliloquy where Hamlet meets Fort Embrass's army and he talks about how all occasions do inform against me and he's concerned at this point that he should be revenging and he can't. And then he succumbs, well, from this time forth my thoughts be bloody or I must get on with revenge. That soliloquy was probably cut. It was there in the written text but not performed on the stage.

So it was there for perhaps the reader as opposed to the audience. I mean, thinking about the, you know, for different audiences, I mean, in a way it's the court audience that's really fascinating, isn't it? Because, you know, the point about all these plays is that they were liable at any time to be summoned to do a special court performance, you know, at Whitehall in front of the Queen and then after 1603 in front of King James. And yet so many of these revenge plays are about a wholly corrupt court system. Now, obviously, it's displaced. They're nearly always set in somewhere like Italy.

and Italy is sort of shorthand for political corruption, Machiavelli and all that. But there are always these resonances with the English courts, so they are sailing very, very close to the wind. And popping in a phrase like there's such divinity that the Hedger King is kind of insurance. Yeah. But of course it might be an indication of, as I think, that the Christian element was going on in Hamlet as well. Did there are a lot of plays,

and I think we'd just confuse everyone if most of all me if we just, if we rattled through too many of them. But we've talked about, we've talked about Spanish tragedy, we've talked about Tasan Tronica, talked about Hamlet. Was there any sense of development? The play's rolled on for another 20 years being written. Was there any sense of development, Julie Sanders?

Was there any sense of the wait? Anyway, that's the question. Yeah, I mean, I think it develops in two almost parallel directions. I mean, I think you can see the sort of philosophising, interiority, introspection of Hamlet, continuing to concern Shakespeare, and you come something like the tempest, which is in a sense a kind of rethinking of the revenge format,

redirecting it towards a kind of mercy, a kind of forgiveness. But the other direction that it goes in is this group of plays, I suppose, represented by these Inns of Court type dramatists, by Webster, by Marston. But in particular, what we now think is a play probably by Thomas Middleton, the Revenge's Tragedy, which is performed around about 1607, which has all of these formulaic conventions we're talking about, but I think is almost plural.

almost, it's so self-aware that it's almost kind of citing the conventions to expose them. It's kind of hyper-artificial in how it invokes the dead coming back to haunt you. It starts with Vindice. There you go. The characters are named things like Lucurioso, Letchery, Vindice, the figure of revenge. And he starts the play with a skull in his hand, which I think audiences would automatically have had the echo of Hamlet, but this is something different. He's a performer. He's a revenger who is a man of theatre.

It's all about the more extravagant performances He can offer. There's an example of clever liars mucking up a perfectly respectable show. It's a fantastic play. It's really exciting. I mean, it twists you because I suppose what you find yourself is, as a member of the audience,

it had a couple of recent performances, so we've actually had the opportunity to see the play sort of worked out on the stage. It brings you in, it makes you complicit in all kinds of ridiculous and extravagant. But being complicit doesn't necessarily mean it's any good, does it? No, but it's a remarkable play in terms of the language.

The relationship, again, that you have with Vindich. It starts with a big, long monologue in which he describes this decadent court in silk and silver. You're seeing the world through these cynical, malevolent eyes. And there's Richard III again. There are echoes. It's not as though it doesn't build on this tradition. I mean, I think we ought to tell listeners the main plot twist, because it is, it's macabre, but also terribly funny.

I mean, the skull that Vindichet is holding. This is a revengeist, right? The Revenger's Tragedy, Thomas Middleton, 1607. The skull is the skull of his girlfriend, who's been killed by the Duke because she won't sleep with the Duke. So what Vindiché does is he gets the skull, he dresses it up in full court costume, puts poison on the lips of the skull,

and then arranges for the Duke to come in and sort of says, you know, I've got a pretty girl for you. But it's actually the skull with the poisoned lips. The Duke kisses the skull and is poisoned. Wow. Yes, I think what happens here is that revenge loses some of its moral power, its moral compulsion, which we see in the Spanish tragedy, and it becomes an artistic device.

It's quaint malice, as one of the characters says. So at this point, it's the ascetics of revenge, which I think have taken over from the ethics. But the language is fantastic. I mean, there's an energy in the language, you know, now cuckolds are coining, a pace, a pace, a pace. And also extraordinary colloquial at one of the... Point Spurio the bastard comes in and says,

what, old dad, dead? I quote this to my students and they think, yes, this is early 17th century drama. But there's a sense in which, by painting the lips of a skull with poison or poison, you're going away from a certain, a residual realism in the previous plays. You know, a woman, alas, could be raped, her hands cut off, a tongue, and that's a real person.

But somebody mistaking a skull for a face, you think, hold on, we're being had. Well, it's in the dark, but I take your point that it's a deliberate stylisation of the form. I mean, in a way, it bears the same relationship to the inherited form as, say, a Quentin Tarantino film does to a kind of Clint Eastwood film. If you think of a Clint Eastwood revenge, you know, High Plains Drifter or something, yeah, there's a residual realism and there's a sort of moral structure to it. the sort of Quentin Tarantino version of the revenge movie, if you like, is a deliberate, how far can I take it? It's black comedy a lot of the time.

A black dark comedy. Yeah, can I just, I know what you want to get in, can I just follow this one point through? We've been talking about the influence of the law and issues at the time and the state trying to command the law and so on. Now, here we have a lawyer writing a play. Is there anything that contributes to the law, that particular argument in this play?

It's difficult with this one. I mean, I think John's already mentioned Webster is a better example of that where he actually brings the courtrooms onto the stage. I mean, Vindici is a psychologist, though, but everything here, as the name suggests, is kind of abstracted. It's about essences. I think this is, as Janet said, it's a play that's interested about theatre.

It's unpacking, actually, all of the mechanics of why Revenge Traged. was popular. The very questions we started out with this morning. But it does have a very moral conclusion. Vindici could get away with all this crime. He's murdered virtually the entire court. And he actually proudly admits that it was he that he's responsible. And so old Antonio, whose wife, during the course of the action,

has been raped and is conducting a sort of revenge of his own, but he's actually not wielding a knife. he's not actually taking part in the physical punishment, but he comes in at the end and passes judgment. So in fact, the revenge's tragedy is quite a conservative play, and you could say that the law does assert itself at the close of that play as Vendici, who, of course, is quite satisfied.

He's got what he wanted, he's got his revenge. So in fact, we get quite a moral and legalistic conclusion to that play that in fact, revenge is punished. Jonathan, do you want to take that on, the idea of revenge being punished? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's interesting, about these later plays is they really push at the sort of the transgressions.

There's a lot of incest in these later plays. You know, we've had rape and murder throughout the tradition, but one of the new elements that comes in is incest. And I think there is, as it were, a lawyer's interest in what are the absolute boundaries of the law? And what are the moments where the moral law

and the civil law come into conflict with each other? One of the things that, of course, promoted the revenge in the earlier plays we were looking at like Spanish tragedy is usually a crime against one's kin. These are about blood feuds. The family unit in the Revenges Tragedy is

now so corrupt and so riven. You see brothers murdering brothers to get to positions of power. You see Vindice well it's supposedly a performance but prostituting his own sister and he comes perilously close to doing that. That the very units that

kind of drove these old blood feuds are now themselves in breakdown. You've got all kinds of kinds of social collapse being examined and interrogated, I think. And I don't know about that ending. I mean, I also think that what's very interesting about all these plays is that justice might seem to be done in some way. Revengers always die. Criminals are always punished.

But there's a kind of sour taste in the mouth about all these societies. The cycle of violence carries on beyond the end of the play. Near the end of the revenger's tragedy, someone says, when the bad bleed, then is the tragedy good. And that sounds like a neat idea of devoid. divine justice. But of course what's happened in these plays is it's not just the bad who bleed, it's also the good.

Is there a sense in which how did it come to an end, why did they sort of stop being written? Well, the theatres were closed down in 1642, of course. The last one that we refer to is 1622. You get plays right up to the point when the theatres closed down. James Shirley, a Caroline dramatist,

writes the Cardinal in 1641, which goes straight back to some of the Kiddean formulas. He's certainly very influenced by Webster. But did they lose their popularity and clout and did they sort of die away in esteem? I think this pursuit of justice which we

get so much in the Elizabethan revenge tragedy does sort of peter out in a sense and we get much more discursive revenge tragedies in the Jacobian period where revenge is just one of the motifs and crime

becomes part of crimes of passion. Revenge is a kind of matrix for other action in these tragedies. So I think it does kind of peter out to an extent. I don't think it does. I think it's just that we don't know the drama of the 1630s nearly so well, but I think it is also. Pound along, actually. Yeah. Interestingly in the 1650s, we do get a revival in closet drama of revenge with the king in exile. We get the translations, closet dramas of classical revenge plays. So this notion, I think, of revenge, the king during the Republic. So revenge plays do have the sort of revival in

closet form. Just to mention that the revenge figure in the Cardinal is a woman and what we haven't talked about is the fate of women in so many of the plays that often the revenge is promulgated by a kind of fighting between men over possession of women and here we have a female revenge figure. Finally, Jonathan,

was there any sense at the time that these plays were redemptive or cathartic? Well I think there's certainly a sense that they're cathartic for the audience They give us the kind of pleasure, you know, that hawkisson, you know, why do we take pleasure in tragedy? Sweet violence, yes. But I'm not so sure that they were sort of fully cathartic from a sort of political point of view.

I mean, there must be a sense in which at some level they are preparing the mind of the public for the execution of a king. I mean, you know, these are plays in which dukes and kings are killed. We did that last week. Thank you very much. Oh, two weeks here. Thank you very much. I think Claire, Jonathan Bait, Julie Sanders.

Next week. Yes, the split routine to sunny and sheer in the 7th century. Thank you. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes

about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com. com.com.