‫אוניברסיטת תל‪-‬אביב‬

‫הפקולטה למדעי הרוח ע"ש לסטר וסאלי אנטין‬

‫חוג לאנגלית ולימודים אמריקניים‬

‫צדק פרפורמטיבי‪ :‬סמיוזה של חוק ותשוקה במחזות הנקמה ברנסנס האנגלי‬

‫חיבור זה הוגש כעבודת גמר לקראת התואר‬

‫"מוסמך אוניברסיטה" –‪ .A.M‬באוניברסיטת ת"א‬

‫שם סטודנט‪ :‬מרגריטה בלובה‬

‫שם המנחה‪ :‬פרופ' נועם רייזנר‬

‫‪05/2020‬‬
 Tel-Aviv University

Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of the Humanities

Department of English and American Studies

Performative Justice: Semiosis of Law and Desire in Early Modern Revenge

Tragedy

M.A. Thesis submitted by

Margarita Belova

Prepared under the supervision of

Prof. Noam Reisner

05/2020
 Belova i

Abstract

An examination of the three exemplary revenge tragedies, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish

Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, reveal the

imaginative stratagems of each play to contain the epidemic of reciprocal violence of revenge. At

the same time, resembling an Aristotelian concept of catharsis, each revenge tragedy provides its

therapeutic effect by restoring the equilibrium and reinforcing the social structure. By positing

the three plays as a sample, the research proposes a new way of looking at the revenge tragedy

genre as a metonymic chain of plays driven by the audience’s desire for violence, where each

play, in particular, transforms into a stand-in metaphor. Analyzing the plays, which mark both

the beginning and the renaissance of the genre, this study underlines the transformation of the

theatre’s demeanor towards the genre and its audience. The theory proposed in this study endows

the revenge tragedy genre with a new distinct characteristic and challenges future research to

explore this characteristic in other revenge tragedies.

 Belova ii

Table of Contents

Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

Table of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

Introduction: A Way Through Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Methodology and Major Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Thesis and Suggestions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy: “Unconscious” Revenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Revenger “passeth show” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Conclusive meta commentary: John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71

Conclusion and Suggestions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
 Belova 1

Introduction: A Way Through Theory

Like many literary generic units, revenge tragedy is a modern artifice, a label that puts

together a conglomeration of plays with a unifying leitmotif and form. Literary critics of Early

Modern revenge tragedy are no exception in having to deal with the artificiality of generic

boundaries. Some critics like Linda Woodbridge, for instance, consider themselves “generously

inclusive” when it comes to a choice of plays put under scrutiny. As she correctly underlines,

such critics purposefully “downplay the genre issue,” by treating revenge as a theme rather than

a generic category (5). Others often take pains to justify their selection. The present study

belongs to the latter group. However, given the scope of this research, the following chapters will

only discuss those revenge tragedies or plays, over which the literary community had already

reached a solid consensus as belonging to the genre of the revenge tragedy. While there is no

doubt that Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and John Marston's Antonio's Revenge are fair

representatives of the genre, there are still some disputes over William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The majority of critics, however, have been generously inclusive, as it were, on its part, and

further analysis shall prove them right.

Nevertheless, there is another significant issue with this label within the generic

stratification, which Woodbridge seems to, consciously, ignore – the issue of the tragic. She

suggests that her generosity to include more plays stems from the fact that her “quarry is not

genre definition but the cultural work that literary revenge performs” (Woodbridge 5). The

underestimation of the tragic element, however, does not solely pertain to Woodbridge. The

majority of the critics tend to emphasize revenge, rather than tragedy, content rather than form.

Ronald Broude's brilliant study from 1975 deals with the definition of revenge in Tudor England,

and the relation between drama and then turbulent socio-legal climate. Broude states: “Revenge
 Belova 2

tragedy may, in some sense, be understood as a form of response to the basic questions of crime

and punishment posed by these transformations in socio-legal thought and practice” (39). Lorna

Hutson, in her recent book The Invention of Suspicion, published in 2007, further investigates the

connections between the Elizabethan judicial system and theatre, claiming that “a participatory

justice system might have had an impact on dramatic epistemology, and vice versa” (68). In

another recent study from 2016, Derek Dunne explores revenge tragedy as “particularly invested

in the interaction between society and the law, an interaction beset with frictions by its very

nature” (77).

Notwithstanding, some critics managed to reconcile revenge with the tragic, as, for

instance, Terry Eagleton. In his Sweet Violence from 2003, Eagleton suggests that “If the body-

count, as at the close of The Spanish Tragedy, hovers around nine, exactly a third of the play's

total cast, then the spectacle is as indubitably tragic as one with an enormous number of belly

laughs is incontrovertibly comic” (8). The author continues to support his introductive definition

with a more substantial one by Raymond Williams: tragedy often “attracts the fundamental

beliefs and tensions of a period, and tragic theory is interesting mainly in this sense, that through

it the shape and set of a particular culture is often deeply realized” (qtd. in Eagleton 21). Even if

in simplified form, Eagleton thus both presents revenge as tragic and a revenge play as a tragedy.

In her 1931 study, Lily Bess Campbell writes: “the great tragic theme of sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century teaching is this theme of God's revenge for sin…And all Elizabethan

tragedy must appear as fundamentally a tragedy of revenge if the extent of the idea of revenge be

but grasped. The threefold aspect of revenge must, however, be always held in mind” (290). Like

Broude and others, Campbell does not give up on the definition of revenge and its function

outside the theatre. She also succeeds in proposing ‘a tragedy of revenge’ as, primarily, a tragedy
 Belova 3

of private revenge but fails further to articulate it in a clear and lucid form. Following Eagleton

and Campbell, this study will also comment upon both aspects of the genre definition. In this

respect, however, Ronald Broude warns the critics: “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” (38). The purpose of the following analysis

is not only to avoid this mistake but to reveal how and where such conditioning takes place.
 Belova 4

One of the prominent, and sometimes tacit assumptions in criticism of Early Modern

revenge tragedy is that revenge represents a vicious circle of never-ending violence: a perpetual

repetition of injury and retaliation and that this logic of repetition-compulsion of violence is the

kernel of the genre. Before one even delves into critical accounts, the word “revenge” itself

deserves a closer examination. Linda Woodbridge has already shrewdly observed that “the term

“revenge” – as against the medieval “venge” – harbors a sense of reciprocity” (42). John

Kerrigan further underlines this issue as well: “our own language of violent reciprocity has, since

the fourteenth century – when ‘revenge’ entered English as a verb … come to take for granted,

and to inscribe in miniature through the Latin prefix ‘re-’… a mimetic againness (re-venge, re-

tribution, re-cognition)” (21). Revenge signifies both an action and a reaction, an injury and an

act of vengeance, since “one man's vengeance” is “another man's injury.” Kerrigan insists that

“there is a sense in which theatrical ‘doing’ graviates, quite naturally, towards revenge… As any

director knows, it is easier for a performer to respond to something than to create events ex

nihilo.” Nevertheless, it is essential to underline that revenge works as “a building-block” not

only and not so much in theatre as outside it (Kerrigan 4-5).

 Belova 5

René Girard is one of the scholars who address the issue of revenge outside drama.

Girard explores the role of ritualistic sacrifice in communities and the agency of the sacrificial

victim. He suggests that “the sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own

violence… The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the

social fabric” (8). The author suggests that every society accumulates violence, but each society

has its discharging mechanism. In a well-developed society, “we owe our good fortune to one of

our social institutions above all: our judicial system, which serves to deflect the menace of

vengeance;” while in a more primitive community – an act of nemesis turns into a sacrifice

(Girard 16). As Kerrigan, Girard remarks that “the crime to which the act of vengeance addresses

itself is almost never an unprecedented offense; in almost every case it has been committed in

revenge for some prior crime. Vengeance, then, is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process”

(16). “Injury breaks a taboo, and disinhibits violence,” and it is through revenge, Girard points

out, that each society accumulates this violence to a point, where it threatens the entire social

order and requires detente (Kerrigan 4). In fact, each instance of injury and retaliation could be

considered as a menace because it has the potential for infinite development. Along the same

lines, Gary Schmidt, too, confirms that “revenge’s origin is a primal scene: the crime, the

murder, the inexplicable intrusion of violence… Revenge only breeds more revenge, expanding

exponentially,” and endlessly (472). Schmidt also insists that there is no possibility of disrupting

such a “revenge dynamic” (464). Dramatic representation offers “a concordant end” bounded by

its own form, but “the text's totalizing logic collapses upon itself, failing to understand that any

“final” retribution is but a necessary fiction” (472). Like others before him, Schmidt claims that

revenge represents an endless chain of events. A play can never disrupt the chain or reach the

end of it. Thus, Schmidt concludes that “revenge comes to frustrate the reader's [or viewer’s]
 Belova 6

search for an end… and offers in return nothing but the “fear of endlessness”” (476).

There is, however, a fact, which these accounts fail to realize seeking their conceptual

integrity. Each revenge play, mentioned at the beginning of this introduction and analyzed in the

following chapters, succeeds in its own manner to circumscribe revenge and to void it of its

repetitive impetus. As Schmidt remarks, the text emphasizes the final retribution, which is

inseparable from the ending of the play. Analyzing Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Schmidt,

however, fails to see that the mass violence at the end of the play leaves no possibility of further

retaliation. Hieronimo kills his offenders and commits suicide, killing those who tried to stop

him. Bel-imperia does so as well, even though, as Hieronimo himself mentions – this action was

not part of her role in the plot. Furthermore, even though most of the action takes place in the

end, the middle of the plot deserves some closer attention as well, for the play gradually

eliminates all of the characters, who show any potential to revenge or represent a potential victim

to take revenge on. Such characters include Serberine and Pedringano, pawns in Lorenzo's game,

who are sacrificed to keep the plot unfolding. There is also Isabella, Hieronimo's wife, who is the

first character to commit suicide. The present work seeks to claim further that both Marston's

Antonio's Revenge and Shakespeare's Hamlet provide a similar attempt at a fictional containment

of revenge's violent imperative.

 Belova 7

In this respect, the essay will introduce a concept of Machiavellian revenge. In his book

The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli famously advised on how the prince should rule the colonies to

minimize the involvement of physical, military force and to maximize the profit. One of his

advice sounded as follows: “Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated

or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they

cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does

not stand in fear of revenge” (25). It is according to this principle that the plot of the

abovementioned revenge tragedies is designed. These plays stage suicides and mass violence as

preventive and only possible measures against the propelling drive of revenge, thus willing to

sacrifice not only the main hero and the villain, but other characters as well, in order to restore

the social equilibrium.

Schmidt proposes that revenge plays sustain “the desire for a mythical retribution to end

all retribution, a totalizing climax of violence that will make sense of the originary moment”

(472). The author, however, follows the narrative theory of Peter Brooks, which adheres to

psychoanalytic point of view on desire and states that “no plot can offer a satisfaction of desire,

as desire is by definition unsatisfied and insatiable; it simply aims at its own reproduction,

thereby keeping us away from jouissance” (Sunderland 68). While the following analysis is not

aiming at questioning the psychoanalytic theory, it does seek to pinpoint several

underestimations in Schmidt’s suggestion.

Lorna Hutson remarks that “the passion for revenge expressed in late sixteenth-century

drama is not different in kind from a passion for justice” (276). Hutson underlines the issue

Ronald Broude previously raised in his article – the instability of revenge as a concept in Tudor

England. This issue will be addressed further. Nevertheless, Hutson observes that a desire for
 Belova 8

retribution or punishment is similar to a desire for violence, a desire for revenge in a modern

sense of this word as “the action of hurting, harming, or otherwise obtaining satisfaction from

someone in return for an injury or wrong” (OED 1.a). Woodbridge, too, remarks that revenge

plays “prompt us to desire vengeance” (32). The following chapters shall reveal that the desire

for violence is inseparable from the desire for justice. The point of friction with the

psychoanalytic theory and Schmidt’s argument arises because the plays not only seem to satisfy

the desire for violence but also succeed in their reparative function and despite the numerous

killings introduce order forestalling “the series of reprisals” (Girard 37).

Again, it is Linda Woodbridge, who conducts a short survey of “the cultural role of

revenge.” Unlike others, she insists that “in Renaissance drama, too, revenge is often

therapeutic” (Woodbridge 22). The author explains this therapeutic quality of revenge plays

through their ability to attain justice. She suggests “that revenge plays appealed to the audience’s

own feeling of deep social wrongness. The villain embodied all that kept them from getting what

they deserved,” and thus, a proper ending was equivalent to the villain’s execution (Woodbridge

19). To this respect, Regina Schwartz offers a more encompassing and substantial argument. She

explores the ritualistic and, to an extent, the social value of the Mass and the possible

consequences entailed in “giving up the sacrifice of the Eucharist” and “in the loss of the Mass”

(Schwartz 147). Schwartz establishes a strong connection between the institutions of church,

court, and theatre, where the responsibility of the first is displaced onto the other two: “With the

English Church’s reluctance to offer sacramental deterrence and sacramental remission of sins –

that is, sacramental justice – the scene shifted inevitably to the court where evil was fought

judicially and to the theatre where evil was fought imaginatively.” Schwartz emphasizes further

that there is another significant displacement that took place: displacement of a ritual as an act by
 Belova 9

its representation: “When the Reformers had replaced the Church’s transformation with

representation and its sacrifice with remembrance, they had left themselves less power of ritual

than (ironically, given its opposition to theatre) the catharsis of spectacle” (148). Schwartz

establishes a network of interconnections, where the attainment of justice is deemed cathartic, or

‘therapeutic,’ in any of the three mentioned institutions. Moreover, a parallel could be drawn

between a sacrificial ritual, a theatrical play, and, by extension, a court trial.

 Belova 10

In order to compromise the psychoanalytic notion of desire and its endless mechanism

with the cathartic effect of the theatrical spectacle, one should turn again to René Girard’s

examination of the ritual. Girard shrewdly pinpoints the structural paradox of the sacrifice, or, in

fact, any ritual: “If the unanimous violence…succeeds in bringing this crisis to an end, clearly

this violence must be at the origin of a new sacrificial system. If the [sacrificial] victim can

interrupt the destructuring process, it must be at the origin of structure” (98). The mechanism

that Girard observes structurally resembles the one of metonymy and desire – it is the

mechanism of looping. “Whether it be through sacrificial killing or legal punishment,” the

community seeks to divert or interrupt the reciprocity of violence, to end all violence, but the

issue at stake is that the punishment or sacrifice are in and of themselves representations of one

(Girard 37). Regina Schwartz, too, underlines that if the sacrifice, i.e., a murder, is considered

outside of the ritualistic framework, it “is framed very differently, far from satisfying the

demands of justice, murder violates them…[and] cries out for satisfaction” (144). “The vicious

circle of reciprocal violence, wholly destructive in nature, is replaced by the vicious circle of

ritual violence, creative and protective in nature,” - Girard establishes a structural similarity

between revenge, as reciprocal violence, and a ritual, in this case, a sacrifice (154). He explains

further that “by means of rites the community manages to cajole and somewhat subdue the forces

of destruction. But the true nature and real function of these forces will always elude its grasp,

precisely because the source of the evil is the community itself” (Girard 104). Hence, each

sacrifice represents the end and the beginning of another loop, circle, or link in an endless chain.

The following essay seeks to display a similar mechanism being operative in drama.

The idea, of course, is no invention and had been already introduced and explored, as

mentioned above, by Peter Brooks. Brooks, following Lacan, employs the concepts of metaphor
 Belova 11

and metonymy, in order to construct his theory of plot: “we read the incidents of narration as

‘promises and annunciations’ of final coherence, that metaphor may be reached through the

chain of metonymies: across the bulk of the as yet unread middle pages, the end calls to the

beginning, transforms and enhances it” (93-4). Although, as Luke Sunderland correctly

accentuates “narrative might, as Brooks has it, offer metaphors at the end of the chain of

metonymies, but the long-awaited metaphoric object is still a stand-in” (68). Examining a

revenge play as an example, one can see that the mass violence at the end of the play is, indeed,

both a metonymy and a metaphor. It is a metaphor because, in a sense, it transcends violence and

revenge; it restores equilibrium, grants satisfaction, and, indeed, ‘reinforces the social fabric.’ It

is, however, at the same time, a metonymy because it does not seize to represent what it initially

was – just another instance of violence, and quite appalling at that. Justice and vengeance are

intertwined as much as “a desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium” – as Simone

Weil puts it. As she notes further, however, “The search for equilibrium is bad because it is

imaginary. Revenge. Even if in fact we kill or torture our enemy it is, in a sense, imaginary” (qtd.

in Kerrigan 10). It is not, of course, that the injury inflicted is imaginary, but that the long-

desired equilibrium is what Schmidt called ‘a necessary fiction.’ Therefore, ‘a tragedy of

revenge’ Lily Campbell talked about starts to take its shape. Revenge as punishment and

fictional restoration of the past, i.e., vengeance as justice and metaphor, acquires its cathartic

function and structural similarity from tragedy. Revenge as injury, however, represents an excess

of violence, which “cannot be domesticated” and which aims at an infinite deferral of any kind

of restoration (Sunderland 68). Revenge, then, functions like metonymy through endless

repetition, promising us a possibility of justice, at the same time, perpetuating the impossibility

of actually attaining it.

 Belova 12

René Girard claims that our modern society knows “absolutely nothing about the

contagion of violence, not even whether it actually exists” (31). This statement, of course, is not

genuinely accurate; however, it implies that modern societies are successful at their attempts of

mitigating violence. Moreover, our society had drawn an almost rigid boundary between law and

state justice and revenge and violence. Therefore, the idea of vengeance, or revenge, and justice

being one and the same is deemed merely incomprehensible. This separation, which we now

tacitly exploit, in Tudor England, was, to a great extent, illusory and had not yet become

operative. John Florio, in his A VVorlde of Wordes (1598) dictionary, defines vindice (revenger)

as: “a reuenger of wrongs, a redresser of things, and abuses. A defender, one that restoreth and

setteth at libertie or out of danger, a punisher of things done amisse” (449). According to the

same dictionary, vendetta is defined as “reuenge, reuengement, vengeance. Also punishment…”

and the verb vindicare as “to reuenge, to auenge…to defend or deliver from danger or wrong”

(Florio 591-2). Let alone the fact that the words vengeance and revenge are used

interchangeably; these accounts portray the act of revenge and the agency of the revenger in a

favorable light emphasizing the restorative function and ability. It is all the more surprising to

discover that on the opposite end, the concepts of justice and of being just are seen as rather

bloodthirsty and slaughterous. Thus, Florio defines giufstitia (justice) as “Iustice…righteousness,

equity. Also a place of execution” and guiftitiare (as a verb) as “to deale with according to

iustice, that is to execute iustise vpon, or put malefactors to death.” Following the agency of a

revenger, giuftitiaro, the one, who exercises justice, is “a Iusticer of peace. Also an executioner

or heads man;” while giuftitiato, the one on whom the justice is exercised, is the one who is “put

to death by law” (213). It can, thus, be seen that revenge/vengeance and justice alike are

associated with both restoration of peace and order and with violence.
 Belova 13

Ronald Broude aptly observes: “It was not until the mid-sixteenth century, when the

Tudor government pressed the claims of the state to a monopoly on all revenge, that the need

was felt for terminology which would facilitate distinction among the agents by which revenge

might be effected.” In Elizabethan England, there were two competing systems of exercising

justice, or revenge: self-government and state justice. When the government monopolized its

power over justice, it sought to delineate its boundaries, including semantic boundaries. Broude

notes further: “To carve up the general idea denoted by vengeance, the terms ‘divine vengeance,’

‘public vengeance,’ and ‘private vengeance’…were introduced. These terms, however, do not

seem to have gained any permanent hold…” (42). Interestingly enough, however, this

terminology is, indeed, widely used by the critics of revenge tragedy, who have mastered this

semantic triad. Long before Broude, for instance, Lily Campbell asserts: “revenge must be

reckoned as including God’s revenge, public revenge committed to the rulers by God, and

private revenge forbidden alike by God and by the state as his representative” (290). It was then

that private revenge began to acquire its negative connotation. As Linda Woodbridge astutely

points out: “Christianity is reconciled with a harsh judicial system by othering – distinguishing

(good) state-sponsored justice from (bad) private revenge…Judicial harshness is projected onto

revenge, keeping justice pure” (90). Both Woodbridge and Broude explore how law, or state

revenge, was beginning to be separated and opposed to private revenge. Even though private

revenge “sometimes seemed the judicial system’s evil twin,” as a form of self-government, it

remained a vital choice for a very long time (Woodbridge 9). Broude confirms that “the

operation of state justice [was] liable to lengthy periods of impaired efficiency, so that self-

government remained a viable and often necessary alternative to the justice of the king’s courts”

(45). Not only private revenge remained a necessity, but Woodbridge also considers its
 Belova 14

conviction to be a “propaganda from state church.” She claims that “condemning [private]

revenge was an ideological move, promoting a state monopoly of violence. Subjects could and

did resist such move,” and revenge plays were part of such resistance (17).

The concept of divine vengeance, however, generated hope, anxiety, and confusion. On

the one hand, it provided “comforting reassurance that even the apparent triumphs of evil and the

depressing failures of human justice had their places in the Divine Plan and would, in God’s

time, be reversed, to His glory and the joy of all Christians” (Broude 53). On the other hand,

however, “Tudor theorists explained crime…as a source of communal pollution which, should

the criminal long remain unpunished, threatened to bring divine wrath down upon the entire

commonweal” (Broude 47-8). So, a crime, oftentimes, presented a moral dilemma: shall it be

revenged and the society purified of pollution here and now, or shall it be left to God’s

vengeance. Woodbridge insists that revenge plays “stage a vacancy of divine as well as

governmental justice” (37). Campbell, on the other hand, suggests that these plays are concerned

with “private revenge in its relation to God’s revenge” (293). De facto, they are both right. There

is no question about state justice being absent from these plays: “in revenge plays, a resort to

private retaliation is a vote for no confidence in official bodies charged with providing fair

treatment” (Woodbridge 6). Divine justice, as Campbell notes, does operate in these plays, it

does so, however, only as a stratagem or manipulation. Thus, in a sense, it could be regarded as a

vacancy or a void. God’s revenge in these plays is not a possibility. It is a center or, as both

Schmidt and Eagleton call it, a ‘blind-spot,’ which both defines and condemns private revenge in

a purely structuralist manner. By extension, the following analysis of the plays shall reveal that

every revenger attempts to claim himself heavens’ “scourge and minister” (Hamlet III. iv .178)

pretending to be the sword in God’s hands, while ‘pretending’ will be a keyword.

 Belova 15

Methodology and Major Concepts

The revenge’s semantic triad introduced above is, indeed, a part of critical terminology

and will be employed in this study as well. Nevertheless, the present research seeks to provide a

new, different model, which must be more appropriate to drama and, therefore, can be seen as

the extension of former definitions. René Girard mentions that “the system does not suppress

vengeance; rather, it effectively limits it to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a sovereign

authority specializing in this particular function. The decisions of the judiciary are invariably

presented as the final word on vengeance” (16). Girard describes how law subjugates revenge: it

is this balanced justice which ought to protect society effectively. Furthermore, since, in

Elizabethan England, state law was an earthly institution to convey divine vengeance – the

concept of balanced justice includes both divine and state vengeance. The balanced quality of

justice had always been “implicit in the scales” held by Justitia (Woodbridge 107). Justitia has

numerous representations in both sculpture and painting: many times, she has a bandage on her

eyes signifying blindness, although not always; sometimes, she raises her sword pointing

skyward, at other times – her sword is pointed down and touches the ground. In all instances,

however, the scales are held as totally balanced, i.e., they are equilibrium-scales. Derek Dunne

pinpoints further: “while the scales play an important part in early modern conceptualisations of

justice, we must not forget what occupies Justice’s other hand - the sword. This dual nature of

justice, simultaneously balanced yet violent, becomes a guiding principle” (79). Dunne’s

statement requires further clarification. What Justice essentially represents is a law of measure

for measure: the purpose of justice is not an annihilation of violence. Instead, it is safeguarding
 Belova 16

the balance of violence. As Woodbridge writes, “that bastion of legitimate authority, the Law,

sought decorum: penalties should fit crimes” (17). At the same time, private revenge will

presently acquire a concept of violent justice. Francis Bacon calls revenge “a kind of wild

justice,” Thomas McAlindon calls revenge “justice without law” – revenge becomes justice

represented by the image of the sword, at the same time gradually disassociated from the image

of the scales (Bacon 15; McAlindon 29).

These definitions slightly differ from the previous triad because they are embedded with

symbolic representations and because they represent different kinds of justice, rather than

agencies, who exercise it. The third manifestation of justice finds its roots in linguistics and will

be called performative justice. In linguistics, the word performative relates to an utterance or a

sentence, which itself represents an act: for instance, the declamation “I do” at a wedding is a

performative statement. Not only our legal system is full of such declarations (“put under arrest,”

“sentenced to death,” “found guilty”); the acts of justice themselves are very similar to a

theatrical performance. One can think of a courtroom, where each party is assigned a role like an

actor on stage: a judge, a defendant, an advocate, a prosecutor. In Elizabethan England, although

outlawed, there were duels, where the two parties assigned both space and the props/weapons.

Also, occasionally, a trial scene turns into a performance as well: when the trial is displayed to

the public serving as a preventive measure. Thus, performative justice might refer both to the

theatrical performances, which present themselves as trials, investigations or executions, and to

performative linguistic registers, where speech turns into action and affects or even transforms

reality.

These three faces of justice: balanced, violent, and performative, can be easily applicable

and observed outside theatre and drama. The main concern of the following analysis is to see
 Belova 17

how these definitions are mapped onto a theatrical space. The question is essentially one of the

frameworks or spaces. As Schwartz and Girard had already remarked in their studies, murder

acquires a different definition when it is transplanted from the ritualistic framework into a legal

one. Each of such frameworks/spaces has its laws of decorum and its conventions. In his book

The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Keir Elam observes: “The theatrical frame is in effect the

product of a set of transactional conventions governing the participants’ expectations and their

understanding of the kinds of reality involved in the performance” (88). One of the most

significant conventions that define theatre is the process of semiosis. Russian formalists were the

first to introduce the concept, followed by the theorists of the Prague School, who developed it

through the prism of C.S. Pierce. Elam carefully summarizes the mechanism: “the very fact of

[objects’] appearance on stage suppresses the practical function of phenomena in favour of a

symbolic or signifying role, allowing them to participate in dramatic representation” (8).

In theoretical accounts, this theatrical metamorphosis has acquired several names: Keir

Elam calls it “semiotization,” Susanne Langer – “symbolic transformation,” Richard Hornby –

“aesthetic transmutation” or “semiosis.” Hornby aptly pinpoints that this process “does not

necessarily imply that the elements being transformed change their looks” (98). What this

process does imply is that each object, concept, or person involved in the performance “acquires,

as it were, a set of quotation marks” (Elam 8). Hornby, whose book also owes its principles to

Russian formalists and the concept of Otstranenie, i.e., defamiliarization, notes that “the

ordinary, real-life selves of the table or to the actor are still there, unchanged in essence, the

potential for easily shifting back to the real-life mode is always there as well” (98). What

undergoes a metamorphosis is not the ontological reality, but the audience’s perception of that

reality, which under semiosis acquires its new symbolic function. Moreover, “it is important to
 Belova 18

emphasize that the semiotization of phenomena in the theatre relates them to their signified

classes… (the dramatic referent…might be represented by a painted sign, a linguistic sign, an

actor on all fours, etc.). The only indispensable requirement that is made of the stage sign-vehicle

is that it successfully stands for its intended signified” (Elam 8). This means that no matter what

kind of substitution took place (if it did at all), objects and actors on stage should resemble what

they signify in shape, function, or other qualities. Thus, if the semiosis is successful – it sustains

the virtual reality and illusion of the theatrical performance.

James Calderwood becomes one of the critics, who accentuate the semiosis of language.

Calderwood begins his argument by describing the semiosis of a physical object: “For the play to

succeed as realistic illusion the audience must regard the stool as Macbeth’s, which means

fictionalizing in their imaginations an object that remains incorrigibly what it was before the play

began.” He continues to claim that, consequently, language undergoes an analogous process and

is conceived as “a self-enclosed complex of meaning that abandons its referential dependence on

the world outside.” Calderwood accentuates that along with the semiosis of physical objects,

“language is reconstituted…not through any material alteration in words but by virtue of their

contextual relations” (13). Although Calderwood did not go further to analyze what constitutes

this process, his idea is a valuable realization. It is, as previously mentioned, the aim of this

research to show how the three kinds of justice undergo such a semiotic process. This cannot be

done, however, without tracing the semiosis of desire. Since revenger conducts his detective

narrative and constructs his plot of retaliation through language, his desire for any kind of justice

can only be analyzed linguistically, that is, through speech, unlike justice, which mostly consists

of physical acts and representations like a murder or a trial. Ultimately, it is a desire for revenge

and not the revenge itself that is the propelling force in the play.
 Belova 19

Keir Elam further pinpoints that semiosis “involves the showing of objects and events

(and the performance at large) to the audience, rather than describing, explaining or defining

them…The showing is emphasized and made explicit through indices, verbal references and

other direct foregrounding devices, all geared towards presenting the stage spectacle for what it

basically is, a ‘display’” (30). This displaying quality, in effect, does not differ from or is almost

the same as defamiliarization. As a matter of fact, Hornby also states that “by forcing audiences

to reexamine famous plays, one is making them reexamine not political issues themselves, but

the way in which they perceive those issues” (45). Thus, the emphasis shifts from the dramatic

representation to the audience’s perception of the issue addressed in the play. Revenge plays, for

instance, do not simply address the issue of separating the balanced justice from violent revenge;

they identify the flaws in the audience’s perception of this issue.

Thesis and Suggestions

The following chapters will provide a comprehensive analysis of three Early Modern

revenge tragedies: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and

John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge. As a result, this research seeks to issue that each of these

important Renaissance plays provides a similar mechanism of containment of the reciprocal

violence. On the one hand, each of the three plays stages a primal offense, which incites the

epidemic of violence: suicides, murders, and mass killings. On the other hand, however, each

play’s strategy is to limit this contagion to one performance. Murders and suicides, even those

that seem to many critics accidental or circumstantial, can be seen not only as instances of

violence but as measures the play undertakes to, eventually, stage an act of Machiavellian

revenge. The concept of performative justice introduced earlier helps not only to shed light on

disputable moments in these plays, but also to see the end of each performance as dramatic
 Belova 20

decorum, in a sense that pure never-ending violence would be unfit for the theatrical

performance as entertainment. By staging Machiavellian revenge, each play will be shown to

achieve a fragile equilibrium, interrupting the impetus of revenge and attaining justice. This

justice, which each performance grants to its audience, represents the cathartic or therapeutic

value of the spectacle. The artistic success of each play to end all violence and to satisfy the

audience’s desires constitutes a stand-in metaphor: it claims to transcend the reciprocity and the

inexhaustible impetus of revenge.

The issue, which the present study seeks to underline, is that the revenge tragedies

struggle not so much with the mimetic structure of revenge, as with the audience’s desire for

justice and violence. Considering the insatiate nature of desire, it is, essentially, the audience’s

desire for justice that propels not only the plot of each play but the entire genre of revenge

tragedy. Therefore, the speculative suggestion of this research is that the genre of revenge

tragedy represents a metonymic chain of plays, where each particular play sacrifices itself and its

cast to forestall violence and satisfy the audience’s desire. Theatre can effectively contain

violence because, after all, it is imaginary, unlike desire. No matter how lavishly each play

satisfies its audience’s desire – the performance cannot contain or adequately fulfill it because

this desire for justice and violence is external to the theatrical frame.

Revenge tragedy, however, is not merely a playground for the roistering of the audience’s

desires. When this paper addresses the semiosis of law, it does not only imply the amplification

of the law’s inefficiency to its total vacancy in the play. More importantly, the semiotic process

forces us to examine the reason for such amplification and to examine what this display

represents. The impossibility of legal procedures in these plays, mainly, helps to map the private

revenge onto the divine providence to consider the relationship between them. The analysis of all
 Belova 21

three plays will show that each of the revengers tends to assume the role of heavens’ minister in

exercising vengeance, and each of them fails to do so. The failure will be observed in revenger’s

attempt to assume God’s prerogative and in his desire both to surpass his offender in violence

and outstrip him in the performance/plotting of revenge. At the same time, the fact that divine

ordinance is simply a veil for violent justice explains the semiosis of desire. The theatrical

performance and language put the audience’s desire for justice on display, which, on a closer

look, proves to be a desire for violence. Thus, while law seeks to establish balance or equilibrium

by framing the desire for violence, the analysis of all three revenge tragedies shows what

happens when the so-called desire for justice breaks loose.

By analyzing the plays, which represent both the beginning and the renaissance of the

revenge tragedy as a genre, this study wants to emphasize a potential change in the theatre’s

demeanor towards this genre. Thus, for instance, Kyd’s play is fully self-contained and presents

no threat to the reality of its audience, leaving the King and the Viceroy as the two ultimate

victims. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, however, as will be shown, reaches out to victimize its audience

by staging the death of the queen, turning the performance into a dreadful spectacle, which will

ultimately literalize itself in the reality of the audience. By the time of Shakespeare’s play, the

theatre seeks to vindicate itself and show that the source of violence is not the stage, but the

audience itself. At the same time, John Marston comes up with his meta-commentary in

Antonio’s Revenge, which not only exaggerates everything that other revenge tragedies had

already staged but by staging violent private revenge as a fortunate public one, Marston’s play

walks around the edge of blasphemy and religious hypocrisy. Marston offers its audience a

revenger, who not only seeks to surpass God in suffering and Devil in violence, but, ultimately,

protests the public opinion, which attempts to establish him as a victim and his revenge as a
 Belova 22

legitimate response and purification of the state. As Jonathan Bate underlines: “by casting

revenge in the form of an elaborate public spectacle, the drama reveals that the public

performance known as the law is also a form of revenge action” (275). Marston, thus, seeks to

criticize the audience’s perception of violence as a just punishment and to show legal punishment

as violent.

The final proposal of the research is that other revenge tragedies might also employ a

similar or a different mechanism of handling the violence and the desire, by aiming to

circumscribe the former and satisfy the latter. If the suggestion and the concepts of the present

study can be extended to other revenge tragedies, they will not only be gratifying in elucidating

the puzzling instances within those plays but will shed more light on the genre’s development

and the theatre’s attempt to claim justice for itself as an artistic medium.
 Belova 23

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy: “Unconscious” Revenge

Judd Hubert defines a play as a fruitful “interplay between illusion and elusion,” where

“illusion...refers to the positive…building up and unfolding of plot and characterization, while

elusion designates such negative or unraveling aspects of dramatic unfolding as a character’s

explicit or implicit reluctance to perform the part assigned by the author” (9). Whether Hubert’s

claim is valid for all drama, or, at least, Shakespearean drama, which his book is preoccupied

with, is an illuminating question to pursue. Virtually, his claim is applicable to revenge tragedy

and particularly to the character of a revenger. Shakespeare’s Hamlet immediately comes to

mind as a perfect example of a character who resists the action of the play and is ready to escape

into madness rather than to perform his role. Gary Schmidt suggests that “Hamlet knows the

rules of the genre all too well,” he knows that the play’s closure is synonymous with “the hero’s

death,” which is why “it requires a colossal effort of the will to motivate himself to play” (472).

In this sense, Hamlet is similar to Barnardine from Measure for Measure. Barnardine’s

drunkenness constantly protracts his execution. Terry Eagleton explains that if Barnardine is

executed as is, “death will not constitute an event in Barnardine’s life.” Besides, “the law will

stand in danger of being discredited,” because his death will no longer represent the punishment.

Instead, it will become “a blunt biological fact” (104). Barnardine’s reluctance to accept his role

comes to a point where others must persuade him to play and die: “Persuade this rude wretch

willingly to die” (IV. iii. 68). Hamlet’s madness, in this sense, does not differ significantly from

Barnardine’s drunkenness. Although, Schmidt pinpoints that by the time Hamlet arrives at the

stage, the revenge tragedy conventions are solidified, and both Hamlet-the-character and Hamlet-
 Belova 24

the-play must find their way through an established tradition. This chapter, however, will be

devoted to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy that laid a foundation for these conventions.

Schmidt observes further that Kyd’s play could be called “the unconscious of the genre.”

He insists that the characters “do not fully understand the logic of revenge; they enter it “by

experience first, and only later by understanding”” (473). Hieronimo, as the first revenger on the

Elizabethan stage, is no exception to the rule. Several critical accounts from the theoretical

section above have shown that revenger’s origin as a character is a primal crime. “The avenger’s

role…is simply a space to be filled” in a chain of injury and retaliation (Schmidt 474). The

character put into this structure experiences the initial injury (crime, murder) in a structurally

similar way to birth trauma: he is both born out of and born by this trauma as a subject, i.e., as a

revenger and as a victim. The protagonist’s confusion and reluctance to step into revenger’s role

is justified because the injury inflicted upon him is arbitrary. Hieronimo questions, “O poor

Horatio, what hadst thou misdone” (II. iv. 89), and the answer is – nothing. Horatio fell prey to

the revenge logic. After Don Andrea’s death, Bel-imperia decides to avenge his death and

chooses Horatio, Andrea’s friend, as her means to implement her revenge:

Yes, second love shall further my revenge.

I’ll love Horatio, my Andrea’s friend,

The more to spite the prince that wrought his end. (I. iv. 66-8)1

When Lorenzo and Balthazar discover the identity of Bel-imperia’s new lover, the latter

decides to take revenge, although, as Linda Woodbridge notes, “the woman is just to love

someone else” (112). Balthazar has no particular reason to avenge, and his justification is

fictitious:

1
All excerpts from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are quoted from The Revels Play edition, edited by Philip
Edwards, Methuen, 1969.
 Belova 25

Glad, that I know on whom to be reveng’d,

Sad, that she’ll fly me if I take revenge.

Yet must I take revenge or die myself,

For love resisted grows impatient. (II. i. 114-7)

Hieronimo, throughout the play, refers to Horatio’s body and murder as both causeless

and as a cause: causeless – because his death is nonsense, cause – because it is what compels

him to revenge. Hieronimo’s identity oscillates in this interval of causality, an interval between

“an unjust action” and between “a just cause” (Dunne 82). In Seminar XI, Jacques Lacan

articulates cause as that which is “to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain,

[the] law…whenever we speak of cause…there is always something anti-conceptual,

indefinite…there is a hole…there is cause only in something that doesn’t work” (22). Hieronimo

is inserted into a revenge chain and is “forced to play the undesired role,” the facts of which he

has no knowledge (Abel 46). He can find no law that brought his injury about and, therefore,

identifies the injury as a cause for something, i.e., revenge, rather than a cause of something.

Schmidt correctly observes that “for Lacan as for Kyd, the central point is “the terrible

vision of the dead son” … the play’s ineffable core,” which creates Hieronimo as a split subject –

a grieving father (victim) and a revenger. Karin Coddon remarks further: “the corpse is at once a

thing, materially present yet marked by the absolute absence of subjectivity – no-thing, a

signifier severed from its referent” (125). Hieronimo’s encounter with the body of his dead son is

registered in his speech, and it is through his speech that one can notice the identity schism. The

first speech registers him as a father and as a victim:

Those garments that he wears I oft have seen – 

Alas, it is Horatio, my sweet son!

 Belova 26

O no, but he that whilom was my son!

O was it thou that call’dst me from my bed?

O speak, if any spark of life remain!

I am thy father. [My emphasis] (II. iv. 75-9)

The indeterminacy of the tense and the transition from the lack of identity to the

identification and vice versa establish subjective distancing. Furthermore, the three consecutive

apostrophes perpetuate the discovery of no-one: both defining and defying Horatio as a subject

or a lack of one thereof. Hieronimo’s linguistic registers represent Horatio’s body, materially, as

a shell, as a wound – as an ‘O.’ Lacan articulates the subject in a telling and illuminating parable:

Suppose that in the desert you find a stone covered with hieroglyphics. You do

not doubt for a moment that, behind them, there was a subject who wrote them. But

it is an error to believe that each signifier is addressed to you—this is proved by the

fact that you cannot understand any of it. On the other hand, you define them as

signifiers, by the fact that you are sure that each of these signifiers is related to

each of the others. And it is this that is at issue with the relation between

the subject and the field of the Other (198-99).

Hieronimo, thus, experiences the dead body as both someone who represented to him

“the network of signifiers” (as hieroglyphics), and as something like a blank stone, which is the

void unveiled (Lacan 53-4). Terry Eagleton, in this respect, offers another elucidating comment:

“Dead bodies are indecent. They proclaim with embarrassing candour the secret of all matter,

that it has no obvious relation to meaning. The moment of death is the moment when meaning

hemorrhages from us” (164). Horatio’s death for Hieronimo is not a fact; it is an experience,

which constitutes itself in two instances: an experience that resists signification, the encounter of
 Belova 27

the void, and Hieronimo’s speech, i.e., his attempt to create meaning around this void. Lacan

writes: “The function of the tuché, of the real as encounter – the encounter in so far as it may be

missed, in so far as it is essentially a missed encounter – first presented itself in the history of

psycho-analysis in a form…of the trauma” (Seminar XI, 55). The encounter with Horatio’s body

represents such a trauma for Hieronimo: he is faced with a subject, which can no longer signify.

It is, however, the second speech that binds Hieronimo as a revenger:

Seest thou this handkercher besmeared with blood?

It shall not from me till I take revenge.

Seest thou those wounds that yet are bleeding fresh?

I’ll not entomb them till I have revenged.

Then will I joy amidst my discontent;

Till then my sorrow never shall be spent. [My emphasis] (II. iv. 113-8)

Maintaining subjective distancing, Hieronimo refers to Horatio’s body as ‘wounds,’ and

it is these wounds, which he refuses to bury until he takes revenge. De facto, however,

Hieronimo’s use of the tenses has already betrayed him. If, in the second line, Hieronimo uses

the present tense projecting into the future, then, in the fourth line, he uses a version of future

perfect, describing revenge as an action already accomplished. So, while Hieronimo-the-father is

stupefied by the “murd’rous spectacle” (II. iv. 71) and registers the body as a lack of a subject “at

the level constitutive of language;” Hieronimo-the-revenger defines the same body as a cause for

revenge (Schmidt 470). Since Hieronimo already ‘have revenged,’ he has already entombed the

wound on the level of the symbolic, in language. However, as Francis Bacon asserts in his essay

Of Revenge, “This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green,

which otherwise would heal, and do well” (15). Schmidt confirms Bacon’s thought: a horrifying
 Belova 28

reality of a loss is a “reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly”

(474). As a matter of fact, since these first linguistic registers, Hieronimo refers to Horatio’s

body as a wound/wounds another six times throughout the play, three of which are in his final

speech. Two additional instances can be found in Isabella’s monologues as well. Hieronimo is a

judge and a revenger – the character who ‘studieth revenge,’ and the scene with the citizens and

an old man forces him to uncover the wound, neither for the first nor for the last time. Hieronimo

has torn the papers that citizens presented him as evidence, and to their accusation, he responds:

That cannot be, I gave it never a wound;

Show me one drop of blood fall from the same:

How is it possible I should slay it then? (III. xiii. 129-131)

After re-entering the stage, Hieronimo’s mind is distracted, and he mistakes the old man for his

son’s ghost, who, he thinks, came to accuse him of being remiss in his revenge.

Tracing all of the instances of the word-wound in the play could be developed into

another chapter. Going back, however, to the notion of the missed encounter, one can realize that

Hieronimo accepts his role as a revenger unconsciously first, in a sense, on a metatheatrical

level. “The subject inserted into a pre-existing symbolic order, according to Lacan, is defined by

the rules and conventions of that order, unable to change it or even attain an outside perspective

from which to understand it,” – thus, Hieronimo, being unable to listen to his own words and

unable to understand the cause of his injury, signs up a contract to a revenger’s role, essentially,

missing his own approval (Schmidt 474).

Nevertheless, there is a significant difference between Hieronimo-the-revenger before

and after the ‘Vindicta mihi’ speech. This difference is dictated by the two irreconcilable notions

of justice: balanced and violent. It is not before his ‘Vindicta mihi’ soliloquy that Hieronimo
 Belova 29

consciously accepts his role as a violent revenger. The notion of revenge, along with the notion

of vengeance, is dubious throughout the play, but Hieronimo’s soliloquies reveal his motivation

together with the notions of balanced or violent justice, which support his complot. When

Hieronimo receives Pedringano’s letter from the hangman, a letter which serves as final evidence

of guilt, Hieronimo presents a long soliloquy, where he determines: “But wherefore waste I mine

unfruitful words/When naught but blood will satisfy my woes?” (III. vii. 67-8). These words,

however, are pronounced by a judge who is a God’s representative. Earlier in the same

monologue, Hieronimo verifies that “now I feelingly perceive/They did what heaven unpunish’d

would not leave” (III. vii. 55-6). Thus, it is heaven that seeks to punish the murderers, and it is

Hieronimo’s duty as a judge to safeguard the state revenge. Therefore, he concludes his soliloquy

with a formidable decision:

I will go plain me to my lord the king,

And cry aloud for justice though the court,

Wearing the flints with these my wither’d feet,

And either purchase justice by entreats

Or tire them all with my revenging threats. (III. vii. 69-73)

The protagonist’s desire for a bloody satisfaction here is equivalent to ‘justice through the

court,’ to balanced justice. Significantly too, the only other option, which Hieronimo considers

as an alternative, is a suicide, not revenge. In his next monologue, the protagonist holds a poniard

and a rope and ponders which path to take, i.e., what kind of suicide is preferable. He, however,

concludes his speech by choosing life over death not because of fear, but because he cannot

leave his post and abandon his responsibilities as a judge, as a punisher of wrongs:

This way, or that way? Soft and fair, not so:

 Belova 30

For if I hang or kill myself, let’s know

Who will revenge Horatio’s murder then?

No, no! fie, no! pardon me, I’ll none of that:

He flings away the dagger and halter.

This way I’ll take, and this way comes the king,

And here I’ll have a fling at him, that’s flat. (III. xiii. 16-20)

This speech represents the second time in the play when Hieronimo preserves his life in

order to safeguard the law. Earlier in the play, he formulates the same thought (originally in

Latin): “But none the less, I shall keep myself from a hasty death, in case then no revenge should

follow your [Horatio’s] death” (II. v. 79-80).

R. L. Kesler suggests that in a never-ending pattern of revenge, where a victim is always

a revenger, and revenger is always a victim, “to act at all becomes to commit suicide – a

particularly strong image of closure that can be expanded to produce the familiar mass disasters

of the final act” (qtd. in Schmidt 472). This claim might be theoretically valid, but The Spanish

Tragedy stages suicide as an alternative and a resistance to revenge, rather than an equivalent. As

previously mentioned, Hieronimo seeks to ensure balanced justice and legal retribution instead

of committing suicide. Once balanced justice ceases to be a vital choice, and is replaced by

violent justice, suicide occurs to be the opposite of revenge. Isabella, Hieronimo’s wife, was the

only character to offer divine justice as an option. Nevertheless, when she realizes that

Hieronimo’s attempt to attend the King has failed, she is resolute to revenge:

Since neither piety nor pity moves

The king to justice or compassion,

I will revenge myself upon this place

 Belova 31

Where thus they murder’d my beloved son.

She cuts down the arbour. (IV. ii. 2-5)

The time, “the medium in which Providence works,” has revealed the identities of the

murderers, but the state justice turns out to be inefficient, and Isabella embraces the last resort of

violent justice (Broude 48). She, however, devalues revenge, voids it of it repetitive drive,

because, in a manner similar to a sacrifice, Isabella outpours all her violence on a ‘victim’ (if one

may call a garden or an arbor as such), whose death, as it were, entails no “fear of reprisal”

(Girard 14). Having revenged in her peculiar manner, Isabella takes her own life, denying

revenge the possibility of perpetuating itself further through her character. Bel-imperia and

Hieronimo commit suicide in a similar fashion – these the chapter will address later, discussing

the ending of the play.

Presently, the discussion shall return to Hieronimo’s character transformation. Hieronimo

is resolute in presenting his case to the King, but as he had already mentioned in his previous

speech, he is struck mute by Lorenzo. When Hieronimo realizes that Lorenzo will not allow him

to deliver his complaint, he, as promised, proceeds with the threats of revenge:

And bring my son to show his deadly wounds.

Stand from about me!

I’ll make a pickaxe of my poniard,

And here surrender up my marshalship:

For I’ll go marshal up the fiends in hell,

To be avenged on you all for this. (III. xii. 73-8)

Hieronimo’s speech, however, is not empty rhetoric. The words ‘wounds’ and ‘this,’

pointing to the murderous spectacle of Horatio’s body, have already appeared in his earlier
 Belova 32

speeches. These words contain Hieronimo’s grief and his experience of loss, and substantially

represent Horatio’s murder. Unlike Hieronimo, who is keeping the wounds green both

linguistically and physically, King gives no weight to these words: “What means this

outrage? /Will none of you restrain his fury?” (III. xii. 79-80). Hieronimo’s own use of language

has betrayed him once again. He literalizes his own metaphor of wasting ‘unfruitful words’ by

seeking to win justice through ‘plain[t]’ and ‘threats.’ Since the law can grant no justice,

Hieronimo chooses the path of a private revenger, concluding his interaction with a King with a

proverbial phrase: “Needs must he go that the devils drive” (III. xii. 82).

“John Ponet advocates lone assassination only as a last resort: “It cannot be maintained

by God’s word that any private man may kill, except … any private man have some special

inward commandment … of God”” (qtd. in Woodbridge 142). In the following scene, Hieronimo

enters a stage holding a book:

Vindicta mihi!

Ay, heaven will be reveng’d of every ill,

Nor will they suffer murder unrepaid:

Then stay, Hieronimo, attend their will,

For mortal men may not appoint their time. (III. xiii. 1-5)

Hieronimo seems to be reading from the Bible, presenting himself as an agent of the

heavens, as a judge, who is the instrument in God’s hands. There are, however, several issues

with him trying to claim the providential affirmation, and his last appeal to the King is the least

problematic. First of all, Hieronimo has already left his post as a marshal and judge in his

previous speech. Significantly, he did so by transforming the noun ‘marshalship’ into a verb to

‘marshal,’ – thus, transforming words into actions. Secondly, the protagonist reverses the
 Belova 33

quotation from the Bible that says, “Scriptum est enim: Mihi vindicta: ego retribaum, dicit

Dominus (ad Romanos 12:19)” into ‘Vindicta mihi,’ which symbolically represents the reversal

of roles or the transference of power. Vengeance now is in Hieronimo’s hands, and heavens’ will

is his camouflage and excuse. Last but not least is the fact that further quotations in the same

speech are from Seneca, not from the Bible.

The further explanation requires a short analepsis. Right before Hieronimo receives the

second letter that confirms the identities of the murderers, he gives another monologue, which

should be illuminating to Hieronimo’s use of language:

The blust’ring winds, conspiring with my words,

......................................
Made mountains marsh with spring-tides of my tears,

And broken through the brazen gates of hell.

Yet still tormented is my tortur’d soul

......................................
Beat at the windows of the brightest heavens,

Soliciting for justice and revenge:

......................................
I find the place impregnable, and they

Resist my woes, and give my words no way. (III. vii. 5, 8-10, 13-4, 17-8)

Hieronimo’s reluctance to perform revenge is salient in this soliloquy as well. Kyd placed

his protagonist into a new symbolic order, into a dramatic setting, where language had already

undergone a semiosis. This new virtual linguistic reality presupposes and prescribes Hieronimo’s

desires. Hieronimo’s words, i.e., his language, are entrapped in hell – they will become operative

if and only if Hieronimo votes for violent justice. The judge attempts to solicit for state justice

and divine retribution, but the linguistic reality he inhabits denies him that possibility. This new

dramatic reality is predicated upon violent justice. The process of semiosis is a process of
 Belova 34

amplification and display. While, as Ronald Broude explained, Elizabethan law was oftentimes

sluggish and unproductive, the balanced justice in Kyd’s play is presented as extremely

superficial and futile. In fact, it is displayed as such so artfully that the majority of literary critics

cannot thoroughly account for Hieronimo’s inability to present his case to the King to the present

day. I here use the concept of balanced justice for drama, because it encompasses both state

justice and divine vengeance, for, despite the agency, they both aim at balancing violence.

It is, therefore, not surprising that Hieronimo’s rhetoric and his ability to use language

recuperate once he is resolute to attain violent justice: “if language cannot be made to relieve his

feelings, or accomplish justice, at least it can be turned into a weapon of harassment, and used to

disturb the peace of mind of his woes” (Barish 80). In ‘Vindicta mihi’ soliloquy, Hieronimo

consciously accepts his fate and steps into his role as a private revenger, although, consciously

does not necessarily mean willingly. By mastering his language, Hieronimo “is determined to

make an actor of the very playwright who had cast him for an undesired role” (Abel 48).

Hieronimo becomes “an author and an actor in this tragedy” (IV. iv. 147). The protagonist

reconciles his fate and his desire to act in his own manner (freedom of action) by combining the

two “through a kind of amor fati, hugging one’s chains and making one’s destiny one’s choice.

This is to treat freedom as the knowledge of necessity, embracing the inevitable in the form of a

free decision” (Eagleton 115).

John Kerrigan and Lionel Abel confirm that the interplay between illusion and elusion,

between play’s plot and character’s reluctance to perform, introduces meta- and intra-theatrical

flexibility and bestows a revenger with the potential for dramatic double-consciousness: “the

familiar posture of the Elizabethan revenger, standing slightly outside his role, examining his

actors like a playwright at work” (Kerrigan 17). Abel talks about Shakespeare’s Hamlet
 Belova 35

specifically, but his comment is applicable here as well: “every important character acts at some

moment like a playwright, employing a playwright’s consciousness of drama to impose a certain

posture or attitude on another,” and the avenger is no exception (46). Hieronimo practically

becomes a playwright and plots his revenge as a dramatic performance. Kerrigan notes further

that “if revenge worked only towards the subordination of the revenger, the consequences would

be claustrophobic. In fact... subordinating the agent to a situation, but, at the same time,

prompting him to shape events towards the action’s end. This generates theatricality…” (15-16).

The revenge play structure, unlike that of tragedy, burdens the protagonist with the knowledge of

the outcome, at the same time, granting him the freedom to perform.

Kyd makes a brilliant move by turning a state judge into a revenger. He provides his

protagonist with the most effective disguise of being a heavens’ minister, and Hieronimo

continues to employ it:

But may it be that Bel-imperia

Vows such revenge as she hath deign’d to say?

Why then, I see that heaven applies our drift,

And all the saints do sit soliciting

For vengeance on those cursed murderers. (IV. i. 30-4)

The Elizabethan audience perceives these words as ironic because Don Andrea’s ghost

and the personification of Revenge are the only metaphysical agents ‘soliciting for vengeance.’

This irony is even more salient because, in the previous scene, Andrea expressed his gratitude to

Revenge: “And thanks to thee and those infernal powers/ That will not tolerate the lover’s woe”

(III. xv. 37-8), and those were not heavens’ powers that propelled the action of the play.
 Belova 36

Another instance appears later in the play, where Hieronimo has already assigned the

roles to the actors in his inset play: “Now shall I see the fall of Babylon/ Wrought by the heavens

in this confusion” (IV. ii. 195-6). The confusion of the tongues in the play-within-a-play makes it

clear that Kyd implies the story of the tower of Babel. Hieronimo, in his turn, assumes God’s

power for the second time. Not only is he going to perform vengeance instead of God, but he will

do so, like God, by confounding the language. Woodbridge pinpoints that “Maynard Mack

famously accused Hamlet of playing God, but by default, that was an avenger’s job” (37).

Instead of becoming the sword in God’s hands, the avenger wants to hold the sword himself.

Similarly, and tellingly again, Hieronimo uses language as his instrument and as means

of control, imitating God: “And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one

language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they

have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not

understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:6-7). This linguistic omnipotence is also observed

in a fact that neither the audience in the court of Spain nor the Elizabethan audience, know what

kind of plot Hieronimo has devised until he takes revenge and reveals it in his speech. The

Elizabethan audience, however, can be sure to see a “dire revenge” (IV. iii. 28).

Interestingly, the meaning of the word “justice,” unlike that of revenge, is persistent

throughout the play; it refers to balanced justice and mostly appears in the first part of the play.

In the second part, after Hieronimo accepts his revenging role and the play operates on the

concept of violent justice, the word “justice” appears only several times in order to be denied in

all of the instances. While balanced justice is exiled, the violent one multiplies itself in

Hieronimo’s speech:

Though on this earth justice will not be found,

 Belova 37

I’ll down to hell, and in this passion

Knock at the dismal gates of Pluto’s court,

Getting by force, as once Alcides did,

A troop of Furies and tormenting hags

To torture Don Lorenzo and the rest.

......................................
Revenge on them that murdered my son:

Then will I rent and tear them thus and thus,

Shivering their limbs in pieces with my teeth. (III. xiii. 108-13, 121-3)

Mitchell Macrae remarks that “in revenge tragedy, imitating and surpassing are the

modus operandi of the revenger, who takes a prior offense and returns it to the offender in an

amplified form” (109). There is, however, a difference between a desire and an act of revenge

itself. Hieronimo wants to torture his offenders, but, in reality, he never does – Lorenzo and

Balthazar are stabbed on stage, and, unlike Horatio, they are not even hanged. Hieronimo seems

to stage an equal punishment. The key to amplification, however, lies elsewhere: revenger

“makes himself resemble the opponent he has blamed . . . he transforms his enemy into the kind

of victim he was once. Indeed, the more scrupulous he is in pursuit of retribution, the more exact

in exacting vengeance, the more he effects this interchange” (Kerrigan 6). Kerrigan, however,

along with Macrae, and some other critics, too, overlooks a significant structural mistake. The

issue is that Hieronimo’s enemies, whom he seeks to take revenge on, are Lorenzo and

Balthazar, but they are not the only victims in this play. The victims, who resemble Hieronimo in

his suffering, will now be the King of Spain and the Viceroy, now “hopeless father[s] of a

hapless son[s]” (IV. iv. 84). This clarification is crucial because this is how revenge indeed

works – it “seeks justice by mimicking injustice” (Woodbridge 51). Revenge always involves
 Belova 38

innocent victims, and it always affects agents from outside the initial conflict, that is why René

Girard calls violence a contagion. Kerrigan is, nevertheless, correct to underline that the more

calculated and the more fastidious the plotting of revenge, the more violent and cold-blooded it

will seem. Revenge imitates justice in many respects, it even attempts to usurp time (the medium

that ensures divine providence), and while the play shows this by making the character of

Revenge fall asleep for a while, our culture preserves the principle in a proverb ‘revenge is a dish

best served cold.’ In addition, since both offenders are stabbed during the performance, they are

left oblivious to their fate. In this respect, Francis Bacon underlines: “Some, when they take

revenge, are desirous, the party should know, whence it cometh. This is the more generous. For

the delight seemeth to be, not so much in doing the hurt, as in making the party repent” (16).

Hieronimo, however, denies his opponents the possibility of repentance and sentences them to

death, to make sure that they will be forever tortured in the inferno.

Derek Dunne asserts that “Hieronimo’s final revenge is as judicial as it is artistic, since it

is in the act of onstage revenge that law and drama are finally brought into communication, and

conflict, with one another” (44). Dunne further supports his claim by explaining Hieronimo’s use

of the word ‘spectacle.’ The author underlines that by using this word, “Hieronimo seeks to

elevate his actions from murder to execution.” The author notices further that the play-within-a-

play operates on “the idea of punishment ‘for example’s sake,’” and concludes by suggesting:

“What could be more exemplary than the divinely-ordained violence of public execution?” (45)

Dunne, however, misses out several crucial points, and one of them is the fact that a trial never

preceded the execution. Hieronimo gathered convincing evidence, but he has never presented it

to the King, and the punishment was never defined. I tend to suggest, therefore, that his attempt

to present it as a legal execution is a stratagem to conceal the murder. Moreover, Dunne chooses
 Belova 39

not to mention that the word spectacle in Hieronimo’s speech refers solely to Horatio’s dead

body. It appears in his speech twice as the phrase ‘this spectacle,’ echoing Hieronimo’s words of

the initial discovery: “What murd’rous spectacle is this?” (II. iv. 71). Metatheatrically, of course,

this phrase refers both to the spectacle Hieronimo had staged, literalizing his own words into a

spectacle that murders and the spectacle of The Spanish Tragedy, which is equally fatal.

In effect, Dunne undermines his own suggestion by stating that “while Hieronimo echoes

legal procedure, he does so without the safety of legal mechanisms of control” (46-7). Dunne

brings this back to the issue of framework or space. The violence of execution, similarly to

revenge, is “like sacrifice, it attempts to “remedy evil with evil, or to wash away murder with

murder”” (Woodbridge 51). Within the legal framework, this violence is supposed to be

effectively contained and should not generate any reprisals. A theatrical framework, which

deems the state law vacant, staging it only to cancel it out of the equation, lets this violence to

disseminate itself through every character, who gets in the way.

Richard Hornby correctly insists that ““reality” is always the defining background of the

dramatic illusion…in quotation marks, because according to cultural theory - we are

experiencing the world through the cultural prism, not directly” (113). The concepts of violent

justice and balanced justice do not differ much from their non-dramatic twins: private revenge

and state and divine vengeance, respectively. The process of theatrical semiosis is similar to a

magnifying glass: it transforms law’s inefficiency into worthlessness, and the violence of

revenge into massacres. This opinion is not new and had been many times implied in various

researches. While all of the previously mentioned kinds of justice are perceptible to a greater or

lesser extent in both the virtual and the “real” reality, the performative facet of justice is mostly
 Belova 40

salient in a dramatic performance. Hieronimo had already expressed his desire for violent justice;

in the following speech, he expresses his desire to not only implement it but to perform it:

Behoves thee then, Hieronimo, to be reveng’d:

The plot is laid of dire revenge:

On then, Hieronimo, pursue revenge,

For nothing wants but acting of revenge. (IV. iii. 27-30)

The last line, operating on a theatrical metaphor, could be read ambiguously to represent

both the desire for implementation of revenge and the desire for performing revenge. “The major

moral saving grace of retributive hatred is that the retributive hater not only desires to injure,

even kill, the target, but … also desires to restore the moral balance in the community” – while

this statement can account for exercising revenge, indubitably, it cannot justify the protagonist’s

desire to perform (French 110). Revenger’s attempts to assume God’s power and position are

equivalent to his zeal of becoming an author, but revenger is always destined to fail, because he

is, in any case, only an actor. Hieronimo inhabits a dramatic symbolic order, where the language

is in and of itself performative. After all, “what is really there” in the dramatic performance “and

what has really been there is only what words persuade us to see” (Hutson 137). The words that

sustain the theatrical metaphor: spectacle, show, acting, are there to condemn the revenger. The

play not only furnishes and imposes the desire to perform onto the protagonist but by tricking

Hieronimo into staging revenge as a theatrical performance, which brings satisfaction – it

endows the revenger with the “sadistic and ostentatious need to show off” (Dunne 45).

Kyd’s play binds the desire for violence and the desire for performance both structurally

and linguistically. More importantly, it does so through one character who is both a victim, a

revenger, a judge, an author, and an actor. Hieronimo’s character confounds three branches of
 Belova 41

vengeance: divine, state, and private into one agent. Lorna Hutson, who believes that

participatory justice might have influenced theatrical methodology, also suggested that dramatic

plot similarly to “judicial narration…was designed to produce a particular telling of events that

made sense as evidence of motivation, and hence of ‘character’” (137). Hieronimo’s character

undergoes a metamorphosis: a judge, a minister of God, is transformed into a revenger.

“Dramatic characters have a history, and a speech in a play forms a moment in that history,” –

Hieronimo’s every monologue in a play registers the development of his ‘motivation,’ i.e., his

desire (Barish 83). Keeping in mind the examples from Florio’s dictionary presented in the

theoretical section, one realizes that Hieronimo’s desire for balanced justice is not innocuous:

For blood with blood shall, while I sit as judge,

Be satisfied, and the law discharged. (III. vi. 35-6)

.......................................
When naught but blood will satisfy my woes? (III. vii. 68)

Reviving, too, Hutson’s suggestion that “the passion for revenge expressed in late

sixteenth-century drama is not different in kind from a passion for justice” – it is now easier to

observe that both the need for justice and the demand for revenge are equally blood-thirsty (276).

Once, however, Hieronimo is denied a secure legal procedure, he decides to take a round-about

way to attain the object of his desire – vengeance. Since vengeance and the ability to exercise it

belong to God, the revenger assumes God’s agency, also, the agency of an author. By casting

himself into his own play, Hieronimo not only ensures the implementation of revenge but also

keeps the power of performing it solely to himself:

With these, O these accursed murderers,

Which now perform’d, my heart is satisfied.

And to this end the beshaw I became

 Belova 42

That might revenge me on Lorenzo’s life,

Who therefore was appointed to the part

And was to represent the knight of Rhodes,

That I might kill him more conveniently. (IV. iv. 128-134)

One might object that it is Bel-imperia, who kills Balthazar in the inset play and takes

part in revenge. To such an objection, Hieronimo has an answer as well:

So, Viceroy, was this Balthazar, thy son,

That Soliman which Bel-imperia

In person of Perseda murdered:

Solely appointed to that tragic part,

That she might slay him that offended her.

Poor Bel-imperia miss’d her part in this,

For though the story saith she should have died,

Yet I of kindness, and of care to her,

Did otherwise determine of her end. (IV. iv. 135-143)

In his Godly, author-like manner, Hieronimo shows that he cast Bel-imperia to kill

Balthazar, making her an instrument of revenge in his hands. He explains further that he has

revised and altered the original plot of Soliman and Perseda so that Bel-imperia stays alive, but

it was her choice to commit suicide. Bel-imperia’s words in the inset play confirm Hieronimo’s

omnipotent agency on revenge: “But were she able, thus she would revenge/Thy treacheries on

thee, ignoble prince. Stab him” (IV. iv. 65-6). Bel-imperia expresses her revenge in hypothetical,

unreal conditioning so that she is a passive agent, whom the vengeance is exercised through.

Reiterating for a moment Kesler’s statement and previously mentioned discussion on suicide, it
 Belova 43

is worth to consider Bel-imperia’s suicide as well. As Isabella, she takes revenge “on herself”

(IV. iv. 67) in an attempt to restrain further dissemination of violence.

Another crucial suggestion derived from this last speech is that Hieronimo denies his

audience the satisfaction from entertainment, which the ordinary spectacle must provide, by

emphasizing that all of the actors were cast for their roles ‘solely’ for Hieronimo to be able to

pursue his revenge. This presently brings the discussion to a comment made earlier that by

imitating, in his revenge, the injustice inflicted upon him, Hieronimo not only revenges himself

on Balthazar and Lorenzo but victimizes the King and the Viceroy – imposing upon them a role,

which he was once appointed to.

When we suffer, we almost always attempt to establish “equilibrium” by deflecting the

suffering back onto the world. Sometimes these deflections take the form of revenge…In

all cases, these deflective consolations are anesthetic distractions that constitute evil

(Stone 76).

In order to perform his revenge ‘more conveniently,’ Hieronimo manipulates the notion

of decorum: “playgoers base their good conduct on the supposition that playwrights, too, must

keep decorum by withholding from the field of theatrical action anything unfit for their

consumption” (Mackay 308). By staging murder within the dramatic illusion, Hieronimo

succeeds in pursuing his revenge in a way, which leaves the audience unaware of the injury they

have already been afflicted with. The revenger structures this injury as a missed encounter.

Although everything happens in front of the audience, both victims remain oblivious to the fact

that Hieronimo had already transferred revenger's role onto them. Anne Righter suggests that in

the inset play, “everything that seems illusory is in fact real… Life has fitted itself into the

formal pattern of art, and so skillfully that Hieronymo…must abandon his rȏle and explain the
 Belova 44

true nature of the action” (81). Although, must he? The story might have been much more tragic

if the play would end without Hieronimo stepping out of his role. If Hieronimo would go on to

end the play and commit suicide, leaving the dead bodies scattered around the stage (including

Horatio’s) for the King and the Viceroy to only later realize their tragedy – the ending might

have been equally sobering. This, however, would affect the “symmetries of action” (Kerrigan

5). “The displacement of revenge from one character to another creates a structure of obligation”

– the revenger must not only imitate his offender in an attempt to excel him but is also obliged to

pass the baton of responsibility to the next revenger (Kerrigan 7).

Dunne remarks, “by its very nature, drama destabilises any correlation between what is

shown onstage and what is actually happening; or to put it another way, what is seen and what is

known” – once the action is over, Hieronimo decides to reveal his revenge and the cause,

Horatio’s body, which urged him to do it (85). Jonas Barish underlines further as well: “words

come to oppose physical events as well as buttress them, and in the tension between speech and

act lies much of the tragic force of the plot” (67). Indeed, the evanescent moment between what

has happened physically on the stage and what Hieronimo will reveal in his speech is a

dramatically charged becoming. Here, the concept of performative justice steps in with a bang.

To the Elizabethan audience, Hieronimo’s grant epilogue is simply a summary of the entire play.

To the audience of the Spanish Court, however, Hieronimo’s testimony constructs and enacts an

entirely different reality. Hieronimo’s words substitute actions, which in fact would never have

happened in King’s and Viceroy’s perception of the world, for Hieronimo is the only witness

left. Thus, Hieronimo’s tragedy was an imitation of an action, whereas his speech is an action,

which his tragedy has already imitated. It is in his speech that the judge finally obtains

satisfaction, and through his speech, he performs revenge. It is the speech that marks the injury
 Belova 45

of the King and the Viceroy as a missed encounter and afflicts them with endless suffering.

Hieronimo tellingly concludes his speech:

And gentles, thus I end my play:

Urge no more words, I have no more to say. (IV. iv. 151-2)

The absence of words is tantamount to the absence of further action – Hieronimo has

played his role and seeks to commit suicide. This last act of radical self-destruction, surprisingly,

has its purpose as well. There is one thing in which Hieronimo outstrips his offenders. The

protagonist is resolute to make his revenge absolute in denying both his victims and the author,

who cast him for this role, i.e., Revenge, the satisfaction of further retaliation, the one which he

presently succeeded in attaining.

Pleas’d with their deaths, and eas’d with their revenge,

First take my tongue, and afterwards my heart.

He bites out his tongue. (IV. iv. 190-1)

When Hieronimo is caught on his way to commit suicide, the King and the Viceroy

demand from him further explanation of his reasons, information about his confederates, etc.

Many critics are perplexed by victims’ repetitive demands of the facts, which Hieronimo has

already provided them with. In this respect, Hutson’s The Invention of Suspicion hints at the

most reasonable explanation. Since Hieronimo’s speech has constructed a totally new reality for

both victims, what they substantially want to do is to fill in the gaps, which Hieronimo’s speech

left in their perception of this newly established reality they chance to inhabit. Unlike the

Elizabethan audience that possesses the full knowledge of the situation, the reality of the Spanish

Court’s inhabitants is at once shattered and completely transformed. The victims, as Hieronimo

before them, think that the injury imposed on them is arbitrary. For even if their sons are guilty,
 Belova 46

Hieronimo has never provided any proof other than a dead body, which has no meaning to it.

Therefore, both the King and the Viceroy seek satisfaction in the investigation, for Hieronimo’s

testimony is not full. After Hieronimo bites out his tongue, Castile insists that there is still a

subject that can signify: “yet can he write” (IV. iv.195). King responds:

And if in this he satisfy us not,

We will devise th’extremest kind of death

That ever was invented for a wretch. (IV. iv. 196-8)

Hieronimo asks for a knife to mend his pen, stabs Castile and himself denying his victims

both the satisfaction of completing their investigation, leaving a void in the center of their new

reality, and denying them the satisfaction of taking revenge. The revenger annihilates himself,

dramatizing Revenge, circumscribing the retributive violence.

Accounting for the death of Castile, which also seems accidental to many critics, I will

provide the following explanation. In her revengeful suicide, Isabella exclaims:

I will revenge myself upon this place

...............................
Fruitless forever may this garden be
...............................
And as I curse this tree from further fruit,

So shall my womb be cursed for his sake. (IV. ii. 4, 14, 35-6)

She takes revenge and curses the place where Horatio was killed, to be forever sterile.

Considering the overt metatheatricality of this play in general and her statement in particular, one

can, indeed, suggest that the place represents both the garden and the stage itself. Isabella’s

words are not merely prophetic; they turn into action as well. By the end of the play, the potential

of the stage to renew itself is exhausted. Isabella and Bel-imperia, the only two female

characters, both committed suicide. All younger men are killed, including princes – potential
 Belova 47

heirs to the throne. Finally, Castile, King’s brother, and his possible substitution, is assassinated:

What age hath ever heard such monstrous deeds?

My brother, and the whole succeeding hope

That Spain expected after my decease!

.....................................
That he may be entomb’d whate’er befall:

I am the next, the nearest, last of all. (IV. iv. 202-4, 207-8)

The stage is left infertile, leaving two heirless kings. Viceroy leaves the stage with the

body of his dead son (whose death was foreshadowed at the beginning of Kyd’s play). The Court

of Spain is left with a lonely King on stage. “Imagine two characters on an open stage…The

simplest yet most fraught way to mesh them up is through injury and retaliation” – this is

Kerrigan’s statement of the opening pages in his book on revenge, to which Kyd responds by

leaving only one actor in the Spanish Court (4).

In the theoretical section, I have introduced a concept of Machiavellian revenge – a kind

of totalizing violence to end all violence. Machiavelli suggested that if one seeks to avenge his

enemy, he must ensure that he inflicts such an injury, of which his enemy will never be able to

recuperate. By leaving no possibility of further violence, Kyd's play stages Machiavellian

revenge. The three suicides in the play serve precisely to this end, and, therefore, oppose revenge

by resembling the act of sacrifice – instead of diverting violence that is or potentially might be

directed at them, the characters accept it and nullify it in the act of self-destruction. The play,

thus, stages Castile’s murder not only to leave the King the ‘last of all,’ but to ensure that no one

attempts to take revenge on Castile, making him guilty of his daughter’s actions.

The concept of performative justice, however, operates not only in Hieronimo’s speech,

but, likely, extends to the entire The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd’s play is uncannily prophetic. Much
 Belova 48

of what is being said by the different characters in the play – later on, materializes in action. The

first scene in Portugal opens up with the Viceroy’s laments for his dead son Balthazar. When

Alexandro tries to convince the Viceroy that Balthazar is alive, caught by the Spanish army,

Viceroy replies: “Then they have slain him for his father’s fault” (I. iii. 46).

Alex. That were a breach to common law of arms.

Vice. They reck no laws that meditate revenge. (I. iii. 47-8)

One of the most well-known phrases in The Spanish Tragedy belongs to the Viceroy and

is operative throughout the entire play – Hieronimo indeed meditates revenge, and the law is

slipping through Hieronimo’s own ‘unfruitful words,’ just another performative statement.

Balthazar is, too, avenged upon and struck dead at the end of the play. Furthermore, the

stage/garden is cursed as sterile and infectious by Isabella, named both pleasant and safe by Bel-

imperia, and defined as a place “made for pleasure not for death” (II. v. 12) by Hieronimo. These

statements are performative as well, for the stage truly brought pleasure and ultimately

represented a framework, where violence was safely multiplied and contained, and justice

obtained. Nevertheless, it is also, from now on, a stage, which was infected with the contagion of

violence and from Kyd’s play on, the Elizabethan theatre-goer will genuinely remember that on

this stage: “murder’d, died the son of Isabel” (IV. ii. 22), along with the third of the entire cast of

Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. All these performative statements culminate in a final spectacle,

where words and illusion are being transformed into actions and reality. Nevertheless, no matter

how many ‘monstrous deeds’ has the theatrical space staged and how much blood has infected it

– the space is left fruitless until the next revenge tragedy will introduce its apple of discord.

Richard Hornby wittily remarks, “theatre is a kind of identity laboratory… theatre

teaches the skill of identifying with others rather than objectifying them;” it teaches us “how to
 Belova 49

play roles, and equally important, how and when to drop them (71, 85). Shifting, finally, to the

Elizabethan spectator and his perception of Kyd’s play, I would like to reinstate my point on the

catharsis of the spectacle. Whether the audience had fully identified itself with Hieronimo or not,

justified his actions or not, the audience is still conditioned to identify his revenge as “a victim’s

response,” and, by extension, as a punishment of wrongs (Woodbridge 62). Ultimately, the

audience attains its satisfaction, similar to Hieronimo’s, “the satisfaction of conscience in this

world that occulted blood-guilt has been, however violently or ambiguously, proved and

discovered by those who have suffered most anguish and wrong,” and, subsequently, the space

was purified of every evil (Hutson 276).

Kyd’s play serves to represent both a link in a metonymic chain and a metaphor. On the

one hand, Hieronimo’s desires for vengeance and performance are satisfied. Even his utmost

desire to commit suicide as avenging Revenge itself is attained. Hieronimo succeeds in ending

the play at a point where the chain of desire is interrupted. The play successfully stages both an

epidemic of violence, which threatens the entire social order, and effective containment and

circumscription of it by sacrificing several characters (in fact, all who participated in the

conflict). In this respect, the theatrical spectacle resembles a sacrificial ritual. The stage itself is

ready to become barren in order to detente violence’s reciprocal and never-ending impetus. It is,

therefore, in this sense that the spectacle literally becomes ‘performative justice,’ a fragile

equilibrium attained through performance – hence, a metaphor.

On the other hand, reiterating René Girard’s suggestion from the theoretical section,

play’s violent denouement, even though it achieves temporary peace, eventually lays the

foundation to further violence. Both because the stage is already infected and because the source

of violence is the audience itself. I have mentioned previously that, substantially, what propels
 Belova 50

the play’s plot is the desire for revenge, not the revenge itself. So, even though the play ends in a

spectacle of mass violence, which successfully contains revenge, the achieved equllibrium is

imaginary, for it is the audience’s desire that creates the demand for theatre. Thus, Kyd’s play

also represents a link in a metonymic chain of tragedies.

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Revenger “passeth show”

Shakespearean facetious clowns are always in the right. After four hundred years, they

can still teach the modern audience the nuances of life, if not life, then, definitely, the clues to a

dramatic performance. It is no wonder that Shakespearean clowns and their shrewdness fill in

dozens of critical books if clown-the-gravedigger outstrips Hamlet in philosophizing. While the

present chapter is far from invading the clowns’ rhetorical terrain, it will use clowns’ wits as a

starting point in discussing William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Hamlet. What man dost thou dig it for?

First clown. For no man, sir.

Hamlet. What woman, then?

First clown. For none neither.

Hamlet. Who is to be buried in’t?

First clown. One that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul,

she’s dead.

Hamlet. How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card,

or equivocation will undo us. (V. i. 122-31)2

Hamlet gets into a short witty repartee with a grave-maker and, by the end of it, is

amazed at the clown’s precision in his use of language. Hamlet approves of grave-maker’s

2
All excerpts from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet are quoted from The Oxford Shakespeare, edited by G. R.
Hibbard, Oxford University Press, 2008.
 Belova 51

linguistic method and suggests that everyone must use language unambiguously. Before Hamlet

enters the scene, however, the two clowns have already discussed the same method of precision

concerning action. “An act hath three branches – it is to act, to do, and to perform” (V. i. 11-12)

– the foundation of drama presented by a clown. “Hamlet dwells on the enactment of revenge as

precisely that, an act. This metatheatrical approach to revenge leads to some of Shakespeare’s

most eloquent observations on the dilemma of action as a species of acting” – in order to

understand the act of revenge, one must scrutinize the act itself (Dunne 97). By proposing three

branches of an act, the clown implies that an act has three different manifestations, each

following a particular kind of action – meaning, the act can be done, performed, or acted.

Accordingly, the first instance stands for implementation or accomplishment of an action; the

second stands for imitation of an action, which does not presuppose real consequences, while the

third constitutes the unison of the former two. These three, consequently, elucidate the layers of

dramatic performance. ‘Doing’ inhabits the dramatic illusion, unaware of the audience and the

performance, and represents an action, which belongs to the characters within the play.

‘Performing’ is located entirely outside: it belongs to the real world of the audience and is an

action belonging to the actors. ‘Acting,’ however, contains both the ‘doing’ and the ‘performing’

in one instance.

The clown provides the audience with the theatrical metaphor unveiled, which Hamlet,

however, misses. Hamlet’s entangled state stems from his own advice and understanding, which

he earlier shares with the actors: “suit the action to the word, the word to the action” (III. ii. 16-

7). Hamlet’s issue is that the language in the play is, indeed, precise. The ghost calls revenge an

‘act’: “But howsoever thou pursuest this act” (I. v. 84), and while the ‘act’ might imply any of

the three manifestations, Hamlet reiterates it much later in his speech as he conceives of it:
 Belova 52

Do you not come your tardy son to chide,

That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by

The important acting of your dread command? O, say! (III. iv. 99-101)

The question, which Hamlet attempts to answer throughout the play, is what kind of

action suits to the word ‘acting’? The revenger always enters a pre-existing situation and pre-

determined linguistic reality: the protagonist will never be allowed to step outside and observe

the master plan. Instead, however, he will always be deceived into believing that he can. Since

the word ‘acting’ functions both within and outside the play, Hamlet thinks that he has a choice.

The protagonist escapes into the level of performance, assuming the role of a dramatist and

casting himself for the role of a mad man. What Hamlet is forbidden to perceive is that the

theatrical metaphor operates on the simultaneity of performance and implementation, and his

escape is imaginary and futile. “It is interesting to observe the direct relation between fate and

formal integrity” – the revenger, no matter how reluctant he is and how inventive in his attempts

to escape from his “undesired role,” will be forced, eventually, to take revenge (Eagleton 102,

Abel 47). The protagonist, however, is equally forbidden to escape entirely into the level of the

play, i.e., Hamlet can neither take revenge after Ghost’s command nor after the Mousetrap, in

which he caught “the conscience of the king” (II. ii. 594), because not only revenge but the

theatrical performance, too, sustains itself through his character.

Similarly to Hieronimo, Hamlet accepts his role as a revenger on a linguistic level and

experiences the trauma as a missed encounter.

Ghost. Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing

To what I shall unfold.

Hamlet. Speak, I am bound to hear.

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Ghost. So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.

Hamlet. What? (I. v. 4-8)

Unlike Hieronimo, however, who, indeed, entered the genre by experience rather than by

understanding and has received his role in an active form ‘I have revenged,’ hoping for the law

to be just; Hamlet expresses his willingness to hear the ghost’s story in a passive voice ‘I am

bound,’ marking the absence of his will in this decision. Hamlet signs a contract to revenge, but

he will shortly discover that his perception of the existing reality was not full and that the

primary injury was yet awaiting him. Hamlet’s desire to hear the ghost is his attempt to

determine what role he plays both in the play and in his unfortunate life:

My fate cries out,

And makes each petty artery in this body

As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve.

The Ghost beckons. (I. iv. 56-8)

Hamlet deems himself invulnerable both physically, indicated in the speech above, and

metaphysically if it might be articulated this way:

I do not set my life at a pin’s fee,

And for my soul, what can it do to that,

Being a thing immortal as itself? (I. iv. 45-7)

The protagonist assumes this invulnerability, thinking that all possible evil had already

usurped his life. Once, however, he realizes what role he is cast for and that the ultimate injury

was yet to come, Hamlet understands that it is precisely his soul, which is now in danger.

Hamlet’s reluctance to revenge constitutes itself in the very next speech:

Haste, haste me to know it, that I, with wings as swift

 Belova 54

As meditation or the thoughts of love,

May sweep to my revenge. (I. v. 29-31)

Lionel Abel, too, elaborately remarks that while Hamlet swears the Ghost to remember

him, in the next scene, “when the Ghost has disappeared under the boards…Hamlet asks the

guards and Horatio to swear that they have seen nothing” (47). So, while Ghost asks Hamlet to

‘mark’ and ‘re-member’ him, Hamlet is engaged in a theatrical undoing forcing others to swear

they saw no-thing, dis-membering the ghost.

Nevertheless, “thanks to the Ghost,” the murder of the king “emerges as a dramatic

narrative,” which pertains to the performative justice as well because this narrative, as

Hieronimo’s last speech, not only claims to transform reality but by doing so puts Claudius under

suspicion for murder (Hubert 104). Hamlet questions Ghost’s real intention and challenges his

theatrical potency, but he is still forced to investigate and find “grounds more relative than” (II.

ii. 593) Ghost’s testimony. Leaving Hamlet for a moment to assume his “antic disposition” (I. v.

179), let the discussion presently go back to clowns’ dialogue.

First clown. What is he that builds stronger than either the mason,

the shipwright, or the carpenter?

Second clown. The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.

First clown … It does well to those that do ill.

Now thou dost ill to say the gallows is built stronger

Than the church…

First clown …when you are asked this question next, say ‘a grave-maker’. The

houses that he makes lasts till doomsday… (V. I. 40-3, 45-7, 57-8)

Two more constructive ideas, which explain the play’s dynamic, emerge from this
 Belova 55

conversation. Unlike Hamlet, who claims to be heavens’ representative thrice throughout the

play with regards to every death he has caused, and who is not very convincing at that; the

gravedigger without pretense becomes an instrument in the hands of an omnipotent dramatist,

death. Death is the ultimate prosecutor who puts our life and actions on trial, where,

Claudius … the action lies

In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled

Even to the teeth and forehead of our fault,

To give in evidence. (III. iii. 61-4)

Similar to Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s play, too, revolves symbolically

around an open grave, a “dead corpse” (I. V. 31), the Ghost, and his narrative. It is not, however,

a gravedigger, who builds the graves, but death itself, and it is death, who eventually hosts a

“feast” in his “eternal cell” (V. II. 317), filling in the graves with bodies. Hamlet regards

Denmark as a prison, because as Schmidt suggests, Hamlet-the-play is fully aware of the genre

and tradition it pertains to, and Hamlet knows what the revenger’s performance results in, he

knows that “this fell sergeant Death/Is strict in his arrest” (V. ii. 589-90). From the moment

Hamlet accepted his role, he knows he has already been arrested for what he is yet to do. Abel

suggests that once Hamlet returns from England, “he is ready for death. As he says, “the

readiness is all.” Hamlet accepts death’s dramaturgy” (49). However, “death has no power over

those who already move among the living dead” – Hamlet both represents such a person as a

revenger, who is destined to die, and literally dwells in one reality with the Ghost, conflating the

theatrical illusion with the metaphysical realm (Eagleton 104). Marvin Hunt suggests further that

“the smell of rotting human flesh hovers over the final two acts of the play, as does Hamlet’s

concern with the grotesquely cannibalistic pattern of dining on creatures that have dined on
 Belova 56

human flesh” (75). In this respect, Eagleton’s remark turns uncannily truthful: the entire cast of

the play, along with the audience belong to the living dead and “death will make us all theatrical,

no matter what we have done in life” (Abel 49). The idea of being ready to die, which Hamlet

expresses, in fact, is religious teaching – in accepting the denouement of our life in death, death,

indeed, loses its power over us. Although, the majority of the people, unlike Hamlet, are

hypocrites in this regard. Abel, however, misses this point because for Hamlet to accept his death

also means to, finally, take revenge. Be it a coincidence or an ingenious plotting, right before

Osric informs Hamlet of a duel and the latter accepts it; Hamlet reports to Horatio of

Guildenstern’s and Rosencrantz’s execution, which was shaped by divinity and in the design of

which “was heaven ordinant” (V. ii. 49). Hamlet continues further to claim providential powers

side with him, assuming the role of the revenger as a punisher of public wrongs:

… - is’t not perfect conscience

To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damned

To let this canker of our nature come

In further evil? (V. ii. 68-71)

No matter how depoliticized Derek Dunne finds Hamlet, the play does address the issue

of the king’s death, using the organic metaphor, and the idea of the wheel of fortune popular at

the time. The Ghost says that “the whole ear of Denmark/Is by a forgèd process of my

death/Rankly abused” (I. v. 37-9). Hamlet later employs the same metaphor:

Rosencrantz. My lord, you must tell us where the body is,

And go with us to the king.

Hamlet. The body is with the king, but the king is not with

The body. The king is a thing –

 Belova 57

Guildenstern. A thing, my lord?

Hamlet. Of nothing. Bring me to him… (IV. ii. 22-7)

Rosencrantz seeks to find out where Hamlet hid Polonius’ dead body, which makes Hamlet think

of the Ghost, a thing representing no-thing, and his father’s body, reversing the organic metaphor

back to the ontological matter and reminding the audience of Marcellus’ words in the very

beginning of the play, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (I. v. 65). Hamlet admits

that ‘the body is with the king,’ that is Denmark nominally has a king, but ‘the king is not with

the body’ – the true king is dethroned, detached from his people, and materially detached from

his physical body. This discourse is, however, most prominent in Rosencrantz’s speech:

…The cease of majesty

Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw

What’s near it with it. It is a massy wheel,

Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,

To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things

Are mortised and adjoined; which when it falls,

Each small annexment, petty consequence,

Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone

Did the King sigh, but with a general groan. (III. iii. 11-23)

These words are not merely realistic: they point both to the beginning and the end of the

play. The words address the crime, which already took place, and as such, they become a

metaphor for the final massacre, where the play proves that the king's murder devours all next to

him. At the same time, they foretell the end of the play, where both Claudius and Hamlet will be

deceased, and the entire social body will be in danger of being swallowed up by the violence of
 Belova 58

the final scene, for violence “every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to

involve the whole social body” (Girard 15). Guildenstern’s suggestion occurs to be sinister in

this light, foreshadowing Hamlet’s speech on worms feeding on the king’s body:

Most holy and religious fear it is

To keep those many many bodies safe

That live and feed upon your majesty. (III. iii. 8-10)

Claudius defines Hamlet’s madness as a dangerous hazard, which threatens him and,

hence, the entire state. Hamlet does the same by accusing Claudius of polluting nature with the

‘unnatural’ murder. It could be inferred that Hamlet is finally resolute not to die, but in dying to

take revenge, because he has won or assumed heaven’s support. Thus, Hamlet’s phrase

“prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell” (II. ii. 573) does not stand for Ghost’s dubious

nature. De facto, hell in this phrase rather stands for the ghost, while heaven might be connected

to the idea of crime as communal pollution, which “should the criminal long remained

unpunished, threatened to bring divine wrath upon the entire commonweal” (Broude 48).

Another valuable idea expressed by the clowns goes back, again, to the discourse on

frameworks. The clown regards gallows as a frame that purifies evil with evil, i.e., that does

good. Another clown clarifies, however, that the gallows cannot be a better frame than a church,

meaning that the state punishment cannot substitute repentance or divine vengeance. By

suggesting, nevertheless, that the grave-maker is the best builder, clowns refer not only to death

but also to a private revenger. This discussion might lead to accusations of stretching the

metaphor, but the play approves of this argument. Claudius, for instance, suggests that bribery

was a widespread deal, which discredited justice and urged private revenge:

In the corrupted currents of this world

 Belova 59

Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,

And oft ‘tis seen the wicked prize itself

Buys out the law… (III. iii. 57-60)

More importantly, however, responding to Laertes’ readiness to take revenge in a church,

Claudius insists that “No place indeed should murder sanctuarize/Revenge should have no

bounds” (IV. vii. 104-5). Within the play, this means that revenge must have no boundaries, but,

on the metatheatrical level, this rather implies that neither church nor state law could purify

private revenge, and thus the only frame for it - is the grave. Polonius asks Hamlet if he would

“walk out of the air,” to which Hamlet responds, “Into my grave,” and Polonius remarks,

“Indeed, that’s out of the air/How pregnant sometimes his replies are!” (II. ii. 206-9). Claudius

is, to a certain degree, correct by saying that Hamlet is diseased. He, however, mistakes Hamlet’s

feigned madness for his true state. Hamlet is infected, but not with lunacy: he is contaminated

with the violence of revenge, which the play will eventually attempt to contain. This reciprocal

violence begins to constitute itself in the deaths of Polonius, Guildenstern, and Rosencrantz,

which, if observed closely, all represented Hamlet’s re-action.

Going back to Hamlet’s sluggish investigation, Lorna Hutson observes that “unusual care

has been taken, in the emplotment of Hamlet, to exploit the potential inherent in dramatizing a

number of issues … as uncertain issues of fact rather than, as in the example of Orestes, an

ethical issue of which the facts are already certain” (141). Hutson wittily points out that, unlike

The Spanish Tragedy, where Horatio’s death is a fact, which requires details, in Hamlet, the

murder is only an accusation, which requires proof in order to become a fact. Hamlet, thus,

decides to stage a play to prove Claudius’ guilt:

…I’ll have these players

 Belova 60

Play something like the murder of my father

Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks,

I’ll tent him to the quick. If he but blench,

I know my course… (II. ii. 583-7)

The scene including the Mousetrap is structured like a trial. The play employs a, then,

common belief that a theatrical performance can disturb the mind of a guilty person to the extent

that he will be prompted to profess his crime. Here, Shakespeare anticipates modern criticism,

which might propose that as much as the Ghost might be wholly imaginary, Hamlet’s inner

voice, so much Hamlet’s judgment of Claudius’ reaction might be deemed fictitious. Therefore,

Hamlet invites Horatio to be a second juror:

There is a play tonight before the King.

One scene of it comes near the circumstance

Which I have told thee of my father’s death.

I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,

Even with the very comment of thy soul

Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt

Do not itself unkennel in one speech,

..................................

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face;

And, after, we will both our judgments join

To censure of his seeming. (III. ii. 70-6, 80-2)

Following Hutson's argument, this scene is a jury trial, where the function of the jury is to

provide a partial verdict on a matter of facts. Usually, the legal decision of a judge, whose word
 Belova 61

is the last on determining the measure for punishment, follows the jury’s decision. Hamlet’s idea

was successful, and Claudius was convicted for the crime. The justice becomes performative

once again: the scene, staging a play-within-a-play, takes a form of a trial. Furthermore,

Claudius’ guilt, indeed, reveals itself in one speech, although, the dialogue between the player

King and the player Queen has already previously disturbed the king. On second thought,

however, what discloses Claudius’ guilt is not the speech itself, but his reaction to it, which

Hamlet and Horatio settled to observe. It is this speech-act that transforms suspicion into a fact,

and, although the performance alters the identity of the murderer, the murder materializes into

reality. Hamlet, as he puts it, knows his course – Claudius is sentenced to death, although the

sentence comes from the jury, not from the judge.

The play continues to imitate the legal procedure: a confession of the sentenced party

follows the trial. Even though the murder has taken place, the knowledge and reality of it,

Claudius thinks, are limited solely to him. The structure of the play denies Claudius the regular

confession with a priest and forces him to repent in solitude,

…Pray can I not.

Though inclination be as sharp as will,

My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent…

..................................

…Help, angels! Make assay.

Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings of steel,

Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.

All may be well. (III. iii. 38-40, 69-72)

The king seems to express a sincere inclination to repent, at the same time, however,
 Belova 62

forcing himself to perform it physically because his body resists his predisposition. The

equivocal sincerity evaporates once he concludes:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go. (III. iii. 97-8)

The irony of the scene lies in a fact that Claudius pronounces these two lines precisely at

the moment when Hamlet has just left the stage. Hamlet, who is resolved to execute Claudius,

finds him at prayer and defines the moment as inappropriate for execution because his father was

murdered “even in the blossoms of my sin” (I. v. 76), and killing Claudius after he has repented,

“When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?” is but “hire and salary” (III. iii. 86, 79). Hamlet’s

attempt at imitating balanced justice, finally, fails. First, because the execution takes place

precisely after the confession and since Hamlet believes Claudius has professed his sins and

repented – this was, in fact, the most suitable moment to implement his death sentence.

Second, the play introduces an economic metaphor, where murder and revenge stand for

‘hire and salary,’ respectively. The revenger, however, seeks to excel his offender: Hamlet

rejects a metaphor that creates a balance between the murder and the punishment. Linda

Woodbridge underlines, “conceiving of revenge as a debt helps make sense of a revenger’s

desire to exceed the crime he avenges. Muir notes the widespread idea that “escalation of

retaliatory killings” is “a kind of interest payment”” (84). Unlike Claudius, who kills the king in

his sleep and sends his soul to Purgatory, “till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/are

burnt and purged away” (I. v. 12-3); Hamlet desires to:

Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hint.

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,

Or in th’incestrous pleasure of his bed,

 Belova 63

At gaming swearing, or about some act

That has no relish of salvation in’t –

Then trip him that his heels may kick at heaven,

And that his soul may be as damned and black

As hell, whereto it goes… (III. iii. 89-95)

Hamlet seeks to kill Claudius under aggravating circumstances to ensure that his soul will

be damned and sent straight to hell. Hamlet’s subtlety in exercising revenge, however, denies

him any possibility of going back to assume the face of balanced justice. The more hypocritical

then appears his later attempt to propose himself as a punisher of public wrongs, since his choice

for violent revenge has already established him as a violator himself. The audience, however, as

Woodbridge noted, no matter how strongly it condemns private vengeance, is still conditioned to

conceive of private revenge as of a victim’s reaction. Shakespeare approves of this as well:

Claudius. He’s loved of the distracted multitude,

Who like not in their judgement but their eyes;

And where ‘tis so, th’ offender’s scourge is weighed,

But never the offence… (IV. iii. 4-7)

Claudius’ words turn into Shakespeare’s metatheatrical commentary on the audience’s

perception of a revenge play. The word ‘distracted’ previously appears in another metatheatrical

phrase “this distracted globe” (I. v. 97): ‘multitude,’ therefore, represents the audience in the

Globe, which is prone to concentrate on the punishment of a villain, but never considers ‘the

offence,’ which this punishment, de facto, represents. Hamlet, who realizes that he can no longer

reside in his refuge of madness, not only accepts his role as a revenger but, like Hieronimo,

assumes God’s agency in seeking not only to deprive Claudius of his life but to condemn his
 Belova 64

soul. The protagonist is aware that the audience is enchanted both by his witty madness, his

reluctance to act, and his victimized character. Hamlet, therefore, tricks the audience along with

many literary critics to believe that he is a noble avenger.

This understanding might shed some light on Hamlet’s inward state, which so many

critics wrestle with. One of Hamlet’s most famous statements is that he has that in him, “which

passeth show” (I. ii. 85), something that he refuses to reveal, and no one else can perform.

Hutson suggests that Hamlet is a beguiling character not because of his statement, but precisely

because he refuses to be investigated by other characters.

Hamlet’s interiority is compelling not because he states in soliloquy that he has ‘that

within which passeth show’, but because many of his speeches to other characters in the

play are reflexively marked by resistance to the same forensic habit of inference that had

already, as early as 1600, come to be associated with the mimesis of the dramatic

narrative. (Hutson 145)

By nesting within Hamlet’s character that, which supposedly cannot be played,

Shakespeare forces other characters to continually try and discover that “true state” (III. i. 10).

Shakespeare creates an unattainable object of desire within Hamlet, presenting his inner state as

some kind of quintessential essence, which can be represented neither in speech nor in action.

This is, perhaps, why Hamlet’s character is so appealing not only to other characters, but to the

audience, and, equally, to the literary critics. Hamlet, however, calls the man “quintessence of

dust” (II. ii. 306), while the word ‘dust’ throughout the play refers to dead bodies and the earth,

into which they all ultimately dissolve. The only possible interpretation is, thus, that the thing

that cannot be played or imitated is the soul, which, in religious terms, is the essence of a man.

Although, this means to hover on a metatheatrical level, where the theatrum mundi metaphor
 Belova 65

operates to engage the audience, and conflate the virtual reality of the theatre with the, likewise,

virtual reality of the audience. Within the play, however, Hamlet’s true state could be explained

otherwise. It is not before the fifth act that Hamlet discloses some of the truth: “For though I am

not splenative and rash/Yet have I something in me dangerous” (V. i. 251-2). What Hamlet has

in him is what the play bestows him with: the seed of reciprocal violence, the knowledge of his

role and its fate, and the freedom to perform. All these are, indeed, dangerous and, therefore, are

restricted to one character. So, although, as Abel suggests, there is a competition of playwrights

in the play, for “almost every important character acts at some moment like a playwright

employing a playwright’s consciousness of drama to impose a certain posture of attitude on

another,” Hamlet is the only one, who is allowed to possess more knowledge than any other (46).

Claudius. So is it, if thou knew’st our purposes.

Hamlet. I see a cherub that sees them… (IV. iii. 49-50)

Since Hamlet’s words do not imply any proverbial expression and the only metaphysical

agent in the play, which Hamlet sees, is the ghost, one can infer that cherub is merely Hamlet’s

other name for it. The name fits perfectly both because Hamlet attempts to convince everyone

that his actions are shaped by divine ordinance and because cherubins were angels “reputed to

excel specially in knowledge” (OED 2.b). The knowledge, which Hamlet was bound to acquire

from the ghost since “his predicament is imposed on him, and to know this is part of his plight,”

grants Hamlet his theatrical double-consciousness as that, which others, indeed, cannot imitate

(Kerrigan 12). This knowledge also allows the revenger to enjoy “the role no one gave him,” the

role of a mad man, which creates for him “a refuge from the seriousness of his task” (Abel 52).

Another question which literary critics savor is whether Hamlet’s madness is authentic or

does he essentially become distracted in his attempt to perform madness. In this respect, Mark
 Belova 66

Robson provides the most eloquent and ingenious explanation. While analyzing Richard II,

Robson shrewdly observes: “The madness lies in the misrecognition of the role as role, in a total

identification with the part that one plays within a social order such that one believes that one

“is” a king in some essential way. In other words, this form of madness involves a forgetting of

the relation between king and subjects, so that the king is seen to be king outside of this relation”

(64). The play leaves no doubt that Hamlet willingly decides to put on his ‘antic disposition,’ it

shows further, too, that Hamlet does not become mad, “that I essentially am not in madness/But

mad in craft” (III. iv. 175-6). Speaking of Richard II, which is evoked several times throughout

the play, Hamlet portrays its protagonist’s feigned madness as an imitation of Richard’s

authentic one. Richard mistakes his role for his ontological essence: when he is “unking’d by

Bolingbroke,” bereft of his only identity, he thinks he was reduced into “nothing” (Richard II V.

v. 37-8). In Hamlet, however, both the protagonist and several other characters in the play

recognize Hamlet’s madness as a craft. Interestingly, the characters who find ‘method’ in

Hamlet’s madness: Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern – all die in their attempts to inquire

into it. Hamlet, unlike Richard, exploits his assumed madness both in order to separate reality

around him from hypocrisy and to veil his true identity as a revenger.

As all roads lead to Rome, all discourses and ideas discussed above find their epitome in

the last scene of the play, which binds them all together. As in The Spanish Tragedy, in Hamlet,

the wave of reciprocal violence in the last scene sweeps the entire Danish court resulting in a

massacre. Following Kyd’s play, too, Hamlet’s last scene attempts to present itself as an

execution. Once all action ceases, Horatio declares to the newcomers that he, as the only witness,

will testify of everything that has happened. While he tells the story, he desires the dead bodies

scattered all over the stage to be presented as if on a scaffold,

 Belova 67

You from the Polack wars, and you from England,

Are here arrived, give order that these bodies

High on a stage be placèd to the view. (V. ii. 329-31)

Shakespeare’s play also provides Machiavellian revenge. All revengers and victims are

dead: there is no one left to blame, and the violence crosses itself out in a web of injuries and

retaliations. The only victim that stays out of this mass violence is Ophelia. The present

discussion purposefully omitted her suicide, for the dilemma her actions lay the foundation to is

beyond the scope of this chapter. The only relevant fact about her death, for the sake of the

present argument, is that she falls prey to the play’s purpose of containing violence. Whether, as

some critics suggest, Ophelia takes revenge on Hamlet by enacting suicide, whether she drowns

herself out of grief or madness, and whether she does so ‘wittingly’ or not – her suicide

interrupts the chain of revenge. For those, who might suggest that Ophelia’s revenge on Hamlet

might, in fact, align suicide with revengeful violence, I presently remark that Hamlet is a

revenger and being avenged twice, both by Ophelia and Laertes, the play merely compels

reciprocal violence to ‘self-slaughter.’

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, among other things, introduces an additional reason to assassinate

all members of the court, which will shed light on Gertrude’s seemingly unnecessary death. The

Spanish Tragedy left one man alive in the Spanish court – the king, whose potential for

becoming a revenger or a victim was abolished by the play. Gertrude, the queen of Denmark,

could have, analogously, remained alive without jeopardizing play’s effort to restrain violence.

However, the play, which is “a register of the collective experience of an English nation facing

the imminent passing of the aged Queen Elizabeth,” seeks to encircle its audience into the
 Belova 68

tragedy (Hunt 30). Dying, Hamlet invites the audience from “outside the deadly circle of the

tragedy” into the play (Righter 164).

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,

That are but mutes or audience to this act. (V. ii. 326-7)

By leaving the Danish throne empty, the last scene of the play, too, exploits the organic

metaphor. The scene leaves the nation without a king, i.e., stages a decapitation of the social

body – that is precisely why the scene delivers itself as an execution. The execution will not be

proper, however, if Gertrude stays alive. Thus, the ‘Wretched Queen’ dies as well, the only

victim in the scene, whose death is somewhat circumstantial. Gertrude’s death turns into an

appalling metaphor, which promises to, inevitably, literalize itself in the real world of the

audience.

Massacre, execution, and performance are once again commingled merging three

manifestations of violent, balanced, and performative justice into one appearance. While the

violent justice of revenge is, to all appearances, circumscribed, the dubious nature of balanced

justice in the play calls for an immediate clarification of facts. Kyd, in The Spanish Tragedy,

employs dramatic irony casting the judge for a revenger’s role, denying him that, which he

always assured other people would get. Shakespeare, however, denies his protagonist even the

thought of accessing the legal procedure by turning the only evidence of the crime to be a

testimony of a dead victim, the ghost, and limiting the knowledge of this evidence to Hamlet.

Prosopopoeia, “personification, the making of what is absent to speak,” is not merely a

“rhetorical device behind all haunting.” Steven Greenblatt proceeds to pinpoint that this device

leads to ideological struggle “that turned negotiations with the dead from the institutional process

governed by the church to a poetic process governed by guilt, projection, and imagination” (251-
 Belova 69

2). By renouncing the state law, the play’s only way to give balanced justice a passageway is for

Hamlet to become ‘heaven’s scourge and minister,’ for the play still operates on a principle of

communal pollution, which cannot wait for divine Providence. Hamlet agrees to take revenge, as

the ghost has commanded him, but he seeks to do so on his conditions, trying to dramatize a

devil into an angel turning devil’s deceit into a divine ordinance. The ghost might claim that it

came from Purgatory, but, as both Greenblatt and Campbell persuasively remark, such a ghost

would never beg for revenge. The fact that ghost’s narrative turns out to be true does not grant it

more credibility because the confirmation, which Hamlet gets, prompts him to his revenge.

The point cannot, it seems to me, be too much emphasized that the ghosts which the

Catholics recognized as coming from purgatory to ask help from the living in the

expiation of their sins did not demand revenge, but only masses, alms, prayers and

fasting. (Campbell 295)

The impossibility of a legal procedure forces Hamlet to employ theatre as a means of

facilitating his revenge. The scene of a play-within-a-play is staged like a trial, turning the

dramatic performance into a performative justice. The play-within-a-play, however, is similar to

an ambush. As a criminal caught at the crime scene, Claudius is caught in the act (of murder) –

in his reaction to the play. As mentioned previously, however, Claudius’ guilt reveals itself in a

speech-act, it is triggered by “textual interpolation, as a sententious dialogue between Gonzago

and his queen, followed by the black magic of Lucianus’s monologue,” which finally coerces

Claudius to act upon it (Hubert 104). It is, thus, not only that performance presents itself as

judicial, but the language that underwent the process of semiosis becomes performative and

transforms reality by turning the uncertain testimony of a dramatic narrative into an actual

murder. Hamlet, too, in a sense, violates decorum because he wittingly stages that, which will
 Belova 70

disturb the audience, for, as in Soliman and Perseda, in the Mousetrap as well, everything that

seems illusory proves to be ipso facto real. Thus, Hamlet, like Hieronimo, turns words into

weapons, more precisely into ‘daggers,’ which like poison, enter Claudius’ and Gertrude’s ears,

marking the beginning of the end.

By using theatrical performance and its language to offend the audience, Hamlet turns the

scene into a mock trial. The protagonist’s desire, further, to not only take Claudius’ life but also

to condemn his soul, establishes Hamlet as a revenger, an agent exercising nothing but violent

justice. Moreover, although, as Hieronimo, Hamlet never gets to enact the revenge he wishes for

– it is his desire to outstrip the offender in violence that condemns his soul. Hamlet can pretend

to be the instrument in God’s hands if he kills Claudius, but by wishing to judge his soul, Hamlet

intrudes upon that kind of vengeance, which only God can exercise.

In Kyd’s play, the desire for violence, be it balanced justice or a violent one propels the

action of the play and constitutes itself in Hieronimo’s speeches. In Hamlet, however, it is very

easy to lose track of Hamlet’s desire toward his ‘blunted purpose.’ The key to resolve this, too,

lies in Hamlet’s madness. Hamlet uses his madness, along with that something within him,

which becomes an object of desire both for the audience and for other characters, to transform

the desire for violence, or, at least, to, temporarily, redirect the impetus of the play. In wishing to

find out what kind of essence Hamlet conceals, everyone in the Globe pushes the desire for

violence to the background. The audience’s desire to investigate Hamlet’s character can be

understood through the notion of mimetic desire. By forcing other characters in the play to

investigate Hamlet and his madness, Shakespeare’s play instigates the same desire in its

audience.
 Belova 71

Once his basic needs are satisfied…man is subject to intense desires, though he may not

know exactly for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks

and which some other person seems to possess…It is not through words, therefore, but by

the example of his own desire that the model conveys to the subject the supreme

desirability of the object. (Girard 155)

Hamlet, indeed, claims to possess that which cannot be imitated, some kind of

unattainable essence, which causes other characters to compete in their attempts to acquire this

object. At the same time, these characters become a model for the audience, which, therefore,

develops the same desire to discover that object. Furthermore, there are competition and rivalry

over this object of desire between the play’s characters and the theatre audience. The former tries

to seek the object out by interrogating Hamlet, while the latter tends to analyze Hamlet’s

monologues. Hamlet, thus, effectively redirects everyone’s attention from revenge onto himself.

But, the play invariably forces Hamlet to do what he must do. After all, Hamlet succeeded even

if imaginatively to separate his ‘performance’ from his ‘doing:’ being engaged almost the entire

play in his performance of madness and reluctance, what is left for him is ‘to do’ the revenge.

This is why the revenge on Claudius seems so uncertain and indecisive. Hamlet has exhausted

his performative potential and merely implements the act, which he has been bound to.

The last scene shows a duel, which turns the stage itself into a battlefield. While Horatio

wants the bodies to be presented as an admonition, Fortinbras gives a different order:

Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. (V. ii. 355-6)

At the end of the play, the stage purifies itself of all evil: theatre claims that its stage is

not a suitable space for violence. The bodies are taken off the stage to fill in the graves. It is now
 Belova 72

theatre that seeks to vindicate itself. “Just before its final dissolution, the play world,” through

Hamlet’s last words, “has reached out to encompass the theatre audience.” Shakespeare’s play

endangers the real world of the audience as “an affirmation of the power of the stage” (Righter

164). It merely holds the mirror up to nature – the theatre deflects the violence, which the society

imposes onto it. So, unlike The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s play leaves no apparent victims

of revenge, which deceives the audience into believing that the violence is circumscribed and the

equilibrium restored, “with Fortinbras on the verge of assuming the crown of Denmark” (Hunt

30). The play, however, had already shown the potency of theatrical illusion to become a reality.

By staging the death of the queen “in a theatre whose very name, The Globe, implies the play

metaphor,” the play victimizes its audience, by proposing that what has happened on the stage,

despite inaccuracy, might be the reality yet to come, taking into account that the society itself is

the source of all evil (Righter 164). Theatre satisfies the audience’s desire for justice, show and

violence, at the same time, obtaining justice for itself by pouring violence back onto the

audience. One can, therefore, readily observe why Shakespeare’s play is already the one fully

conscious of its genre.

 Belova 73

Conclusive meta-commentary: John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge

If Shakespeare’s Hamlet was said to be the conscious play of the genre, John Marston’s

Antonio’s Revenge should acquire a meta-play status among other revenge tragedies. On the one

hand, Marston created an engaging and unified plot, which the audience can follow and enjoy.

On the other hand, Antonio’s Revenge characters are obsessed with performance: metatheatrical

and intertextual references affect both the speech and the actions, continually keeping the

audience alert. The present chapter will show that Marston’s play has many elements in common

with both Kyd’s and Shakespeare’s plays: the structure, which attracts the audience. At the same

time, however, it will account for the play’s overt metatheatricality and intertextuality, which, in

unison, can be granted an enlightening purpose.

Richard Hornby compares the spectators’ perception of art with the process of selective

attention, which they use in their daily lives. Hornby explains that our perception of life is

always fragmented and is marked by a constant tendency to create ‘wholes,’ although we can

never achieve the creation of a totalizing unity. Unlike reality, however, Hornby claims that

theatrical performance provides the audience with a unified and harmonious whole, which is one

of the reasons we enjoy drama.

It is pleasure giving…because it presents us with a unified, coherent vision. We enjoy it

because it is comprehensible…In the theatre…the stage itself provides it with a frame of

 Belova 74

coherence. We know that everything we see on the stage is there to contribute to our

understanding, and that…nothing that we need to know is left out. (Hornby 111)

In this sense, Antonio’s Revenge is not merely a unified whole – it is a mosaic made of numerous

fragments taken from other revenge tragedies. Marston’s play is not a poor parody or a bad

imitation; it is, instead, a cunning exaggeration of intertextuality. The following speech by Piero,

for instance, encapsulates the re-membering of several revenge tragedies together:

Look I not now like an inamorate?

Poison the father, butcher the son,

And marry the mother, ha! (I. i. 104-6)3

Like in Hamlet, Piero kills a duke-father and seeks to marry the duchess, like in The Spanish

Tragedy, he butchers the son: the phrase is perceived as divided commentaries, however, because

Piero’s victims, Feliche and Andrugio, are not from the same family. Like the victims of Hamlet

and The Spanish Tragedy, Piero’s victims have nothing in common, except for being now killed

by one villain. Such instances within Antonio’s Revenge, where the playwright conflated a

number of plays, were meant to disturb the audience’s attention, to make it remember other

plays, and draw these memories into the dramatic illusion. Hornby suggests that “real” reality is

always at the background of all drama. However, when the play seeks to become a meta-

commentary, what it essentially tries to do is to set its genre and medium as just another

background, turning the play both into “experimental metatheatre” and “socio-political realism”

(Macrae 95). Although, such intertextual references alone would be less operative without the

properly metatheatrical moments like Balurdo’s entrance with “a beard, half off, half on” (II. i.

20-1), or Pandulpho referring to himself as “boy that acts a tragedy…and raves but passion” (IV.

3
All excerpts from John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge are quoted from Five Revenge Tragedies, edited by
Emma Smith, Penguin Classics, 2012, pp. 169-240.
 Belova 75

v. 50-1), denoting what he really is – “a child actor playing the part of an old man” (Baines 289).

By entangling other revenge tragedies into his play, Marston sought to present it as an exemplar,

to establish a strong metonymic relationship between Antonio’s Revenge and the genre as a

whole, which sets a background for his play. By using both intertextuality and metatheatricality,

which are not always clearly distinguished from one another, Marston activates the audience’s

perception and sets the entire genre under scrutiny.

Other revenge tragedies depict revenge’s effects on characters within the play, but

Marston links the visual and verbal extremes of revenge to metatheatrical concerns. This

mimetic response to the genre is why Marston’s characters speak and act as if familiar

with other revenge tragedies. (Macrae 95)

Macrae suggests that an intense rivalry between the playwrights marked the end of the sixteenth

and beginning of the seventeenth century. The critic creates a parallel between this rivalry and

the competition of the characters from different plays to outstrip their fictional counterparts in

speech and performance. This is why he explains, Marston’s characters act as if they know they

are not the only inhabitants of the world-stage. It should be added, however, that by positioning

his characters as matchless in their roles, Marston did not merely enter the playwrights’

competition to excel Kyd or Shakespeare in rhetoric. Barbara Baines rightly clarifies, “By calling

attention to his artifice, Marston distances his audience from the dramatic illusion and thus

makes possible a degree of emotional objectivity” (289). The intertextuality of Marston’s play

and his characters’ desire to excel others, who played the same role or will play the same role

they do, are closely linked. By bragging out, characters like Piero and Antonio put the very role

they are playing, say, a revenger or a victim, on display and force the spectators to not only

evaluate characters’ skills but to reexamine the perception of the dramatic role itself.
 Belova 76

Pandulpho. Woe for my dear, dear son!

Maria. Woe for my dear, dear husband!

Mellida. Woe for my dear, dear love!

Antonio. Woe for me all, close all your woes in me… (II. iii. 70-3)

Antonio, for instance, is deemed to play an ultimate victim of the Elizabethan stage. Antonio

here offers to become an epitome of woe for every character not only in Antonio’s Revenge but

in every play ever. When someone like Pandulpho assumes the role of the victim with the utmost

rhetorical rigor, Antonio perceives such an attempt as a threat:

I scorn’t that any wretched should survive,

Outmounting me in that superlative,

Most miserable, most unmatched in woe. (IV. v. 57-9)

Although, Antonio’s rhetorical display and vehement perseverance of becoming this

quintessential victim gradually turn into blasphemy.

I’ll not blaspheme…

....................................
I am a poor, poor orphan; a weak, weak child,

The wreck of splitted fortune, the very ooze,

The quicksand that devours all misery.

....................................
My breast is Golgotha, grave for the dead. (IV. iv. 11, 14-16, 23)

Despite his promise, Antonio tends even to excel Christ. He presents his breast as a place,

where not only people but Christ as well suffered and died, metaphorically enclosing all death

and suffering in him as Christ was an ultimate sacrificial victim atoning all past and future sin.

This speech, however, is not the only instance of such desire. Earlier in the play, Antonio recites

Seneca’s De Providentia (originally in Latin): “Endure bravely. In this you may surpass God. He
 Belova 77

is exempt from suffering, while you are superior to it […] scorn pain; either it will end or you

[…] scorn fortune: it has no weapon to strike your soul” (II. iii. 46-9). Antonio’s attitude,

however, is artistic: he does not seek to endure suffering; if there is no way to escape the role (of

victim and suffering), Antonio wants to excel in it as to surpass God himself.

Mellida…O world, thou art too subtle,

For honest natures to converse withal.

Therefore I’ll leave thee. Farewell, mart of woe… (IV. iii. 179-81)

Mellida, dying, proclaims that she is leaving the marketplace of woe. This marketplace

represents the Marston’s play, the revenge tragedy genre, and the real world of Elizabethan

England as well. Thus, by making Antonio the ultimate victim, Marston wittily employs an

underlying economic metaphor: if Antonio is the best in woe, he will equally be the best in

revenge, because he will have the most to payback. No matter how extravagantly Piero presents

himself as “great in blood,” “unequalled in revenge,” and “unpeered” in mischief, he is destined

to lose his role because it is Antonio’s revenge (I. i. 17-8, 10). Victim and villain (revenger) are

always placed on the same scales, and while justice seeks to equalize the victim with the

offender through punishment, “Antonio’s Revenge reminds its audiences that no matter how

brutal his enemy, the revenger will ultimately do worse” (Condon 62).

In order to become a revenger, however, Antonio has to discover the offender and to

accept the new role. The protagonist, as Hieronimo and Hamlet before him, acquires his role

unconsciously first and structurally as a missed encounter. This time, however, it is played out

literally on the unconscious level, in his dream and not in his speech. Hamlet’s ‘bad dreams’ turn

into Antonio’s ‘horrid dreams’:

Three parts of night were swallowed in the gulf

 Belova 78

Of ravenous time, when to my slumbering powers,

.......................................
Two meagre ghosts made apparition:

The one’s breast seemed fresh paunched with bleeding wounds,

The other ghost assumed my father’s shape.

.......................................
Both cried ‘Revenge!’… (I. iii. 40-5)

Andrugio’s and Feliche’s ghosts, who will reappear to Antonio later on in the third act to

demand revenge, visit him right after Piero has committed the murders. Although, as Piero

correctly pinpoints, “yet no creature dream ‘tis my revenge” (I. i. 88): the ghosts have already

cast Antonio for the role of the revenger, without revealing, however, the identity of the

murderer. A few moments after sharing his dream, Antonio and others discover the dead bodies,

and Antonio proclaims: “Why now the womb of mischief is delivered/Of the prodigious issue of

the night” (I. v. 27-8). Antonio’s stratagem, however, is not to investigate or suspect others for

murder, but to excel in performing the role of the victim, which will cast him later on as the

fittest for revenge. After Antonio accepts his role consciously in the third act and kills Julio, he

enters the stage as Piero has entered it at the beginning of the play, “Enter Antonio, his arms

bloody, [with] a torch and a poniard” (III. v. 13-4). By establishing this apparent parallel

between Piero and Antonio, Marston not only shows that Antonio has transformed into a

murderer but also that at this moment Antonio inflicted Piero with an equal injury. However,

Andrugio’s ghost reminds Antonio, reviving the revenge tragedy maxim (originally in Latin):

“you do not avenge crimes unless you surpass them” (III. i. 50).

Naturally, following just another cliché of the genre, Antonio expresses his reluctance to

play the role he was cast for by suggesting that it would be better for him to become a fool:

…Had heaven been kind,

 Belova 79

Creating me an honest senseless dolt,

A good poor fool…

....................................
I should not know what ‘twere to lose a father.

I should be dead of sense, to view defame

Blur my bright love. I could not thus run mad,

As one confounded in a maze of mischief,

.......................................
I should not shoot mine eyes into the earth,

Poring for mischief, that might counterpoise. (IV. i. 48-50, 52-5, 57-8)

While Antonio’s reluctance is sincere, it is mainly represented in the above-quoted speech, and

even here he does not merely wish to have never experienced what he had but to be cast for a

different role, which would entail a different posture. Unlike Hieronimo and Hamlet, who spent

half a play or even the entire play trying to oppose their fate, “Antonio…accepts without

question the mandate for revenge” (Baines 285).

Lo, thus I heave my blood-dyed hands to heaven:

Even like insatiate hell, still crying: more.

My heart hath thirsting dropsies after gore.

Sound peace and rest to church, night ghosts and graves;

Blood cries for blood, and murder murder craves. (III. iii. 67-71)

Occasionally Antonio and Andrugio’s ghost claim the support of providential powers.

Such statements, however, are avowedly hypocritical both because Antonio expresses an ardent

desire for violence and because these claims inhabit the context, which devalues them. Phillip

Ayers suggests that “it is essential that religious imagery should attach itself to Antonio,”

because “Marston’s audience is in a similar position to that of Kyd’s, ready to see private
 Belova 80

revenge as a justifiable answer to the evil forces at large in the world of the play” (365, 361). The

imagery is there, but “the evidence suggests that Marston is deliberately seeking to shock in such

instances, implying that both Antonio and the ghost assume a religious sanction to which they

have no right” (Ayers 370):

Antonio… Gracious, o bounteous heaven!

I do adore thy justice. Venit in nostras manus

Tandem vindicta, venit et tota quidem. (III. iii. 6-8)

These words are deemed shocking not only because Antonio slaughters Julio the next moment

but also because the word ‘adore’ had already been used in two additional instances in the play

by Piero. This word, thus, appears only three times in the play, but it linguistically transfers the

villainy from Piero to Antonio. Piero uses the word twice in the following statements: “adore my

topless villainy” (I. i. 85) and “our friends we should affect, justice adore” (II. ii. 50). Piero

loves justice, because he manipulates it towards his villainous purposes, and by doing so, abuses

it. While Piero, however, assumed the legal justice, and it was the state law, which he used to his

interests; Antonio abuses the divine justice by using it as a cover-up.

[Marston] perceived that the source of the dramatic power of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and

Shakespeare's Titus is the tension they evoke between the emotional response and the

moral judgment of the audience. Focusing on this tension, Marston deliberately drives a

wedge between the audience's emotional response to and its moral judgment of the

revenge protagonist. (Baines 279)

It cannot be emphasized enough, however, that it is not only Antonio, who is judged by

the audience, but the role of the revenge protagonist itself that is reconsidered by the spectators.
 Belova 81

Moreover, while Marston’s play deliberately takes the genre’s clichés to their extremes, it also

defines the audience as an active agent in performance:

Yet here’s the prop that doth support our hopes:

When our scenes falter, or inventions halts,

Your favour will give crutches to our faults. (Prologue 31-3)

It is the spectators’ attitude, which might approve of or condemn the theatrical performance; the

same attitude, which Andrugio’s ghost expresses in watching “the last act of my son’s revenge”

(V. i. 11). Marston sets the ghost as the audience to revenge, “Here will I sit, spectator of

revenge/And glad my ghost in anguish of my foe” (V. v. 21-2). By placing the ghost to watch the

act of revenge together with the audience, Marston forces the Elizabethan spectator to compare

his judgment of the scene and the reaction to it with those of the ghost. The more disturbing then

become ghost’s references to heaven’s justice.

Antonio. Murder and torture: no prayers, no entreats!

........................................
Andrugio. Blest be thy hand. I taste the joys of heaven,

Viewing my son triumph in his black blood. (V. v. 31, 35-6)

........................................
Antonio. Now, therefore, pity, piety, remorse

Be aliens to our thoughts: grim fiery-eyed rage

Possess us wholly. (V. v. 60-2)

The appalling violence of the scene is intensified because, once again, the audience is

forced to revive in its memory Hieronimo and Lavinia, and all cruelty associated with The

Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus. Antonio and his revenge comrades deny Piero any

possibility of repentance; the fact that goes against the conception of public revenge, which

frames the scene. The ghost’s sincere blessings are inappropriate and might perturb the audience.
 Belova 82

At the same time, however, the audience feels equally triumphant at the villain’s punishment,

and it is the emotional response, in which Andrugio’s ghost and Elizabethan audience are alike.

Marston, again, reminds his spectator that Antonio is not the only one who is blessed by the

ghost: “’Tis done, and now my soul shall sleep in rest/Sons that revenge their father’s blood are

blest” (V. v. 85-6). Therefore, be it Hamlet or Antonio, or any past or future revenger-son on the

Elizabethan stage – Marston’s play approves of them all no matter how bloodthirsty they are.

Finally, reconsidering the claims of Richard Hornby, one can see that Marston wittily

binds metatheatrical and intertextual elements, and by doing so compels the theatre audience to

reexamine its own perception of the revenge protagonist and revenge tragedies more generally,

especially because the senators equally applaud the “gory spectacle” and bless other revenge

characters as well:

Blessed be you all, and may your honours live

Religiously held sacred, even for ever and ever. (V. vi. 1, 11-2)

The shocking quality of the Marston’s play goes hand in hand with his criticism of the

audience’s attitude towards the genre. By leaving the revengers alive and fortunate, Marston

goes against the conventions of the genre, which catches even the main revenger himself by

surprise: “We are amazed at your benignity” (V. vi. 30). By setting the violent revenge within a

frame of a public one, the play stages murder as a just response of the victim. Antonio, however,

refuses to admit that all his efforts epitomize in vain. Once the senators announce that evidence

was found of Piero’s villainies against Antonio and call the protagonist a ‘poor orphan,’ the same

name, which Antonio used to describe himself earlier, the revenger revolts:

I will not lose the glory of the deed,

Were all the tortures of the deepest hell

 Belova 83

Fixed to my limbs. I pierced the monster’s heart. (V. vi. 5-7)

..................................
Poor? Standing triumphant over Beelzebub?

Having large interest for blood, and yet deemed poor? (V. vi. 23-4)

As much as Antonio sought to surpass God in suffering, he seeks to surpass the Devil in revenge,

echoing his soliloquy on the nature of men: “striving to be more than man, he proves more than a

devil” (III. ii. 70). Antonio publicly defends his desire for violence and his role, showing that he

played a victim solely to ensure the privilege of becoming the best revenger.

Marston, however, needs to balance out his invention to achieve the effect of

Machiavellian revenge. Thus, even though the public approves of the murder and disregards

Antonio’s complaint, the revengers express their willingness to repent and become “constant

votaries” in some religious seclusion (V. vi. 38). This gesture helps Marston’s play to interrupt

the reciprocal violence introduced at the beginning of the play. However, the sincerity of

repentance proves to be just another instance of blasphemy since Antonio’s ‘interest for blood’

was not quenched. Despite the fakeness of the attitude, the revengers are no longer a part of the

community, Mellida, Julio, and Piero are dead, and the public is happy with the outcome. Drama,

once again, presents its performative justice by punishing the villain and nullifying revenge of its

impetus. At the same time, however, like Hamlet, Antonio’s revenge, too, attacks its audience.

Marston’s play grants satisfaction, simultaneously criticizing everyone, who accepts it: even

Antonio’s last words of the play puzzle the audience. Antonio suggests that if ever there be a

‘black tragedy’ written about Mellida’s death:

May it have gentle presence, and the scenes sucked up

By calm attention of choice audience:

And when the closing epilogue appears,

 Belova 84

Instead of claps, may it obtain but tears. (V. vi. 68-71)

The issue with this statement is that Antonio’s Revenge is that same ‘black tragedy,’

which showed Mellida’s death and, thus, pleads for tears, because ‘claps’ or applause do not suit

the occasion. Moreover, the audience might also refuse to resemble Andrugio’s ghost in

expressing its content with Antonio’s revenge by giving ‘loud applause to hypocrisy.’ The

Elizabethan audience, however, is bounded by theatrical decorum: Marston’s play, indeed,

deserves its plaudit, and the inevitable clapping, finally, exhibits the spectators’ awareness of its

own immorality. Thus, “by creating a revenge tragedy that cultivates sympathy for a morally

deficient revenger, Marston forces his audience to experience first hand the response he is calling

into question” (Baines 293).

The ostentatious self-awareness of Marston’s play and the insistence on artifice have an

additional effect: they bring attention to the form of the play. Marston defines his play both as

Antonio’s revenge and as a black tragedy. By scorning the satisfaction and the entertainment,

which the audience seeks, Marston attempts to redefine tragedy.

‘Tragedy,’ then, would appear to evolve in a three-step process from describing a play or

piece of writing to denoting an account of historical adversity, and from there to

designating historical adversities themselves. In the best Wildean fashion, tragedy begins

as art, which life then imitates. (Eagleton 14)

The Elizabethan spectator enjoys Marston’s revenge tragedy as a dramatic piece, but by

addressing the play as ‘tragedy’ within the dramatic illusion where the word designates reality

and by pleading for tears, Marston defines his play as potentially real. In other words, Marston’s

play is not merely an imitation of action; it is a representation and a part of tragic reality, which

is happening outside of the theatre walls.

 Belova 85

At the beginning of the play, Antonio praises Mellida to his mother. Galeatzo, who has

heard enough of that, asks, “Nay, leave hyperboles,” to which Antonio responds: “I tell thee

prince, that presence straight appears/Of which thou canst not form hyperboles” (I. iii. 123-5).

The scene, of course, is darkened by the fact that the presence that actually appears is the

hanging body of Feliche, “yon gory ensign” (I. iii. 131). Barbara Baines persuasively claims that

the “gory spectacle” of Piero’s corpse, in the fifth act, is staged “in the same curtained area of the

lower stage” and mirrors precisely the opening of the play (293). Marston’s play, together with

all other revenge tragedies, which the playwright has woven into Antonio’s Revenge, presents the

hyperboles of the gory spectacle and ensign of murder and revenge. Thus, Marston not only

accounts for the hyperbolic language of the characters but seeks to remind the audience that both

hyperbole and spectacle have a function. The semiotic process of drama and its displaying

quality as much as the figure of hyperbole is not an exaggeration for its own sake. Reviving Keir

Elam’s argument, in the process of semiosis, things, and actions lose their practical purpose and

acquire symbolic function. The function of exaggeration as in hyperbole or of display as in

spectacle is to incite an emotional response or create a keen impression. By bringing attention to

the artistry and performance, Antonio’s Revenge reveals that the sole function of the theatre is to

perform, to show, to present a spectacle. By exhibiting reluctance to play the revenger’s role, the

protagonist shows that his only desire is to perform a role and he would rather be a clown, who is

endowed with immunity: “he that speaks he knows not what/shall never sin against his own

conscience” (II. i. 35-6). The desire for violence and revenge mark the role, not the protagonist,

and the role is assigned by a ghost, which merges with the audience:

By defining the ghost as the spirit of revenge tragedy and, simultaneously, as audience to

it, Marston suggests that the moral deficiency of the dramatic genre derives art from the
 Belova 86

very theater audience whose taste has established the conventions. (Baines 291)

The intertextuality of Marston’s play allows it to draw the audience’s attention to the

entirety of that phenomenon, which we now name revenge tragedy. Simultaneously, its

metatheatricality distances the spectator from the dramatic illusion in order for the audience to

reexamine not only its own emotional response to these plays but revenge tragedy and theatre as

the matter of its own hands. Eventually, when the senator questions “whose hand presents this

gory spectacle?” (V. vi. 1) – it is Marston’s hand that created this spectacle to satisfy the demand

of the audience. If the audience seeks satisfaction in justice and revenge, theatre responds to its

petition but reminds the spectator that one cannot abuse the medium by equating violence on the

stage with the essence of the spectacle.

Jonathan Dollimore, who advocates the subversion of providentialist orthodoxy in the

Elizabethan drama as much as outside of it, points to the issue, which Lily Campbell described in

her study as the mapping of private revenge onto the providential plan:

So it is that in the final scene of Antonio’s Revenge Marston subverts the dramatic

conventions which embody a providentialist perspective. In particular, the forced

conjunction of the contradictory absolutes – secular and divine revenge – generates an

internal strain which only stresses their actual disjunction. (Dollimore 39)

The issue that Dollimore avoids by using the word ‘secular’ is the distinction between the public

and the private revenge, which Marston emphasizes. Both these kinds, indeed, fall under the

category of secular revenge, although the playwright subverts the convention with regards to the

public revenge. As Dollimore correctly pinpoints, “there is no conceivable way that Christian

teaching could condone such revenge” as Antonio and his accomplices exercise (37). By framing

the private revenge as the public one, however, Marston seeks to erase the same boundary
 Belova 87

between the two, which the Tudor government sought to solidify. Marston does not try to

exonerate the private revenge; he attempts to criticize the public one, reminding the audience, as

mentioned earlier, that “the public performance known as the law is also a form of revenge

action,” and is equally if not indecorously violent (Bate 275).

Conclusion and Suggestions

The concepts of Machiavellian revenge and performative justice, introduced in this

research, were meant to both shed light on the dynamics and represent the ambiguous nature of

the three plays analyzed in the chapters above. Each play successfully punishes its villain in an

attempt to satisfy the audience’s desire for justice and entertainment: the imaginative fight with

unfairness and evil forces leads to the therapeutic catharsis of the spectacle. However, the

Machiavellian revenge, which each play stages, shows that once balanced justice is not

operative, the only way to interrupt violence is the extermination of entire families. De facto, it is

the annihilation of all agents, who, in one way or another, participated in the conflict. Thus,

Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy sacrifices all the representatives of the Spanish Court, leaving the

stage deserted, ruled by an heirless king. Shakespeare’s Hamlet executes the entire Danish Court

and endangers the reality of the audience by staging the death of the queen. Marston’s Antonio’s

Revenge, too, presents the extirpation of the Duke of Genoa and the Duke of Venice, their

families, and other characters of the Venitian court. Machiavellian revenge serves its practical

purpose – it circumscribes the revenge impetus and voids it of any potential for successful

recommencement by presenting a totalizing spectacle of violence and satisfying the audience’s

desire for revenge. Both concepts, thus account for the holistic structure of the three revenge
 Belova 88

tragedies, which represents a stand-in metaphor.

Theatre, however, is always precautious. Theatre stages the contagion of violence and

sacrifices itself to satisfy the audience’s desires, but it will never allow the audience to associate

it with violence, which, ultimately, stems from the audience itself. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy

shows what the dramatic illusion is capable of by violating the decorum. However, marking the

beginning of the genre, the play victimizes the audience of the Spanish Court and presents itself

as an admonition to the Elizabethan audience. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, however, represents the

renaissance of the genre and tends to be much more aggressive: not only the-play-within-a-play

disturbs its spectator. Shakespeare’s play, too, abuses its audience by unnecessarily killing the

queen and menacing its audience. While Kyd and Shakespeare establish the violent potential of

the theatre to fight back, Marston’s play directly accuses the audience of violence, which it

imposes onto the stage and its characters, and of which the revenge tragedy genre as a

phenomenon is an embodying instance. Each play employs a metaphysical agent as a spirit of

revenge. Also, in Kyd and Marston, these agents are placed as the audience to the play. By

placing the demand for revenge outside the reality of the spectacle, the plays show that the desire

for justice and violence are external to the dramatic illusion. The Elizabethan spectator’s desire

to impose violence on drama can be fought back, it can also be satisfied to an extent, which the

theatre can contain it, but since it is deemed external – it cannot be entirely annihilated or

transformed. The three revenge tragedies reveal to their audiences that a desire for justice is a

chimera, for it, substantially, is a desire for violence that requires a framework of containment

and, while the justice of the law will remain an impossibility, the balanced justice or the

equilibrium will not be achieved. Machiavellian revenge and performative justice are fictional

processes of circumscription that sustain the theatrical decorum: they can be and were applied
 Belova 89

outside the theatre, but were seldom successful precisely because of the insatiable nature of

desire, which propels the violence.

The missed encounter, characters’ reluctance to accept their revenge mandate, and their

desire to play a jester/a mad man – represent features of the dramatic role. The characters scorn

the role of revenger not due to its suicidal nature, which Kesler and Schmidt pinpoint, but

because of the double-consciousness and the knowledge this role entails. Just like in Thomas

Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College: “where ignorance is bliss/’Tis folly to be

wise” (99-100). The character wants to play the role of a fool or a mad man because it offers

immunity and ignorance of the subject of the play. The structure of assigning the role as a missed

encounter, however, imposes the inevitability onto the character cast for it. Unlike, for instance,

Barnardine, who is destined to die much as Hieronimo, Hamlet, and Antonio, the revengers

cannot dwell in the refuge of ignorance and reluctance forever. Marston’s play, of course, stands

somehow aloof and seems to be different from those of Kyd and Shakespeare, but the fact that

revengers will be enclosed in religious seclusion instead of death does not change the structure of

the play itself significantly, even though the fact does embody much of Marston’s criticism.

Ultimately, the model and the concepts introduced in this study serve the same purpose as

their numerous theoretical counterparts: they shed light on the controversial moments in the

plays’ structure, linguistics, and performance. The concepts are developed to investigate the

dynamics of the plays and the genre from a slightly different angle, creating a fragmentary

vision, which must enrich the existing critical mosaic of the revenge tragedy genre. The final

suggestion of the research was to portray the revenge tragedy genre as a metonymic chain of

plays, where each play sacrifices itself and its cast to forestall the reciprocal violence of revenge,

which many critics define as never-ending. The analysis of the plays proved that each of the
 Belova 90

three plays successfully disinhibits and contains the contagion of revenge violence and represents

a metaphor. At the same time, it showed that the repetitive and never-ending structure of revenge

is actually the structure of desire, which underlies it. Since the desire is external to the theatre

and dramatic illusion and is continuously regenerated by the audience – each revenge tragedy

becomes a part of a metonymic chain. In this respect, the research offers a future critical

challenge of applying this conception to other revenge tragedies. If the theory proves correct, it

will not only enlighten our understanding of the genre but will assign to it a new characteristic,

which might help to mark its distinction from other genres.

 Belova 91

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