The Revenger's Tragedy - Surely we are all mad people, and they / Whom we think are, are not

The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606 or so) has been the subject of much fuss about its author.  Much of T. S. Eliot’s “Cyril Tourneur” essay is about attribution.  How he would like the play to be written by Toueneur, who is nearly anonymous himself, just so Eliot can knock it up against The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611).  Maybe that is why the authorship consensus has shifted to Thomas Middleton, who wrote lots of plays, giving scholars lots to do.

I will assume the author is unknown.  I do like, and happily borrow, Eliot’s idea that he was very young when he wrote this strange, comic, Gothic fantasy, this brilliant distillation of the revenge genre.

The cynicism, the loathing and disgust of humanity, expressed consummately in The Revenger’s Tragedy, are immature in the respect that they exceed the object.  Their objective equivalents are characters practicing the grossest vices; characters which seem merely to be spectres projected form the poet’s inner world of nightmare, some horror beyond words…  its motive is truly the death motive, for it is the loathing and horror of life itself.  (p. 129 of Elizabethan Essays)

But we grow out of this, mostly.  I like the idea of a Jacobean Goth adolescent under the sway of Hamlet concocting this great morbid fantasy.

The setting is of course Italy, a dukedom where everyone is corrupt, murderous, and lustful, especially the latter.  The fiancé of one of the Duke’s victims, Vendice, precipitates the cascade of revenge and backstabbing that gives us a plot.

Vendice’s first scene, the beginning of the play, is a monologue addressed to his girlfriend’s skull, “My study’s ornament, thou shell of death.”  The skull returns in Act III, Scene 4, where it becomes an instrument of vengeance, and also part of a long dialogue between Vendice, his brother, and the skull.

                           Age and bare bone

Are e’er allied in action.  Here’s an eye,

Able to tempt a great man – to serve God:

A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble,

Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble;

A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo ‘em,

To suffer wet damnation to run through ‘em.

Vendice is enjoying his time with the skull.  Getting a little punchy, even.

Surely we are all mad people, and they

Whom we think are, are not: we mistake those;

‘Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes.

Vendice spends most of the play in disguise, I will note.  Imagine Hamlet in the grave not with Yorick’s skull but with Ophelia’s, which he then brings to the final scene for some reason.  I suspect that is exactly what the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy was imagining.

                                  See ladies, with false forms

You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms –

Eliot puts “Tourneur’s” quick, crisp blank verse up with the greats – Shakespeare, Webster – because of passage like this one, a monologue of the Duke’s bastard son, who would be the villain except almost everyone in this one is a villain:

Faith, if truth were know, I was begot

After some gluttonous dinner; some stirring dish

Was my first father, when deep healths went round

And ladies’ cheeks were painted red with wine,

Their tongues, as short and nimble as their heels,

Uttering words sweet and thick…

This is an author with a metaphysics, however immature.

The female characters are terrific, especially Vendice’s tough, sarcastic sister.  The blundering plots of the Duke’s idiot sons are amusing, like something from a Coen brothers film.  The end is close to an open parody of the revenge genre, perhaps a warning of the inevitable exhaustion of the form.  But it wasn’t exhausted yet.

Next up is Francis Beaumont’s comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607).  If a reader asked me to pick just one play for him from this fall’s schedule, it would be this one.  It is full of surprises.