What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?1

When Hamlet reflects on the charged power of the tragic theater, the figure who haunts his imagination is Hecuba, Queen of Troy, whose tragedy came to define the genre in sixteenth-century Europe. As a bereaved mourner who seeks revenge, Hecuba offers a female version of Hamlet. Yet even while underscoring her tragic power, Shakespeare simultaneously establishes a new model of tragic protagonist, challenging the period’s longstanding identification of tragedy with women. In exploring why both Hamlet and Shakespeare are preoccupied with Hecuba, this chapter argues that ignoring the impact of Greek plays in sixteenth-century England has left a gap in our understanding of early modern tragedy. Attending to Hecuba highlights Shakespeare’s innovations to a genre conventionally centered on female grief. In invoking Hecuba as an icon of tragedy, Shakespeare both reflects on and transforms women’s place in the genre.

The Vengeful Lioness in Greek Tragedy: A Posthumanist Perspective1

This chapter reinterprets the animal metaphors used in ancient Greek tragedy to describe revenging women from a posthumanist perspective. Whereas critics have commonly regarded such metaphors as indicating the female revenger’s inhuman savagery and otherness (whereby a woman’s attempt to assume a male heroic role transforms her instead into a monstrous beast), posthumanism challenges conventional distinctions between animal and human, male and female. Drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti, it argues that female revengers similarly challenge these distinctions. The metaphorical metamorphosis of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Medea into lionesses reveals their complex figuration as male-female hybrid beings, recalling the tragic suffering and protective violence of the Homeric lion within a new context of interfamilial conflicts. These transformations engender terror but also compassion, evoking new ways of conceptualising humans-as-animals that invite recognition of our own unstable and hybrid nature.

Cursing-Prayers and Female Vengeance in the Ancient Greek World1

This chapter analyses women praying for revenge in ancient Greece in literary texts (such as Homer’s Iliad, and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus) alongside thirteen prayers for justice written exclusively by women and found in Knidos (Caria, modern Turkey). It argues that because women did not have direct access to legal forms of retribution and often had complaints that fell outside the normal judicial system (such as a husband’s adultery), cursing-prayers prayers had an important psychological and social function for women, providing a legitimate outlet for potentially disruptive feelings through an established ritual that was recognized as meaningful by the civic community. Like lamentation, cursing allowed women to express anger and hatred within socially acceptable roles and practices, providing women with a legitimate, communal medium in which to air grievances and to rectify or revenge the injuries done to them.

‘Brother Unkind’: Annabella’s Heart in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

This chapter explores Giovanni’s pursuit of Annabella’s heart in John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore, suggesting that it is the Courtly lover’s necessary abject position in relation to the beloved which explains the play’s ambivalent representation of Anabella’s sincerity, her honesty, and the reason Giovanni casts her murder as revenge. Ford’s depiction of Annabella’s rhetoric, her stage positions, her unfathomability, even her death, is consistent with the representation of a courtly love lady, the seemingly chaste, silent, and obedient actor, either a virgin or a whore, appearing regularly in early modern literature and theatre. Revenge, however, is part of courtly love’s ideology, according to Slavoj Žižek’s seminal essay, ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing’, and Giovanni’s expectations for Annabella’s behaviour exposes the contradictions inherent in the courtly love rhetoric found in the play. Rather than being sadistic towards his sister, luring her into incest and then killing her, Giovanni has all the marks of an abject masochist, as does Annabella.

Outfacing Vengeance: Heroic Dying in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Ford’s The Broken Heart

Revengers, as has been frequently observed, are artists who devise intricate tortures both to overreach the crimes that have come before and to invest their acts of violence with specific meanings. But what happens when the revenge does not go to plan? Both John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and John Ford’s The Broken Heart feature victims who take charge of their suffering, seizing theatrical power in a manner that challenges the meaning of their punishment. The shift in focus encountered in these plays – away from the witty plotting of the revenger and towards the courage of the victim – corresponds to a wider shift that Mary Beth Rose has identified in the construction and gendering of heroism in the early modern period, in which there is a move away from the heroics of action towards the heroism of endurance. The chapter maintains, however, that the heroics of endurance are gendered: while in both plays heroic dying functions as a form of self-authorship, nevertheless differences between the portrayal of the Duchess of Malfi and Ithocles suggest that masochistic self-sacrifice is perceived to be natural for women and unnatural for men.

‘She’s Turned Fury’: Women Transmogrified in Revenge Plays

This chapter explores early modern responses to Hecuba, arguing that whereas Euripides’ Hecuba is a sympathetic tragic heroine and successful avenger, this model was not replicated in early modern plays. Instead the two aspects of Hecuba’s role, that of lamenting mother and ruthless avenger, bifurcate in English revenge tragedy. Pitiful, mourning mothers such as Isabella from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are unsuccessful, while savage ones, such as Tamora from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, are abhorrent and aberrant, inflicting violence from a position of power. In contrast to Germany and France – where artistic treatments of the Biblical Judith decapitating General Holofernes offer a heroic, political image of female vengeance – the chapter argues that in early modern England revenge was definitively not a woman’s business.

A Phrygian Tale of Love and Revenge: Oenone Paridi (Ovid Heroides 5)

This chapter explores how lamentation operates as a covert means of revenge in Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of fictional epistolary poems written as though by women from Greek and Roman mythology to the lovers who abandoned and mistreated them. It interprets the fifth letter, in which the nymph Oenone writes to Paris, her former lover, as a letter of revenge that expresses Oenone’s frustration and anger. Ovid’s language and imagery alludes to events that await Paris in the dramatic future of the letter, hinting at her revenge to come. Countering the view that the female speakers of the Heroides offer a consistent view of women as pathetic and passive victims, the chapter thus shows how Ovid’s female letter-writers can exploit socially prized roles as a means of expressing their anger and preparing for vengeful action.

Introduction: Female Fury and the Masculine Spirit of Vengeance

This chapter examines revenge narratives in relation to gender, asking whether depictions of vengeance reinforce conservative gender roles, interrogate the ‘masculine’ values that society prizes, or establish new ways of conceptualizing women and men. It demonstrates that while revenge is frequently conceptualized as a quintessential masculine activity, it is simultaneously seen to unleash the female Furies and the violent, ‘feminine’ emotions that threaten a man’s reason and self-control. It surveys scholarly debate about female avengers, asking whether they should be interpreted as honorary men, heroes in their own right, monstrous inversions of gender norms, or conduits through which male subjectivity is formed. The chapter also examines grief, demonstrating how women use lamentation in ancient Greek literature and medieval Icelandic sagas to express grievances, directing revenge action and, at times, influencing wider political events. It argues, however, that female lamentation becomes discredited in later periods and detached from the revenge process. In early modern literature, for example, the revenger is typically also the mourner, whose grief inhibits the revenge process. The change in lamentation’s status and function has wider implications for women’s roles and for the gendering of the male revenger.

Lament and Vengeance in the Alliterative Morte Arthure

This chapter explores the complex relationship between lamentation, masculinity, and heroic action in the Alliterative Morte Arthure. It demonstrates how the fourteenth-century poem’s earlier episodes distinguish between the contained grief that prompts heroic action and the debilitating grief which shocks and overwhelms: the fighting men’s laments for their fallen comrades are qualitatively different from the grief displayed by the widow after the Duchess, her foster-daughter, is raped and killed. However, this gendered model of male, moderate grief, and female, overwhelming grief, breaks down when Gawain, Arthur’s beloved nephew, is killed in battle. Arthur himself becomes the grief-stricken lamenter, displaying feminised behaviour that his knights view as both ineffectual and unseemly. The chapter argues that Arthur’s lament is not only a catalyst for revenge, but also marks a move away from indiscriminate conquest towards heroic action focused on justice and the restoration of order.

‘The Power of Our Mouths’: Gossip as a Female Mode of Revenge1

This chapter examines gendered methods of revenge as depicted in ancient Greek literature and court trails. While men favour physical attacks or judicial processes when taking revenge on an enemy, women are typically thought to be too weak to attack in these ways and are shown using persuasion or trickery to achieve revenge or bringing up their children as future avengers. Gossip provides another mechanism by which women and other disempowered individuals, such as slaves, can take revenge: either directly, by damaging an individual’s reputation, or indirectly, by provoking others to violent behaviour. Focusing on literary texts (such as Aeschylus’ Choephori, Euripides’ Andromache and Hippolytus, and Chariton’s novel Chaereas and Callirhoe) and legal revenge narratives (such as Lysias’ On the Murder of Eratosthenes) the chapter demonstrates how women find circuitous and covert ways to achieve revenge, while simultaneously showing how women’s reputation for gossip allows them to be used as scapegoats for men’s violence.