Revenge Tragedy | John Kerrigan (essay date 1996)
John Kerrigan (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: Kerrigan, John. “‘Remember Me!’: Horestes, Hieronimo, and Hamlet.” In Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, pp. 170-192. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
[In the essay below, Kerrigan discusses the ambiguous role that remembrance plays in Elizabethan revenge tragedies—especially The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet—tracing this motif to the classical Greek dramatic theme of introspection.]
At the start of The Libation Bearers, Orestes stands beside his father's tomb, thinking about the past. Apparently sunk in passive grief, he offers Agamemnon a lock of hair and laments that he was not in Argos to mourn at his funeral. Then, however, retrospection modulates into a cry for revenge: ‘Zeus, Zeus, grant me vengeance for my father's / murder. Stand and fight beside me, of your grace’ (17-18). Exactly the same movement of feeling is experienced by Electra when she, in...
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