Edgar Esparza
Within the Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy tradition, there is more than the narrative of a revenger forced to commit murder because of an absence of justice. The legal and historical parallels to this seemingly simple synopsis overturn all sorts of commonly held beliefs about English society during this time period. The relationship between people and their governments is one of the key factors in the revenge tragedies of authors such as Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. Specifically, I will consider Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy to uncover the “unexamined” aspects of these plays that Derek Dunne cites as being the “[l]egal innovations [that] had a profound effect on how citizens came to experience and interact with their legal system” (8). As this essay will demonstrate, much of what was seen on the Elizabethan and Jacobean public stage reproduced encounters with contemporary governments regarding the concepts of justice and revenge in early modern society. Furthermore, examining these plays in the context of their historical time periods reveals the conditions that justify and even legitimize the role of the revenger.
Self-government is a kind of political philosophy that requires the participation of the general public. During the Anglo-Saxon period, from the 5th century to the 10th century, the wergild system was the dominant form of governance in Britain. If a wrong was committed, the wronged party expected to receive a form of retribution they deemed equitable. In some form, Britain retained this system of governance. Then, in the 15th century, Britain experienced a plethora of wars between two families seeking the throne of England, the houses of Lancaster and York. After the War of the Roses (1455-85), the English monarchy realized that this form of self-governance needed to be curtailed for the nation to prosper. Under the Tudor monarchy, which began in 1485, England’s government became more centralized and assumed greater authority over its people. However, the accession in 1558 of Queen Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch, established a new order of self-governance. The role of the citizenry was suddenly an essential aspect of the inner workings of the English court system. The state embedded revenge into the justice system by using the courts to determine guilt and punishments. The public participated in this form of justice as jurors, litigants, and witnesses to public executions (Dunne 27). The plays that arose from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras contain covert and overt representations of the concept of participatory justice, demonstrating its importance in these respective eras.
Perhaps due to The Spanish Tragedy and other revenge tragedies, scholars have presupposed that revenge is distinct from the concept of justice. Gregory Semenza discusses the role of the revenger: “[N]o fact in The Spanish Tragedy so loudly proclaims the failure of the public justice system as the decision of Spain’s chief magistrate to pursue justice through self-governmental means” (58). This quotation indicates that revenge and justice are opposing concepts that do not overlap. An administrator of justice cannot engage in revenge unless he abandons his post. However, this modern analysis of the play is not in sync with the historical context of the play’s composition. In fact, all of Hieronimo’s actions have legal justification, and Hieronimo’s revenge is deeply embedded with the concept of justice. As far as The Spanish Tragedy is concerned, the concepts of justice and revenge are inseparable—a depiction that is rooted in Elizabethan history.
Within the first scene of The Spanish Tragedy, the audience is introduced to the significance of both revenge and justice. The first ninety lines of the play set the stage for a plot that is intertwined with revenge (on Don Andrea’s part) and justice (as Don Andrea has encountered three underworld judges, as well as Pluto and Proserpine, the sovereigns of the underworld). The first act foreshadows the idea that revenge is fulfilled through judicial means. Proserpine’s judgement in Don Andrea’s case allows him to be vindicated in the final scene of the play. Because The Spanish Tragedy is the first Elizabethan revenge tragedy, it introduces certain elements to the overall genre that are later imitated by Shakespeare in Hamlet, by Middleton in The Revenger’s Tragedy, and by Webster in The Duchess of Malfi. The prevailing notion of Hieronimo is that he, according to Peter Mercer, “change[s] from his normal social self to a monster of avenging fury” (2). As Knight Marshall, Hieronimo uses his vindictive nature to seek justice for his murdered son. The words “vindictive” and “justice” may not be synonymous, but they are not both mutually exclusive. The Oxford English Dictionary defines revenge by the vindictive impulse that overwhelms people to avenge, an idea similar to Emily Wilson’s assertion that emotions rule, dominate, and win out in the revenge tragedy (vii). Therefore, it is fitting that OED defines vindictive as “giv[ing] to revenge” or as “having a revengeful disposition.”[1] Furthermore, the historical lineage of the word “vindictive” demonstrates that the word had a synonymous relationship with a (now rare) definition of justice. Throughout The Spanish Tragedy, there are both subtle and obvious references to the thesis that Hieronimo uses justice (or legal means) to get revenge. In the beginning of Act 3, Scene 13, Hieronimo exclaims, “Vindicta mihi. / Ay, heaven will be revenged of every ill,” (3.13.1-2). Here, Hieronimo makes a subtle reference to “vindictive justice.”[2]
Derek Dunne explains that The Spanish Tragedy was a “public play” in the sense that it was not written for the elites but for the general public (8). Therefore, it is not surprising that the play became widely popular in England. The play clearly had some connection to Elizabethan audiences. The Spanish Tragedy places on the stage many historically accurate relations between Elizabethan society and the state. Many important topics of this era of history are relevant to the play’s plot, such as class tension. For example,
Linda Woodbridge notes the significance of social class in the play and acknowledges [James R.] Siemon’s work on Kyd’s own social background when she draws attention to the way in which social status not only inflects the Spanish king’s nepotism (favouring his own nephew over Horatio), and Bel-imperia’s relationships, but also determines the protagonist’s vengeful course: “Hieronimo turns to revenge because his low status blocks access to justice.” (Simkin 98)
Class tension is ubiquitous in The Spanish Tragedy, as there are utterances of class difference. The Arden edition of The Spanish Tragedy has a historical notation that references Horatio’s hanging: “Hanging was regarded as a ‘humiliating’ form of execution suitable for lower-class criminals” (Calvo 175, n. 53). Lorenzo makes this point obvious when he claims in reference to Horatio that “[a]lthough his life were still ambitious-proud, / Yet is he at the highest now he is dead” (2.4.59-60).
In Elizabethan society, Hieronimo’s social status would have been close to what modern standards would describe as upper-middle class. However, there was no distinction between classes in those terms. William Harrison gives a first-person account of Elizabethan society, writing that, “[w]e in England divide our people commonly into four sorts, as gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen, and artificers or labourers” (94). Gentlemen were the highest group of the Elizabethan societal order, and they were mainly the king’s second-in-command or confidents such as earls, dukes, barons, noblemen and princes. Citizens were people living in urbanized communities or citizens that could hold some sort of public office. Yeomen were “freemen born English,” meaning that they could own land and profit from revenues generated from it. The artificers and laborers were the poorest of the employed society and included day workers, “poor husbandmen,” tailors, carpenters, masons, and shoemakers.
As a Knight Marshall, it is obvious that Hieronimo and his family were of the “middling sort” […], “a category roughly tantamount to the middle class” (Dunne 184). The “middling sort” consisted of citizens and yeomen. Woodbridge alleges that Hieronimo’s revenge was a practical response for men of his status and disposition in the Elizabethan era—in terms of murder. However, C. W. Brook’s research reveals that by 1640 “one in every eighty Englishmen was using the king’s courts.” Furthermore, it was ordinary citizens who “characteristically served as jurors, constables, tithingmen and churchwardens” (Dunne 26). The justice system of the Elizabethan era was dependent on ordinary citizens, in the form of both jurors and litigants. Dunne cites statistics that demonstrate this very fact: “Cases at advanced stages of the King’s Bench and the Court of Common Pleas combined had risen from 2,100 in 1490 to 13,300 in 1580 and 23,453 by 1606” (25). This raises some serious points running counter to conventional histories of the era that portray the period as one of chaos and anarchy. Semenza formulates much of his theory about the era on the fact that “England lacked an efficient police system, [and that therefore] it would have been difficult to detect crimes while they were unfolding, which would have led, in turn, to a number of legal cases whose outcomes hinged upon largely unverifiable accusations” (54). This environment would have resulted in “lawlessness,” “the threat of self-government,” and a “myriad” of other problems. Dunne believes that Semenza, along with Fredson Bowers, a source of Semenza’s supporting thesis, cite “an older native tradition of private justice (revenge)” that leads them to believe, as Bowers does, that there was “a general disrespect for law” (Dunne 21). These accusations would be well-founded in the times of the wergild system, during the War of the Roses, and even up to the reign of King Henry VIII. Dunne succinctly explains the competing synopsis of the era: “Revenge was not an imminent threat to the status quo, nor were the majority of Elizabethan citizens likely to disrespect such an important social tool as the law. In short, the typical theatre-going Elizabethan was more likely to have a case in the courts for the suing of a neighbour then” (28).
If self-government was not a typical reaction from the people of the Elizabethan era, then there must be a rationalization for Hieronimo’s actions that do not conflict with Elizabethan justice and legalisms. Specifically, Hieronimo’s murder of Balthazar and Lorenzo requires an explanation that is appropriate for a “middling” Elizabethan. In two instances, Hieronimo refers to the deaths of Balthazar and Lorenzo as a “spectacle”: “See here my show; look on this spectacle!” (4.4.88) and “And griev’d I, think you, at this spectacle?” (4.4.112). In today’s terms, the word “spectacle” would mean, as the modern definition of OED defines it, “forming an impressive or interesting show or entertainment for those viewing it.”[3] However, the word had a (now obscure) definition that translated into a form of public punishment, i.e. that one would be made an example of a crime and thus act as a deterrent for others.[4] In other words, the deaths of Balthazar and Lorenzo in the final act of the play are in many ways like the execution of Pedringano in Act 3. Hieronimo, who assumes Pedringano to be responsible for Horatio’s death, exclaims that “For blood with blood shall, while I sit as judge, / Be satisfied, and the law discharged” (3.6.35-36). Similarly, a few scenes later Hieronimo utters a familiar feeling of content that justice was done per capital punishment with the killing of Balthazar and Lorenzo: “Soliciting remembrance of my vow / With these, oh, these accursed murderers; Which now performed, my heart is satisfied” (4.4.126-128). In both cases, Hieronimo claims that he is “satisfied” with the result as if the latter scene was another execution. Yet, one of the important aspects of this scene is Hieronimo’s need to have the audience, both in the play and in the theater, view the deaths of Balthazar and Lorenzo as if they were executions. This sort of participatory justice was common in Elizabethan society in terms of citizens being jurors, litigants, and witnesses. Also, as Dunne points out, “the spectacle of public execution” was common among Elizabethans (40).
The failure of the state to remedy the mistakes within society does not lead Hieronimo to change his character as a judicial figure. Dunne explains that “even in the midst of his delusions, Hieronimo still envisages the world in judicial terms” (48). Although Hieronimo’s attempts to achieve justice from the King for his son’s death are for naught, he resorts to other forms of justice: “I will go plain me to my lord the King, / And cry aloud for justice through the court” (3.7.69-70). Hieronimo also pleads to the heavens: “And all the saints do sit soliciting / For vengeance on those cursed murderers” (4.1.33-34). After all else has failed, Hieronimo makes his final plea: “Though on this earth justice will not be found, / I’ll down to hell, and in tis passion / Knock at the dismal gates of Pluto’s court” (3.13.107-109). Whether the justice is earthly, heavenly, or of the underworld, Hieronimo does not leave the path of justice. Hieronimo, like Elizabethan society, “for euery toy and trifle…goe to law,” as Robert Burton stated in The Anatomy of Melancholy (Dunne 26).
Historian Laura Stevenson states that “Elizabethan authors … had only one set of values at their disposal—aristocratic values. To them, the idea that two social groups might conflict with each other on ideological grounds was unthinkable” (qtd. in Jardine 293). Clearly, Kyd’s play is an outlier in this respect because there is a clash of ideologies between Bel-imperia and Lorenzo. Bel-imperia, the daughter of the king of Spain, has a personal connection and attraction to those of lower-classes. She treats Hieronimo and Horatio better than she does Lorenzo and Balthazar, who are princes. There is not necessarily any historical precedent for Bel-imperia’s actions in this regard, but this observation furthers the thesis that The Spanish Tragedy is a play with historical, non-historical, and ahistorical references.
The participatory nature of the Elizabethan justice system was something Hieronimo greatly utilized, but, in contrast with The Spanish Tragedy, it is a concept that is absent in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Vindice, in his quest for revenge, is so secretive and private about his revenge that he keeps his plans from his own accomplice, his brother Hippolito, who in turn scolds Vindice: “Prithee tell me, / Why may not I partake with you? You vowed once / To give me share to every tragic thought” (3.5.4-6). What Vindice hopes to achieve is the complete opposite of Hieronimo’s execution. Vindice’s plan is simple torture and murder because the Duke he lambasts in the opening lines of the play is a sovereign. Because sovereigns are the supreme rulers, to kill a sovereign is treason—a fate that Vindice later meets in the closing lines of the play. Therefore, no matter how the Duke has offended him, Vindice cannot publicly execute the Duke in the same manner that Hieronimo kills Balthazar and Lorenzo. As a result, Vindice must plan accordingly and murder the Duke “[i]n some fit place veiled from the eyes o’ th’ court, / Some darkened, blushless angle, that is guilty / Of his forefathers’ lusts and great folks’ riots;” (3.5.13-15). Yet, again this runs contrary to the historical period under Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. Subha Mukherji states that, “[t]he notion of the audience as an equitable jury that underlies so much of Renaissance drama … [provides] a provocative basis for alternative criteria of adjudication” (qtd. in Dunne 14). Shakespeare’s Hamlet utilizes this literary device to justify Hamlet’s actions in the same manner as Kyd does with Hieronimo. To wit, in Act 3, Scene 2, Hamlet’s advice for the Players includes his warning to be aware of the “judicious” in the audience. However, it is Hamlet who must take note of the audience as he references the entire court and the audience as “auditors,” according to the Arden edition of the play in the final scene of the play (5.2.319, n.). In terms of context, the OED defines an “auditor” as “[o]ne who listens in a judicial capacity.”[5] Hamlet continues a trend that preceded it. Hieronimo is a judicial officer that demonstrates both in word and in action his legal mindedness and, therefore, his lack of abandonment for justice. Because of his occupation, Hieronimo cannot abandon completely his standing with justice. Therefore, he stages a play as a public execution. Although Hamlet is not a judge, and although he does not plan it this way, he follows in Hieronimo’s footsteps by killing Claudius and Laertes in front of the entire court. Both characters require public participation in their murders to justify their actions and to possibly deter future crimes of the similar nature—a reflection of the Elizabethan justice system. Yet, this literary trend would vanish from the revenge tragedy tradition as the English justice system became less participatory.
Walter Mildmay, a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, advised his son about the English Court: “Know the Court but spend not thy life there, for Court is a very chargeable place. I would rather wish thee to spend the greatest part of thy life in the country than to live in this glittering misery” (qtd. in Hurstfield and Smith 163). To Vindice, a “glittering misery” is an understatement compared to his opinions of court in the opening of the play. Vindice is aware of the ill-natured Duke and his family. The lust of the Duke and his family resulted in the death of Vindice’s lover and the breakdown of his family. Vindice’s revenge clouds the actual significance of the play. His revenge demonstrates a new shift in justice that differs from The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet.
The disturbing aspect of the play is the abrupt interference with the administration of justice. Joel Hurstfield notes that the last years of the Tudor monarchy are often misconstrued as an era of “despotism” because “[t]he kind of despotism which historians discovered in the sixteenth century varied according to their knowledge of the period and their sensibility to the colour and texture of Tudor English” (Freedom 26). The sources of commonly cited corruption were favoritism and patronage that had existed within the English court for years. The fact remains that “the first half of the fifteenth century saw an extraordinary exercise in self-government[.] [As a response,] the usurping Henry IV, anxious to make his government acceptable, made a bid for middle-class support as represented in the House of Commons” (25). This caused a struggle for power that stained his administration as weak and that continued into the years of Henry VI. This perception of weakness inevitably led to a struggle christened the “Wars of the Roses,” a civil war between “England’s two most powerful families,” the Yorkists and the Lancastrians (Semenza 52). By the end of the fifteenth century, the Yorkists and ultimately the Tudors began to work towards a “strong, centralized government.” This new form of government would later be called “the Tudor despotism” because of modern historians’ subjective interpretations about what is considered despotism (Hurstfield, Freedom 25). However, the late Tudor years were not despotic because “[t]he power of the crown rested not on force but on popular support” (30). The Elizabethan era was built on a strong court system that had popular support, which Dunne calls participatory justice. Furthermore, The Revenger’s Tragedy centered on private revenge and not public vengeance—an antiquated practice. Dunne is blunt in his analysis of The Revenger’s Tragedy:
Structurally, Middleton’s revenge play may be comparable to what has gone before; socio-politically, it is not. [I make] very little reference to the wider social milieu of this play, and that is because so little of what is contained within the play seems to engage directly with real world politics or society; in [Scott] McMillin’s words, “[t]his is a court not much given to history.” The exception here is the infamous clash between King James and his Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, and even this has been shown to be as much generic convention as social commentary. Vindice is no people’s champion, nor does he decry the justice system that has failed him. (164)
The Revenger’s Tragedy was written around 1606–within the Jacobean era. The Jacobean conflict between Sir Edward Coke and King James I would be years into the future of the play, but the “topicality” of this conflict is closely related to the Duke’s utterance of “Hold, hold, my lord!” (1.2.81), which is viewed as a disruption of justice, and the Duke’s command to “defer the judgment till next sitting” (1.2.84), which is a matter of “a monarch’s prerogative powers” (Dunne 144).
In the first instance, the play’s disruption of justice in the courtroom scene and trial of Junior Brother is a prime example of a sovereign’s ability to halt or hurry justice in the Jacobean and not Elizabethan era. In 1621, the venerated Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, was accused of impropriety. Bacon, who claimed in his essay Of Judicature that “the virtue of a judge seen, to make inequality equal that he may plant his judgment as upon an even ground,” was accused of re-opening a case after being written a letter that eluded to some sort of gift if the case was re-opened (Dunne 42). Bacon pleaded guilty to the charges of corruption. As a punishment, Bacon was fined and sentenced to some imprisonment, but because of his close connection to King James I, Bacon escaped both the fine and the imprisonment (Hurstfield, Freedom 147). The correlation between the treatment of Junior Brother and Francis Bacon is astounding. However, The Revenger’s Tragedy was written and performed many years prior to Bacon’s indictment. These examples demonstrate the abuse of authority from which many of the revenge tragedies ostensibly arise. Although Lussurioso’s imprisonment leads to the execution of Junior Brother by mistake, the fact from this scene is that judges, and, indeed, all judicial officers, are subordinate to a sovereign. Historically, this play foreshadows the forthcoming ruling of King James I. In addition, the revenge tragedy tradition continues to develop with the changes in society—adding new elements to the genre that incorporate its respective time periods.
King James I made the personal assessment that judges were mere “delegates of the king” and, therefore, as king, he “could elect to act as judge himself in ‘what causes he shall please to determine’” (Dunne 149). Sir Edward Coke retorted that although the king was a brilliant man “endowed” by God with certain abilities, he could not “adjudge any case” because to do so would require “long study and experience” of the law (149). Then, as a final point, Coke cited God as the supreme ruler of all mankind in an attempt to reach some common ground with the king. The manner in which King James I believed he could interfere, and did interfere to an extent with public justice, draws strong parallels to the attitude and demeanor of the Duke, who holds in his hands the fates of his sons—not the judge of Act 1, Scene 2 All in all, The Revenger’s Tragedy is perhaps coincidentally a portrayal of the monarchy that was to come, and even more so because the lack of participatory justice within the play is also in agreement with Thomas Green’s analysis that the “age of nearly unlimited jury control was passing; the age of the law and of the bench was commencing” with King James I (144).
The corrupt society represented in the plays of Kyd and Middleton is either decades in the past or predictive of the future. In Act I of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the stage is set by a description of the French court that is juxtaposed with the Malfi court by the biographies of some of the members of the court provided by Antonio and Delio. The Arden edition of the play makes a biographical notation: “In Jacobean England, the references to court degeneracy that follow would have resonated with criticisms of the corrupt court of James I” (1.1.7, n.). The Duchess of Malfi was written nearly ten years into King James I’s reign, and, consequently, it can be said to reflect more completely the political corruption of the Jacobean era. However, it is still an interesting conclusion to find that Middleton’s play somewhat foreshadows the succeeding years under King James I with the fading of participatory justice. The vestiges of the Elizabethan era were either fading or being modified, as the centralization of power continued alongside the advancement of the justice system. Elizabethan society saw revenge and justice in different ways than people might see them today. The Spanish Tragedy set the foundation of the revenge tragedy, and it demonstrated more than just the common conventions of the revenge tragedy tradition, but also firmly placed those conventions within the history of early modern English society.
Works Cited
Calvo, Clara, ed. The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, Arden Shakespeare, 2013.
Corrigan, Brian Jay. “Middleton, the Revenger’s Tragedy, and Crisis Literature.” Studies in English Literature, vol. 38, no. 2, Spring 1998, p. 281. EBSCOhost, ccc.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=641706&site=ehost-live.
Dunne, Derek. Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law: Vindictive Justice, Palgrave Macmillan P, 2016.
Harrison, William. The Description of England, edited by Georges Edelen, Folger Shakespeare and Dover, 1994.
Hurstfield, Joel. Freedom, Corruption, & Government in Elizabethan England, Harvard UP, 1973.
—, and Alan G. R. Smith. Elizabethan People: State and Society, Hodder P, 1972.
Jardine, M. D. “New Historicism for Old: New Conservatism for Old?: The Politics of Patronage in the Renaissance.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 21, 1991 pp. 286–304. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3508495.
Marcus, Leah S., ed. The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, Arden Early Modern Drama, 2009.
Maus, Katharine Eisaman, ed. “The Revenger’s Tragedy,” by Thomas Middleton. Four Revenge Tragedies, Oxford UP, 1998, pp. 93-174.
Mercer, Peter. Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge. Macmillan, 1987.
Semenza, Gregory. “The Spanish Tragedy and Revenge.” Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, edited by Garrett A. Sullivan, Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, Oxford UP, 2006, pp. 50-60.
Thompson, Ann, and Neil Taylor, ed. Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Arden Shakespeare, 2006.
Simkin, Stevie. “The Spanish Tragedy: State of the Art.” The Spanish Tragedy: A Critical
Reader, edited by Thomas Rist, Arden Shakespeare, 2016, pp. 83-110.
Wilson, Emily. Introduction. Seneca, Six Tragedies, edited by Emily Wilson, Oxford UP, 2010.
Woodbridge, Linda. English Revenge Drama. Cambridge UP, 2010.
[1] The Oxford English Dictionary, “vindictive” 1. a.
[2] The Oxford English Dictionary, “vindictive” 2. a. “As an epithet of justice.”
[3] The Oxford English Dictionary, “spectacle” 1. a.
[4] The Oxford English Dictionary, “spectacle” 5. c. “An illustrative instance or example.”
[5] The Oxford English Dictionary, “auditor” 4. a.