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Abstracts:
Hardin L. Aasand (Dickinson State University):
O'ertopping Pelion: Hamlet, Laertes, and the Revenge
Tradition
Abstract:
The early editions of Hamlet (Q1, Q2, F1) convey
disparities in their treatment of Hamlet's and Laertes's
disposition at Ophelia's graveyard. While Q1 clearly
indicates Hamlet and Laertes both leaping into the open
grave, only F1 depicts Laertes leap into the grave, while Q2
omits both stage directions completely. The critical
tradition betrays a divided opinion regarding the propriety
of both of these physical gestures, with Hamlet's leap
receiving the harshest criticism from critics during the
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The
critical tradition considers Hamlet's behavior to be
unseemly and thematically inconsistent with the newly-found
maturity that he has voiced in his previous scene with the
gravedigger and with Horatio.
Revenge tragedy, Michael Neill reminds us, represents in its
theatrical negotiation of social practices the accommodation
both of "death" as an abstract terminus ad quem for
all mortals and of the dead who remind us of our obligation
to accommodate them, an accommodation the Protestant
Reformation rendered anxiety-ridden and inconclusive as a
socially sanctioned event. My conjecture is that the Q1
stage directions ought to be respected because they
represent Shakespeare's deliberate evocation of the dance
macabre iconography and the wrestling with death that
was part of the medieval tradition, a dance made all the
more significant by the excision of Purgatory and
incessionary prayers, which encouraged a vital incorporation
of the dead with the living. In addition, Hamlet's satirical
commentary with Yorick's skull suggests that his leap is
tantamount as well to a clownish jig, which like the dance
of death, reminds us of our human frailty. Thus, Ophelia's
grave is a locus defined by contrastive avengers. If
Shakespeare intended these graveside leaps - Laertes's
followed by Hamlet's - it suggests a visual tableau of
contrastive avengers rather than redundant mourners.
Hamlet's violation of Laertes's physical space within
Ophelia's grave serves only to contrast a mourning that,
hyperbolic in its classical heaping of images, is
inappropriate for a Hamlet whose deferred mourning has found
its outlet in the wistful exposition upon Yorick's skull. If
critics deplore Hamlet's insensitive leap as a malicious
attack on Laertes's private grief, they ignore the
historical significance of the motley drama in which comedy
and tragedy struggle in a dialectical embrace.
paper
Susan L. Fischer (Bucknell University):
Calderón's Painter of Dishonour: Revenge
Mediterranean Style
Abstract:
The Painter of Dishonour is one of a trilogy by
Calderón that dramatizes the predicament of the
husband who becomes convinced that his wife is unfaithful;
in each case the marriage is an arranged one contracted
after the death or departure of the man the wife previously
loved. All three wives remain faithful--two in thought, all
in deed--but the obsessed husbands cannot live with the
threat they represent and end up avenging their supposed
dishonor by murdering their wives and, in two cases, the
lovers as well.
Why does the revenger not die? Why does the play end
tragically with undeserving deaths and contrived reprieve,
yet fit structurally within the cadre of comedy? In
Calderón the avenging subject lives, murder is
condoned by the victims, the patriarchy and the state alike,
and future marriage is shrouded in death (literally, on
stage, by the omnipresence of an extra-dramatic Death masque
in an RSC production). The reader, especially of
performance, is made to query whether such juxtapositions
can have but a radically subversive intent. Instead of
complying with the demands of formal generic harmony--the
convention which would countenance the attempt at resolution
-- Painter of Dishonour concludes with irreconcilable
events which interrogate, if not undermine, the prospect of
closure and restoration.
Charles A. Hallett (Fordham University, New York State):
Anger's My Meat": Coriolanus and the Emotions of
Revenge
Abstract:
Recently Coriolanus has been receiving far more
attention than it had formerly been given. Frequently,
however, the nature of the hero seems to be misconstrued,
largely because two fundamental questions concerning the
play are left unasked and therefore unanswered. It may seem
obvious that this play should take place in Rome. But the
Rome we find in Shakespeare's drama is not the Rome that
Shakespeare found in Plutarch's Lives. It is his own
construction. To understand Coriolanus, we must first
grapple with the question, What did the Rome Shakespeare
created in Coriolanus symbolize for Shakespeare?
Then, turning to Coriolanus himself and seeing that at the
crisis of the drama in Act III he undergoes a near-total
reversal, from valiant, loyal citizen to vengeful hater of
everything Roman, we must ask a further question, Precisely
what is it about Rome that now seems so despicable to
Coriolanus that he would raze it to the ground? I believe
that answers to these two questions may be gained by
contrasting Coriolanus with Hamlet. The
differences between the worlds of Coriolanus and
Hamlet throw light on aspects of Coriolanus
that may otherwise remain obscure.
paper
Frederick Kiefer (University of Arizona):
Revenge in the Mediterranean: Opportunity and
Vengeance
Abstract
Because a revenger must conceal his intent and gain access
to his target, some times are more propitious than others:
he must discover the optimal moment for action. No revenge
plays are more preoccupied with locating and seizing
opportunity than those with a Mediterranean setting. In
The Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta, and The
Revenger's Tragedy, vengeance and opportunity are
inextricably connected, and this nexus has important
implications for the playgoers' attitude toward the
revengers. Kyd's Hieronimo, Marlowe's Barabas, and
Tourneur's Vindice all pursue opportunity with vigor and
success. But the more they scheme and employ deceit in their
pursuit of personal revenge, the more alienated the playgoer
becomes. Only Hamlet manages to achieve his goal without
sacrificing his appeal as a character.
Akiko Kusunoki (Tokyo Woman's Christian University)
Women and Revenge in English Renaissance Plays
Abstract:
One of the characteristics of Revenge Plays written after
Hamlet in the English Renaissance is the emergence of
female revengers, which may be seen in terms of a response
to a variety of political, social and cultural factors in
the politically turbulent years of the early seventeenth
century. The Maid's Tragedy embodies the
characteristics of Jacobean Revenge Plays in an especially
interesting way. My seminar paper will examine the
significance of the representation of female revengers in
The Maid's Tragedy in terms of gender and politics in
Jacobean society. The characteristics of the play's
engagement with the theme of revenge will be further
explored through a comparison with The Duchess of
Malfi. Finally the essay will compare the attitudes of
male authors toward female revengers with that of Lady Mary
Wroth as represented in Urania (Part I). Through the
comparison, the essay aims to explore alternative
perspectives to those which have traditionally been proposed
in discussion of the actions of female revengers in Jacobean
plays.
Markus Marti (University of Basel): Language of
Extremities / Extremities of Language: Body Language
and Culture in Titus Andronicus
Abstract:
The use of body language is essential in drama and in
performance. But the way in which body language is used in
Titus Andronicus is something else. The Roman empire
(one of the many Mediterranean birthplaces of European
culture) is presented as a society in which knives are used
instead of pens, blood and tears instead of ink, human
bodies instead of paper, a place where arms do speak and
where bodies and their parts, heads and limbs, are exchanged
like words or sentences. This makes sense if we see Titus
Andronicus as a play about the repressed and sublimated
extremities of culture, of communication and language (both
verbal and non-verbal), constructed like a game of chess
with its plot of double revenge.
paper
Alessandra Marzola (University of Bergamo):
Hamlet and the Revenge of Memory
Abstract:
Taking stock of a number of recent studies of the
refashioning of death and of memory in Renaissance Tragedy,
as well as of Hamlet's inscriptions of contemporary
history, my paper examines cultural anxieties about the
Stuarts succession and about death by plague, which coalesce
in the disjointment of the revenge pattern and the collapse
of death's meanings. The revenge tragedy foregrounds the
issue of memory while pushing in the background redemptive
deeds. Focussing on questionability and on disjointment as
on the main themes of Hamlet, cultural analysis and
close reading allow us to specify the incompleteness of the
refashioning of death , of revenge and of memory. Instead of
tying or untying a knot of meanings, Hamlet leaves
loose ends that subsequent mythologizing has taken hold of.
Steven Mullaney (University of Michigan):
"The Villainy You Teach Me": Asking Questions,
Questioning Answers on Revenge Cultures
Abstract:
Early modern England does not seem to have been a
revenge culture, yet revenge plays were extremely popular
and common during the formative years of the theater, in the
1580s and early to mid-1590s. Focusing on this disjunction
between the worlds represented on stage and the world off
stage, this paper explores the advantages and opportunities
offered by such a medium or mode as revenge, in its very
social irrelevance, for an evolving and highly experimental
form of theater. Ways in which revenge allowed a range of
experimentation in both genre and affective characters are
suggested, with particular focus on plays such as The
Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus, and
The Merchant of Venice.
Giuseppina Restivo (University of Trieste):
Hamlet's Revenge and Montaigne
Abstract:
Mainstream criticism has been long reluctant to acknowledge
Montaigne's influence on Shakespeare. And even today this
influence, though recognized, has not been brought to bear
on the issue of Hamlet's revenge.
The Danish prince is in fact the first of three princes in
three different plays, ranging top among Shakespeare's
Montaigne-influenced plays - Hamlet, King Lear and
The Tempest - who appear to prefer intellectual
activity, or distance from court dealings, to the exercise
of power. Hamlet, by no means an isolated case, is followed
by Albany (who renounces the crown in favour of Edgar) and
by Prospero, a scholar who prefers his books to reign. All
three cases involve a recusation of the feudal aristocratic
concept of honour as of revenge, with four unappealing
'models' of which Hamlet is vainly confronted in his play.
Fortinbras' example, in particular, evokes Montaigne' essay
Of Diversion, where not only is 'honour' discussed in
terms of dangerous vanity, but the very idea of revenge is
substituted with opposite ideals. This choice seems to be
shared by Shakespeare and can 'justify' both Hamlet and the
structure of the play.
Montaigne's suggestion of these ideals to future Henry IV of
France probably solicited a similar attitude in Shakespeare
during the no less complex succession of James I to
Elizabeth, both situations involving a choice between
tolerance, or revenge and sharp religious conflicts. Hence
Shakespeare's attitude in Hamlet's refusal of revenge
(though prudently censured and under cover of
self-reproach), connected with Montaigne's far-reaching new
philosophy, but long obscured by a German-rooted, Romantic
and Freudian, critical tradition.
Ildiko Elizabeth Solti (University of Middlesex):
HAMLET, THE CLOWN - revenge a la Commedia dell'Arte
Abstract:
This paper is an exploration of the seemingly incongrous
choice of introducing Commedia dell'Arte elements into the
performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet at the Globe
theatre in the 2000 season. Following through the
interaction between the theme of revenge and the technique
of Commedia in the scenes leading up to the play-within-the
-play, the paper argues for an intimate, mutual
interdependence of theatrical Story and Style in the making
of meaning. Seen through the combined framework of the
revenge and Commedia traditions, Hamlet becomes a
play of 'passionate action'.
Linda Woodbridge (Pennsylvania State University):
Getting What One Deserves: The Economics of Revenge in
The Spanish Tragedy
Abstract:
The heyday of revenge tragedy in England coincided with a
cultural preoccupation with the difficulty of ensuring that
people get what they deserve (either reward or punishment).
I connect this with proto-capitalism and with a new economic
reality in which people got not what they deserved but what
the market would bear. I treat issues of unmerited reward,
unrewarded merit, unpunished guilt, and undeserved
punishment in two tragedies set in Mediterranean countries,
Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Titus
Andronicus, with the emphasis on the former
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