Servants

Servants in early modern drama have increasingly been investigated less as objects of domination than as subjects capable of affective and ethical relations with their masters. Both sorts of interpretation depend upon the assumption that actual early modern servants are straightforwardly represented in drama of the time. Observing that common players were themselves patronised and liveried servants, and that the theatre itself appeared as a form of mercenary service, this chapter shows how procedures of dramatic figuration implicate identification of the servant in a complex dialectic of discernment. With roots in various sorts of contemporary social anxiety, such difficulties are at their most intense in revenge tragedy. In many places reading revenge plays involves confronting their ability to undo the social concepts used to grasp their historical content.

Points

The closing scene of Hamletentangles the play’s tragedy in a series of problems relating to intention, accident, and physical dexterity. Showing how many of the epistemological difficulties intrinsic to the play’s climax arise from legal and social issues around the status and purpose of the early modern duel, this chapter argues that Shakespeare used the occasion of swordplay to launch a daring formal experiment. Hamlet’s subjectivity disappears into the fencing-match, and it is uncertain whether he achieves his revenge against Claudius by accident, in spontaneous reaction, or with full intent. The sovereignty of Hamletthe artwork is thus connected inextricably to its realization on the stage. For it is only in a specific performance of Hamlet that the problem of Hamlet’s intention can be provisionally resolved.

Bare Facts, Endless Tragedies

Turning first to the classic revenge play sansrevenger, Arden of Faversham, this concluding chapter considers how this book’s findings bear on strongly held assumptions concerning the way concepts and categories relate to tragic works and their literary or theatrical afterlives.It is uncertain whether or not such works attain to ‘tragedy’ itself, or whether they prove incapable of it – but ‘metatheatre’ is a troublesome substitute. ‘Metatheatre’ is one of the most ubiquitous and influential concepts in contemporary study of (early modern) drama, yet the term’s origins and implications are very poorly understood. It conceals a host of naïve assumptions about the history and purpose of theatre, but survives precisely because its inadequacy reflects the confusion provoked by the figurative experiments identified for the first time by this book.

A Brief Interlude of Vice

Bridging from the dialectic of action explored in the previous chapters to the dialectic of figuration and appearance considered in those which follow, this chapter sketches a triangular historical relationship between plays of revenge, the professionalisation of theatre, and the figure known as the ‘Vice’. The common player became the Vice when that figure disappeared from English plays in the 1570s and 1580s. Those were the years in which the professional actor emerged and theatre became an object of greater suspicion. In this way the appearance of the actor and his agency within the fictional scene acquired a specific and complex moral value. For revenge tragedy this was significant because the Vice had been the origin and impetus of the revenge narrative since English playwrights had first shown interest in the theme of extra-judicial vengeance, in translations of Seneca in the 1560s. To ask whether revenge was a moral deviation or devilish concoction, as did more famous plays of later decades, was to question the agency of the player and his interest in producing dubious illusions.

Verge

The Spanish Tragedy is widely considered a seminal work in English dramatic history, not only for its contemporary popularity but for its influence upon later secular tragedy. Nonetheless the role of its protagonist Hieronimo, as Knight Marshal of the Spanish court, has never been properly defined. This chapter recovers his English office’s ancient connection to the Verge, that is, the legal and virtually sacred space extending from and around the body of the English king. After a sketch of the origins and historical evolution of the Court of the Verge (or Marshalsea), it is shown for the first time how this anachronistic and highly contradictory space informs the structure and logic of the play. Within and around the Verge, role-play and affective alienation were enduringly connected to the performance of revenge. In The Spanish Tragedy, the tragic court took new shape; the avenger appeared on its margins.

Introduction

If finished works only become what they are because their being is a process of becoming, they are in turn dependent on forms in which that process crystallises: interpretation, commentary, critique. These are not merely brought to bear on works by those who concern themselves with them, but are the scene [...

Figures

How do we see the figures of baroque drama? This chapter challenges common moral and historical interpretations of the revenge play by showing how judgement itself is forestalled by prior difficulties of discernment and recognition. Such difficulties are produced by these plays because early modern playwrights had begun for the first time to link tragic form to problems of figure and figuration, person and personation. From this interest arose serious artistic investigations of dramatic materials, achieved via extended manipulation of revenge tragedy’s corpses, ghosts, and uncertain substances. Exploring these from a variety of angles, this chapter concludes that both moralist and historicist accounts of early modern tragedy have conspired in the neglect of its most inventive claims upon our attention.