SOURCE: “Chastity and Justice in The Revenger's Tragedy,” in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, edited by Carole Levin and Karen Robertson, The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991 pp. 215-36.

[In the following essay, Robertson argues that in The Revenger's Tragedy there is a connection between misused sexuality and ill rule, and that Tourneur shows with his play that in a corrupt court that attacks chastity there can be neither virtue nor justice.]

The court of Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607-1611)¹ is a place of sexual and economic circulation, where women fall behind the arras, in bedchambers, in banqueting halls. The rare women who resist seduction by word or gold become targets of aggression, frequently victims of murder. In the central act of vengeance in the play, Vindice offers a poisoned skull to the Duke, who eagerly and fatally kisses the ‘bony lady’ (3.5.120). Vindice has been interpreted by a number of modern critics as a villain protagonist. Some see his villainy in the mere fact of revenge itself; others in the particular device he chooses. In this essay I argue that Vindice can been seen as a heroic revenger who uses the body of a woman in the execution of justice to uphold and affirm older, medieval ideals of chastity. Vindice finds in the bones of chaste, dead women an ideal that resists the contaminating transformations of the court. The play's assertion of the positive value to be found in the bodies of women, however, fails to address the negative implications of a system of binary oppositions which traps both men and women. The play remains within the boundaries of a system of sexuality which finds virtue readily in the bodies of chaste, dead women, and suspects the mutable virtue of the living, a system which Nancy Hartsock has described as the masculine eros.²

The dominant modern interpretation of The Revenger's Tragedy has judged Vindice as a man corrupted by his devotion to revenge.³ Such judgments are rooted in the assumption that sixteenth-century audiences had attitudes defined solely by homiletic and political injunctions against private vengeance.⁴ This essay is grounded in an alternative view of English Renaissance attitudes toward vengeance. While some members of an audience might adhere to homiletic injunctions against private vengeance, there existed powerful theological support for individual participation in the execution of justice. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saieth the Lord” (Rom. 12:19) does not simply enjoin human passivity before evil, but promises God's intervention in human affairs and selection of appropriate instruments for vengeance. Stories of the strange exposure of criminals are demonstrations of the inexorable operations of God's justice in the world.⁵ Vindice's curious vengeance on the tyrant Duke thus becomes a demonstration of such operations. An interpretation rooted in an a priori assumption of the invalidity of private vengeance for the Elizabethan and Jacobean audience unduly constricts an understanding of the play.

Since such arguments have been made elsewhere, (Broude, Robertson), this essay operates from the assumption that Vindice's vengeance could be condoned by some members of a Jacobean audience. Here I examine the connection between the bodies of women and male violence. Female sexuality pervades this play, in the delineation of tyranny, the description of a debased court, and in the definition of heroism. Vindice's activities from the first scene of the play focus particularly on the defense of the bodies of chaste women and his violence is exercised in defense of female chastity. Such violence in protection of women, condoned by a gendered system of honor, grants a range of activity to the male defender, while restricting feminine participation in the operations of justice. Like Junius Brutus, the avenger of the chaste Lucrece, the revenger finds in the bodies of dead, chaste women models of heroic virtue that animate his own resistance to tyranny.

The Italianate court of this play is a place of sin, specifically sexual sin, and the tyranny of the ducal family is carefully delineated in specifically sexual terms. The family illustrates a range of sexual crimes. The youngest son is a rapist. Lussurioso hires a pander to seduce a chaste virgin—in medieval canon law seduction was a crime.⁶ The bastard commits incest with his stepmother, and the Duke confesses that he has murdered women who resist his sexual advances, confirmation of the accusation of murder made by Vindice in 1.1.⁷ The family's power is demonstrated by their ability to invade the bodies of women.

Vindice, when disguised as a pander, describes to his mother the inevitable status of a maid at court.

And chide away that foolish country girl
Keeps company with your daughter, Chastity

(2.1.81-82)

The punning ambiguity of the line splits Castiza into two figures—the chaste daughter, Chastity, and the foolish, country chaperone who accompanies but cannot protect her companion at court. The bawdy pun, “country girl” suggests not only the urban progression of the country girl from maid to whore,⁸ but also the inevitability of such progression. From the perspective of a pander, the body of a chaste woman only promises her shame, a shame made inevitable by her possession of the female sexual organ which lies buried in her body as the word ‘cunt’ lies buried in the word country. As objects of desire, women fall—into concupiscence, adultery, incest. Vindice describes them, as agents of their own desire, enticing and inviting men:

This woman in immodest thin apparel
Lets in her friend by water; here a dame
Cunning nails leather hinges to a door
To avoid proclamation.

(2.2.138-141)

One such moment of feminine sexual aggression is enacted in the second scene, when we watch the Duchess seduce her husband's bastard son.

Proximity to court will expose the woman's body to male lust, a circulation of sexual energy that, in this play, is inexorably linked with economic energy. The purse of the vulva opens to receive the lover as readily as the hand opens to receive gold. This system of sexual and economic exchange is challenged by two siblings, Vindice and Castiza. Their resistance to tyranny is encoded as the defense of the chaste. The process that honors the chaste leads to an elevation of stasis, the closing of the body, and death as principles of resistance.⁹ Feminine self-defense operates within a severely limited structure of value, yet the play does present a sequence of increasingly energetic figures of chastity who work in their own self-defense. These figures of active virtue contribute to the cleansing of the contaminated court.

Julian Pitt-Rivers, in an anthropological analysis of the honor code, explains its gendered division of labor. For both men and women, the body is the arena in which honor is won or lost. For women, honor lies in successful protection of their sexual chastity. For men, honor can be accrued through the exercise of the body in battle-and thus the submission of the body to potential threat. Yet a painful vulnerability exists for men, for male honor is deeply entangled in the reputation of female family members. The sexual division of labor “delegates the virtue expressed in sexual purity to females and the duty of defending female virtue to the males” (Pitt-Rivers 45). The play does not overthrow this sexual division of labor, but exposes the paradoxes and dilemmas of the survival of the chaste at court. The range available to women is presented in the activities of the female characters who appear on stage and then is amplified through the numerous references to feminine emblems in the dialogue.

Three living female characters appear on stage. The Duchess, lustful, adulterous, and incestuous, delimits one boundary of feminine evil. The other female characters, Gratiana and Castiza, illustrate the precarious survival of chastity at court. These living characters are joined by the bodies of the chaste dead—Antonio's wife and the skull of Gloriana—who make explicit the court's threat to chaste survival. The value vested in the bodies of women is amplified further in the use of emblems of femininity.¹⁰

The use of feminine images as provocation for resistance to tyranny and as site of value begins in the opening scene. From the first lines, Vindice guides the audience toward accurate judgment of the ducal family and exposes the criminal behind the ducal robe. Himself an ancillary victim of unpunished crime, he mourns the murder of his mistress, poisoned by the Duke because she resisted his sexual advances. Vindice uses the skull of the dead Gloriana to tutor the audience in correct discrimination of value. In this scene the traditional virtues vested in the skull as a memento mori are granted to a specifically feminine skull.¹¹ Vindice's lesson in discrimination is taught through the body of a woman—a pattern repeated in the play. He tutors the audience in a reconstruction of the face of the dead beloved, a lesson in which they learn to reconstruct from the substance of bone, an outward appearance of beauty. We learn to see that the skull has a truthful beauty far superior to the outward shows of the court.

The literal skull held in the hand of the revenger is then associated verbally with two other bald-headed Madams—those of Opportunity and Occasion:

                                                                                Prithee say,
Has that bald madam, Opportunity,
Yet thought upon's?

(1.1.54-56)

It may point out Occasion; if I meet her,
I'll hold her by the foretop fast enough;
Or like the French mole heave up hair and all.

(1.1.99-101)

As he evokes the image of a man grasping the forelock of the bald madam Opportunity, Vindice holds in his hand the female skull which will provide both motive and instrument for his revenge. The metaphorical is given physical representation on the stage, a literalization of the figurative that characterizes Tourneur's use of the bodies of women in this play. Further, this scene awakens in the audience an awareness of Vindice as emblem maker, a talent made completely explicit late in the play in an exchange between Vindice and Lussurioso.¹²

The second scene, in which the Duchess's youngest son is tried for rape, confirms Vindice's evaluation of the ducal family. The rape trial makes particularly clear the lethal danger of the court. Once at court, a chaste woman becomes the target for male sexual aggression, and her resistance can lead, as in the case of Gloriana, to murder, or, as in the case of Antonio's wife, to rape. Such behavior on the part of a male is considered, by the ducal family at least, as entirely natural. The youngest son, blaming his victim, excuses himself as moved by “flesh and blood,” powerless before the lady's beauty.

The presentation of a judicial trial for rape is intriguing in the context of contemporary, sixteenth-century English practice. Though rape had been a felony offense since the Statutes of Westminster in the thirteenth century and punishable by death (Brownmiller 22), prosecutions for rape were rare. J. S. Cockburn in Crime in England 1550-1800 analyzes indictments in three counties, Essex, Hertfordshire, and Sussex, in a roughly fifty-year period. Of the 7544 persons indicted, only 68 were charged with sexual offenses, only fifty with rape (Cockburn 58).¹³ Judicial trial for rape of an aristocrat, let alone a member of the ruling family, is an extraordinary exception to English practice at the turn of the century.¹⁴ A trial for rape, rather than a prosecution over trespass, focuses on the woman as the victim of aggression. For his Jacobean audience, Tourneur's presentation of a trial for rape reemphasizes the vulnerable position of women at the court. This scene demonstrates the contamination of justice in the state and, through the blocking of state justice, establishes justifications for private revenge. The lust that infects the ducal family signals the complex of failures which mark the tyrant and can provide justifications for tyrannicide.¹⁵

While the trial gives some prominence to the virtuous woman as victim of rape, Tourneur chooses not to dramatize the scene of the suicide of Antonio's wife. Instead, the play focuses on the consequences of that suicide: the precipitation of vows of vengeance by her husband and associates. Antonio's wife, after her rape, has taken the solution of Lucrece. The failure of the apparatus of public state justice and the delay in sentencing of the Duchess's son provokes her suicide. The dead body of the lady is presented on stage both as a demonstration of the failure of the judicial system and a redaction of the death of another chaste lady, Vindice's Gloriana, though in this case the lady is self-poisoned. Antonio explains:

Her honor first drunk poison, and her life,
Being fellows in one house, did pledge her honor.

(1.4.10-11)

Her action shows that the retrieval of contaminated honor for a woman is possible through her death.

Suicide of this sort, a ritual purgation of the shame of contaminated honor, has a long history. Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg summarizes the patristic debate over suicide in preservation of virginity. Although both Jerome and Ambrose approve of suicide in defense of virginity, Augustine, in Book I of the City of God disapproves of the solution of Lucrece and raises the possibility that rape may involve pleasure for the victim. Shame is the consequence for such a woman for “it may be believed that an act, which perhaps could not have taken place without some physical pleasure, was accompanied by a consent of the mind” (Schulenburg 35).¹⁶ Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, picks up the fine discrimination that a woman commits no sin in being violated if she does not consent “since without consent of the mind there is no stain on the body” (Aquinas, Part II-II, Q, 64, Art. 5). Thus, for Aquinas, suicide after rape is unjustified; a great sin is being committed after no sin at all. The suicide of Antonio's wife, the lady whose chastity made her the obsessive target for the attentions of the youngest brother is not subject to such criticism. On the contrary, her action is condoned, with all doctrinal sanctions against self-slaughter ignored. The stage-picture presents a Christianized version of the Lucrece story, substituting a prayer book on her pillow instead of a dagger.¹⁷ Like that of Lucrece, her suicide precipitates an immediate oath of vengeance against the tyrant by the male courtiers present. This scene makes clear one method for feminine participation in male rituals of honor. One single, final, heroic gesture is possible for Antonio's wife, yet the act of violence is turned inward. Heroic feminine violence can be condoned when that action stills the feminine agent of violence. Onstage, the silent body of a dead woman provides the impetus for male action—the drawing of swords and vows of vengeance.¹⁸

In the second act of the play, the sexual energy of the ducal family approaches Vindice's family even more closely, as Lussurioso turns his attention to the chaste maid who rejects his suit. He hires Vindice, in disguise, to pander his sister, a task which Vindice accepts both to protect and test his family. The anxiety provoked by the deaths of Gloriana and Antonio's wife is subdued by Vindice's position as pander and brother. Violent seduction cedes to the chastity test.

Gratiana submits swiftly to his persuasion. Her poverty cannot withstand the offer of one thousand angels. Further, her vulnerability to the tongue of the pander can perhaps be understood by her status as a sexually experienced woman. To Vindice's distress, she seems to prove the truth of the proverb “‘That woman is all male whom none can enter’” (2.1.111). Vindice's description of his mother makes clear that he sees her as a woman who has already admitted a number of men:

Now must I blister my soul: be forsworn,
Or shame the woman that receiv'd me first.

(2.2.36-37)

In the final clause we are forced to see Gratiana as one who has ‘received’ at least three men—Vindice and Hippolito, in addition to her husband. Her susceptibility to persuasion to sin becomes more explicable. Her sexual experience, her loss of a protector through the death of her husband, as well as her poverty, all combine to exacerbate her weakness. Her fall sets into high relief the testing of Castiza who must resist alone the blandishments of a skillful pander who is assisted by her own mother.

Lussurioso has been attracted to Castiza by her imperviousness to persuasion by gold. Such resistance to the common exchange of the court, particularly by one meanly provided for, leads Lussurioso into a odd quibble on the parable of the talents. He instructs his pander:

Enter upon the portion of her soul,
Her honor, which she calls her chastity,
And bring it into expense; for honesty
Is like a stock of money laid to sleep,
Which ne'er so little broke, does never keep.

(1.3.113-117)

Lussurioso, prime representative of the circulation of sexual energy in the court, fittingly merges sex and money. Unable to imagine the transformation of virgin into wife, because Castiza's dowry is negligible, Lussurioso insists that she move from virgin to whore.¹⁹

Vindice tests the congruence between the inward substance and outward show of his sister. Castiza, to his delight, is firm in her resistance to seduction and goes so far as to box the ear of Lussurioso's messenger. The virgin sister, tested, proves that her allegorical name accurately describes her substance. In resisting the temptation to participate in the sexual economy of the court, Castiza explains the reason why she has slapped Lussurioso's messenger:

I swore I'd put anger in my hand,
And pass the virgin limits of my self
To him that next appear'd in that base office,
To be his sin's attorney.

(2.1.31-34)

Her physical resistance is animated by a vow she has made. Like Vindice, she takes her vows seriously.²⁰ The anger, the slap, and her vigorous verbal self-defense give us a female figure of much greater energy than that presented by the pious, dead body of the unnamed wife of Antonio. Although Castiza chooses a condition—chastity—which satisfies the demands of a male-defined and male-controlled system of female sexuality, the vigor of her own self-defense suggests a determined agency. The character's energetic fulfillment of the prerequisites of her name provides a valiant opponent to the sinful energies of the ducal heir, Lussurioso. She vigorously defends the “crystal tower” (4.4.152) of her own “virgin honor.”

She explains her seeming indecorum as appropriate transgressions. In Act Two, she slaps Piato. In Act Four, she pretends to have succumbed to her mother's blandishments. In both instances, she performs actions that do not seem immediately appropriate for a virgin. She explains that in defense of virtue she will “pass beyond the virgin limits of the self” (2.1.32), a licensed indecorum which echoes a punning observation made earlier by Hippolito. To Vindice's comment on the scarcity of grace at the court—“Save Grace the bawd, I seldom hear grace nam'd!”—Hippolito replied, “Nay, brother, you reach out o' th' verge now” (1.3.16-17). Ross, in his editorial note, explains that the “verge” refers to that area around the court subject to the rod, the virga, the jurisdiction of the Lord High Steward, “with probable punning sense, ‘beyond virginity.’” That pun is more than probable. Castiza passes over the limits of virgin propriety to perform actions that successfully defend her chastity.²¹ Not only does she act in self-defense, but her disguise as one ready to participate in the sexual activities of the palace serves as a test of Gratiana's newly found grace. Castiza is a virgin capable of unwinding “the black serpent” of persuasion (4.4.131). In the central act of vengeance, a third female figure is granted even greater agency.

The Revenger's Tragedy is a play concerned with the movement of women ‘beyond virginity.’ Such movement, as we have seen in the first two acts of the play, usually means a transformation into whore, rape victim, bawd, or incestuous partner. In the central revenge of the play, the skull of a female murder victim becomes a participant in the execution of her murderer. This passing beyond the virgin limits of self has provoked critical condemnation. Gloriana's disguise as a whore has been seen as a prostitution of the dead woman herself.²² I argue that beneath the disguise of the prostitute, the audience, already instructed in acts of discrimination, is invited to decipher a device which is a polyvalent symbol of feminine virtue.

Tourneur repeatedly uses the skull to suggest multiple meanings. In the opening scene, the skull is a memento mori, the reminder of death used to turn men from sin. The topos, Vanitas, is implied as the truth of the skull exposes the fleeting surfaces of worldly pomp. Tourneur then provides a visual pun with the conjunction of the physical skull in the hand of the character and Vindice's desire to seize the forelock of the bald head of Occasion, or Opportunity, for when Vindice holds the skull in his hand in Act One, and considers his desire to catch the forelock of Opportunity or Occasion, he holds the Opportunity or method of his vengeance. Occasion, repeatedly described as “sweet,” refers either to sexual intercourse or vengeance. For example, Spurio when he hears news of Lussurioso's planned seduction of Castiza describes the information as “sweet word, sweet occasion” (2.2.123). Vindice describes the moment of revelation of the Duke's death to Lussurioso as “the sweetest occasion” (5.1.15). In Act Three, those two descriptions of a sweet occasion—sexual congress and vengeance—are condensed into a single image. Vindice offers to the Duke the lady he has been hired to procure. The Duke is so blinded by lust that he cannot discern behind the mask and robes, the fleshless skull and bones of a dead woman. He hastens to embrace the engine of his own punishment. He kisses the poisoned lips of the skull of a woman he himself has poisoned. Then, dying, he is forced to witness the incest and adultery of his bastard with his wife. Vindice constructs from the bones and skull of the dead woman a fitting device of vengeance. As the Duke has poisoned for lust, so is he poisoned by lust. This polyvalent symbol of the device of the ‘bony lady’ provokes a number of associations.

The portrait macabre was a popular image in the Renaissance.²³ The conjunction of women and death, as in Death and the Maiden,²⁴ clearly represents theological equations between death and sexuality, particularly the sexual organs of a woman. Vindice presents to the Duke a “country lady” (3.5.132) whose mouth is literally the mouth of death, for the teeth of the skull are painted with poison. Here is a clear rendition of fears of the vagina dentata, with stage directions which concentrate attention on the skull's teeth and the nailing down of the Duke's tongue with Vindice's dagger. Yet it is also possible to see in this scene a conflation of emblems or devices in which the audience is invited to discern a more positive, though threatening, representation of feminine agency than the conventional intersection of sexuality and death in a woman's body.

In this moment, the female murder victim participates in the execution of her murderer. Feminine vengeance is enacted from beyond the grave and feminine participation in the operations of justice is reinstated. Modern critical assumptions about the invalidity of private vengeance can lead to a moral condemnation of the revenger which both erases the tragic effect of the revenge play and elides the revenger's association with justice.²⁵ Reading these plays from a time deeply uneasy about the appropriateness of even the state's execution of criminals can lead to an elision of the revenge play's primary concern with questions of justice. Wary about the potential failures of human constructs of justice, we are reluctant to condone violence performed on criminals. Such hesitations were less widely held in the Renaissance. The right of the state to carve its power on the body of a traitor is the justification that lies behind the horrors of state executions for treason.²⁶ For the corrupted judge—the individual who, granted privilege in the hierarchy, failed in his responsibilities—the worst punishments could be imagined.²⁷ Vindice's witty device of the bony lady who executes judgment on her murderer presents an emblematic device that makes emphatic the justice of the punishment.

While the representation of justice most familiar in the twentieth century involves the female figure, blindfolded, robed with a sword, and scales-the scales symbol of evenhandedness, the sword symbolic of the necessity for the making of fine discriminations (Warner, 160)—other versions of justice were available to the Renaissance. Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, a major collection of emblems published in 1602, presents four figures of justice. Jean Baudoin's Iconologie, (II.56), which is a translation and illustration of Ripa published in 1644, depicts a quartet of figures of justice. Three of the women are young, beautiful, voluptuous, clothed in robes. The fourth is a robed female skeleton, named “Justice Rigoreuse.” Gloriana, though disguised as a whore,²⁸ can be recognized literally as a figure of Justice.

Yet that single emblem may be conflated with a second one, just as, in the first scene, Tourneur played with a conflation of the emblems of Occasion and Opportunity. To Rigorous Justice I suggest he adds a second emblem, “Truth is the Daughter of Time,” although this conflation is more speculative. My argument turns on Truth, Time, and the name Gloriana. The skull has been repeatedly associated by Vindice with Truth. Vindice himself is the character most obsessively alert to time. The name Gloriana, withheld until this moment, evokes not simply Elizabeth I, a queen whose chastity was a crucial fact of diplomatic and cultural life for the preceding half-century, but may also evoke a device adopted by Elizabeth from her sister Mary I, the motto “Veritas Filia Temporis” or “Truth is the Daughter of Time.”²⁹

The word vengeance reverberates in the scene, like the motto on an emblem. Vindice insists: “'Tis I, 'tis Vindice, 'tis I!” (3.5.165). While a careful effort at definition has been made to split the meaning of vengeance from that of justice,³⁰ even Francis Bacon, a contemporary legal authority in England, admitted the kinship of the two words in his essay on revenge: “Revenge is a kind of wild justice” (Bacon 13). When Gloriana, resurrected from the grave and dressed in robes, confronts and executes judgment on her murderer, she has gone beyond the virgin limits of the self to become an active agent of justice. When the Duke in horror realizes that he has kissed the skull of the victim that he has murdered, a fitting vengeance executes him. He is forced to recognize the consequences of his own lust. Vindice points the lesson. To the Duke's cry, “O, 'tas poisoned me,” he asks, “Didst not know that till now?” (3.5.149-150). The Duke, whose lust has led him to poison the women who have rejected him, is forced to recognize that the poison he prepared for others has returned, inevitably, to poison himself.

The second verbal cue that suggests the connection between Vindice's device and the operations of justice is the name of the murdered lady. Gloriana, a name widely associated with Elizabeth I, reverberates in this moment of justice and evokes a golden age of regal virtue (Wilson 321-369). It is possible that the female figure of Justice is being conflated with the figure of Truth, the daughter of Time, in a second emblem that condenses and makes literal a number of verbal clues in the play.

The frequent references to time are closely linked to Vindice. When Hippolito proffers his brother as servant to Lussurioso, he says:

This our age swims within him; and if Time
Had so much hair, I should take him for Time,
He is so near kin to this present minute.

(1.2.24-26)

Vindice could well be called the time keeper, or clock of the court, for he repeatedly refers to minutes, hours, and days, the measurements of time. “O hour of incest” (1.3.62), “This night, this hour, this minute” (2.2.159). He even seeks to profit from time when he asks “to have all the fees behind the arras, and all the farthingales that fall plump about twelve o'clock at night upon the rushes” (2.2.79-81). He describes the hurry of the court toward the “bewitching minute.” And it is he who condenses nine years' vengeance into a minute: “Now nine years vengeance crowd into a minute” (3.5.121).³¹

Vindice, linked closely to time, repeatedly describes the skull as the ultimate image of truth. In this scene of vengeance, Vindice has extensively described the skull and its effects:

                                                                                Here's an eye,
Able to tempt a great man—to serve God;
A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble;

(3.5.54-56)

The skull, impervious to the effects of weather, immutable now, can turn men from sin—make the swearer tremble, the drunkard to forgo drink. At revels and brothels, the skull would “fright the sinner,” “cloy [the] epicure,” and force women to see themselves:

See, ladies, with false forms
You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms—

(3.5.96-97)

The bare bone of the lady is an image of Truth which the Duke is forced to confront. Vindice reveals the truth to him by saying that he has kissed “the skull of Gloriana.” Truth usually represented by the flesh of a naked woman, here has been stripped down to bone itself.³² Truth is represented by Time.³³

This interpretation of the emblematic possibilities for the stage picture of a skull and bones dressed as a woman and revealed by a figure closely associated with Time is offered as a corrective to the moral criticism that has been directed at this method of justice. Vindice operates as a witty revenger in finding a fitting, appropriate mode of revenge. The Duke is killed by his own lust, his own willingness to embrace a bony lady. Vindice's explanation is crucial:

I have not fashion'd this only for show
And useless property; no, it shall bear a part
E'en in it own revenge. This very skull,
Whose mistress the duke poisoned, with this drug,
The mortal curse of the earth, shall be reveng'd
In the like strain, and kiss his lips to death.

(3.5.99-104)

A rape involves the seizing of a woman's body, the seizing of rights of ownership. Vindice restores the skull to its rightful owner, the skull “whose mistress the duke poisoned.” Here we see an alternate possibility for the activities of a “country girl” at court. We see here delineated a second opportunity for feminine participation in the operations of justice, though again female agency is possible only after death. Here, the female bones participate directly in the execution of justice. Although the female figure has no tongue, cannot speak, and is manipulated by the male character—thus in one way the perfect image of the woman as male property—possession is explicitly returned to the female murder victim. The scene offers a terrifying image of the rigorous execution of justice by the victim herself. From passive and manipulated bones, a woman rises to revenge. Virtuous women have turned from passive and self-mutilating victims to active participants in the operations of justice.

Let us return to Castiza's temptation and Vindice's triumphant acceptance of death. The play presents one miracle: the preservation of the chastity of one woman in this Italian court. The daughter who has successfully withstood the blandishments of a witty tongue, subsequently tests the restoration of Gratiana. The daughter deliberately disguises herself as willing to submit to seduction, and the mother, tested a second time, proves true.³⁴ In the fallen world of the court, one woman withstands temptation and maintains the crystal tower of virgin honor. Castiza's resistance to the serpent's tongue of both her mother and brother provides us with the image of an Eve who this time resists the temptation of the devil. In a postlapsarian world we have had an image of female heroism that could have saved humanity from the processes of time. Vindice, in his final words, summarizes his triumphs:

                                                                                                    We have enough,
I'faith, we're well: our mother turn'd, our sister true,
We die after a nest of dukes-adieu.

(5.3.122-124)

Vindice has witnessed the miracle of his sister's defense of her chastity through a number of tests, and has executed fitting justice on a nest of dukes. His life has reached its apotheosis. He has seen enough. Through the bones and dead bodies of chaste women he has discovered the possibility of the existence of honor in the female. He has seen or participated in the elevation of feminine emblems of virtue in a corrupt and fallen world. Female characters have passed beyond the virgin limits of the self to become emblems of virtue. It is important to acknowledge the valorizing implicit in representations labelled as feminine—Chastity, Grace, Truth, Justice—yet we need to go further and recognize that the valorizing of particular abstract qualities through their representation in feminine bodies still rests on a system of oppositions which entraps both men and women. From one perspective, femininity is used to represent that which is condemned, in this case sexuality. Vindice, in his attempt to resist the sexual economy of the court and restore a set of traditional values,³⁵ uses the feminine to represent virtues. From neither perspective is the trap of binary opposition transformed.³⁶ Vindice's final resolution—that death is more satisfactory than survival—asserts his triumph but also describes a world of rigid abstractions that can be maintained more readily by the dead than by the living. Though Castiza and Gratiana, the two female family members, do live on to uphold family honor in the world, the emphasis of the final scene lies on Vindice's welcoming of death. Not only has Vindice executed justice on the ducal family, but he has discovered the virtue inherent in death. Taught by the bones of dead, chaste women, he recognizes that entirely secure emblems of Virtue are to be found only in the grave. Having triumphed in justice, and witnessed a miracle of chastity, he welcomes the embrace of death. We acknowledge his triumphant cleansing of the court of a nest of dukes, with its sinister overtones of a nest of snakes, but hesitate before the lesson such a system of honor inculcates. The bones of chaste ladies make explicit the deadliness of the system of virtue which the entire play upholds. Caught within those oppositions, and unable to solve the paradox of honor that resides in that frail case, the human frame, Vindice welcomes death with his “adieu.” Yet the penultimate reference to “our mother turn'd, our sister true” reaffirms the potential of feminine agency and evokes the living embodiment of chastity who has withstood the assaults and temptations of the masculine eros.

Notes

1. Quotations from The Revenger's Tragedy refer to the Regents Renaissance Drama edition by Lawrence Ross (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966) and are cited parenthetically.

2. Hartsock defines the masculine eros in Chapters 7 and 8 of Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism. She describes the masculine eros as one in which the three aspects of eros-the search for reciprocal fusion with another, sensuality and bodily concerns, and creativity and generation-all point toward death. See in particular 167-168.

3. A number of critics have developed H. H. Adams's argument that the play illustrates Vindice's moral deterioration. See, for example, Ross, in his introduction to the play, who sees corruption in Vindice's acceptance of Lussurioso's gold, for “‘Honesty’ is always poor,” (xxiv) and Peter B. Murray, who sees the taking of gold as “a symbol of Vindice's moral poisoning” (192).

4. See Eleanor Prosser for an extreme version of such arguments.

5. Consider the extraordinary death of Cambises, or the ax that falls on the false executioner in The Atheist's Tragedy. See Thomas Beard's The Theatre of God's Iudgements (1597) for extensive examples.

6. See James Brundage, 141-148, in particular 147.

7. Note that the Duke's confession confirms Vindice's accusation of murder. Two witnesses to the murder, required in English law, have been presented.

8. See, for example, the progression of the Country Girl in Middleton's Michaelmas Term.

9. Gordon Braden discusses the appeal of Senecan stoicism to an aristocracy feeling a constriction of its power (76-77).

10. See Marina Warner for a discussion of the traditional vesting of abstract virtues in feminine form.

11. Marjorie Garber discusses memento mori figures in Shakespeare's plays.

12. In Act Four, Vindice, no longer disguised, offers Lussurioso a conceit, repeatedly described as something drawn, depicted. “I have a conceit a-coming in picture upon this. I draw it myself” (4.2.77-78). Lussurioso, confronted with the motto of the emblem—“A usuring father to be boiling in hell, and his son and heir with a whore dancing over him” (4.2.85)—fails to acknowledge the pertinence of the device. The scene makes overt Vindice's talent in the picturing of devices.

13. J. A. Sharpe notes but does not analyze the low incidence of rape prosecutions in Elizabethan England (49, 170). J. B. Post analyzes the Statute of Rapes 1382 in which “The emphasis of the law of rape was thus drawn away from the actual or potential plight of the victim of a sexual assault, and placed upon the unacceptability of an accomplished elopement, or an abduction to which the victim became reconciled” (25). See E. W. Ives for further developments of laws against abduction. See Guido Ruggiero for an analysis of the treatment of rape as a petty crime in Renaissance Venice, 1338-1358. The English Law Reports do not, in the sixteenth century, report rape as a felony, though rape of another man's wife may appear as a trespass case, misuse of another's property. Rape is probably also disguised in those records as assault. (Computer index of the English Law Reports by the Anglo-American Legal Project. Unpublished. I am grateful to Sarah Cox-Byrne, Vassar College Library, for access to this material.)

14. See Suzanne Gossett's discussion of a trial for rape in “‘Best Men are Molded out of Faults’: Marrying the Rapist in Jacobean Drama.” For an analysis of the criminal behavior of the upper classes in the fourteenth century, see Barbara Hanawalt. For associated material on Elizabethan female criminals, see Carol Z. Weiner. See also Otten's discussion of sexual crime, in this collection.

15. For further discussion of the idea that lust signifies the tyrant, see the essay by Carole Levin in this collection.

16. See Jerome's praise of Lucrece in Against Jovinian (342).

17. For discussion of the representations of Lucrece, see Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations.

18. See the central scene of Botticelli's The Tragedy of Lucretia, Fig. 10 in Donaldson, for such a moment.

19. This quibble bears an odd resemblance to one of Donne's Paradoxes on Virginity, “That Virginity is a Vertue,” though Donne urges marriage, while Lussurioso argues for prostitution. Donne, arguing against the medieval ideal of virginity, wittily restricts that virtue to a temporal span. According to Donne, it is to be regarded as a virtue in women between the ages of twelve and thirty and after that is to be seen as Avarice and as Sloth, comparable to that of a farmer who fails to harvest a crop when the fruit is fully ripe. See also Juliet Dusinberre's discussion of this paradox, 41-45.

20. Vindice's reluctance to swear to reveal all to Lussurioso (1.3.159-162) and “Now must I blister my soul: be forsworn, / Or shame the woman that receiv'd me first. / I will be true;” (2.2.36-38) make clear the seriousness with which he takes vows.

21. Stephanie Jed in Chaste Thinking makes a fascinating analysis of the humanistic traditions of categorization which insist on the abstraction of figures from their context. See Chapters 1 and 2. Castiza's violation of decorum resists that process of containment.

22. See Note 3. See also Ornstein, 109.

23. See Roland Frye for an extensive discussion of the figure of the skull (205-253). See also Stephen Greenblatt's analysis of the anamorphic figure in Holbein's The Ambassadors (17-21).

24. See, for one example, “Death and the Maiden” c. 1517, by Hans Baldung Grien, (c. 1485-1545) in the Kunstmuseum, Basel. I thank Paul Russell for this reference.

25. For a discussion of this problem, see Philip Edwards 43-52.

26. Consider the particulars of the execution of Balthazar Gérard, assassin of William of Orange. He was flogged, his skin cut with split quills and then soaked in salt water, vinegar, and brandy. The next morning he was racked and then skinned with red-hot pincers (Froude 15).

27. For example, the flaying of Sisamnes in Preston's Cambises.

28. The use of craft by the revenger may not necessarily signal corruption. For a discussion of the use of fraud for the maintenance of justice, see Jane Aptekar 7.

29. For analysis of the emblem, see Fritz Saxl 197-222. See also Marina Warner 315-322. In her coronation procession through the City of London, Elizabeth was greeted by a pageant: “In the middle betwene the sayde hylles, was made artificiallye one hollowe place or cave, with doore and locke enclosed, oute of the whiche, a lyttle before the Queene's hyghnes commynge thither, issued one personage whose name was Tyme, apparaylled as an olde man with a Sythe in his hande, havynge wynges artificiallye made, leadinge a personage of lesser stature then himselfe, whiche was fynely and well apparaylled, all cladde in whyte silke, and directlye over her head was set her name and tytle in latin and Englyshe, Temporis filia, the daughter of Tyme. Which two so appoynted, went forwarde, toward the South syde of the pageant. And on her brest was written her propre name, whiche was Veritas, Trueth who helde a booke in her hande upon the which was written, Verbum veritatis, the worde of trueth” (The Quenes maiesties passage, Sig. Ciii r/v).

30. See the 21 examples given for the first two meanings of the word revenge in the OED (1st ed.). In one of the examples, revenge and justice are equated. Nine of the examples either place revenge in negative contexts or explicitly condemn it.

31. “Nine years” is a common phrase for a long time, rather than a literal nine years. See Othello, “I would have him nine years a-killing” (4.1.178). I am grateful to S. F. Johnson for this point.

32. See Warner's discussion of “Nuda Veritas,” Chapter XIII of Monuments and Maidens, 295-328.

33. Frye has an illustration of a watch made in the shape of a skull (Fig. VI.2, 211).

34. Curiously, Vindice's disguise as pander has been subjected to extreme moral condemnation by critics, while Castiza's disguise has not.

35. Vindice's complaints about the deterioration of the court relate to a medieval tradition of complaint and satire. See John Peter 264.

36. This is a central strand of contemporary feminist criticism. See Toril Moi's discussion in “Feminist, Female, and Feminine,” particularly 127.

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