SOURCE: Hallett, Charles A. and Elaine S. Hallett. “The Revenge Experience as Tragedy.” In The Revenger's Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs, pp. 101-27. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.

[In the following essay, the Halletts maintain that the Elizabethan dramatists—led by Thomas Kyd—employed the revenge tragedy motif in their plays to symbolize late sixteenth-century England as a civilization in crisis.]

And know ye all (though far from all your aims,
Yet worth them all, and all men's endless studies)
That in this one thing, all the discipline
Of manners and of manhood is contain'd;
A man to join himself with th'Universe
In his main sway, and make (in all things fit)
One with that All, and go on, round as it.
Not plucking from the whole his wretched part,
And into straits, or into nought revert,
Wishing the complete Universe might be
Subject to such a rag of it as he. …

George Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois

I

If the actions of the revenge hero could be adequately explained solely in terms of Elizabethan psychology, an investigation of the works of men like Pierre de la Primaudaye and Thomas Wright could possibly be sufficient to unravel their mysteries. But when we experience the plays, we are instantly struck by the complex nature of our response to the hero. To be sure, one aspect of this response does tie in directly with statements on madness found in the contemporary psychological texts: the revenger does seem a man possessed and overruled by his passions. Yet we immediately recoil from the glaring inadequacy of such a characterization of Hamlet, Hieronimo, or Vindice. The revenger is a tragic hero, not a madman. His problem is not that he cannot get a grip on himself but that he is in the grip of a force beyond himself. Acknowledging in ourselves this tension between approval and rejection of the revenger, we must ask the next question. Is this response appropriate to the plays? There is no evidence to make one suspect a different response was expected from the original audience. These contradictory feelings the plays arouse in us, which stand in marked contrast to the disapproving attitude toward revenge and revengers found in tracts of the period, should warn us that a reconstruction of the contemporary climate of opinion regarding the revenger's madness is not an adequate explanation of the experience rendered by revenge tragedy.

Knowledge of the official Elizabethan attitude toward revenge, because it alerts us to the fact that the playwrights not only use but go beyond it, helps us to understand just how original the insights of the revenge tragedies are. In juxtaposing the plays with the textbooks we get the feeling that the authors of revenge tragedies were saying to the accepted wisdom of the age, “Yes, but. …” “Yes, what you say is true, but you don't say everything. In fact, what you leave unsaid is vastly more important.” Hamlet and Vindice continue to intrigue people because of what lies beyond the madness and touches mystery.

The fact that the revenge hero is angered by the murder of his father or son or the defilement of his beloved is not the root of the problem. Anger is the fitting response to such a grotesque act of malignancy. Murder and rape threaten the order of society. Only if someone is moved sufficiently to oppose them can order be maintained in the face of the towering human passions that drive men to such deeds. Within any established order, the emotions experienced by Hamlet, Vindice, or Hieronimo have a beneficial function. In the first place, anger must always be channeled directly against injustice; it supplies the force that resists injustice and works for the restoration of order. But beyond that, the mere presence in a society of a store of righteous indignation, with the potential force for justice that it represents, acts as an effective deterrent, discouraging violations of the order. But this anger and indignation must itself be restrained by the order if it is to function as a stabilizing influence. To this end, all societies have developed within their symbolism, customs that are designed to regulate the course of the emotion, customs aimed at making certain that when passion is elevated to the level of action that action will in fact redress an injustice and restore balance, not fly off into excess. In revenge tragedy the weakness ultimately rests not in the anger but in the defective symbolism.

Regulating the passions and therefore the actions of men is the primary function of society, and this can only be achieved through a healthy symbolism. Conversely, when the symbolism of a society fails to regulate the actions of men, particularly those of the good, capable, and well-intentioned men, then that society has entered a time of crisis. That this regulation is missing from the societies and consequently from the lives of the revenge heroes is crucial to an understanding of the action of the plays. The authors are all surprisingly clear and in agreement on this point, even when they are either cryptic or in disagreement on others. Each play is structured to reveal that the disorder is social and not individual. Further, the source of the disorder is internal to the society, not caused by external pressures. It is always the king or duke—that person who should represent authority and order in the society—who has transgressed and violated the order that he should both symbolize and maintain.

In Hamlet Shakespeare goes out of his way to establish the fact that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” For an entire act he leads the audience to believe that Denmark's problems have some external cause. When the Ghost appears, he does so in that “warlike form / In which the majesty of buried Denmark / Did sometimes march”.¹ The whole kingdom is drawn together in defensive preparations while King Claudius negotiates peace:

… Now, sir, young Fortinbras,
Of unimproved mettle hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Shark'd up a list of lawless resolutes
For food and diet to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in't, which is no other,
As it doth well appear unto our state,
But to recover of us, by strong hand
And terms compulsatory, those foresaid lands
So by his father lost; and this, I take it,
Is the main motive of our preparations,
The source of this our watch, and the chief head
Of this post-haste and romage in the land.

[1.1.95-107]

No doubt in retrospect, in the study, one may pick apart Claudius's initial speeches (1.2.1-128) to expose the oily hypocrisy there. However, anyone innocent of the play, hearing it for the first time in the theater (as it was meant to be experienced, and as we always must experience it regardless of how familiar we are with the text) would be impressed by his seemingly even-handed control of all aspects of statecraft. Only when the Ghost reveals that Claudius is the murderer is our attention swung around from looking to Norway for the source of corruption to finding it in the seat of judgment itself.

By focusing our attention on the possibility that a foreign power threatens Denmark before alerting us to the true source of the upheaval, Shakespeare has deliberately divided the world into external and internal and by eliminating one emphatically condemns the other. The problem is not an invading force, not Norway, nor Fortinbras, not the external world, but our own state, our king, our uncle, our mother, and, ultimately, ourselves.

As in Hamlet, so in all the revenge tragedies: we are confronted with a society at war with itself. The rift is internal and the source of the disturbance is in each case the organ that should be the fountainhead of order and stability, the one person in the state who stands for more than himself. The king, whose only justification for his authority to rule is that he is God's steward on earth, makes a mockery of the symbol of kingship by using the sacred office to legitimize tyranny, and thus undermines the whole symbolic structure of the civilization. Is it any wonder that men are without the guidance necessary to curb their passions and channel their emotions into fruitful conduct?

This rift in the social order is merely a manifestation of the more fundamental breakdown of the very symbolism developed by the society to interpret the universe. Thus, the disturbance among men reaches beyond the human sphere into the divine. It is not only the passion of the citizens within the society that lacks regulation when the ordering symbolism loses its power to transform the chaos of experience into a meaningful structure. For a people whose social order disintegrates, the entire order of existence is threatened. The natural forces that were formerly placated within that order break lose and demand propitiation directly.

The power that breaks out in the revenge tragedy, surging forth from the underworld to intervene directly in the lives of men, is the same power represented in Greek constructs of the universe as the Furies. But that power did not have access to the consciousness of the Elizabethans, whose minds were strangely taken up by man. In a sense the playwrights are recognizing this fact when they employ an intermediary—Andrea, Andrugio, Albanact—to go between these powers and mankind. The human ghost has a shape that would be understood by a people who lacked the direct consciousness of the gods evidenced in the primitive Greeks. Through it, the “Furies” can press their claims.

The ghost brings a gift of knowledge to the hero. In the sense that this knowledge is not common among men, it is a gift. In the sense that the knowledge wells up out of the region external to man that is the corollary to his passions, it is more of a curse. The knowledge the ghost grants irrevocably separates the hero from his fellow men, because it makes him the subject of his passions. But supernatural knowledge is heady stuff and the gods, particularly the Furies, do not give it without a purpose. Nor are they at all interested in the well-being of the individual they grace. The course of action they prompt the hero to through their gift of knowledge involves extraordinary self-indulgence. Even the hero recognizes this and would avoid it, except that in his passion he convinces himself he is God's avenging angel.

At the same time, the vision that isolates the hero and drives him mad does raise him above the world he lives in. As something outside the human order, the hero's madness places him directly in the realm of mystery. He has been removed from the order that binds men together. The message from beyond the grave gives the hero a wedge into the follies of man. Yet he is not lifted into a new order. Rather, he is placed in a void where vision and insight alternate with passion and illusion in an undifferentiated kaleidoscope. Ultimately, of course, he acts out of the blind passion that is symbolized by the excess at the end of the play. We feel he must die because he has fallen into sin. Nevertheless, his action has purged the state of the corrupting force it had harbored. But there is no epiphany. It is as though the disease is so deep-rooted in the society that the mere killing of a Claudius or a Piero is insufficient. The problem was not that a corrupt individual cast his shadow over a healthy society. If that had been the case, then, as with the death of Macbeth, an epiphany of order would have ensued. But the pall that blankets the society in the revenge tragedy is of a more universal sort.

The course of action of the revenge tragedy is not from disorder to order. Rather, it is from ignorance to knowledge. The disorder is still there. The hero has been unable to dispel it because his actions, the result of unregulated passions, were themselves symptomatic of the disorder. Yet if the problem is not solved, it has at least been identified. The problem lies in the civilization.

II

To fully comprehend where the revenge hero derives his tragic stature from, we must know the state of the civilization in Elizabethan England, not the state of the climate of opinion. The revenger symbolizes certain things that were true then and continue to be true today. The symbols used to render that meaning have significance for us, but we cannot understand the symbols unless we understand the civilizational epoch out of which they come.

It is axiomatic that comedy can be written at just about any point in history, whereas tragedy requires very special civilizational conditions for its creation. Ironically, though tragedy is one of the supreme achievements of the imagination, it is not the product of a civilization that is itself at its high point. Tragedy is produced only in societies that have reached a point of crisis. We are aware that to speak of a civilization in crisis is to make several assumptions, assumptions about civilization and assumptions about civilizational validity. In fairness to the reader, we shall set these assumptions out fully before attempting to discuss tragedy in terms of them. One is that at certain moments in history—pre-Aeschylean Athens or the high Middle Ages—civilization was achieved. Another is that something was present in these eras and not in other eras which gave coherence to the population. A third is that sociological or economical definitions of civilization do not really recognize, let alone explain, this achievement.

The characteristic that distinguishes a culture as a culture and at the same time distinguishes it from all other cultures, marking it as uniquely itself, is its symbolism. All cultures develop symbolism. Each one is different, but the purpose of every one of them is fundamentally the same: to render experienceable the interrelationships of the levels of being. The process of developing such a symbolism is the life work of a culture. So all-pervasive an activity is it that ironically much of it is carried out below the level of consciousness. The very language itself, as spoken universally throughout the culture, becomes heavily laden with the culture's symbolism of order. The metaphors arising from that language in the poetry, philosophy, and theology of any given epoch will be especially revealing about how that culture at that time perceived the order of the universe.

Nor should this process be surprising to any student of literature who is continuously discovering how garbled an understanding one age has of the values of another. What may seem surprising, however, is our insistence (developed below) that there is a causal relationship between the decay of a civilization and its failure to comprehend its own symbolism. Nevertheless, it is the symbolism that defines the culture. And this symbolism must lead the culture to civilization.

Furthermore, as the culture itself has a history of growth and decay, so has its symbolism. The growth and decay of the culture is more dependent upon the health of its symbols than upon either its army or its economy. To make a distinction in this process of growth and decline, it is useful to define a “civilization” as that period when a culture develops a symbolism which imparts a sense of coherence to the lives of its citizens by relating their everyday actions directly to the transcendental ground of being. At such a time the sacred and the profane, which otherwise would literally be worlds apart, merge into one cohesive, extended universe. To achieve this the symbolism must, metaphorically, place the culture directly over the center of being. When this alignment of being, the culture, and the individual is accomplished, they have a common axis. At such moments in history the individual is spared the anxieties of existing as a dislocated alien in his world.

These moments do not simply come about in the normal course of things. They are accomplishments perennially sought after but only occasionally achieved in the history of man. The very idea of a history of mankind presupposes that human nature is constant. And precisely because it is constant, the problem of order is the same for all men at all times. “Human existence in society has history,” says Eric Voegelin, “because it has a dimension of spirit and freedom beyond mere animal existence, because social order is an attunement of man with the order of being, and because this order can be understood by man and realized in society with increasing approximations to its truth.” Insights into the nature of the order of being are the accomplishments of individual men living at specific times and in particular societies. The Christian West is the heir to two unique insights that are of such magnitude and penetration that they can only be characterized as leaps in being. One is the “Hellenic experience of God as the unseen measure of man,” and the other is the Israelite experience of the God who reveals himself to his people.² But no matter how monumental these leaps in being were, not the Hellenic nor the Israelite nor the Christian established the ultimate order of mankind. What was achieved in each case was that the struggle for the truth of order continued on a new historical level.

That is to say, the struggle to comprehend the order of being is the permanent subject of the history of man. The struggle is characterized as much by failure of insight as achievement and subsequent development of insight. The symbols which have illuminated the order of being for one generation are not necessarily superseded by the subsequent generation: they may as easily be misunderstood, corrupted, or forgotten. Much as the proponents of the myth of progress would have us believe that the history of man has been a story of continuous growth, the fact is that understanding achieved by previous generations is frequently garbled and lost. When this happens, though the wise may regret the loss, there will always be large numbers committed to the form of provincialism that proclaims that what is, is good. Thus a civilization may easily be in a state of crisis without the fact being generally acknowledged.

The times of Elizabeth and James were times of crisis not only for England but for all of Europe. The crisis, however, was not specifically the result of those movements we associate with the names of Copernicus, Machiavelli, Luther, and Montaigne. These disruptions in the spheres of science, politics, religion, and moral philosophy were both causes and symptoms of the crisis. But the crisis itself was the breakdown of the medieval symbolism which had achieved an unparalleled integration of the individual with the ground of being.

Since the symbolism of the civilization we call the Middle Ages had located the society spiritually over an archetype by developing its structure out of the mythic unconscious of its citizens, the resulting cultural myth opened toward the ground of being by symbolically enacting the ground of being. Within such a context the citizen could rely on the value structure that surrounded him to solve his day-to-day problems as well as his metaphysical problems.

To keep all the activities of life wound together, the Middle Ages had developed an intricate symbolism that stitched the sacred and the profane together so that everyone lived simultaneously in both worlds. Each day was two inseparable days, where the rhythms of the workaday world were counterpointed by such ecclesiastical services as Matins, Lauds, and Prime; likewise, the natural rhythms of life—birth, marriage, and death—were supported by appropriate sacraments. The individual life in a civilization is woven into the structures and relations created by the symbolism of that civilization.

The hero performs a vital function for his civilization. His willingness to put his life on the line in defense of the civilizational values gives proof of their validity in a way no philosophical argument could hope to do. Although no national state has ever come near to achieving perfection, insofar as the order of the nation validly reflects the order of the universe, the defense of the nation is the defense of the order of the universe. The crown that Richard II failed was not the crown of the risen Jerusalem. Still, the crown did represent something quite real. It stood, anagogically, for the order in the universe. This was as near as imperfect man could get to that order. Using the crown as a symbol, he could see beyond it to the true order. The nation that no longer respects its heroes or, worse, no longer produces heroes is a nation that has lost its meaning. Then the Falstaffs become heroes.

Since the values of a high civilization transcend reason, neither nature nor science are exalted as sources of truth. Hope and faith give it its structure and the warrior, saint, and philosopher are its heroes. As there was no question in the Middle Ages that the Crusaders were heroes acting in righteousness, so there was no question that men like Saint Anthony and Saint Francis were God's chosen. The symbols of the civilization interconnected the different orders of being. The result was that though the saint, like the tragic hero, had to descend into himself to find his being, the journey was not made unaided. The saint's descent is as real as the tragic hero's, but the path he travels is well marked by the mythology of Christianity—this gives a symbolic structure to the journey. Because this symbolism is not a purely human invention but derives its validity from the fact that it incorporates within it a perception of reality at its highest order, the saint is never cut off for long from hope. Even the dark night of the soul is no exception. Though it may be agonizing, the saint knows where he is. Even when life becomes frightening and hallucinatory (as in the temptation of Saint Anthony), there is a symbolic formulation of experience that explains what is happening to him. For the saint as for the Christian hero, there is always present the very real possibility that he may break under stress; nevertheless, his journey is charted.

Unfortunately, the high civilization has its own destruction built in. Although the ground of being is fixed and immutable, man and his symbols are constantly changing. On the positive side, this flexibility makes it possible for man to develop his perceptions and his symbolism to the point where they put him in touch with the ground of being. But this process of change cannot be switched off when it reaches the point of equilibrium. The conditions of life change and what was formerly an adequate symbol, largely because it related the experiences of a particular time to the eternal, no longer illuminates. Furthermore, like all metaphors, symbols lose their freshness and must be renewed.

And this is what happened in the Middle Ages. No sooner had all of life been fitted into a pattern and that pattern and the resulting sureness reached its highest state of refinement than the language of that refinement developed the same symptoms as the Greek of the age of Plato and Aristotle. In its sophistication, it begins to examine consciousness more closely. The language (in its metaphoric aspects) develops the capacity and desire for a more intricate exploration of experience. Man becomes more introspective, and he expends more of this metaphoric ingenuity peering into the self and less looking out into the world. But as the symbols turn inward they develop an opacity in the direction of being. The symbolic alignment of the culture with the ground of being begins to fail because not adequately attended to. Soon the symbols themselves block the view of that which they were to illuminate.

These developments mark the first step toward civilizational crisis. Things become more arbitrary as values that were formerly self-evident become less apparently so. And though polemicists willing to prove the validity of the old values are frequently abundant, the very fact that the self-evident needs champions to assert its claims is a measure of the decline. Increasingly, it becomes more difficult for the individual to align his actions with the right, because the metaphors necessary to penetrate through to the ground of being are no longer available to him in his language and just exactly what is right in a given circumstance becomes problematic.

While the myth crumbles, individualism flourishes. The individual has lost the ability to live his life in terms of the covering myth of his civilization. The more myth loses its essential quality as the cohesive force cementing the variety and multiplicity of society, the more the language of the culture turns inward exploring consciousness. The myth fragmentizes and the old symbolism is regarded as restrictive and limiting. To break out of the limitations of the symbolism which has failed him, the individual turns to more radical forms of metaphor. He seeks to create a personal language in an effort to open a line to the ground of being. Language now is no longer a civilizational property jointly held by all but becomes the property of each individual in his struggle to find validity for his actions. Language now becomes the property of the poets who can manipulate it to express their personal visions, while the rest of the culture, which has lost direct contact with the vibrant quality of words, is left with a degraded language, the control of which falls into the hands of sophists and hucksters who manipulate words to manipulate people. Ironically, in spite of this new power of the poet, he too is unconsciously aware that he cannot find meaning or purpose for or in his actions. This new language, charged with metaphoric intensity, is like a cluster of bombs hurled at the narrowing passage leading to the ground of being in an individual effort to blast one's way through. Paradoxically, it is the creation of this language itself that finally isolates the individual both from the ground of being and his community. Shorn of its myths, the civilization no longer performs its primary function of safely carrying the individual on his personal journey. It has broken apart into a treacherous ice floe that cuts people off from one another rather than uniting them.

The fact is, however, few people possess either the temperamental or the intellectual capacity to create their own symbolism from within themselves. As a result, the simple people are excluded from the world of poetry. At first they cling to their faith, which no longer has a symbolism adequate to engage the minds of the more sophisticated. Eventually the symbolism of the old faith atrophies because every poet is now developing his own private symbolism. Still, the belief of the common people holds fast at an almost silly level to a symbolism now hopelessly garbled and mistaken for literal truth.

Some have speculated that a civilizational decline is traceable directly to political corruption, while others have said that it is the moral fiber of a people that gives way first. Still others have tried to find in economics or demography the central cause of the collapse of a civilization. Obviously we have not the space here for an elaborate proof but we have tried to show that most of the problems a culture has in any of those areas can be dealt with, so long as the symbolism of the culture is healthy. Of course it goes without saying that the symbolism of a culture can be placed under stress by disasters in the economic, military, or political spheres. But so long as the language of the community remains vibrant and the mythology growing out of the linguistic symbols possesses sufficient vitality to keep the culture aligned with the ground of being, the vicissitudes of the material world will not overwhelm the citizens but be understood as part of the encompassing order. It was never part of the Christian mythology that there would be no suffering in the world. What that mythology did was supply a context within which suffering was made meaningful. Once that context was lost, suffering could no longer be understood and the world seemed absurd.

Tragedy is the creation neither of a civilization at its height nor of one which has utterly collapsed. Tragedy arises in a period of shifting civilizational values. The civilization is no longer compact and at one with its theological values, nor has it swung to the other extreme—the agnostic or atheistic society. Tragedy is produced in a civilization at a point where the consciousness of the individual is enlarged. At this stage, meaningful action is still possible, though many, including the heroes of revenge tragedy themselves, have strong reservations on the point.

But what is implied by the statement that action is meaningful? In the twentieth century, we have become too sophisticated to regard the world as “a proving ground for souls.” Rather, we insist upon viewing the pains and pleasures of life as ends in themselves. There is, nevertheless, adequate evidence to indicate that the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers of tragedy stood on the other side of this issue, and if we are to understand what they were doing we had better acknowledge this fundamental divergence in world outlook.

A basic assumption they all shared was that though none of us made the world we live in and none have total control over choosing the situations we must act in, we are all nevertheless fully responsible for our actions. Consequently, one of the most important questions in life is, how does one conduct oneself in a world that was shaped and framed without regard to one's own desires? Basically, that is the situation the revenge hero finds himself in. He is a man who awakes to find himself a citizen in a civilization in crisis. As a conscientious man, he hungers for an ordering principle for his life and will not accept the illusions of order he sees those around him gravitating to. Yet no action available to him seems to have the potential of leading to truth. Still, so long as he continues to hunger after truth or justice and delays his actions, he only feels the pain of his desire but is no nearer his goal. On a purely logical level, his paralysis seems justified. Although he hungers for justice and truth, his society offers no taste of it, so he is at a loss as to what direction his search should take. Why should he take any road when all roads seem to lead to error?

It is at this point that tragedy makes its fundamental assertion as regards the nature of human existence. Tragedy insists on the redemptive function of action itself. Voegelin stresses this point in his study of Greek civilization:

The truth of the tragedy is action itself, that is, action on the new, differentiated level of a movement in the soul that culminates in the decision of a mature, responsible man. … Tragedy as a form is the study of the human soul in the process of making decisions, while the single tragedies construct conditions and experimental situations, in which a fully developed, self-conscious soul is forced into action.³

The process of action has miraculously within it the potential of its own reformation. And revenge tragedy, more particularly, is asserting the paradoxical nature of this transformation inherent in action by saying that even action fraught with damnation may end in an epiphany.

III

Although the Christian myth was still the official belief of England under Elizabeth, the one hundred years of Tudor rule, particularly the religious turmoil under Henry VIII, “Bloody” Mary, and Elizabeth herself, had effectively ended the self-evident quality the Christian symbols formerly possessed for Englishmen. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, England was obviously in a state of civilizational crisis. In hindsight it seems an ideal time for the writing of tragedy. And certainly the plays of Middleton, Shakespeare, Webster, and Tourneur contribute to the genre. But the Elizabethans should not have been able to write tragedy, for the destruction of the symbolism had gone too far. By the time of Marlowe, it was impossible to create a believable tragic hero who could achieve a genuine epiphany of knowledge as Oedipus had.

Marlowe is an excellent example of the Elizabethan plight. Here is a great dramatist whose innovations were to become the foundations for the later flourishing of the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, yet one whose plays never achieve tragic stature. Marlowe was trying to do the impossible. He was centering his plays on the character of his heroes and their ability to reach within themselves and find a personal ordering principle. He created a series of Übermenschen who were also outsiders—a tyrant, a Jew, a homosexual, and a genius. One after another they are lacerated by life and, in true Promethean fashion, defy the limitations that shackle ordinary mortals. They cannot be denied their superhuman stature. But to make such Prometheans tragic is impossible: they lack the believability necessary to the tragic hero. Macbeth may grow into a bloody monster by the end of the play; nevertheless, he is still a recognizable human being. Tamburlaine never quite seems like a mortal man; he always remains somewhat fabulous.

Marlowe can be called the Michelangelo of the Elizabethan drama. Long before Michelangelo, Giotto had created a new realism both of figure and setting. He had, in painting, foreshadowed the nineteenth-century box set in the theater, and he used it for the same purpose as the dramatists would. His figures were made part of a distinct environment. Now though the gestures remained slightly generalized, the figures were rendered specific and recognizably human by the surrounding context. For two hundred years the basic premise of the box remained unchallenged. Then Michelangelo pulled man so far forward in the box that he destroyed the relation of the figure to the box. Two hundred years of artistic experiment ended in man's gigantism. Of course Michelangelo's figures are believable for what they are, but they are no longer human figures. The figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are neither us nor our heroes. They are super heroes. We can experience awe and wonder in their presence because they are, in every sense, far above us. When we look at them we are seeing the age of the giants. Not so the Christ and Saint Paul in Masaccio's Tribute Money; these figures are believable because, though transfigured, they could be us or our neighbors.

Marlowe is hardly terminating a long tradition in English drama. But he is doing the same thing with his dramatic heroes as Michelangelo did in his paintings. He pushed his heroes so far forward on the stage that the other characters fail to establish a limiting context within which the hero must realize his potential. He transcends the human dimension.

For Michelangelo, this gigantism should not be regarded as a failure of vision. He may be contrasting the Golden Age of his paintings with the fallen world of those who view them; hence, the very chasm that separates us from them renders them believable. With Marlowe, the case is different. His titans do represent a failure of vision. But not just Marlowe's. Marlowe's problem was representative of an age. One reason Marlowe could not make a believable tragic hero is that the Elizabethan Age could not believe in a tragic hero—one who, through a descent into himself, could reach that epiphany of knowledge that links the sacred and the profane.

The fact that tragedy is only written when a civilization reaches a certain phase in its development implies that a necessary relation exists between the values of the community and those expressed within the drama. Tragedy is, therefore, a communal art form. Its success depends upon an overlapping of public taste with the inherent demands of the tragic form. Most importantly, the community's image of heroism must include within its diversity the actions of a man who possesses a capacity for gaining self-knowledge through suffering. They must believe in the possibility of descending into oneself and discovering there the mythic connections that exist between the individual and the deity. In short, the community must believe in the existence of tragic actions. That is, they must believe that action can lead to epiphany. If they do not, there is no way in which they could understand the symbolism of the action. Beyond being believable, the hero who achieves the epiphany must be acceptable to the community as an archetype. His actions must express symbolically one of the central experiences of their lives.

There can be no doubt as to whether the Elizabethans had a concept of the hero. In the English-speaking world the notion of the Renaissance man is derived from the heroic scale of the Elizabethan Age. But this idea of the heroic was more akin to the Marlovian Übermensch than to the tragic hero. They saw themselves as bigger than life. As the anagogic relation broke down, the concept of the hero as one whose life enacted the civilizational myth gave way to the fantasy of the rebel as hero. The hero was one who stood against the existing order. Prometheus became their hero. And the hubris of the Renaissance man was the attempt to become the Übermensch.

Rather than the concept of the hero and the heroic acting as a corrective to the excesses of their personal lives, the Elizabethans had transformed those very excesses into an ideal. Man had become his own hero. As the Tudor monarchs led the nation further out of the Middle Ages, the people were faced with a confusing (not to mention highly dangerous) situation for many. Here was a ruling dynasty, whose right to the throne was itself questionable, propagandizing the nation with a reoriented symbolism in which the king would assume the roles formerly shared by king and pope. Again the secular and individual were being magnified at the expense of the sacred.

Where a civilization lacks the concept of the hero, it means essentially that it lacks the symbolism by which it can interconnect the orders of the sacred and the profane. Elizabethan England had not gone that far. But just as they had redefined the relation between the earthly and spiritual orders, so they had redefined the hero. For them the hero had to have the virtues they valued most in themselves—grandeur and defiance. Typical of a symbolism growing out of a time of crisis, the Elizabethan myth of the Herculean man tended to isolate its adherents from the ground of being. While isolating them, it increased their sense of self-importance. So grandiose had they grown in their own estimation that they were encouraged to challenge the order imposed by the ground of being with one of their own construction. Where the artist formerly thought of himself as a maker, he began to regard himself as a creator.

The Elizabethan era would not appear a propitious time for the writing of tragedy. Although it was a period of civilizational crisis, the values had shifted so far that it was already too late to construct a tragic action around a hero like Oedipus, who in the end fully comprehends the implications of his actions. Even so, if Marlowe's Herculean heroes were not tragic, they were Elizabethan. That was the kind of hero the people could believe in. The problem was how to make characters cut from the Marlovian mold into tragic heroes.

The Elizabethan dramatists were stymied. How to write tragedies that resolved within themselves the conflicting demands of a society which only accepted as heroes men cut from the Promethean mold, and the inner necessities of the tragic form itself, which requires that the tragic hero be a man who, though perhaps deficient to a degree, has at his core sufficient humility to acknowledge his hubris? Obviously the answer did not lie in creating more gargantuan protagonists. Nor was it tragic to see a villain such as Richard III brought low. The fact is, the beliefs of Elizabethan society and the tragic hero were irreconcilable. But if the Elizabethan absolutely insisted on a hero who was constitutionally incapable of tragic wisdom, perhaps the tragic form could be induced to be more yielding. No getting around the fact that without tragic knowledge there could be no tragedy. But would it be possible for the tragic knowledge to be present without the tragic hero participating in it?

Ironically, it was not Marlowe, but Thomas Kyd, a lesser dramatist, who intuited the solution to the dilemma. What is radical about The Spanish Tragedy is not the idea of a revenger as a protagonist; John Pikeryng had long since written his Horestes, in which this hero sought vengeance for the death of Agamemnon and in which the figure of Revenge appeared as a vice, and Marlowe was shortly to create the most intransigent of revengers, Barabas. Kyd's innovation is the creation of the revenge configuration itself. With it, Kyd introduced a dramatic form which was also a symbolic form. This was the solution the dramatists had been seeking. The revenge configuration presented them with a tragic situation involving a recognizably Elizabethan hero conducting the business of his life at a level believable to the theatergoing audience of the day. At the same time, the play, through the structure of the revenge configuration, transcended the limitations imposed by the community values and achieved tragic stature. Kyd's symbolic form made it possible for the play itself to actually “learn” more in the course of the action than the hero does.

Kyd taught the Elizabethan playwrights how to put together a dramatic action that operated on two levels at once. On the realistic level, it was simply the narrative of Hieronimo's search for justice, a search that leads him to madness and revenge. On the symbolic level, The Spanish Tragedy is a myth of the civilization. In this case the myth is not, as myths usually are, a symbolic narrative of the civilizational origins, but a symbolic rendering of where the civilization is now. Nor did Kyd's new myth provide the grounds for the troubled individual to comprehend his role in the world. That understanding could only come from a knowledge of the relation of the finite to the infinite, and this myth had as its burden the theme that that knowledge was to be denied to the hero, as it was denied to the Elizabethan citizen. On the symbolic level, then, the revenge tragedy would be a myth of the civilizational crisis of the Elizabethan Age. That is what the other playwrights who wrote revenge tragedies learned from Kyd, and what some, like Shakespeare, were able to learn from the revenge tragedy and apply to other tragic situations. It is that and not the “poor girl run mad” or the ghost screaming “Vindicta, revenge!” or the stage drenched in blood that captured the imagination of the Elizabethans.

IV

Some critics have maintained that to stress the revenge aspect of the revenge tragedies is to distort the plays. Any passion would have done as well; revenge just happens to lend itself to heightened theatrical situations. So long as the plays are approached from this direction, the significance of the revenge configuration will continue to elude scholar and critic alike. They will go on searching for explanations for the incredible popularity of these plays. We miss the whole point if we regard revenge as just another passion. No other passion could have been elevated to a search for justice. That search is symbolic of the individual's quest for order.

Kyd saw in the revenger the possibility of creating an archetype of the Elizabethan man, an archetype the Elizabethans could themselves recognize. But not just any man overruled by the passion for revenge would do. Equally important as the kind of revenger is the kind of revenge. The revenge sought in the revenge tragedy is a very special kind. It must be distinguished from the Poe-like revenge, where an offense (real or imaginary) festers in the mind until, crazed by passion, the revenger strikes out. Villain-revengers like Barabas and the brothers in The Duchess of Malfi could be placed in this category, but not Hieronimo or Hamlet. Revenge tragedy probes beyond the anger and rage within each of us to investigate the whole question of justice and order in a society that is experiencing a civilizational crisis.

In each of the revenge tragedies the revenger is introduced as a man noted for his uprightness. Furthermore, the offense the revenger is called upon to avenge is always real—the revenger's passions toward his victim never arise from a morbid hatred or jealousy of some innocent person. It is exactly because the hero is a good man and the offense is real and cries out for punishment that the situation can become tragic. Were he not a man determined to do what is right himself and at the same time a man whose sense of righteousness is so strong that he cannot tolerate seeing justice withheld, he would not be caught in the peculiar situation we find him in. Like the heroes of many plays, the revenger must make a decision. Not, however, the decision Faustus must make between good and evil but between two conflicting goods. Nor is the revenge hero's situation analogous to that of the heroes of French neoclassical tragedy, men of the noblest of intentions who find themselves in situations where their virtues are at odds with one another. The heroes of French tragedy would do what is right but they are caught between conflicting obligations. To do anything is to injure someone who has a clear call on their loyalty. In Corneille, for example, the dilemma frequently grows out of the fact that within the structure of values in any society, it is possible for events to so fall out that two areas of a person's life simultaneously make incompatible demands of him.

This was not the kind of situation the revenge hero found himself in. He was not prey to demands put upon him by conflicting virtues defined within the same system of values. Rather, his will was the battleground for competing systems of value. In this regard, Hieronimo, Hamlet, and Antonio are symbolically undergoing the same spiritual stresses that men in the audience were subjected to. As the Christian symbols lost their grasp on the mind, men turned elsewhere for guidance and order. First there was the pull of pagan antiquity, which was followed by the rise of rationalism with its morality based on natural reason. So, like the revenge hero whom he watched agonizing on stage, the Elizabethan was himself bewildered by the array of conflicting systems of value he was to choose between. While the Christian symbols of the Middle Ages continued to be the symbols he generally thought in, these failed to inform and cover the actions of his life the way they had his father's.

The revenge hero finds himself in just such a situation. He has a father or a son murdered, a sister or a mother defiled. How should he revenge himself? Christian dogma tells him quite clearly that he should not revenge himself, that revenge is evil. He must practice the Christian virtue of patience. The injunction is unequivocal. Nor is his particular situation an exception: the rule applies directly to him. And he is a good man, neither rebellious nor headstrong. Yet somehow he cannot align his will with the sanctions of his culture. The symbols have lost the stature of unquestioned authority and have become one of several possible courses of action.

The ghost is the key to understanding the symbolic reverberations that link the plays to the Elizabethan world. Christianity had, by several devices, been largely successful in placating the natural order. But that could only remain true so long as the people found the symbols adequate for the events in their lives. The Elizabethans did not. One of the first things that occurs when a universal system fails in its universality is it loses its power as the voice of justice and order. This was the situation in Elizabethan England, symbolized in the revenge tragedy by the emergence of the ghost. The Furies have ceased to be placated.

In each of the plays a horrendous crime is committed but the agencies of justice are paralyzed. With injustice mounting on injustice, nature itself, that incomprehensible and seemingly capricious force which nonetheless takes cognizance of men, becomes offended and cries out for redress. The irrational which had been held in check breaks forth to intervene directly in the affairs of man.

This is one way that the plots of the revenge tragedy reveal a society in which civilization has broken down. There is another. It has become a commonplace of the criticism of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama to point out that the typical plot moves from order into disorder with a new order achieved at the end. One can find this movement in any number of Shakespeare's tragedies. It is a pattern that is apparently present in all the revenge tragedies. There is, however, a significant difference between the order in Scotland under Duncan and that in the Denmark of Claudius or the Spain of The Spanish Tragedy. As we pointed out earlier, in Hamlet Shakespeare is at great pains to establish what appears to be a well-run kingdom in which all rejoice except Hamlet. But we quickly learn that this apparent order is just that—an illusion. So it is with each of the revenge tragedies. Now we are in a position to see that the order at the opening of the play was like the order in Elizabethan society itself. It appeared wholesome but was incapable of rendering justice and therefore was no order at all.

As is so often the case, The Spanish Tragedy is the most schematic. Once Hieronimo learns of his son's murder, he turns for justice to the authorities whose job it is to maintain the order of society. A large portion of the play then deals with his growing sense of betrayal as justice is denied him. In contrast, we meet Hamlet and Vindice when their sense of betrayal has already reached full bloom. The important thing is that they all find themselves in societies others believe to be functioning but which, they learn, are characterized by a seeming order that reveals itself as a communal fantasy.

If the hero of the revenge tragedy does not completely comprehend the nature of the decision he was forced to make, there is good reason to believe that his author was in much the same state. The revenge tragedies present an instance where the authors are discovering their theme in the writing of their plays. They had no theoretical structure available to them that gave cognitive expression to what they were intuiting to be the nature of a particular kind of revenge and what the existence of that kind of revenge said about the nature of the world. Their insight, in part as old as tragedy itself, had not found articulation in either the philosophy or the theology of their day. Like their heroes, the authors of revenge tragedy were on their own, forging through the symbolic action of their drama the articulation of their insight.

It is this quality of being isolated and confused that marks the revenge hero as an archetype for the Elizabethans. The highly ordered, systematic world picture with its degrees and correspondences had become an illusion covering a growing spiritual chaos, much as the perfumes and high fashion of the court masked the foul breath and inadequate hygiene. But just as physical corruption can be masked to an extent, so can spiritual chaos be covered up in daily life. The revenge hero, however, is not living at the level of daily life. He is not allowed the luxury of self-deception. The revenge hero had to face what the intelligent Elizabethan knew but was too busy erecting defenses against to face. For the individual living in a civilization which has entered the stage of crisis, the problem of aligning one's will with the reality of the civilization (as would be natural were the civilization healthy) has lost its meaning. The hero is enjoined to act, yet everything he turns to for guidance in action proves insubstantial. His only recourse is to construct a meaning to life from the order he finds within himself.

There is no place for the revenger to turn but inward; he must begin his descent into himself in his search for justice. What is meant by the “descent into himself”? Voegelin describes it in careful detail in his analysis of the inquiry undertaken in Plato's Republic:

The depth of experience is not unrelieved night; a light shines in the darkness. For the depth can be sensed as misery, danger, and evil only because there is also present, however stifled and obscured, the sense of an alternative. The illuminating inquiry … is not carried from the outside to the initial experience, as if it were a dead subject matter, but the element of seeking is present in the experience and blossoms out into the inquiry. The light that falls on the way does not come from an external source, but is the growing and expanding luminosity of the depth. On the one hand, therefore, the concepts of the inquiry do not refer to an external object, but are symbols evolved by the soul when it engages in the exegesis of its depth. The exegesis has no object that precedes the inquiry as a datum, but only levels of consciousness, rising higher as the Logos of the experience becomes victorious over its darkness. The inquiry continues, on rising levels of logical penetration, the substantive struggle between good and evil that rages in the depth. On the other hand, therefore, the concepts and propositions do not primarily tender information about an object, but are the very building blocks of the substantive stature into which the soul grows through its inquiry.⁴

In being forced to fall back on his inner resources—to look within himself for the ordering principles he cannot find in the external world—the revenge hero is like the Greek tragic heroes before him. But unlike Orestes and Oedipus at least, he cannot find within himself that epiphany of knowledge that would warrant our saying that, though he suffered greatly, the knowledge he won by it more than justified the pain. Hieronimo learns nothing. Antonio is self-deluded and Hamlet's insight that “readiness is all” is small comfort for the carnage it cost. Revenge tragedy, then, does not conform to what is commonly regarded as the basic format of the tragic vision, which can be stated briefly in the triad do-suffer-know. The revenge hero never achieves tragic knowledge. What he does is all that can be expected of a hero in a society incapable of producing either saints or heroes with tragic insight. The revenge hero enacts the tragic journey into the self. That it is an aborted journey does not diminish the heroism of the effort.

But that is true of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy in general. Certainly none of Shakespeare's tragic heroes gains an epiphany of knowledge through his suffering. Though they are both quite believable, neither Othello nor Macbeth learn much through their suffering. When Othello dies he has learned considerably less than Hamlet. As grand a creation as Macbeth is, his final nihilistic view is in sharp contrast to the hopeful tone of the end of the play itself. Macbeth does raise himself to a height of grim stoical courage when facing death that lends him a perverse dignity. One cannot but admire this man. Yet his suffering has not gained him wisdom. There is something of the Marlovian man about him, except that where Faustus and Tamburlaine are exotic, Macbeth is quite believable. He shares with them the same defiance of the gods merely because they are gods. They all seem to be saying “Even if we are wrong and our error brings us to grief, we will not go down in penitence but in defiance.” The Shakespearean hero who comes nearest to tragic wisdom is, of course, Lear. Significantly, the meaning Lear finds within himself brings him to the verge where tragic hero merges with Christian saint. This was an ever-present problem for the dramatists. It was all but impossible for them to create a believable hero capable of learning enough by the end of the play to generate a tragic epiphany without being confronted in the final moments of the drama by the spectacle of their hero transforming himself before their eyes from a tragic protagonist into a saint. In Lear's scene with Cordelia he approaches sanctity but then moves away from it. For all his insight, he remains a violent old man (“I kill'd the slave that was a-hanging thee”) and dies happily deceived. The necessity to have a believable figure as hero transcends the genre of revenge tragedy and is characteristic of all tragedy of the period.

This question of the believability of both the hero and the action was one of the paramount considerations that guided the dramatists to their unique success in the field of tragedy. It was their dogged determination to be true to the nature of the experience they were writing about that confronted them with what looked like the insurmountable problem of bringing the action to a truly tragic conclusion. It should be noted that we have deliberately not used the term “realism” here, because the question of verisimilitude is not at stake. It is not the quality of being able to capture surface nuances that we are referring to. By the believability of the play we are referring to that quality that grows directly out of the dramatists' commitment to the concept of the redemptive dimension present in action. Not that they set out to prove it; rather, they firmly believed it. This ruled out dramas centered around outlandish action pursued by fantastic creatures who could only live in poets' imaginations. Nor should the hero be a man consciously seeking redemption. The point is that out of the actions of life itself—the morally ambiguous and compromising acts that characterize all of our lives—redemption can grow if only we have fortitude enough to live the action through. They understood that the only way action could be shown to lead beyond itself was to be absolutely faithful to the nature of the action itself. If they violated the natural course of the action, the audience would say, “but that's not true: people in that situation don't act that way.” Far from implying the realism for which T. S. Eliot condemned the Elizabethans for introducing into the drama, this is the believability that one finds in Sophocles. As a member of the audience, one is carried with Oedipus every step of the way on his dreadful journey because one says, “Yes, I know he is wrong, yet I must admit I would have done the same thing.”

That is where the psychology of revenge comes into the revenge tragedy. As we watch the plays, we are not witnessing a pastiche of theatrical conventions. We are watching a fictional character work his way through a real action. Although the character is unreal, we know the action all too well. It is revenge. And we have all felt its grip. Because the dramatists had studied how real human beings act in revenge situations, they were able to distill from the psychology of revenge those key elements that could at the same time present a thoroughly recognizable revenger while they were raising the action from the level of case history to that of symbol. So, as a member of the audience, one says, “I know exactly how he feels; I have tasted the hunger for revenge myself, and while I don't know whether he is right in what he is doing, I do know passionately the emotions he is feeling.”

Scholars, with their dedication to research, have tended to ignore this aspect of Elizabethan drama in favor of ferreting out the literary sources of the plays. But they forget that the only reason we are even dimly interested in the influences operating on the imagination of the Elizabethan (in a way that we are not at all interested in the eighteenth-century dramatist) is that the experiences they rendered in their drama are intensely true. One of the primary fascinations about the revenge tragedies is the accuracy with which they render experience. But the accurate portrayal of a passion is not in itself tragic. An indication of the depth of their dedication to the believable is that even where their loyalty to this principle might have caused their dramas to fall short of the tragic, they did not sacrifice it in an effort to heighten the significance of the play by suddenly granting the hero insights that could never have grown out of the play's action. Where it was not possible for the hero to gain tragic knowledge, they did not violate the experience.

In a demonstration of incredible artistic integrity the dramatists time and again remained true to both the experience of revenge and the tragic journey into oneself despite the fact that it meant that they must leave their hero's tragedies aborted. Yet the dramas themselves are not aborted. Tragic knowledge is imparted to the audience nonetheless. Throughout each of the plays it has been implied that while the tragic protagonist is the pivotal figure and prime mover of the action, he is never to be seen as the sole focal point. Contrary to what many hold to be the way to read drama, in the revenge tragedies we are never invited to identify or empathize with the protagonist. The tragic structure of the revenge motifs grants us adequate distance so that we in the audience are able to perceive the working out of an order that the hero lacks either the ability or opportunity to find.

To say that the revenge hero, or for that matter the hero of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy, is not granted an epiphany is not to say that the dramas lack tragic epiphanies. What Thomas Kyd taught the Elizabethans was how to write tragedies in which the play itself as a symbolic form learned more than the hero. At the end of any Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy, the audience is in a position to know a great deal more than the hero ever did. The drama as a whole has a meaning greater than the actions of the hero. This can only be true where the action has been constructed in such a way as to become a symbol itself. Kyd's symbolic constellation of revenge motifs achieves this purpose. Through them, the tragic journey of the hero took on greater significance. It was not just Hieronimo or Hamlet, but Hieronimo and Hamlet as representative men seeking order in a time of civilizational crisis. If the plots of the revenge plays located the action in Spain, Denmark, or Italy, the symbolic structure placed them like templets directly over contemporary England.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, Hamlet 1.1.47-49.

2. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 2, The World of the Polis, pp. 2, 1. We are indebted to the chapter on “Mankind and History” in this volume for the approach to the relationship of history and order developed here. The reader is encouraged to read the entire chapter, which is pertinent to this argument.

3. Ibid., p. 247.

4. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 3, Plato and Aristotle, p. 84. For another description of the descent, see Charles A. Hallett and Kenneth E. Frost, “Poetry and Reality: The Zetema and its Significance for Poetics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1977): 430-35.