Tragedy, Justice, and the Subject
[In the following essay, Belsey examines The Cardinal in the contexts of Renaissance revenge tragedy and changing perceptions of political authority.]
1
Shirley's tragedy, The Cardinal, was performed by the King's Men in 1641. The Cardinal is the revenge play to end all revenge plays (literally, I want to argue). Most obviously, it combines motifs from Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. Less obviously, at least to bourgeois criticism in quest of the essential coherence of the text, The Cardinal spectacularly gives way under the pressure of precisely those contradictions which are held in precarious balance in earlier revenge plays.
‘Revenge tragedy’ is a modern category with no Renaissance authority.1 It was produced by and has produced a mode of criticism which focused on psychology and motive—the state of mind of the revenger—and the history of ideas—the moral status of revenge in the period. On those counts we have probably got as far as can be expected: revengers are well-intentioned but unbalanced; seventeenth century audiences knew that private revenge was contrary to Christian morality (‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’),2 but they probably had a tendency to sympathise with revengers all the same. The banality of those conclusions may suggest the inadequacy of the original classification.
The word which insists most vehemently throughout The Cardinal is ‘justice’, and it is at the moment when justice is announced, defined and installed that the point of collapse is reached. On the wedding day of the Duchess Rosaura to D'Alvarez, the bridegroom is murdered in a masque by his rival, Columbo. The King, who is present and in control, promises justice and imprisons Columbo. As Act III ends, guards escort Columbo from the stage, and the Duchess declares, ‘This shows like justice’ (III, ii, 247).3 Immediately afterwards, at the beginning of Act IV, Columbo is at large and vowing to kill at the altar any future bridegroom of the Duchess. The King is conspicuously absent at this point, and he remains so until the final scene, when he reappears at the climactic moment, authoritatively interrogates all those present, encourages the innocent Duchess to take poison by mistake, expresses amazement at the extraordinary wickedness of the Cardinal (V, iii, 270-71), and concludes that Kings should be more careful (V, iii, 299).
Whether or not the Machiavellian Cardinal himself was identified by contemporary audiences as Archbishop Laud, misleader of Charles I, there is no doubt that this is a royalist play. There is one explicit reference to the extra-textual events of the period: the Duchess urges the Cardinal to reform his ways, ‘before the short hair'd men / Do crowd and call for justice’ (II, iii, 165-66). But the royalist project is most readily apparent in the displacement of the revenger, Hernando, by the figure of the King. Hernando has a relatively minor role in the play; he is apparently killed by the Cardinal's servants before the final scene (V, iii, 181 S.D.); and although he kills Columbo and wounds the Cardinal, he does not dominate the play at its climax in the manner of Hamlet, Hieronimo or Vindice. On the contrary, the dominant figure at the high points of the action is the King.
The two symmetrically placed scenes of violence, the murder of D'Alvarez and the murder of the Duchess (III, ii and V, iii, 184 ff.), are conducted in the presence of the King and centre in each case on an appeal to him for justice. The King's response each time is prompt, authoritative, confident and entirely ineffectual. It is clear that the sovereign is the only source of justice, that he acts with the authority of heaven, that he must be just ‘Or be no king’ (III, ii, 205) and that his failure to impose justice is the pivot of the tragedy.
There are several ways of accounting for the radical incoherence of the play (without resorting to the inanity, simply contradicted by the emphatic, authoritative parataxis of his key speeches, that the King is to be seen as a weak character).4 Reflectionist criticism would find the play a precise mirror of the problems of the period, with Charles I's heroic, confident, stubborn blindness central among them. Alternatively, we can find here a collision between the ideological project of the play—to show that kings, because they are the source of justice, must be vigilant—and the interest of the narrative, which necessitates that justice is withheld so that revenge becomes imperative. If the King's promise of justice had stood uncontradicted, the play would have had to end with Act III. In order to be a play about revenge, The Cardinal has to become a play about a crisis of justice. But because the ideological project foregrounds the figure of the King, the crisis of justice is not merely the context of an act of revenge: on the contrary, it is at the centre of the play.
2
Our commitment to our own classifications tends to suppress the preoccupation with justice in the plays of the Renaissance. Measure for Measure, a problem play interpreted in relation to All's Well and Troilus, is only secondarily seen as posing the problem of the just administration of the law. Measure for Measure is rarely linked with The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest, which quite overtly propose related debates about the nature of justice and the right to inflict punishment. Similar questions reverberate through the political plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and the so-called revenge plays of Chapman and Marston. But they ring out in the speeches of the earliest revengers: Hieronimo ripping the bowels of the earth with his dagger, and begging for ‘Justice, O justice, justice, gentle king’ (The Spanish Tragedy, III, xii, 63);5 and Titus Andronicus, urging his kinsmen to dig a passage to Pluto's region, with a petition ‘for justice and for aid’ (Titus Andronicus, IV, iii, 15).6
The problems posed in these plays are never fully resolved, and the chronic interrogation of justice in the drama of the period becomes critical in certain of the revenge plays. Hieronimo and Titus, like Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy, act unjustly in the interests of justice and are justly destroyed in consequence. When ‘the world's justice fails’ (The Cardinal, V, iii, 78), they act against the will of God, on behalf of an earthly justice which is consistent with the will of God. There is no closure in these plays, no obvious position of final knowingness for the audience, because neither the ordering of the discourses within the texts themselves nor the colliding planes of their intelligibility permit the spectators to know whether Hieronimo, Titus and Vindice—or Hamlet, or Hernando in The Cardinal—are, simply, right or wrong.
No closure is possible in that that question cannot be resolved, and this in turn is because the terms in which the question is posed prevent the possibility of resolution. It is my hypothesis that there is a radical discontinuity between medieval justice and the form of justice brought into being by the English revolution, and that The Cardinal is the last in a succession of plays which are themselves the site of this discontinuity, instances of a discourse of justice in crisis. I do not want to seem to privilege drama, nor in any way to diminish the well-documented struggles being fought out within and between the institutions of the law, the monarchy and parliament. I want to argue that the discourse of the theatre and these institutional struggles converge in the ‘theatricals’ of the trial and execution of Charles I, and that this is the moment at which the Renaissance contradictions, crystallised and made visible in the tragedy of the period, finally precipitate a bourgeois justice, guaranteed by and guaranteeing the existence of the bourgeois subject. In consequence, tragedy itself begins to give way to classic realism, the dominant mode of bourgeois fiction. To substantiate this I need to move some way from 1642.
3
Medieval justice is divine and offence against it is sin. Its paradigm is the Last Judgment and its guarantee is the presence of God as judge. At the end of The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1400) the Four Daughters of God participate in the trial of Mankind's soul after his death. Righteousness and Truth as prosecution hold that he is damned for his sins; Mercy and Peace in his defence plead for clemency. God pronounces sentence from his throne above the playing area. Mankind is to be saved because he cast himself on God's mercy, but God utters a solemn warning to the audience:
‘Lytyl and mekyl, the more and the les,
All the statys of the werld is at myn renoun; [control]
To me schal the yeue acompt at my dygne des.
Whanne Myhel hys horn blowyth at my dred dom …’
(ll.3614-17)7
Medieval justice haunts the Renaissance. Macbeth's murder of Duncan is performed in the shadow of the Last Judgment:
‘this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu'd, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off.’
(Macbeth, I, vii, 16-20)
The soul of Desdemona will confront Othello in that high court of justice:
‘When we shall meet at compt,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And friends will snatch at it.’
(Othello, V, ii, 276-78)
The will of God is not constrained by any external, abstract measure of justice. On the contrary, the divine will is itself the source and guarantee of justice: ‘God must first will a thing before it can be just’.8 God's justice is absolute, and the divine sovereignty is displayed in the tortures of hell, where each sin has its just penalty:
‘Where usurers are chok'd with melting gold,
And wantons are embrac'd with ugly snakes,
And murderers groan with never-killing wounds,
And perjur'd wights scalded in boiling lead,
And all foul sins with torments overwhelm'd.’
(The Spanish Tragedy, I, i, 67-71)
This justice descends vertically from heaven to earth. Its order is one and continuous, from God to the individual soul, and its intermediaries, whether these are the church, the sovereign or conscience, are links in a chain of command. In the medieval moralities this vertical order is evident in the ironic mode of the plays, where an uncomprehending protagonist chooses between good and evil at the instigation of counsellors marked as knowing, while the audience, equally knowing, watches the hero stumble towards the inevitable Judgment. Whatever contradictions may be present in the medieval morality plays, they are not here, in the ordering of justice.
The institutional practices of feudal law maintain the vertical system of control. The abandonment of trial by ordeal in 1215 meant that God no longer exercised his judgment in a direct way. But the medieval judicial system identified justice with power, and progressively centralised both in the hands of the sovereign.9 By the sixteenth century the sovereign, as God's representative on earth, has become the guardian of earthly justice, in the interest of the common weal, which, as Foucault points out, defines ‘a state of affairs where all the subjects without exception obey the laws, accomplish the tasks expected of them, practise the trade to which they are assigned, and respect the established order so far as this order conforms to the laws imposed by God on nature and men.’.10 This circular justice finds its guarantee in the delegation of power from God to princes ‘that sit in the throne of God’, and in the analogy between God's will and the will of the sovereign:
‘It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do; good Christians content themselves with His Will revealed in His Word: so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a King can do, or say that a King cannot do this or that, but rest with that which is the King's revealed will in his law.’11
When in The Cardinal the Duchess appeals to the King for justice, she identifies crime with sin, law with the law of God, and faith in sovereignty with Christian faith:
‘If you do think there is a Heaven, or pains
To punish such black crimes i' th' other world,
Let me have swift and such exemplar justice
As shall become this great assassinate.
You will take off our faith else, and if here
Such innocence must bleed and you look on,
Poor men that call you gods on earth will doubt
To obey your laws; may, practise to be devils,
As fearing, if such monstrous sins go on,
The saints will not be safe in Heaven.’
The King's reply is emphatic, authoritative and comes from the heart of Stuart ideology: ‘You shall, / You shall have justice’ (III, ii, 102-12).
By 1641, of course, this ideology is itself in crisis, but the challenge to it begins to emerge much earlier in sixteenth century glimpses of a new and broadly horizontal order of justice. The Protestant reformers could not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue. The dissolution of the monasteries ensured that the world became the arena of the Protestant struggle for the practice of charity, and sin began to have consequences for the social body as well as for the soul. In The Castle of Perseverance Mankind's avarice is evidence of a misplaced sense of values, but in Enough is as Good as a Feast, a morality of the 1560's, Worldly Man's surrender to the persuasions of Covetous precipitates the appearance on stage of three representative social types, Tenant, Servant and Hireling, with a petition against rack-renting and exploitation.
No redress is available to these pathetic figures except the conviction that God will punish Worldly Man when the time comes:
‘No more shall it prevail him, the Scripture saith indeed,
To ask mercy of the Lord when he standeth in need.’
(ll.1155-56)12
In The Longer Thou Livest, the More Fool Thou Art, also in the 1560's, the complaint of People is similarly pathetic and similarly without relief in the world:
‘For remedy we wot not whither to go
To have our calamity redressed.
Unto God only we refer our cause;
Humbly we commit all to his judgment.’
(ll.1737-40)
Divine justice acts more swiftly in this instance, when God's Judgment, ‘with a terrible visure’, arrests the offending hero and strikes him with the sword of vengeance (l.1791).13
Divine justice here is purely retributive: it does not undertake to cure the ills of the social body. The hero is damned, but God does not intervene to avert the sufferings of People. A gap begins to appear between divine retribution and earthly justice. Once the arena of the struggle for salvation is the world, justice in the world becomes an issue, and so does the question of action to secure it. God wills the world to be just and brands injustice a sin which is to be punished. But God as the only source of justice does not undertake to bring it about in a fallen world. On the contrary, the vertical order of justice withholds authority to act from human beings who are nonetheless required to act in the interests of justice precisely because the divine order does not guarantee it. Vengeance is God's, but God may defer it till doomsday, and in the meantime human beings are committed to an ideal of justice in the world.14
This is the problem of Hieronimo, who seeks justice in the earth and cannot find it, and of Titus, who shoots arrows at the gods soliciting them ‘to send down Justice for to wreak our wrongs’ (IV, iii, 51). But Astraea, goddess of justice, left the earth when the golden age came to an end, and she has ceased to intervene in human affairs (Titus Andronicus, IV, iii, 4; The Spanish Tragedy, III, xiii, 140).15
Revenge is not justice. Titus is a man ‘so just that he will not revenge’ (IV, i, 129). Revenge is an act of will, devoid of grace, contrary to the will of God and the authority of the sovereign. But revengers may act as instruments of God's judgment, in the same way that the devils enact divine justice by tormenting the damned in hell. The bloody masques and Thyestean banquets of the plays originate in hell, but they have the effect in each case of securing divine retribution and purging a corrupt social body. Revenge is an (as yet unauthorised) assertion of the individual in the interests of social justice.
4
In The Longer Thou Livest (c.1560), the instrument of divine retribution was a personified abstraction, God's Judgment. Stage revengers are human beings who are entitled to be instruments but not agents of justice. The discontinuity in the concept of justice is matched by a parallel discontinuity in the concept of the subject, and the same group of plays which show justice in crisis are also instances of a discourse of subjectivity in crisis.
The protagonist of The Castle of Perseverance is a subject-in-fragments. The circular playing area shown on the stage-plan as surrounded by water is the world in which Mankind makes a series of critical choices which will determine his eternal future.16 It is also the little world of man, the microcosm, peopled by virtues and vices which together constitute Mankind's nature, his being in the world. The play shows the cosmic struggles between God and the Devil duplicated in the conflict within the protagonist. He is perplexed, torn, wavering, confused, invited to co-operate with the fragments of his own being, to subject himself to their promises, arguments, lies. Control is divided between these knowing fragments and the bewildered figure who, nonetheless, is required to choose. He has no power of himself to help himself, and is saved only in consequence of the will of God, the Absolute Subject.
In the tradition of the psychomachia these fragments are abstract spiritual qualities, but the distinction between physical and psychological properties is a modern one. In the ‘little world, made cunningly / Of elements’, where the blend of humours defines disposition, the physical and the psychological are continuous. The repentant Everyman greets his own Beauty, Strength and Five Senses, as well as Discretion and Knowledge, only to be parted from them all as he crawls into his grave.
In 1637 Prynne and two others had their ears cut off for libel. It is the humanist concept of the subject as a unit to be trained, disciplined, rendered docile, which makes punishment by mutilation a scandal. Titus cuts off his hand and Hieronimo bites out his tongue, reproducing the medieval subject-in-fragments. In Book V of The Faerie Queene Talus, with more obviously allegorical implications, executes justice by cutting off Munera's hands and feet (V, ii, 26).
Lady Macbeth's invocation to cruelty displays the nature of the Renaissance subject:
‘Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood,
Stop up th' access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between
Th' effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry “Hold, hold”.’
(Macbeth, I, v, 37-51)
The personified abstractions of the moralities have given way to fictional human beings in the Renaissance theatre, and the speaker, the subject of the enunciation, is visible on the stage, there before us as a unity, performing the invocation. But it is noticeable that the subject of the énoncé, the ‘I’ of discourse, is barely present in the speech. It is not the grammatical subject of the actions, and the moment it appears (as ‘me’) in the text, it is divided into crown, toe, cruelty, blood, remorse, nature, breasts, milk. The speech concludes with the opposition between heaven and hell, reproducing the morality pattern of the subject as a battleground between cosmic forces duplicated in its own being, autonomous only to the point of choosing between them.
Hieronimo's ‘eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears’ (III, ii, 1) constitutes a modest instance of fragmentation compared with the whole text of Titus Andronicus, where messengers deliver heads and hands with calm mockery (III, i, 234-40) and bones are ground with blood to make pastry (V, ii, 187-8). The discourse of subjectivity in Titus incorporates the mutilation of the narrative to produce a high degree of instability, a series of slides between unity and a fragmentation which borders on disintegration (Titus' madness). Here is an instance:
‘Marcus, unknit that sorrow-wreathen knot;
Thy niece and I, poor creatures, want our hands,
And cannot passionate our tenfold grief
With folded arms. This poor right hand of mine
Is left to tyrannize upon my breast;
Who, when my heart, all mad with misery,
Beats in this hollow prison of my flesh,
Then thus I thump it down.’
(III, ii, 4-11)
Folded arms are signifiers of grief (ll.4-7), but breast-beating becomes the signified of a tangle of signifiers (‘This poor right hand … is left …) in which the grammatical subject shifts from ‘hand’ (l.7) to ‘I’ (l.11) by means of a ‘who’ (l.9) which has no obvious antecedent.
Titus is an extreme case, but vestiges of the subject-in-fragments survive even in The Cardinal in the exchanges between the Duchess and Hernando, at the precise moment when Hernando becomes a revenger on her behalf. He urges the Duchess not to keep her heart alive without vengeance; her hand should be guided by honour to Columbo's heart; her hand is too weak alone, and another arm must interpose (IV, ii, 135-60). (If the fragmentation here has begun to sound figurative, a formal and rhetorical use of synecdoche, this is a measure of the imminence in 1641 of the unitary bourgeois subject).
The choice of action once made, however, the fragments must be assembled, brought under control. Macbeth exclaims, ‘I … bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat’ (I, vii, 79-80). Hieronimo tells himself,
‘thou must enjoin
Thine eyes to observation, and thy tongue
To milder speeches than thy spirit affords,
Thy heart to patience, and thy hands to rest,
Thy cap to courtesy and thy knee to bow,
Till to revenge thou know, when, where and how.’
(III, xiii, 39-44)
Thus unified, in defiance of nature, the subject appropriates an imaginary autonomy, claims a false authority, fails to observe a proper subjection to the will of God which is justice, and acts unjustly, however good the cause.
5
The revenger performs a heroic act of injustice on behalf of justice, inviting the audience to pose (without answering) the question, ‘Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms …’. Hamlet, as always, is a special case, and deserves special treatment. The other plays I have focused on (Titus Andronicus, The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy) avoid the collapse which occurs in The Cardinal by holding in precarious balance distinct and sometimes contradictory planes of intelligibility.
The clearest case is The Spanish Tragedy, where G. K. Hunter has identified an ironic relationship between divine justice, represented in the framing dialogue between Andrea and Revenge, and the blind human attempts to secure justice which constitute the main plot of the play. Thus, he argues, Hieronimo and the other figures on the stage are not perceived by the audience as autonomous subjects, but as puppets of a divine justice they do not understand.17 There is in the play a hierarchy of discourses in which only the discourse of Revenge is fully knowing, and the human figures merely think they know, from Andrea himself, who cannot see where the action is leading, down to Pedringano, who thinks on the scaffold that Lorenzo has placed his reprieve in the box which the audience knows to be empty.
The ironic mode here traces a direct descent from the morality plays. The difference, however, is that while the allegorical mode of the moralities insists on the subject-in-fragments, the quasi-realism of Elizabethan drama permits us to perceive the protagonist as a unity. However much the speeches may deal in fragments, they are uttered by a subject of the enunciation who appears autonomous: ‘I will revenge his death’ (The Spanish Tragedy, III, xiii, 20; my italics).
The Spanish Tragedy is about divine justice; it is also about a human quest for earthly justice. The murder of Horatio is a sin which incurs divine vengeance. But the murders of Horatio, Serberine and Pedringano, and Lorenzo's deception of the King, the fountainhead of justice on earth, are evidence of corruption in the social body. Hieronimo invokes divine vengeance and royal justice, apparently in vain. When the vertical order of justice fails, he turns to the horizontal (and incipient bourgeois) scheme of human action on behalf of earthly justice, and purges the corruption of the social body. He thus becomes an instrument of divine vengeance—and an agent of hell. Hieronimo is poised at the intersection of the feudal scheme of justice and a newly glimpsed, but not yet authoritative, bourgeois order in which the individual acts on behalf of society. He is poised also at the intersection of two orders of subjectivity: he is both instrument and agent, ironic and heroic, subject-in-fragments and Cartesian unity. These orders are held in balance within the play by the intersection of two modes: the medieval, allegorical, divine comedy of the Andrea-Revenge dialogue; and the quasi-realist tragedy of Hieronimo's revenge.
In Titus Andronicus the relationship between the two modes is differently ordered. Like Hieronimo, Titus as revenger is mad, located in an unauthorised order of subjectivity. In his madness he promises to embrace Tamora, who is disguised as a personification of revenge (V, ii, 67-69). Tamora is a human being: her adoption of the role of Revenge is a device to delude Titus. At the same time, Tamora, barbaric Gothic queen, brings revenge to Rome and initiates the series of acts of vengeance which constitutes the narrative. An emblematic reading of this extremely emblematic play would see Tamora as, precisely, a personification of Revenge. Titus is not really deluded:
‘I knew them all, though they suppos'd me mad,
And will o'erreach them in their own devices.’
(V, ii, 142-43)
He falls in with Tamora's scheme only with a view to inviting her to dine on her children. At the same time, it is in the moment that he promises to embrace Tamora that he is appropriated by revenge. In this episode the human being of the realist mode momentarily becomes a morality fragment without ceasing to be a human subject.
In The Revenger's Tragedy Vindice is both human figure and fragment simultaneously. The entire action is intelligible on two distinct planes. In his opening speech, Vindice addresses himself direct to vengeance:
‘Vengeance, thou murder's quit-rent, and whereby
Thou show'st thyself tenant to Tragedy …’
(I, i, 39-40)18
On one plane he is a wronged man, holding the skull of his murdered love and invoking vengeance; on another he is vengeance, as his name implies, addressing himself as abstract participant in the tragic order of divine justice. But it is as human subject that Vindice is required to pay the tragic price of his actions. At the end of the play Antonio summarily despatches the avenger of his wife's death to execution. The new, just ruler, justly installed as sovereign by the unjust actions of the human hero, has the hero justly punished.
‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’. Vindice as abstraction brings a series of vices (Lussurioso, Spurio, Ambitioso, etc.) to divine retribution; Vindice as human subject takes vengeance on a corrupt court dominated by corrupt human beings (Lussurioso, Spurio, Ambitioso, etc.). In doing so Vindice arrogates the vengeance which belongs to God, and himself merits divine retribution. The play achieves its precarious coherence by signifying on these two planes simultaneously, but the planes are brought into direct collision in the judicial execution of the protagonist.
In The Cardinal the pressure of the tragic contradictions of revenge is such that the play collapses into incoherence. The absolutist project of the text is unable to generate a narrative, and in the gap between the ideological and the formal constraints there insists the continuing crisis of justice which in 1641 remains unresolved.
6
In 1637, when Prynne's ears were cut off ‘against all law and justice’,19 he did not flinch ‘even to the astonishment of all the beholders’.20 Prynne's Christian martyrdom promptly became part of the popular mythology of Puritanism.21 In 1649 Charles I met his death ‘with the saint-like behaviour of a blessed martyr’.22 Divine justice had reached a point of impasse when each side invoked it against the other. The collision precipitated a new form of justice.
Prynne claimed that his illegal sentence was an encroachment on the liberties of the people of England:
‘Alas! poor England, what will become of thee if thou look not the sooner into thine own privileges, and maintainest not thine own lawful liberty? Christian people, I beseech you all, stand firm, and be zealous for the cause of God and His true Religion, to the shedding of your dearest blood, otherwise you will bring yourselves and all your posterities into perpetual bondage and slavery.’23
Charles I at his trial protested against the illegality of the court, in the name of the liberties of the people of England:
‘and do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties, for if power without Law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life or anything that he calls his own.’24
But there is no contradiction. For Charles I the liberty of the people consists in having a government which guarantees law and order. ‘It is not for having a share in Government, Sirs; that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things …’.25
Meanwhile, in 1642 Henry Parker, a lawyer of Lincoln's Inn, called for the supremacy of the people through their representatives in parliament.26 In January 1649 the House of Commons declared ‘that the People under God are the original of all just Power’.27 God is included here but the grammatical subject, the presence which is the source and guarantee of just power, is the people. Parliament went on to declare ‘that the Commons of England assembled in Parliament, being chosen by and representing the People, have the supreme Authority of this Nation’.28 A fortnight later, the Lord President addressed the King:
‘… the Commons of England … according to the debt they did owe to God, to justice, the Kingdom and themselves, and according to that fundamental power that is vested, and trust reposed in them by the people … have … constituted this Court of Justice before which you are now brought, where you are to hear your charge, upon which the Court will proceed according to justice.’29
Charles I was tried and executed in the name of the People of England, represented by the House of Commons. The real content of these phrases is, of course, male forty-shilling freeholders represented by a severely purged Commons. In 1649 Britain officially became, as it largely remains, a politically managed patriarchal democracy where property is power. Nevertheless, the vertical scheme of authority has been supplanted by a broadly horizontal one in which individuals, including the sovereign, are accountable to the social body. Charles I's assertion that ‘a subject and a sovereign are clean different things’ takes on a new meaning unknown to him. The people are now sovereign, and the way is open for their subjection to that sovereignty.
Their sovereignty is the natural heritage of the people, ‘being originally and naturally in every one of them, and unitedly in them all’.30 In consequence:
‘the power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the people to the common good of them all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright.’31
Law and order is now firmly grounded in human nature and guaranteed by civil society. The opposition is no longer between heavenly justice and earthly justice, nor between monarch and people, but between the individual and society. Liberal humanism is installed, and with it the autonomous, unified bourgeois subject, subject to and subjected by new and more ruthless mechanisms of power.
The crisis of justice, confronted but not resolved in a series of tragedies, is settled by the production of a new order of justice out of institutional collision. Ironically, this collision itself, a clash between the ‘just’ Cromwell and the king's ‘helpless right’, culminated in the dramatic spectacle of the ‘royal actor’ on the ‘tragic scaffold’, ‘While round the armed bands / Did clap their bloody hands’.32 Charles I, unlike the revengers, submitted to earthly justice, accepting it without defiance as the will of God. His death was the death of an entire order of justice and of subjectivity.
7
It was also the beginning of the slow death of tragedy. In Otway's Venice Preserved (1682) the driving motive of the hero, Jaffeir, is revenge, but the emphasis of the play is on his individual, psychological instability. There is no serious interest in the problem of justice.
Jaffeir is an impoverished gentleman who holds the Venetian Senate responsible in some undefined way for the loss of his fortunes, and is persuaded under the stress of financial desperation to join a conspiracy to overthrow them. Thus isolated from the social body, Jaffeir is induced by his virtuous wife to confess all to the Senate. In consequence, he is cast out by the conspirators too. The only means by which he is able to reassert his integrity is by killing himself, after stabbing to death his friend, Pierre, to save him from being broken on the wheel as a conspirator. Both Pierre and Jaffeir thus die nobly, unfragmented, as individuals (literally, undivided).
The key concerns of Venice Preserved are psychological error, social obligation and personal integrity. Jaffeir is anti-social:
‘I hate this Senate, am a foe to Venice;
A friend to none but men resolved like me,
To push on mischief.’
(II, iii, 141-43)33
He is thus a deviant. But social isolation is intolerable to him. He chooses conspiracy under pressure of friendship, and chooses to betray it under pressure of love. His final act of heroism—killing his friend and himself—is both a recognition of the right of the social body to punish deviants and an assertion of the autonomy of the subject. The two are not in contradiction: Jaffeir acts as an individual on behalf of the social interest and this constitutes an act of justice. Venice Preserved points forwards to The Searchers rather than backwards to The Cardinal and The Revenger's Tragedy.
Venice Preserved displays most of the features of classic realism. There are no abstract figures, no distinct planes of the action. The play takes place in a self-contained fictional world and the diegesis is not fractured. The play moves from enigma to closure, offering the audience a clear position from which it is ethically intelligible. Correspondingly, the Restoration theatre which is its setting contains the world of the fiction by a proscenium arch, and stands its characters against a perspective backdrop, offering a single place from which the coherence of its world is visible. From the position of the audience, relations between characters on the stage, and between characters and their context, are seen to be both internally coherent and consistent with relations in the world outside the theatre. The stage itself contains a microcosmic reflection of the social body, becomes a little world of society, resolving the contradictions and simultaneously displacing the grandeur of the little world of man.
Restoration heroes, for all their deference to the classical proprieties of heroic drama, are not grand. The autonomous subject of classic realism is a more subjected being than the subject-in-fragments, because bourgeois ideology provides no space for the microcosm which defies the macrocosm, and does so in the imagery of the macrocosm with which it is continuous and which is duplicated in its own being. The final location of the revenge tradition is the classic western, where the central figure acts justly, conforming to the true interest of a God-fearing society. This mode of heroism calls for skill, judgment, authority and independence—the true bourgeois virtues—but not for grandeur.
Tragedy thrives on grandeur and on contradiction. It is dispelled by the provision for the spectator of a unitary position of transcendent knowingness. Renaissance tragedy is produced by the crises of a period of discontinuity between one social order and another.
In the Restoration period, Renaissance tragedy (particularly Shakespeare) was re-written, smoothed out, rendered coherent and intelligible to the spectator of classic realism. In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare was re-read as analysing erring individual subjectivity. Titus' problem of justice has been dissolved into the psychological problems of his ‘character’; Lady Macbeth's fragments have been re-assembled to make her intelligible as perversely feminine. Coleridge, Hazlitt and Bradley between them reduced Renaissance tragedy to the novelistic. Meanwhile, twentieth century criticism systematically dissipates the contradictions of The Cardinal in the character of the King, and recuperates the crises of The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy as authorial incompetence. In doing so the critical apparatus performs an act of injustice which demonstrates its subjection to an order of justice and of subjectivity which badly needs to be brought into crisis once more.
Notes
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Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Princeton, 1966), pp.62, 259.
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Romans xii, 19.
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James Shirley, The Cardinal, in R. G. Lawrence, ed., Jacobean and Caroline Tragedies (London, 1974). References are to this edition.
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Lawrence, p.187.
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Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (London, 1959; The Revels Plays). References are to this edition.
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Shakespeare references are to the one-volume edition of Peter Alexander (London, 1951).
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Mark Eccles, ed., The Macro Plays (London, 1969; EETS, O.S. 262).
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William Perkins, Works (3 vols.), Vol.1 (Cambridge, 1612), p.288.
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See S. F. C. Milson, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (London, 1969), pp.3-22.
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Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Ideology and Consciousness, 6, 1979, 5-21, p.12.
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James I, quoted in Stuart E. Prall, The Agitation for Law Reform during the Puritan Revolution 1640-1660 (The Hague, 1966), p.9.
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W. Wager, The Longer Thou Livest and Enough is as Good as a Feast, ed. R. Mark Benbow (London, 1968; Regents Renaissance Drama Series). References to both plays are to this edition.
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These representatives of the oppressed become standard figures on the late morality stage: see George Wapull, The Tide Tarrieth no Man (printed 1576); Thomas Lupton, All for Money (1560's or 70's); Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge, A Looking Glass for London and England (c.1590); anon, A Knack to Know a Knave (1592).
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For Calvinism the contradiction is finally resolved only with the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth: ‘In completing the redemption of man God will restore order to the present confusion of earth … We are content with the simple doctrine that such measure and order will prevail in the world as will exclude all distortion and destruction.’. Calvin, Commentary on Romans v, 21, quoted in David Little, Religion, Order and Law (Oxford, 1970), p.63. (This did not absolve Calvinists, of course, of the need to be just).
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For the other instances see Frances Yates, ‘Queen Elizabeth I as Astraea’, in Astraea, the Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), pp.29-87.
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See Catherine Belsey, ‘The Stage-Plan of The Castle of Perseverance’, in Theatre Notebook, 28, 1974, pp.124-32.
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G. K. Hunter, ‘Ironies of Justice in The Spanish Tragedy’, in Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition (Liverpool, 1978), pp.214-29.
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Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger's Tragedy, ed. R. A. Foakes (London, 1966; The Revels Plays).
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William Lamont and Sybil Oldfield, Politics, Religion and Literature in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1975), p.51.
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Ibid, p.53.
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Ibid, p.53 ff.
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Ibid, p.142.
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Ibid, p.52.
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Roger Lockyer, ed., The Trial of Charles I (London, 1974), p.88.
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Ibid, p.135.
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Prall, p.17.
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Lockyer, p.76.
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Ibid.
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Ibid, pp.81-2.
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John Milton, ‘The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’ (1649), Prose Writings (London, 1958), p.191.
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Ibid, p.192. Milton cites in his support Christopher Goodman, who fled to Geneva from the Marian persecutions a hundred years earlier. The differences between them are as revealing as the similarities. In the earlier text vengeance belongs to God and it can be executed against a sovereign only when all right to sovereignty has been forfeited: ‘When kings or rulers become blasphemers of God, oppressors and murderers of their subjects, they ought no more to be accounted kings or lawful magistrates, but as private men to be examined, accused, condemned and punished by the law of God, and being convicted and punished by that law, it is not man's but God's doing’ (my italics). It is God who acts, and the people are his instruments: ‘When magistrates cease to do their duty, the people are as it were without magistrates; yea worse, and then God giveth the sword into the people's hand, and he himself is become immediately their head’ (p.203).
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Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland’, in The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth, 1972).
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Thomas Otway, Venice Preserved, ed. Malcolm Kelsall (London, 1969; Regents Restoration Drama Series).
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