We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Adapting Francis Bacon's notion of revenge as a 'kind of wild justice', Noam Reisner shows how English Renaissance revenge drama takes the form of 'wild play'. These plays drew on complicated modes of audience participation and devices of metatheatricality, allowing audiences to test how abstract moral or ethical concepts play out in a performative arena of human action. Reisner demonstrates that their overwhelming popularity is best understood in terms of these 'mimetic ethical exercises' which they generated for their audiences. This study surveys a range of revenge plays from the period's commercial theatre, beginning with Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and tracking the development of similar plays responding to Kyd's original design in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean drama. In the process it also provides a stage history of Kydian revenge drama with fresh readings of select plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Marston, Middleton and other early Jacobean playwrights.
This chapter surveys the contingencies and forces of influence between the two prose genres ofearly modern sermons and essays. With reference to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, it argues that essayists who turned to printed sermons for inspiration found in them unique modes of rhetorical self-fashioning. Sermons bring to the fore questions of style that reveal how learned preachers attempted to construct a sacred authorial persona, whose aim was not just to convey the force of an idea, but frequently to evoke its experiential consequences in the pursuit of a religious life. It also considers how the Montaignian essay form offered itself as a model for preachers seeking to perfect, or essay, their voice in preparation for their religious vocation as divine mediators.
The Introduction sets out the study’s main claims and methodological approach and explains the wide use in this study of the term ’mimetic ethical exercises’. In the process, it explains the distinction drawn in this study between ethics and religious morality. Finally, the Introduction addresses the question of genre and theatricality when studying early modern examples of English revenge plays and explains what is unique about the plays selected for analysis.
Chapter 2 turns to the important idea in Kyd’s design of rhetorical hyperbole and dramatic excess by comparing the emerging ethical effects engendered by the moral void of Kyd’s play to similar but crucially different devices involving abused emblems of writing in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. These early, near-contemporary responses to Kyd weigh through performance the consequences of violent action when neither the circumstances of plot nor the demands of justice can help explain or assign meaning to such action within any conceivable moral calculus. In the process, the moral-tragic weight of such plays sinks under the irruption of farce and burlesque, thereby forcing the audience to re-evaluate their voyeuristic complicity in the unfolding onstage representation of ritualised, and highly aestheticised retaliatory acts of violence.
Chapter 1 begins with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy by analysing the mimetic ethical exercise inherent to Kyd’s design. In particular, this chapter analyses the onstage uses in The Spanish Tragedy of disrupted missives, purloined letters and misquoted texts as offering the necessary space for the emergence of a new ‘counterfeiting’ theatrical ethic which eschews moral meaning beyond the immediate effects of what the staged performance can display. As this chapter shows, such mimetic ethical entanglement is often enacted through the theatrical translation of humanist ethical values of Christian Erasmian virtue into an epistolary emblem of writing, sending and intercepting letters. These letters and emblems of writing, in failing to arrive at their destination, frame a moral void in which the excesses of revenge unfold onstage in surprising and unpredictable ways.
Looking ahead to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Chapter 3 turns to the issue of antitheatrical sentiment and polemic and the pressure its moralising brought to bear on playwrights rethinking Kyd’s design. The chapter looks to Marston’s parody of Kyd (and possibly of Shakespeare) in Antonio’s Revenge as a case study of a highly innovative and satirical revenge play on this continuum which consciously comments on the metatheatrical ethics of its genre, and in so doing reflects on the didactic pressures exerted on Renaissance English playwrights to justify and sustain the moral coherence of their dramatic spectacle in practice. Marston’s ironic treatment of what had already become by the late 1590s trite dramatic conventions shows how one competitive playwright was exploring new dramatic possibilities within the genre which would allow his audience to test viable ethical alternatives to a queasy morality through a shared theatrical experience.
Chapter 5, building directly on the impasse of Hamlet’s inaction, looks to Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in exploring how these near-contemporary plays react to Hamlet’s existential impasse and tragic theatrical deficiency. The chapter especially attends to how Chettle and Middleton translate Shakespeare’s ethics of ‘marking’ into a wild exploration of the transgressive limits of moral being on the margins of what remains, once the performance of action leaves behind it a ruined and malformed metaphysics of morality. They do so by re-focusing the genre’s theatrical energy on multiple acts of violent revenge and transgression, paradoxically framed by a moral idealism often on the verge of tipping into frantic paranoia. As this chapter finally shows, the emerging actorly agency explored in these plays bears surprising consequences for how their imagined audiences are asked to understand and experience the passions attending the revenge act.
Chapter 6 turns to later revisions of Kydian revenge drama on the early Jacobean stage in the hands of idealistic playwrights who sought to reform the ambiguous theatrical experience of the original play by restoring its tragic dignity within a reconstituted Christian morality of patient suffering or rational Stoic forbearance. Looking to Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois and its kindred play, Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy, this chapter explores the resulting tension when playwrights reintroduce Stoic-Christian idealism into the theatrical experience of revenge which the play’s performance ethics utterly confound morally and causally. If Chettle and Middleton explore the violence underpinning any attempt to yoke Christian moral idealism onto living and suffering human subjects, in these later plays, this process is re-examined from the idealist point of view and its sustainability.
Chapter 4 turns to the watershed moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the great anti-revenge play of its day, which by commenting on Kyd’s design and its diminished capacity for novelty, profoundly changed it. In the process, Shakespeare’s play became itself an ethically vacant theatrical space in the dramatic continuum of the period, which subsequent playwrights responded to viscerally. This chapter argues that Shakespeare introduces into the intra-theatrical ethics of the standard revenge plot a theatrical ethics of ‘marking’ which seeks to translate through spectacle and performance what is merely shown into that which is, in the world, finally marked and bearing the trace of a wound or a scar. In the process, the chapter reflects on Shakespeare’s wider intervention in the dramatic fortunes of Kyd’s dramatic legacy in raising the stakes for audience participation in the action to new levels of guilt and vexed ethical complicity.
The Epilogue offers some concluding remarks while explaining why later Jacobean and Caroline plays are excluded from this study. In the process, it offers a brief consideration of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge.