Derek Dunne

Piracy, Insurrection and The Tragedy of Hoffman

The previous chapter saw how Hamlet works to absolve its protagonist from some of the guilt associated with his actions; in Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, the criminality of the eponymous Hoffman is beyond doubt. The opening scene sees him put to death the innocent son of his enemy by means of a burning crown, and his catalogue of crimes includes stabbing, poisoning, identity theft, and attempted rape. For all this, Chettle creates a revenger whose villainous exploits may be abhorrent, but which ask to be placed within a wider frame of reference. This is achieved by the introduction of discourses of piracy and rebellion that resist simple categorisation and instead act to destabilise even the most basic early modern hierarchies of meaning. Superficially, Chettle’s play seems to deal in straightforward binaries — lawful duke/convicted pirate; virtuous mother/villainous son; pious forgiveness/sinful rebellion — but each of these hierarchies is overturned in due course. The Tragedy of Hoffman may not pitch a heroic avenger against the forces of social injustice; nevertheless, I suggest that Chettle’s play evinces the revenge genre’s skill for acute social commentary. The Tragedy of Hoffman carries forward the work of earlier revenge tragedies by positing the problem of revenge within a network of legal, and even jurisdictional questions, in a way that Shakespeare’s Hamlet never does.

Antonio’s Revenge, Riot and Collective Action

The idea that ‘there should be nothing certayne, nothing sure’ in the absence of justice has been shown to be a common theme of both The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus. But revenge tragedy’s engagement with legal institutions goes far beyond the danger of biased judgements or the difficulty of interpreting evidence. Having established these early revenge tragedies’ ambivalent attitude towards legal methods of inquiry, in this chapter I develop the socio-political dimension to the staging of revenge in the early modern theatre. The judge’s fear of an uprising ‘against the Crowne’ is precisely what we see enacted in revenge tragedies, which usually end in a regicide that has a degree of popular support. To some extent this is visible in Hieronimo’s struggle against class prejudice when seeking justice through the courts. It becomes more pronounced in the revenge tragedies around the turn of the century like Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge and Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, whose revengers are more forthright in their anti-authoritarian stance.

Correcting Justice with Vengeance in The Spanish Tragedy

The crux of The Spanish Tragedy, and to a certain extent the revenge genre, is articulated in this passage, whereby revengers seek justice in an unjust world, amid a ‘mass of public wrongs’. This heartfelt plea comes in the wake of Horatio’s murder, as Hieronimo struggles to make sense of the ‘lively form of death’ he has discovered in the arbor (3.2.2). Kyd is quick to bring his audience’s attention to the universal, almost symbolic, nature of Horatio’s death. Within two hundred lines of discovering his son’s body, Hieronimo expresses the intertwined nature of vengeance and justice, in a rhetoric that owes more to Fortescue than to Seneca. His utterance relates directly to the rhetoric of law as the bulwark of civilisation, a rhetoric that continually reminded citizens how without law ‘all kingdoms and estates would be brought to confucyon, and all humane society would be dissolved’.1 Compare William Lambarde’s charge to a quarter session jury in 1595, when he says: [I]f these good laws were not, our whole course and conversation should be disturbed and could be nothing else but a continual confusion, horror, and a living death.2 Lambarde’s ‘living death’ is literalised by Kyd in the ‘lively form of death’ that is Horatio’s corpse, presenting us with a world ‘[c]onfused and filled with murder and misdeeds’.

Conclusion: Participation and Vindication on the Early Modern Stage

Laertes’ question to Claudius — why he has not had Hamlet charged with the slaying of Polonius? — is at once the most reasonable response to violent crime, and at the same time strangely out of place within the context of Shakespeare’s play. In effect, he is asking why revenge tragedy is necessary when there exists a fully-functioning legal system. The simple answer is that we are dealing with a world where law may be operative, but where that law is also severely flawed. The pages of this book have endeavoured to offer a more comprehensive answer, by elucidating early modern revenge tragedy’s precise engagements with the legal system of its time. That these plays are filled with scenes of judgement, unreliable witness testimony, and evidence both genuine and false, should alert us to the fact that the genre of revenge tragedy is testing the law as much as it is condemning revenge. What is more, early modern revenge tragedy seems intent on reminding its audience of the absent presence of the law at its core: ‘Terras Astraea reliquit: be you remembered, Marcus,/ She’s gone, she’s fled’ (Titus Andronicus, 4.3.4–5).1 The revengers that populate these tragedies no doubt have their personal grievances against their enemies, yet time and again we see those same enemies make a mockery of the law and trample over their citizens’ rights in the course of the action.

Introduction: Staging Justice

In the opening moments of The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd presents his audience with an image of judicial uncertainty that is almost emblematic in its starkness. As the ghost of Don Andrea wanders in the underworld, he is faced with three judges: Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanth. After discussing the matter among themselves, the judges fail to decide on an appropriate fate for Don Andrea, and resolve to pass the matter on to ‘our infernal king’, Pluto (1.1.52).2 The image of three judges unable to reach a verdict sets a worrying trend for what is to come: from the inaugural moment of early modern revenge tragedy, the law is in crisis. Yet the possibility that revenge tragedy as a genre is capable of serious legal engagement has hitherto been given no systematic attention. Bearing in mind Lambarde’s suggestion that in order to learn about the law it can be illuminating to seek out law’s ‘contraries and differents’, this book reveals the ways in which early modern revenge tragedy evinces an ongoing and thorough interrogation of the legal system of its time. This significantly alters our perception of both revenge tragedy and early modern legal history, by overturning critical commonplaces such as the lone stage revenger, while challenging the dominant narrative of early modern English law as inclusive and participatory.

Vindictive Justice in Early Modern England

In approaching early modern English law, Girard’s formulation is a useful one, reminding us as it does of the compatibility of justice and vengeance. Early modern England may not have been a well-policed society, but it did have a thriving legal system, which openly acknowledged the role of revenge in its operation.3 Public vengeance at that time could mean two very different things. On the one hand the legal system as a civic institution made punishments increasingly public affairs, for example at the infamous ‘Tyburn Tree’. Understood in another way, public vengeance was being made available in the playhouses of London and beyond for the price of admission. Yet how different were these versions of ‘public’ vengeance, and in what ways did the popularity of one come to be reflected in the other? This chapter outlines the reasons why legal history provides such a crucial context for our understanding of early modern drama in general, and revenge tragedy in particular. It gives an account of the participatory nature of early modern law, as well as gesturing towards some of the changes and stresses that system was undergoing at the time that the plays were being written. By dismantling the stale binaries of Law/Revenge, Public/Private that have dominated discussion of revenge tragedy, I seek to realign these discourses as a necessary precursor to a more sophisticated account of how they relate to each other on the early modern stage.

Exceptional Hamlet and Resistance to Law

Hamlet, at once the most well-known of all revenge tragedies and a significant departure from its predecessors, occupies a unique and complicated place within the genre of revenge tragedy. Shakespeare’s second revenge tragedy has been heralded as the apogee of a genre hitherto lacking in moral and philosophical depth. Indeed a correlation can be made between the inordinate focus on Hamlet by literary scholars and a dearth of critical material on other revenge tragedies. As the second most written-about text after the Bible,2 the critical heritage that has accreted to this play is daunting to say the least. One scholar puts it succinctly when he says, ‘[i]t would seem at this late day that all that could be said about the play of Hamlet has been said and often repeated’.3 Considering this comment was written in 1885, this gives some idea of the scale of the challenge facing today’s literary scholar. Therefore I begin this chapter with the briefest of critical introductions to Hamlet and the law. This then leads into my own argument regarding Hamlet’s aversion to couching his revenge in terms of justice, law, and ultimately, revenge itself. The atypical nature of Hamlet is apparent in the language of the play, where staples such as ‘law’ and ‘justice’ do not feature heavily, and in its politics, which never sees the alignment of the revenger’s aims with the good of the commonwealth.4

The Revenger’s Tragedy: Post-Participatory Justice

By its very title The Revenger’s Tragedy proclaims itself to be the quintessential specimen of the genre known as early modern revenge tragedy. And in many ways the play does represent the culmination of a number of the features argued for in this book. Vindice’s principle target is a duke who interferes with a trial in the first act, and this is then used as justification for the multiple homicides committed in the last. The protagonist is without doubt drawn from outside the ruling elite, and in the course of the play he accrues a band of followers that help to transform his actions from personal revenge to political assassination. On a purely structural level, these components all have antecedents in other revenge tragedies examined thus far. However, having identified an undercurrent of social commentary, dissatisfaction with legal innovation, and even civil unrest within the revenge genre, I want finally to suggest how these features can become fossilised within the narrative arc of a revenge play, after their specific social charge is spent. By this I mean that while many of the socio-legal elements identified in other revenge plays are present in The Revenger’s Tragedy, they do not drive the action in the same way as the multiple trial scenes of The Spanish Tragedy, or Jerome’s abortive insurrection in The Tragedy of Hoffman, elements which prove to be thematically integral as well as narratively expedient.

Decentring the law in Hamlet

Hamlet, at once the best-known of all revenge tragedies and a significant departure from its predecessors, occupies a unique and complicated place within the genre of revenge tragedy. This article seeks to approach the question of Hamlet’s exceptional status through the prism provided by law and literature. Instead of arguing that Hamlet is more complex than his fellow revengers when it comes to legal matters, I demonstrate that Hamlet shows comparably less concern for the law and its intricacies. Despite that fact that Hamlet is unprecedented for the attention it has garnered from legal critics, I seek to demonstrate how Shakespeare deliberately downplays questions of law and justice throughout his most famous revenge tragedy. In the process, I suggest that other revenge tragedies of the period have far more to say on the subject of early modern law, but have suffered unfairly through comparison with Shakespeares melancholy prince.

Play Reviews: King Lear, Twelfth Night, the Comedy of Errors, the Tempest, a Midsummer Night's Dream, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, the Taming of the Shrew, a Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Hamlet

of revenge against those he loves most, and the pleasure of his new freedom is drunken brawling with courtiers who are now his mates. However, Hicks’s natural physical elegance, a striking contribution to the success of this production, suggests that a man may have potential beyond his historically constructed public persona. Later, as Lear lurches in and out of madness and grief, Hicks’s graceful strength suggests beauty even in the tragedy of an old man reduced to nakedness. Similarly in Act IV Scene 7, his long white body and the wild meadow flowers that crown his ludic Lear evoke the stillness of sculpture even in the middle of frantic movement. There is a similar quality of underlying quietness in Hicks’s delivery of some of Lear’s most desperate words. He frequently diminishes the sound and fury (“Howl, howl, howl” [V.3.258] and “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” [III.2.1] are almost whispered), choosing instead to emphasise Lear’s personal insights. One of many instances occurs after Goneril and Regan join forces to reject him. He turns abruptly away from them as if looking for another audience and loudly proclaims like a king, “I will do such things” — only to look helplessly around before mumbling to himself, “What they are yet I know not, but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!” (II.4.280-82). His sudden recognition of the scale of his helplessness is shocking. Arguably, King Lear can stand or fall on the central performance, but this production is truly an ensemble achievement. Two sets of juxtaposed performances in particular stand out. The first is the Duke of Kent (Darrell D’Silva) and Earl of Gloucester (Geoffrey Freshwater). D’Silva’s Kent energetically exemplifies the fearlessness and loyalty of a man who is no thinker but who, as the first signs of crisis show themselves, senses his importance to the king as a truth-teller. His strong, muscular figure seems anchored to the earth and is a fitting expression of his moral directness. At the end of the play, spiritual exhaustion drains his voice as he asks, “Is this the promised end?” (V.3.263). His medieval-style roughness is ably complemented by Freshwater’s equivocating Edwardian Gloucester, whose loyalty to the king and conscience are initially compromised by his comfortable and self-regarding affluence. He sucKing Lear, directed by David Farr for the RSC, The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 4 March 2010, left-centre stalls. [See photos, 55]