SOURCE: “Virtù and Poesis in The Revenger's Tragedy,” in English Language History, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 19-37.

[In the following essay, Pearce contends that The Revenger's Tragedy is concerned with the theoretical function of drama itself; that the imagery, characterization, and action underscore the idea of the world as a stage; and that art, poetry, and rhetoric are stand in contrast with the world's moral decay.]

The Revenger's Tragedy persuades an audience of its apocalyptic vision of the void, the horror, the impending collapse of universal order and goodness. The play's intensity and power are, of course, paradoxical, for the thorough depravity of the characters and the decay of social values produce in the work of art, not further disintegration, but vitality, eloquence, and an intricate formalism. If the play demonstrates not only decay but also vitality, not only chaos but also control, not only disorder but also order, then its Weltanschauung may be far too complex to yield to simple paraphrases of the playwright's thesis.¹ The play's richness may be discovered if its subject—its central problem—is taken to be, not how to live morally in a corrupt world, which may be impossible, but how to live intellectually and creatively in an alien and destructive world. The play becomes, in this light, not a “statement” of solutions to the problem of decay, but a posing of the problem in terms of “antilogies”—a word I have borrowed from C. O. McDonald.² And the concern of the playwright is for his “art,” himself as artist displaying the creative impulse poised against the destructive. The artificiality, the mannered characters and dialogue, the stylized action, are signs of a highly sophisticated, self-conscious artist who is, in the final analysis, writing about his art.

The topos of the world as stage, long since overworked, became in the early seventeenth century both a dominant metaphor and a cliché, serviceable to both deep and superficial minds.³ In appreciating this dimension of The Revenger's Tragedy I have come to see the playwright concerned with the theoretical function of the play itself, exploiting the ideas of drama and rhetoric in terms of the individual's role in society. The traditional metaphor of the theatrum mundi becomes thus a ubiquitous and important expression of the social, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual life of the artist in a decadent world.

I shall try to show, first, not only that the play's imagery of various arts and skills points reflexively toward the art of the play itself, but also that this imagery demonstrates a principle of the artist's making use of other people, their arts or possessions, in order to “make.” I shall in addition look at several characters and scenes, considering the artists, their masks, their means and ends. Finally, I shall bring to bear on the play's concluding scene this complex of idea and image.

Metaphors of art, craftsmanship, and skill pervade the play. Especially suggestive are images of architecture and music, both of which are related to the ideas of poetry and rhetoric.⁴ As it occurs in the last act, the word “art” denotes “skill,” and is in addition associated with a tonsorial image of ornamentation. Lussurioso, complaining about a comet's sudden appearance, cites authority for his fears:

But yet they say, whom art and learning weds,
When stars wear locks, they threaten great men's
          heads.(5)

The authorities would seem to be practitioners of the science of astrology. Evidently they gain power through their art, their very predictions causing the new-made Duke to tremble. Lussurioso's words are ironic, however, for it is only the words of authority which affect him: it may be that the “art” referred to is, not the science of astrology, but the art of rhetoric, and that the power is of language per se. One of the play's central ironies derives from this question of the “maker's” power and force, virtù as sheer thrust rather than virtuousness. The sententious statement about comets' “locks,” as a tool of the rhetorician, indicates, like the other sententiae abounding throughout the play, the practice of an art.

Not only do images of art and skill stand against images of corruption, perversion of values, and decay; the dialectic of decay and vitality becomes a seemingly universal principle in the play. The living Gloriana, though a type of heavenly beauty, generated in men the sin of lust (I.i.23-25). Her vitality caused corruption. If beauty can cause vice, however, the horror in her play, the terror generated, produces virtue: the skull bears “an eye / Able to tempt a great man—to serve God” (III.v.54-55). The memento mori and the tragic action are allied in theory, in that both serve to generate goodness out of a vision of terror. Just as Vindice maintains a double image of women in his mind throughout the play—the ideal and the “real”—he and others demonstrate opposed conceptions of tragedy. On the one hand is the principle of pleasure, divorced from other motives: “When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good” (III.v.205). Lussurioso expects “delight” in his masque—“We are for pleasure” (V.iii.13). Opposed to the pleasure principle is the functional one, allied throughout to the Horatian idea of utile, this idea of teaching or “moving” to virtuous action sometimes approaching what appears to be an Aristotelian principle of purgation.⁶

The terrorizing of Gratiana is, like the horror in tragedy, purgative. Vindice speaks to his dagger: “Nay, and you draw tears once, go you to bed.” Gratiana's tears are “a sweet shower, it does much good” (IV.iv.42, 46). It would be a satisfactory end of tragedy should the dialectic of vitality and corruption operate toward healing the world's illness. But the action of the play demonstrates that while beauty may breed vice and terror virtue, such easy inversions are no certain basis for action, since corruption breeds corruption. Vicious acts produce more vicious acts; decay seems universal. The fevered vitality produces no lasting good beyond itself, being only in itself a sure demonstration of power and creativity.

Traditional images of art objects, artifacts, and embellishments point up the power of the virtuoso performer, who may destroy others' art in creating his own. In his lament that Gloriana's skull is an “accursed palace” (I.i.30), Vindice secularizes the Pauline asseveration to the Corinthians that the body is a “temple of the Holy Ghost” (I Cor. 6:19). Antonio reiterates this architectural motif in reference to his dead wife, who was, like Vindice's mistress, “falsely undermined” by an agent of vice. Antonio's image of the “fair, comely building newly fall'n” (I.iv.2), echoed by Hippolito's “ruins of so fair a monument” (I.iv.67), suggests the fragility and vulnerability in this debased, iron age of even God's handiwork. Castiza, ostensibly the sole living example of absolute female virtue, sees her own “virgin” honor as a “crystal tower” (IV.iv.152), weak and open to attack by viciousness. All these images are of a static, immobile work of art which can exist only apart from or protected against the assaults of such agents as the Duke, the Duchess's youngest son, and Lussurioso.

The power to “build,” however, lies in the virtù of the aggressors: Lussurioso can “advance” Vindice, having the skill and means to “rear up towers from cottages” (IV.i.53). The villains, indeed, are creators and builders, who would “raise” their estates upon the woman's beauty, as does Vindice in his imagination (II.i.95). T. B. Tomlinson remarks the “dominating impression” in this imagery of “an intense poetic energy feeding on and drawing substance from specifically identified sins of lust and policy” (p. 119). In stressing the idea that “life and energy” are released in such activities, he implies a connection of the architectural images with other art imagery. The energy becomes, he observes, “life and activity” in Tourneur's poetry, “converting the horror of situation into poetry of imaginative possibility” (pp. 120-21). To see this principle of conversion in the playwright I adopt the fanciful and playful view, not alien to such propensities in the Renaissance, I think, that he is dramatizing himself as playmaker, observing himself sub specie aeternitatis in a chain of “creators” that stretches from the Youngest Son to God. Vindice's fecund imagination reveals that both the sense of evil and the vitality and poetry are in Vindice himself, and his architectural metaphor, extended in self-delight, reinforces the idea of poesis in the play. The “makers” in the play, creating temples of their own delight, have ulterior motives—ulterior in the paradoxical sense of higher or lower—but their true delight is in the art itself. Hence Vindice's building metaphor is reflexive, the ostensible object—convincing his mother to pander her own daughter—being a spurious end while the immediate object is momentary delight in the metaphor itself. Vindice's “true” motive, of course, is that his highly refined rhetorical powers should prove themselves ineffectual, that in the very act of persuasion he should reveal himself powerless to move Gratiana. And this motive is self-contradictory, for he never exercises self-depreciation, demonstrating on the contrary a vigorous remonstrance against the forces of decay and impotence.

The metaphors of art, then, underline those chief arts practiced in the play: rhetoric and drama. Although in the Renaissance distinctions between poetry and rhetoric are possible, the practical functions of these arts are the same. They can be opposed to logic in that they aim at a more casual audience and make use of “colors,” or figures, in order to persuade. Poetry, drama, and rhetoric are alike, too, in being functional only insofar as they serve society, thus becoming highly important to the political world. But they are, like logic, a means of pursuing knowledge. On this ground poetry and rhetoric become thematic in The Revenger's Tragedy, as well as providing the dynamics of action. They establish a poetic framework for exploring metaphysical, epistemological, psychological, and political reality.

Serviceableness to society, the only official defense of poetry allowable, becomes in this play the issue in a logical proposition. The play's major premise is the thoroughly corrupt world, and its minor premise the activity of the artist in that milieu. In a world irremediably corrupted, action cannot be judged by consequences. This presupposition produces the play's thick and pungent ironies, readily observable.⁷ Neither can morality and goodness—virtuous intentions—be relied upon. Human personality and good intentions being questionable, and consequences of actions producing nothing more certain than ironic reversals, virtue being inconstant and vice growing admirable for its constancy, the world is topsy turvy and knowledge of it inconclusive.

What place, then, for the poet in it? If he conforms to the prevailing justifications of his craft, he at best can only watch his valuable lessons turned to bad ends (as Gosson grants the playwrights their good intentions while condemning the bad consequences of their craft), and he at worst must come to doubt his own good motives. One solution is to withdraw from the world, to practice a cloistered virtue—the way Castiza evidently approves. But hers is not the only way. Another is to make use of the world's activity, to grow through practice of the poet's craft, to turn that world to one's self, to transform it through an imitation of God and nature. The play's deepest paradox may be that in the poet's egotism he performs the ultimate act of piety. In his accepting the criterion of self-satisfaction, his fulfillment transcends the world's dramatic irony and other men's enmity. He, godlike, makes use of the world's evil in creating out of its chaos order and meaning. And his art becomes thus a symbolic act of redemption.

Thus virtually all the characters in the play become artists, all practicing their art for some (usually perverse) end, most of them “building” upon another's art, and most demonstrating an irrepressible surge of will and energy which directs their attention toward fulfillment and delight in the performance itself.

The performance, to be sure, as poesis or rhetoric, gains the power to influence through the attractiveness of its embellishments—“colors” or figures. Castiza's rebuff of first Dondolo and immediately afterwards Piato, the disguised Vindice, is motivated not only by a sense of her own spiritual purity but also by a mistrust of elaboration, refinement, sophistication, craftiness, and deception—no less the adornments of the court than its unmitigated vices. When Dondolo exploits metonymy—instead of saying that someone wishes to speak with her, he uses the terms “mouth to mouth” and “show his teeth”—Castiza responds, “Why, say so, madman, and cut off a great deal of dirty way; had it not been better spoke in ordinary words?” (II.i.17-19) As spokesman for simple, unadorned virtue, Castiza approves the plain style. She would agree with George Herbert, who in “Jordan I” defends himself as poet of the plain style:

          Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
          Who plainly say, My God, My King.

In objecting to the craft of Dondolo's rhetoric Castiza shows only disdain. But her reaction to Piato is more dramatic and violent—and at the same time more adulterate. Upon his identifying Lussurioso as petitioner for her favors, she “boxes” his ear and declares:

I swore I'd put anger in my hand.
                                                            … Bear to him
That figure of my hate upon thy cheek.

(II.i.32-36)

She means by “figure” not only a mark, or sign, of refusal and hatred but also, still ruffled at Dondolo's verbal tricks, ironically that her “plain language” is not the usual figure of speech, but more honest and unequivocal. She would seem to be toying with the traditional comparison of the arts of logic and rhetoric to the closed and open fist.⁸ She disdains to use the open palm of the persuasive art, making use of the more powerful fist of logic. If she intends such an allusion, however, her sophistication belies the dramatic force of that spontaneous “cuff.”

She has opened the way, at any rate, for Vindice to pursue the irony, playing on the idea of a “cuff” as embellishment. He admires the blow as “the finest drawn-work cuff that e'er was worn” (II.i.42). A cuff may be mere embellishment, the “finest drawn-work,” and delightful for its own sake; or it may be functional—utilized to some end such as seduction. Piato has in greeting Castiza allowed both possibilities, wishing her “best of wishes”—“Fair skins and new gowns” (II.i.28). The gowns and their cuffs could be thought of as gifts bestowed to some ulterior purpose, or as simply possessions to be enjoyed in the wearing. In the play on “cuff” Vindice is suggesting that if bestowed properly by a lady it may have the rhetorical force that Castiza claims for her “figure” of logical proof. Her “logical” proof has moved him to passion and admiration—though not beyond his own inclination to respond in kind to her wit.

Castiza's subtlety here, compounded with her later feigned capitulation (which indeed seems feigned), makes her a potential artist among artists. To the degree that one cannot be sure of her immovable virtue, she, the play's single example of living purity, is indicted. If she has stooped to mortal wiles in order to preserve her immortal soul, she has only made use of vice in the cause of virtue. But if she tells the truth when she declares her intent to be as “lascivious” (IV.iv.109) as Gratiana could wish, and if she then lies when she says, “I did but this to try you” (IV.iv.148), then her retreat into virtue is somewhat less the result of her mother's artistry than was her march toward vice. As artisan working in marble, Gratiana, Castiza declares, has produced a solid, immobile statue of vice: “I am as [if] you e'en out of marble wrought.” But in addition to being Gratiana's work of art, Castiza is herself practicing craft. Even if her pretense is “but to try” Gratiana, she is nevertheless playing precisely Vindice's masking game—testing her mother, by assuming like Vindice a mask of vice, in order to prove her virtue. I find no way to determine the uncolored truth in Castiza's facile reversal. Read either way, she certainly betrays herself as another of the artists in the play. Perhaps as one of the many surrogates of the playwright, as microcosm of the poet who is in turn a microcosm of God the poet, she is the Tourneur who would retire from the “great deal of dirty way,” the court's circuitousness and intrigue, becoming artist of the pastoral. But as spokesman for the “plain” style she points up the fact that Tourneur's play demonstrates an antithetical ornateness and subtlety of thought.

Antonio's lady in dying practiced her craft to a specified end. Hippolito comments on the power of her native virtue to influence others: her “chaste presence”

Would e'en call shame up to their cheeks, and make
Pale wanton sinners have good colours.

(I.iv.7-9)

Whether their “colours” are imaginatively the colors of rhetoric or the paints of the toilette, they are literally blushes of shame. The contrast seems, again, to be between her natural, simple, unadorned virtue and the sinners' need to conceal through art. But notice Antonio's description of the scene which he has “discovered” to Hippolito, Piero, and the Lords:

          Ant. I mark'd not this before—
A prayer-book the pillow to her cheek;
This was her rich confection, and another
Plac'd in her right hand, with a leaf tuck'd up,
Pointing to these words:
Melius virtute mori, quam per dedecus vivere.
True and effectual it is indeed.

(I.iv.12-18)

Antonio's “I mark'd not this before” seems staged: since he is clearly concerned with the effects which this “tragedy” has on its audience, it seems possible that he rather than his wife may be the craftsman of these effects. But if the lady is artisan, she like Castiza, if truly virtuous, teaches the world its lesson through a rather self-dramatizing art. Antonio's observation of her “rich confection” emphasizes the ironic craftiness of a character seemingly innocent of calculated effects. Surely the Renaissance associations of art and embellishment attach to the word “confection” here, “this” referring either to the fact of the prayer-book arranged as pillow or to the previous “this” of “I mark'd not this before”—the entire dramatic tableau built upon the placement of two prayer-books. Thus Antonio's lady has dressed herself out in death to teach the moral of the Latin apothegm. Antonio interprets her intent as utilitarian and concludes that it is “effectual.” He applauds her drama. The visual tableau, then, becomes emblematic and hortatory, Antonio, and ostensibly his lady, engaging in rhetorical or dramatic persuasion for “noble” ends.

The play's “makers” or politicians assert something fanciful in their own nature, whether the ends they pursue are good or evil. No longer merely a religious figure or a political—the Machiavel—the medieval Vice now has become a persona of the poet as artist. In trying to save the Duchess's Youngest Son, his brothers Ambitioso and Supervacuo have become makers, “weaving” hate and love subtly together in falsely pleading for Lussurioso's life (II.iii.55ff.), though the Duke recognizes them beneath their art as “scarlet hid in lawn” (II.iii.105). Thinking their scheme against Lussurioso secure, the brothers applaud themselves: “Things fall out so fit … So happily” (III.iii.29-30). Their trick, in its superfluity, effects their brother's death rather than Lussurioso's—a consequence the brother anticipates: “Pox o' your trick, and it be so long a-playing” (III.iv.14). Their superfluity, like their younger brother's, and finally Vindice's, originates in delight in their own craft, or “tricks,” and in its audacity becomes instrumental toward the ironic consequences of their “playing.”

The Youngest Son's audacious charm cannot be read off as the seductiveness of evil; his most delightful quality, “impudence,” abounds in the play. Antonio, describing the masque-rape, identifies the Youngest Son's “true” mask as impudence, his “face more impudent than his vizard” (I.iv.41). It is this quality which Vindice condemns as “court virtue” at the moment he assumes his own mask of impudence:

                                                                                                    Impudence,
Thou goddess of the palace, mistress of mistresses,
To whom the costly-perfum'd people pray,
Strike thou my forehead into dauntless marble,
Mine eyes to steady sapphires; turn my visage.

(I.iii.5-9)

In assuming the mask of Piato, Vindice invokes the goddess Impudence, asking that he be transformed through her art. The images, suggesting permanence, ironically anticipate Castiza's use of them to describe her virtue. In a number of ways parallel, Vindice and the Youngest Son are the two most admirably impudent characters in the play, Supervacuo and Ambitioso being farcical imitations of their “marble” impudence. Vindice is lying, of course, when he accuses the honest Fourth Noble of “marble impudence” (V.iii.70), as is Lussurioso in accusing the equally honest First Noble of being an “impudent beggar” (V.i.126). Impudence, as performed in the play, is not merely brashness and egotism, although these qualities are important to it. Sidney might well be thinking of it when he talks about the Energia of the poet, identified by D. L. Clark as a traditional “vivifying quality of poetry” (p. 85). Impudence involves as well the game of deception, the impudent characters in the play assuming masks. The necessity of the mask is affirmed in Supervacuo's philosophy: he “that is least impudent, soonest dies” (III.iii.15). Supervacuo is making a pragmatic assumption about how to survive in a world of intrigue, but his statement suggests something about the psychological life of the artist. If he does not take to himself the world as he experiences it, transforming it into Energia through his “impudence,” he dies as artist. Thus the generation of the Youngest Son's masque, Vindice's Piato, and by analogy Tourneur's play.

The Youngest Son has been an artist in performing the rape not as a gross and violent act of raw lust, but as a formalized masque, anticipating the masques devised at the climax of the play's action. Antonio wittily recognizes both the literal fact of the masque-deception and its figurative value. “Violent rape,” he laments, “has play'd a glorious act” (I.iv.3-4). The irony in Antonio's pointing up the dramatic metaphor lies in the fact that Antonio himself is at the moment contriving his little tragedy. The Youngest Son, thoroughly depraved, marries his masque to its consequences. Total satisfaction is derived from the fusion of ends and means, masque transforming rape, and there is no suspicion of ulterior motives. (This distinction might be brought to bear, in the end, on those double masques which effect the last act's mass vengeance.) The Youngest Son, himself aware of the theatrical metaphor, in the word “sport” suggests both sexual play and theatrical performance. Not only is his “fault … sweet sport,” the world “approves” it; the full satisfaction of “play” or “performance” requires an audience's applause (III.iv.80). He has in his trial scene played with the word “die,” with the conventional pun on sex and death. The lady's beauty, “ordain'd to be” his “scaffold” (I.ii.64), is the thing upon which be “mounts” to death. But since a “scaffold” is also a stage, he not only links the ideas of sex and death, but sees both in terms of the theatrical metaphor:

And yet methinks I might be easier 'sess'd;
My fault being sport, let me but die in jest.

(I.ii.65-66)

The Youngest Son's building his masque upon the lady's beauty anticipates, of course, Vindice's argument to his mother that he would “raise” his “state” upon her daughter's “breast” (II.i.95). What is built by the Youngest Son for pleasure, the dramatic experience, is transformed ultimately into death. Vindice's building comes to the same thing. If death is indeed a “leveller,” as Vindice well knows from the play's beginning, then his greatest need may be the same as the Youngest Son's: to marry means and ends, or to find satisfaction in the means so long as consequences are uncertain.

Vindice not only assumes the roles of revenger and rhetorician but also becomes, like Antonio, both director (or playwright) and actor (protagonist, sometimes chorus) in a play. Indeed, Vindice's opening soliloquy is a complaint about universal decay and spiritual corruption—lust, avarice, and injustice—as well as a set piece on power and impotence. But it is more. It is the assumption of a larger-than-life mask, which is rather self-consciously removed upon Hippolito's entrance. Certainly Hippolito's glib question is deflating: “Still sighing o'er death's vizard?” (I.i.50) And Vindice's response is a descent to familiarity:

                                                                                Brother, welcome;
What comfort bring'st thou? how go things at court?

And it is when Vindice is again exalted in a frenzy of playmaking that he declares his inability to descend to this level. At the “delectable, rare” moment when the skull is prepared to take the stage with the Duke, Vindice is “lost” in his “throng of happy apprehensions,” unable to descend to Hippolito (III.v.30).

His complaint in the opening soliloquy has been on the subject of virtù, at the same time that his poetic outburst has been a demonstration of self-generating virtù. The Duke's vice is not simply that he is lecherous, but that his lust is enshrined in an aged frame:

                                                                                O, that marrowless age
Would stuff the hollow bones with damn'd desires.
          …

(I.i.5-6)

“Riot” and lechery are signs of perverse vitality in an old man. The skull, posed as antithesis to the Duke, evokes the image of beauty's power—which may be good in itself but evil in its effects, moving even “upright” men to lust. But the thing that should be young in the power of beauty, having lost that power, yet has virtù. As memento mori it moves Vindice, or is instrumental in his moving himself, to “good” actions. The duke, however, in his viciousness, has the same power, turning Vindice's “abused heartstrings into fret” (I.i.13). If the lady's skull is a “sallow picture” to move Vindice to tragic action, the opposed pageant of the Duke and his family stirs him to the eloquence of tragic music. In preparing himself in Act IV for his disguise as a rustic, he again will “tune” himself for the tragedy:

I'll bear me in some strain of melancholy,
And string myself with heavy-sounding wire.

(IV.ii.28-29)

The tragic action and music are fused in the play's final masque—which incorporates dramatic action and music.

Although in the opening soliloquy Vindice establishes the essential question of the functions, powers, and ends of art, he demonstrates in his underlying concern with power and impotence that his soliloquy is an activity whose purpose is to generate power. He installs the “art” objects—courtly procession as tableau, skull as “study's ornament”—in his own mind and then utilizes them to generate passion, to move himself toward action.

But if the function of the arts—visual, auditory, rhetorical, dramatic—is to produce finally some action like vengeance, the artificer's skills are practiced with exaggeration and their ultimate aims are obscured by his involvement in, and fascination with, the art itself. Vindice becomes self-delighting and his aim the pleasure of “creating” well. His finest hour comes with the “marriage” (a variation of the “union” achieved in the Youngest Son's masque) of the two images of vitality and impotence from the first soliloquy, decrepit Duke and revitalized Gloriana. Truly debased Machiavellianism—the Vice-Machiavel plotting not more toward sordid ends than for the delight in the scheme itself—produces Iagos and Volpones. Vindice counts himself among this troupe, when, anticipating the pleasure of the play he has written and now directs, casting the Duke and the skull as lovers, he exclaims, “O sweet, delectable, rare, happy, ravishing!” (III.v.1) When he has completed the play, and needs applause from Antonio, he confesses in modest understatement that the play was “somewhat witty carried” (V.iii.97). Vindice is proud of his virtù as artificer, confirming Hippolito's observation that their vengeance is “happy”:

                                                                                                    Why, it hits
Past the apprehension of indifferent wits.

(V.i.133-34)

Indeed, if the ultimate consequences of the dramatic craft can neither be assumed nor predicted, then the dramatist's end may become applause itself. The characteristic response to the play's abundant sententiae is “'Tis true.” Bradbrook imagines Vindice's response to Hippolito's “You flow well” as a turn to the outer audience for applause.⁹ It is not surprising, then, that Vindice interprets the ultimate audience as heaven: “When thunder claps, heaven likes the tragedy” (V.iii.47).

In bold outline the play's concluding scene rounds off the action by the murderer Vindice's being caught and sent off to punishment, order returning through Antonio's literal and symbolic assumption of control. Such is the standard conclusion in the morality-play tradition. But the skepticism and terror which imbue Jacobean tragedy provoke a comparison to a similar spirit being born in the end of the nineteenth century. Dramatic form is affected by that spirit in both ages, producing—not their traditionally neat resolution but through skepticism and burgeoning irony an open-ended conclusion. Both The Revenger's Tragedy and Ibsen's Ghosts dramatize a vision of the void. Mrs. Alving's discovery has been one of personal error as well as worth; her discovery shatters all her liberal complacencies, leaving her facing the abyss, and the necessity of action, when the final curtain falls. The final note of the play sounds the terrible irony of life. And although The Revenger's Tragedy ends “resolved,” the ironies echo to the last word; the “antilogies” are resolved only to the extent that the poet has found a tenuous meaning and value in himself.

Because of Vindice's self-delight he stands self-revealed in the final scene, ostensibly satisfying the demand of Christian ethics, which condemns such egotism. The consequences of his tragic play come together with those of Antonio's, and the catastrophe can be read in terms of those two characters as playwrights or directors as well as actors.

A practitioner of the dramatic and rhetorical arts, Antonio in I.iv has assayed roles as director, protagonist, and audience in his little tragedy. First assuming the role of audience in the final scene, he finds the general slaughter a “piteous tragedy,” moving him to tears of sympathy. Although he has appeared at the opportune moment to take control, he wears a mask of helplessness at the same time that he is effecting a resolution to the conflict. He wrongly identifies the Fourth Noble as a murderer, is led by Vindice to assurance of the Noble's guilt, and finally sends him off to execution. While Vindice and Hippolito flatter him, he modestly accepts the responsibility of rule, remarking ingenuously:

But, of all things, it puts me most to wonder
How the old duke came murder'd.

(V.iii.92-93)

Although Vindice seemingly tries to put him off that track with the remonstrance, “O, my lord,” he persists, leading Vindice to self-revelation. And he loses no time, having elicited the confession, in taking over as director of the larger play, transforming Vindice into tragic hero. His order, “Bear 'em to speedy execution” (V.iii.102), echoes Lussurioso's earlier command, “Bear him straight / To execution” (V.i.127-28). Lussurioso has falsely ordered the First Noble's death, with Vindice's approbation: “You've sentenc'd well”—punning on “sentence” as just condemation and as effective rhetoric. Vindice in that scene, of course, ironically anticipates his own sentence, observing aside that the Noble's confession is self-condemnation: “Who would not lie, when men are hang'd for truth?” (V.i.132) Since Vindice's telling the truth is the cause of his own “hanging,” the parallel situations point up the fact that Antonio is not only in error in sentencing the Fourth Noble but also unjust—or at least rash—in condemning Vindice. Vindice's “excuse,” “Was't not for your good, my lord?” (V.iii.103) moves Antonio only to indignation. Antonio's sympathy for the Duke, “such an old man as he,” rings as false as the Duke's earlier rationale for granting mercy to Lussurioso. And his resort to the aphoristic “You that would murder him would murder me,” sounds like politic rhetoric. It is ironic that the crime for which Vindice is executed may be the single directly justifiable act of revenge in the play. For the Duke's murdering Gloriana, Vindice murders the Duke. Furthermore, the crime for which Antonio condemns Vindice and Hippolito exactly parallels Antonio's attempted vengeance. Although his action has not resulted in such an eye for an eye, he has generated a comparable action in “moving” Hippolito and the Lords. Antonio knows in I.iv that “favor” will save the rapist, and he watches with satisfaction his “audience's” oath to take revenge into their own hands.

Since in the final scene Vindice and Hippolito seem sincere in supporting his authority, Vindice having too confidently reassumed his mask of innocence, Antonio appears all too eager to dispose of them, one of them having been sought out in the beginning as accomplice. Antonio's true motives cannot be proved. But it is entirely possible to read his taking control, becoming “director,” as merely the happy fulfillment of his intentions in at first leaguing with Hippolito. Seen this way, he ends the play on an ironic note. Ordering the “tragic bodies” taken away, he reiterates his belief in the function of tragedy: “Pray Heaven their blood may wash away all treason.” In the literal sense, his wish would seem to be that there are no more ambitious men alive to shake his power. But as a tragic drama, their deaths, including Vindice's and Hippolito's, would teach, persuade, the “audience,” including anyone who might bear seeds of political ambition, that they should practice a discreet renunciation. In an extended Aristotelian sense, of course, their “blood” would become functional in ritual purgation of the body politic, a meaning that Antonio seems not to intend but that would be suggestive toward reading his play as ritualized and symbolically curative. Antonio's statement, “How subtilly was that murder clos'd,” is thoroughly ambiguous, leaving his character still masked. The remark seems naive wonderment about the ways of evil men—“How cunningly those murderers concealed their actions,” or “How crafty Vindice is!” But if there is a note of “admiration” in the word “subtly,” the statement could be reflexive, Antonio's admiring his own skill as director of the tragedy—“How skillfully did I bring this thing to a close,” or “How ingeniously did I resolve the action.” Since neither reading precludes the other, Antonio remains the perfect masquer, seemingly the only intriguer who remains disguised—assuming that Castiza revealed herself truly with “I did but this to try you” (IV.iv.148).

Yet Antonio's is not the ultimate mask. Vindice's catastrophe, the reversal of his fortune, which he recognizes (“Is't come about?”), remains a final affirmation about art and admiration for the artist figure. The artists in the play, conspicuously the Youngest Son, may be evil, but they are possessed by an undeniable vitality and creativity that give them a strange attractiveness. The impossibility of evaluating the consequences or judging the motives of their creativity, the essential post-lapsarian condition, leaves certain only the admirable impulse to create. Only self-knowledge is possible, and tenuous even a grasp of that. Though the artist's virtù may be corrupt in a corrupt world, perverted by the very ends that belie its virtue, in itself it is man's glory. The artist figures become, in a sense, allegorical: not different figures, merely, standing for the same or different vices. They all may share the root vice of destructiveness—lust, ambition, revenge; all prey, and in feeding destroy. But insofar as artists reflect the joy—the pride, self-fulfillment, even “impudence”—in creation, they come to symbolize the poet-playwright himself.

Vindice is “saved,” then, in the final scene. Far from affirming a simple just resolution, the catastrophe re-affirms Vindice's virtù. His tragic “reversal” is truly ironic, for he has brought about his own downfall. Not only in standing self-revealed because of his desire for applause is he destroyed. His motive from the beginning has been through peril to test the world in order to discover some principle of goodness remaining—and he is satisifed on that count: “Our mother turn'd, our sister true” (V.iii.124). His need to try the world is the result of his sense of discrepancy between the corrupt world—epitomized in the court which “rapes” nature (II.i.215ff.)—and the pastoral, or past, ideal world. The long-dead Gloriana symbolizes that innocent world and its destruction by the “decayed” world. Vindice's role as bumpkin is a mask of a true inner self, the Arcadian Vindice who speaks a rustic tongue—“How don you? God you god den” (IV.ii.43)—and has been killed by sophistication. Vindice's “covetousness” to “know the villain” Piato (IV.ii.128) points up his need to rediscover his innocent self through knowledge of his “villain” self. And his hope in the final scene that Antonio will “make the silver age again” (V.iii.86) seems a last breaking forth of the innocent, even naive, Vindice, still longing for, if not the golden, at least the silver age. But the Vindice who can die well, “set as well as the duke's son” (V.iii.107), is the impudent artist who but for his own fault might have succeeded entirely and “the world died an ass.” He goes further than the Machiavel who claims credit for his craft (“This work was ours” [V.iii.120]). He recognizes that his fall has been the result of his innocence, his not “knowing” Antonio. Ironically, considering himself the chief artist, the most knowing manipulator, he has fallen victim to a superior masquer, who at least thinks he knows the villainous Vindice as an absolute politician and murderer. Wit and sophistication are necessary for action in a decadent world. The very innocent self which Vindice is trying to save causes his fall.

If Vindice's impudence is a great part of his attractiveness, and if his role-playing explores these dimensions of the self, then play (masque, tragedy, intrigue) becomes a means of self-discovery through knowledge of others, by absorbing and transforming them through art. Vindice's statement, “I think man's happiest when he forgets himself” (IV.iv.84), is reflexive, pointing toward his reassumption of his mask—forgetting “himself,” but toward pleasure, “self”-satisfaction, an actor's fulfillment. It is a comment by an artist quizzically observing the frailty of his own nature in the flux of events. Confronting his mother, who impudently denies that she is a bawd, he is “in doubt whether I'm myself, or no” (IV.iv.24). By revealing himself, he elicits Gratiana's praise for his rhetorical power: “No tongue but yours could have bewitch'd me so”; and his rhetoric flows on, unimpeded by Gratiana's regeneration, until Hippolito must remind him, “O brother, you forget our business” (IV.iv.82). Although he is made to “remember” “himself,” that self is not reduced to a single conscience: he is no more simply regenerated than is he simply damned. Especially revealing is his response to his mother's praise of Piato:

Grat. I'll give you this, that one I never knew
          Plead better for, and 'gainst, the devil than you.
Vind. You make me proud on 't.

(IV.iv.87-88)

Vindice is not finished with his masks, and he is pleased to have his mother applaud one of them—to be sure, the mask of the “knave.” His pride, his happiness, is that of the artist who has “lost” himself in the mask he has created, albeit a grotesque and wicked one, but who paradoxically “finds” himself through it.

Rather than being at last repudiated, Vindice's impudence finally wins, for though Antonio assumes power and control over his life, Vindice maintains, “saves,” the mask of Piato. Vindice is both using the mask of the villain and protecting it. He likes it. As a mask of the knave it makes the artist corrupt, and accepting it is a bold affirmation that the Puritan's view of the poet is right. But in keeping it, Vindice sustains its virtú; Piato can still speak to pronounce a “sentence” on Vindice: “Time will make the murderer bring forth himself” (V.iii.116). Reciprocally “judging” Piato, Vindice does not unmask him: “'Tis well he died, he was a witch.” The too-innocent Vindice may betray himself in trusting the grandfatherly mask of Antonio, but if the morally ambivalent Vindice and the thoroughly wicked Piato have to die with him they yet have power and skill and wit to save themselves from “self-discovery.” The approval of Piato's death is a private joke among Vindice, Hippolito, and the outer audience, “fooling” Antonio and the stage audience: for the point is that Vindice sanctions his own forthcoming death. The judgment that Piato was a witch—a foreteller of coming events—is a reaffirmation of that part of Vindice which has been of superior intelligence, knowledge, sophistication, and craft. Quoting Piato is, of course, the artist's ultimate “building” upon, deriving from, others, for it is not Piato who has spoken that line earlier. Vindice has taken it from the Third Noble (V.i.156-57) and given it to Piato. The artist, then, has saved himself, all three masks, for good or evil, by transforming fact into fiction. Piato's stolen pronouncement is the perfect ironic conclusion to round off the tragic action. It is Vindice's means to self-fulfillment and self-dramatization. And it is reflexive, the playwright's fig to the Gossons and even the Sidneys who would, whatever their motives, force poetry into narrow social uses.

The Revenger's Tragedy refuses simple and complacent answers to questions of morality and value. The poet as egoist—be he Vindice or Tourneur—lives more vitally and dangerously than the poet as social servant. And his world is far more complex and challenging than it would be if he could reduce it neatly to a set of aphorisms. The real dilemma for this poet is not whether to succumb to the world's evils or to withdraw into an Epicurean garden. His alternatives must be stated in terms of his own sense of the world's attractiveness and repulsiveness. Clearly this playwright finds the challenge of the court—its sophistication, its intellectual playfulness, its opportunity for discovery of the self through the world's games, its love of ornaments, finery, and show—as attractive as he finds hateful its mutability, perversion of values, and dehumanizing drives. The play is reflexive in that its very fiber embodies these antitheses. A highly stylized, ornate, intricate play both in action and language, it would seem to negate those very qualities along with all other sophistications of its wicked world. But its rhetorical power—even too powerfully to persuade readers, as it has done, of the world's decay—is more than a “dance of death”;¹⁰ it is a demonstration of sheer power which seems to have a simple moral end only when limited to an abstracted statement. When in its fullness it is apprehended, its intellectual and verbal virtù becomes an affirmation of life and art in the face of death and annihilation.

Notes

1. Most readings of the play see it in terms of Christian ethics, for instance those of L. G. Salingar, “The Revenger's Tragedy and the Morality Tradition,” Scrutiny, 6 (1938), 402-24; Irving Ribner, Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1962); B. J. Layman, “Tourneur's Artificial Noon: The Design of The Revenger's Tragedy,” MLQ, 34 (1973), 20-35; Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1960); and T. B. Tomlinson, A Study of Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy (Cambridge: Melbourne University Press, 1964).

2. The Rhetoric of Tragedy: Form in Stuart Drama (The University of Massachusetts Press, 1960). McDonald traces from the late fifth-century Dissoi Logoi the principle of opposition which he terms “antilogistic” (pp. 10 ff.).

3. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), has characterized the topos. Thomas B. Stroup, Microcosmos: The Shape of the Elizabethan Play (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), pp. 8 ff., traces the pervasive stage metaphor in Renaissance thought. Jackson I. Cope, The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), authoritatively explores this metaphor, its origins and fulfillment, in Renaissance drama. Remarking “the inspired sophistication of the self-conscious drama of the Renaissance,” Cope finds the Renaissance play “a little world which both boasts and mocks aesthetic objectivity as it incorporates the theatrum mundi into itself upon its own terms” (p. 13). Although neither Stroup nor Cope explores the play, Cope makes the valuable observation that in it “death takes on movement and animation which merge with life itself” (p. 4).

4. Frances Yates, Theatre of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), observes the easy equations of theater, architecture, and music in the Renaissance. This tendency, she speculates, may explain Robert Fludd's omitting architecture from his “technical history” of the world: “The answer may perhaps be suggested that the Temple of Music [Fludd's illustration for his section on music] represents architecture, represents music as architecture. All the Renaissance theorists emphasize the connection, indeed the identity, of musical proportion and architectural proportion” (p. 58).

5. I cite the play from the Revels Plays text, ed. R. A. Foakes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), V.iii.22-23.

6. D. L. Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1963), finds “the Aristotelianism of the Italian renaissance” making “its first appearance in English criticism” in Sidney's Defense (p. 83). But although a “hedonistic view of poetry,” the theory allows a utilitarian interpretation. In his idea of catharsis, Clark suggests, Aristotle “had in mind an analogy with medicine.” In the Politics Aristotle “describes the beneficial effect of music on patients suffering from religious ecstasy” (pp. 108-09). Thus what might be taken as a completely hedonistic activity comes to have social value, “profit,” as a healing agent.

7. Critics have pursued the dimensions of irony in the play, Peter Lisca's analysis being perhaps the fullest discussion: “The Revenger's Tragedy: A Study in Irony,” PQ, 38 (1959), 242-51.

8. Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), observes that “over and over again in logical and rhetorical treatises of the English Renaissance, logic is compared to the closed fist and rhetoric to the open hand, this metaphor being borrowed from Zeno through Cicero and Quintilian to explain the preoccupation of logic with the tight discourses of the philosopher, and the preoccupation of rhetoric with the more open discourses of orator and popularizer” (p. 4).

9. M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: University Press, 1964), p. 173.

10. See Samuel Schoenbaum, “The Revenger's Tragedy: Jacobean Dance of Death,” MLQ, 15 (1954), 201-07.