SOURCE: Grantley, Darryll. “Masques and Murderers: Dramatic Method and Ideology in Revenge Tragedy and the Court Masque.” In Jacobean Poetry and Prose: Rhetoric, Representation and the Popular Imagination, edited by Clive Bloom, pp. 194-212. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.

[In the essay below, Grantley discusses how Jacobean playwrights subtly projected their own ideological principles onto both aristocratic and popular audiences through the dramatic media of the court masque and the revenge tragedy, or a combination of the two theatrical forms.]

Jacobean revenge tragedy, with its turbulent, bloody and uncertain topos, might be thought to have little relationship in terms either of dramatic method or of philosophical concerns with the masque of the court of James I, a dramatic genre of ceremonial serenity and metaphysical certainties. The origins of these two forms of drama were different, as were the purposes they were designed to serve and the audiences for which they were written. Masques were the highly wrought and visually splendid creation serving a celebratory and idealising function within the narrow confines of the court, while revenge tragedy, though also sometimes performed at court, had to satisfy the demand for popular, frequently satirical drama of the broader audiences in the public and coterie theatres. However, they were both ultimately the products of the same political state and literary culture, and many of the writers of tragedies in the period were also writers of royal masques.¹ There is also the fact that many tragedies contain masques as part of their action, either dramatised within the plays or at least referred to as an integral part of the narrative. As products of the royal court, masques were narrowly engaged in constructing a particular view of the political status quo, while the protagonists of revenge tragedy were almost invariably individuals with power in the state; the exercise of power in or the running of the state featuring substantially in this drama. Some sort of common ground and a relationship, however oblique, might thus be seen to exist between the two forms in terms of subject matter. However, what is common to both may perhaps best be sought in the dramatic principles adopted by the Jacobean playwrights. These principles may be regarded as furnishing the particular identity of drama at this period, certainly distinguishing it from the dominant forms of Renaissance drama which preceded it and having implications for the type of plays that were to be written in the Caroline period and after the interregnum later in the century.

Masques have until recent years received scant attention from scholars of the Renaissance theatre and, aside from the insubstantiality of their written texts, the reason is possibly that they might be regarded as peripheral to the concerns of the theatre historian, in the sense both of not being in the mainstream of the theatrical life of the time and, more profoundly, of not even being drama in every sense of the word. Stephen Orgel has pointed to the nature of masques as being something other than pure representation:

To the Renaissance, appearing in a masque was not merely playing a part. It was, in a profound sense, precisely the opposite. When Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson presented Queen Anne as Bel-Anna, Queen of the Ocean, or King James as Pan, the universal god, or Henry, Prince of Wales as Oberon, Prince of Faery, a deep truth about the monarchy was realized and embodied in action, and monarchs were revealed in roles that expressed the strongest Renaissance belief about the nature of kingship, the obligations and perquisites of royalty. Masques were games and shows, triumphs and celebrations; they were for the court and about the court, and their seriousness was indistinguishable from their recreative quality.²

A little further on he continues, ‘the Renaissance ruler went on [in the masque] to create an alternative heaven, asserting his control over his environment and the divinity of his rule through the power of art at his command’.³

Instead of constructing a mimetic relationship with the real world of the audience, the masque thus becomes a metaphor, reinterpreting reality in terms partly of analogy but also by dissolving the boundary between reality and representation. In doing this it creates a sealed, hermetic world of reference; in a sense the world it represents is entirely and self-consciously a theatrical one, not purporting to be anything else. Attention is constantly called to the devices of the spectacle and the ways in which the drama makes its revelations: it is overtly emblematic. Jacobean tragedy can be seen as adopting a similar approach to the process of representation. Of course, the nature of this tragedy produced by a range of dramatists with individual styles is widely divergent, but a distinct tendency towards a similar approach to that outlined above manifests itself: schematic, self-displaying, metaphoric rather than mimetic theatre creating an entirely theatrical frame of reference. Attributes such as these, which might be regarded as characteristically Jacobean, in fact are first found in Thomas Kyd's prototype revenge play, The Spanish Tragedy (1587-8), and it is a particularly interesting phenomenon that this form of arguably crude drama should not only have persisted but actually have evolved further after the developments in dramaturgical sophistication of the 1590s. It is clear from comparison with the tragedy predominating in the 1590s that the characterisation and dramatic devices of revenge tragedy were old-fashioned by the early seventeenth century, and the continued use of them by a number of competent dramatists has to be seen as a deliberate feature of a specific genre. Revenge drama is, of course, not the only form of tragedy in this period, but it was extremely popular and the qualities which it exemplifies are to be found to a greater or lesser extent in many other Jacobean tragedies. Revenge tragedy is a rather loosely defined genre, and ‘the threate of blood’ is sometimes preferred as including plays with similar attributes but without a dominant revenge motif. This discussion will consider not only significant revenge plays proper, such as The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), Webster's The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi (1613), and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (1622), but also Marston's slightly pre-Jacobean two-part revenge drama, Antonio and Mellida (1601) and Antonio's Revenge (1601), as well as related non-revenge plays: John Marston's tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604), Middleton's Women Beware Women (1609-27), Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy (1610-11) and Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy (1611), all of which are conceived very much in terms of revenge drama or ‘theatre of blood’.

An autoreferential focus on the process of dramatic representation was present in the genre right from the beginning, as Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy not only put a frame of the audience-within-the-play in the figures of the ghost of Andrea and the spirit of Revenge, but also located the effective climax of his play in a play-within-a-play in which the boundaries between represented events and real events are dissolved. Perhaps the best-known instance of this theatrical self-consciousness occurs in Hamlet, in the ambiguity of Hamlet's ‘antic disposition’, which is as problematic for the audience as it is for the characters in the play, or in the self-reflexivity of the players scene (II.ii) and in the play-within-a-play (III.ii). Hamlet is a play in which Shakespeare toys with the various formulae of revenge tragedy in the process of constructing a play which is essentially about not taking revenge. Among the Jacobean revenge plays, the idea of some form of drama within drama is almost a sine qua non, and it has the inevitable effect of foregrounding self-consciously the dramatic medium as a medium and throwing up questions about the nature of representation. In Marston's Antonio and Mellida the emphasis on the theatrical nature of the work is even more pronounced, as the Induction, rather in the fashion of the opening of Jonson's comedy Bartholomew Fair, has the actors in the play discussing their parts as actors. The second half of this tragedy, Antonio's Revenge, makes use of two dumbshows in the course of the action, one in III.i and one in V.i; The Revenger's Tragedy has a dumbshow in V.iii speeding the narrative to its climax; and Webster's two classic tragedies both have dumbshows integral to the action, The Duchess of Malfi in III.iv and The White Devil in II.ii. These shows are used in various ways in these plays, to compress the narrative, to isolate and highlight certain important sequences in it or to prepare for the action to follow. Whatever their function, they were old-fashioned devices even by the time Kyd was writing The Spanish Tragedy in the 1580s, having first made their appearance in native English tragedy in Gorboduc in 1561. In each case the use of this device in the plays is also avoidable: the information or effects which these dumbshows convey to the audience are either not strictly necessary or could easily be arrived at by other means. They might thus be regarded as a part of a deliberate theatricalist intention in these plays. In each instance of their occurrence the drama changes gear and thus draws attention to the theatrical medium through which the narrative is being presented. As with the masque, there is a far from straightforward relationship between the audience and the plays here. This by itself is not of any major significance but becomes more important when viewed in the context of a broader consideration of the approach adopted by the Jacobean revenge tragedians, a consideration which involves examining the patterns of reference and meaning which are created in these plays.

Another important feature which the revenge tragedy shares with the masque is the creation of a hermetic theatrical world which is its own frame of reference and which seeks less to the mimetic than to be metaphoric theatre. In each case the worlds presented are ones in which normal expectations do not obtain. An interesting contrast can be made here between theatrical metaphors in, one the one hand, two plays by Shakespeare, the well-known comparison in As You Like It, II,vii (‘All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players’) or the similar theatrical metaphor in Macbeth, V.v (‘Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more’), and, on the other, the Duchess's weary exclamation in The Duchess of Malfi, IV.i, ‘I account this world a tedious theatre / For I do play a part in't against my will’. The difference is that Shakespeare's metaphors are just that, rhetorical observations. The Duchess's, however, has far more immediate resonances within the play, since it is uttered at a point at which the play has become most overtly theatrical; the events in which she is an unwilling participant are deliberately staged like theatre and the world of the Duchess is the world of melodrama. This is accounted for by deliberate design on the part of other protagonists who are torturing her, but it is generally a feature of the macabre theatrical world of the play.

The theatricalism of revenge tragedy manifests itself in several aspects of this genre and is particularly to be seen in the works of John Webster. As with the masque, the world portrayed by this drama has its own rules which bear little relation to the real world; it sets up a self-contained, closed-off system of values and ideas which might be said to have a validity in the theatre alone. This principle is illustrated in the construction of dramatic character. Psychological subtlety and complexity of motivation are less important than clarity of dramatic type and forcefulness in self-revelation. There are some variations between dramatists, though the effect is broadly similar in that what finally emerges in each case is a certain one-dimensionality of character and fixity of type which is determined more by the exigencies of narrative and dramatic effect than anything else. Marston, in his Antonio plays, written for performance by the boys of St Paul's, uses the ranting declamatory style of Kyd's drama to establish his characters. The characterisation of The Revenger's Tragedy uses this too but to a lesser extent, and resorts to allegorical names for the characters to express their moral types or roles in the drama: thus ‘Lussurioso’ is a lecher, ‘Ambitioso’ an ambitious younger half-brother, ‘Spurio’ a bastard and ‘Vindice’ the revenger. Tourneur in The Atheist's Tragedy bases particularly his central character on an explicitly stated idea which is then carefully worked out as the basis of that character's behaviour and motivation.

Webster's characters are to some extent individualised but in his two major plays he uses a similar formula in terms of the dominant characters. Both The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil contain among their central figures scheming dukes, corrupt cardinals, powerful and attractive female victims and, at the very heart of the action, the malcontents who manage it all: Bosola and Flamineo. The scenes are so arranged as to place a focus on various of these characters, not to develop them psychologically but to exploit their dramatic potential. The best examples are the scenes involving the principal women characters in each play: in The Duchess of Malfi, IV.i and ii, in which the Duchess endures mental torture and death, and, in The White Devil, the arraignment of Vittoria Corombona in III.ii. These are scenes the principal interest of which is not so much narrative or character development, though these may naturally be present too, but the display of a victim under persecution. The victimhood is what is essential, just as the lycanthropy of Duke Ferdinand and the melancholy of the Cardinal are in the scenes in which these figures enjoy the dramatic focus in The Duchess of Malfi. It is interesting to note that after the death of the Duchess the dramatic interest of the play shifts squarely to the Duke, the Cardinal and Bosola as the characters offering the greatest possibilities for theatrical exploitation. The rather curious inconsistency of Bosola, who carries out the wishes of the Arragonian brothers even while he appears to switch his sympathies to the Duchess, is a good example of the use of character for theatrical expediency. He will be needed to wreak vengeance on the brothers in the latter part of the play and thus is simply made to change accordingly. As he has already been established as a malcontent and competent Machiavellian, he is the best character to use from the point of view of dramatic effect.⁴ The emphasis is consistently on theatrical display, and, though the instances cited exemplify this particularly well, the same principle can be seen to operate in the construction and use of dramatic character in other Jacobean tragedies, particularly revenge plays. This places the requirements of theatre before psychological consistency or complexity, thus separating off the world of the play, which, rather than being constructed along mimetic lines, has its own rules and frame of reference. As in the masque, the emphasis remains on the visual surface of reality.

Theatricalism is also evident in the narrative construction of revenge plays. Horatio's account to the ambassador in Hamlet, V.ii, could easily be used to sum up the narrative of one of these plays:

                                                                                So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th' inventors' heads.

The world created is one in which perceptions are unreliable, reality is slippery and almost no relationship of trust may be relied upon, even ties of blood being very prone to betrayal. It is, in short, a world in which conventions of realism give way to the demands of the popular theatre. As in the masque, though with an effect which is the absolute converse of it, theatre replaces realism. The structure of action in the masque is based not on the logical development of a plausible narrative but on a series of conceits, and in revenge tragedy the equivalent of these are intrigue strategies producing an equally implausible narrative. However, while in the masque this distance from realism involves the almost total negation of irony, at least in the overt intention of the writing, Jacobean revenge drama goes to the other extreme and dramatic irony becomes one of the main principles of narrative construction. In this respect it recalls The Spanish Tragedy, in which all the climactic moments are based on things not being what they seem—as in the case of the arbour which instead of being a place of repose and romantic trysts becomes a place of slaughter; the execution of Pedrigano, where the ironies are hinged on false expeditions of last-minute release; and the final murder scene, with its complex and multi-layered ironies. In the The Revenger's Tragedy there are many ironies, but among the most interesting are the incident in II.iii in which Lussurioso rushes in upon the bedroom of his father and stepmother seeking to uncover incestuous adultery, and Lussurioso's sending the disguised Vindice on a mission to corrupt his own sister in II.ii. Both of these incidents, ironical in themselves, set in train a sequence of ironies which become more dramatically titillating as they descend further into the realms of improbability. In the Webster plays, two classic scenes illustrate the extent to which irony is exploited in the melodramatic universe of this drama. In The Duchess of Malfi, V.ii is a complex scene which involves a series of turns-about and double-crossings involving Julia, the Cardinal and Bosola, an unexpected declaration of love and an even less expected murder by bizarre means, all in the space of a few minutes, undermining any attempt by the audience to construe the events in terms of psychological probability. In The White Devil a similar scene to this is V.vi, the scene of the pretended suicide pact which Flamineo attempts to impose upon Vittoria and her maid Zanche, which piles twist upon twist and ends in multiple murder. Credibility is not a question here, because what this drama requires of the audience is not simply a suspension of disbelief. Like the masque, it involves the acceptance of a wholly different conception of dramatic representation, one which constructs a world based entirely on theatrical convention.

Another theatricalist feature observable in revenge tragedy is an exaggerated preoccupation with the macabre. This too has its origins in Kydian drama: in The Spanish Tragedy Hieronymo's discovery of his son's stabbed and hanging corpse in the arbour and later his quite gratuitous action of biting out his own tongue set the tone for the popular sensationalism of revenge drama. Shakespeare exploited this fully in Titus Adronicus, and his incorporation of a graveyard scene and skull in Hamlet nods in the same direction; here, though, the skull is a memento mori which becomes the basis for a philosophical disquisition. In revenge tragedy the macabre constitutes a major part of the tone of the drama, presenting a world of nightmare in which horror and the grotesque are an accepted part of the frame of reference, and in which distortion rather than naturalism determines the texture of social intercourse and values.⁵ The fact that this drama relies heavily on the visual for its impact also contributes to this.

One consistent element in this drama is the device of the ghost, something which in Senecan tragedy is used for a specific dramatic purpose which has as much or more to do with narrative expediency—the exhortation to revenge—as effects of horror. Shakespeare in Hamlet and Marston in Antonio's Revenge uses the ghost in this way; in both plays the ghosts of murdered fathers enter calling for vengeance, but in other plays the presence of ghosts is gratuitous. In The Atheist's Tragedy the appearance of the ghost of the murdered Montferrers on two occasions contributes little if anything to the progress of the narrative. In The White Devil the ghosts of Isabella in IV.i and Brachiano in V.iv are similarly, strictly speaking, redundant to the action. There is no ghost as such in the The Duchess of Malfi, but the echo scene in the graveyard (V.iii) provides a ghostly touch without affecting the course of the action in any way. Other macabre effects in these plays involve the use of specific stage props, objects which either possess or are invested with qualities of exotic horror. These include the severed head of the executed younger brother and the disguised and poisoned skeleton with which the Duke is murdered in The Revenger's Tragedy, the fumed picture and poisoned helmet in The White Devil, both unusual murder weapons, the dead man's hand and wax dummies in The Duchess of Malfi, the death's head which is used as a pillow in The Atheist's tragedy and the murdered man's finger in The Changeling. The atmosphere of baroque horror which these images create has its basis in two recurrent ideas. One is the danger which lurks in unexpected places and objects, thus adding to the nightmare unpredictability of the society and life being depicted: terror and death concealed in familiar objects. The other is the stress on bodily dismemberment or destruction: severed heads and limbs and other reminders of physical torture and death. Both of these aspects contrast with the masque's conception of the world, in which uncertainty has no part in the smooth ceremonial nature of the dramatic action, and the bodies of the king and others are invested with either a semi-divine or quasi-mythological property. What is especially evident in this is a removal from the physical to a semi-spiritual sphere, while revenge tragedy by contrast foregrounds the physical, particularly in its more earthy and horrific manifestations. Implications of divinity and immortality are never far away in the masque, whereas revenge drama luxuriates in the horror of mortality. They adopt a fundamentally similar dramatic method to achieve their ends, however. In revenge drama the use of stage props of such potent impact on an otherwise unadorned stage necessarily shifts the attention of the audience from the action and the words to visual images, paralleling to some extent the far more elaborate staging of the masque, in which visual image was all important. In each case the image is a powerful signifier, encapsulating implications far beyond its immediate meaning.

A final significant point relating to the similarity of dramatic method between the masque and revenge tragedy is related to this emphasis which both forms place on visual image. This is the principle of display which is basic to both forms. In the masque this is self-evident, since the genre is essentially ceremonial. However, it can also be discerned as constituting the main organising principle of revenge tragedy. The climactic points of these plays especially are arranged as overt exhibitions of revenge, of persecution or of brutal ironies which have little to do with naturalism and a great deal to do with dramatic effect and show. Examples of various types of display come readily to hand. In The Atheist's Tragedy the climax of the play is reached on a scaffold upon which the villain, d'Amville, knocks out his own brains in the course of trying personally to execute the hero, his nephew Charlemont. The whole event is a sudden turn-around in events, not a natural conclusion of a narrative development, and above all it is spectacular. Its ironical significance is further elaborated by the accidental suicide himself as he confesses his crimes before dying, and the scene is an example of the overtness of this drama's method. Another instance can be found in the death of the Duke in The Revenger's Tragedy, in which the hell of the revenge which is being wreaked on the Duke has to be made minutely plain to the sufferer himself as well as to the audience; in the course of it he learns of the adultery of the Duchess with his eldest son. Another such protracted death is that of Brachiano in The White Devil, in which Lodovico and Gasparo reveal to him at length the process of poisoning that is claiming his life and insist that, dying without absolution, he is damned for ever. The death of the Duchess in The Duchess of Malfi is preceded by a long and ghastly course of mental torture in which the tyranny of the Arragonian brothers is made explicit beyond the strict requirements of the narrative. Bosola in this occupies a strangely paradoxical role which owes a great deal to do with displaying not only this tyranny but also the pathos of the Duchess's death; he is not only the stage manager of the action but in a curiously detached way is commentator on it at the same time, both in his conversations with the Duchess before the murder and in those with Duke Ferdinand after it. The outward, displaying orientation of revenge drama has something of a morality-play quality about it in its careful tailoring of dramatic method to the conceptual content generated by its narrative.⁶ In this respect it corresponds again to the dramatic method of the masque, in which the philosophical and political ends of the drama narrowly define its construction.

The effect of the creation of a hermetic, theatricalist frame of reference in the revenge drama was effectively to distance the political implications which are inherent in it, at least technically. A drama which was so patently constructed to create and satisfy a popular demand for exotic and melodramatic entertainment and whose frame of reference was essentially theatrical would self-evidently be less likely to attract unwelcome official attention than more serious and more overtly topical political drama. One aspect of this was the setting of the plays in the Mediterranean world, which, as conceived by Renaissance Englishmen, was an exotic place whose prevailing values were entirely Machiavellian. For dramatic writers this had the advantage of providing them with a moral and political universe which was sufficiently self-contained and apparently remote to be a relatively safe setting for political tragedy, and at the same time one which by its very nature readily yielded the staff of the most lurid of popular drama. It is fairly obvious that this conception of the Mediterranean world, though probably stimulated by the writing of Machiavelli, owes a lot to the dramatic literature in which it is given imaginative life and which was the most popular medium for its dissemination. The elaboration and use of a histrionic cosmos in this drama goes further in covering its political tracks than the use of allegory or remote settings, such as a classical one, to mask reference to contemporary political conditions and practice. Where the drama extends its material beyond the bounds of psychological and naturalistic probability, its serious allusive potential is called into question. Such an attribute was of immense value under a king whose conception of the position of the monarch was such that his strictures against the negative portrayal of kings in literature and drama extended even to the representation of enemy rulers.⁷ James I was a keen patron of drama and, besides his lavish expenditure on masques, commissioned many performances of popular plays at court.⁸ The danger of incurring royal displeasure was a longstanding one, even under Elizabeth, and James's readiness to take retribution on writers was evident even before he came to the English throne.⁹

The fact that revenge tragedy was thus apparently removed into the realm of purely sensational popular entertainment did not, however, mean that it was devoid of relevance for contemporary political and social conditions. The very fact that it dealt customarily with covert corruption in the state or in ruling households was highly significant, considering that there was a wide discrepancy between, on the one hand, the image of impeccable paternalistic and divinely ordained rule presented in James's writings and other pronouncements, and promoted and dramatically enacted in the masques and other ceremonial manifestations of royal power, and, on the other, the fact of a considerable amount of corruption behind the scenes, both personal and political.¹⁰ Several of the dramatists of the time, such as Marston, who wrote satirical verse before turning to drama, were avowedly satirical writers, even if their satire tended customarily to eschew political targets in favour of more generalised ones such as moral or psychological types—as, for instance, in Jonson's comedy of honours. A more specific instance of social relevance in this drama is the prevalence of the figure of the malcontent, usually in some way economically deprived or perceiving himself to be wrongfully deprived of position, means or power. There is evidence of considerable discontent among the large number of aspiring graduates in and around James's court and several writers may be numbered among those disappointed in their ambitions and thereby suffering real economic hardship.¹¹ In various indirect ways, therefore, this form of popular theatre does address issues with significant political implications. However, probably its most trenchant and profound statement lies in its confrontation of the ethos of mystical state power at the heart of James's political philosophy and forming the basis of the conception and construction of the court masque. Though this has already emerged in the comments thus far, these have principally been concerned with dramaturgy, and a number of important points remain to be mentioned in relation to the actual content of the drama.

The first concerns the choice of principal characters in these plays and the dominant ideas attached to them. Since revenge drama is highly formulaic, there is a great deal of correspondence between the plays in terms of the types of figures which populate them. Significant as a type are corrupt rulers, their corruption residing either in the misuse of power or sexual abuse or both, predatory sexuality frequently leading to Machiavellian perfidy. Rulers who resort to foul means to achieve illicit sexual ends include the Duke in The Revenger's Tragedy, the Duke of Brachiano in The White Devil, the King in The Maid's Tragedy, and the Duke of Florence in Women Beware Women. The sexual element is significant not only because of the quasi-theological suggestion of sexual impropriety as in a sense emblematic of the soul's corruption, but also because of its relevance to the connection between court politics and James's favourites, though this relevance may have been obscured in the period, at least officially, by the fact that James's preferences were homosexual.¹² Rulers or ruler figures whose corruption is more concerned with power include d'Amville in The Atheist's Tragedy and the Arragonian brothers in The Duchess of Malfi. D'Amville is not actually a ruler but adopts Machiavellian means to gain control of family wealth. This is perfectly suitable as a metaphor for state politics in terms of the official ideology of the family within the body politic.¹³ The Arragonian brothers are principally concerned with the acquisition of hegemony over the Duchess's domain, but sexual corruption is never far away, particularly in the case of the Cardinal. What is important about the portrayal of rulers in all these plays is their direct challenge to the masque's mystification of royal power, since they expose that power as being not only highly political, in the sense that it involves the calculated and cynical manipulation of others, but also consistently corrupt and dangerous. In no case is royal concern shown to extend beyond the immediate self-gratifying aims of the ruler to the state at large.¹⁴

Another figure with significant political implications in these plays is the malcontent, as exemplified by Malevole in The Malcontent, Vindice in the The Revenger's Tragedy, Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, Flamineo in The White Devil, and Calianax in The Maid's Tragedy. Each of these is a figure either disgraced or fallen from some previously more favoured social position or blocked in some way in his ambitions. The important point is that these characters have become malcontents through some observable cause, frequently foul play by others in power. This contrasts with the essentialism of the characterisation in the masque, in which any determination of social position or moral state is fixed and mysterious and in which the fountainhead or moral insight and probity is always the ruler. Furthermore, the role of the malcontent as commentator helps to complicate the moral issues, since he can at once be engaged in activities which are morally dubious or unequivocally evil while being able to comment with insight on the corrupt practices of those in power: Malevole, Vindice, Bosola and Flamineo are all sharp analysts. Further complication is produced by the question of the morality of revenge: the stress on lurid instrumentality obscures the moral issues as persecutor becomes victim and vice versa. This complication contrasts markedly with the clear dichotomies to be found in the masque—for instance, in the sharp distinctions between the world of the masque and that of the antimasque, a good example of which is to be found in Jonson's Masque of Queens (1609), in which the cacophonous and disordered witches' dance of the antimasque is suddenly silenced and banished by the glorious and harmonious entry of the main masque.

Aside from the characters who populate them, revenge tragedies are distinguished by the convoluted structures of deception and intrigue which constitute their narratives. Sometimes, as with d'Amville's intrigue in The Atheist's Tragedy, the ends are nakedly evil; sometimes, as with the Duchess's subterfuge in The Duchess of Malfi, deception is a weapon used by the innocent in their own defence; and sometimes, as in Vindice's plot in The Revenger's Tragedy, evil confronts evil. It is in a way less dramatically important to what end the intrigue is constructed than how subtle and sophisticated it manages to be. This too provides an interesting counter to the masque, since not only does it undermine the mystification of political power but it has implications for the dramatic method of the masque itself. Jonson discusses the relationship between display and mystification in the masque as follows:

This it is hath made the most royal princes and greatest who are commonly the personators of these actions, not only studious of riches and magnificence in the outward celebration or show, which rightly becomes them, but curious after the most high and hearty inventions to furnish the inward parts, and grounded on antiquity and solid learnings; which, though their voice be taught to sound present occasions, their sense doth or should always lay on more removed mysteries.¹⁵

As the only fully illusionistic form of theatre in the period, the masque constructed elaborate images while at the same time seeking to collapse the distinctions between those images as constructed representations and the world of actual reality, thus burying the ideology which informed it. Revenge tragedy in its complex intrigue plots demonstrates essentially the methods by which appearances can be made to diverge from reality and how apparent truth frequently has some more subtle political process behind it.

A significant motif in revenge drama which is also of relevance here is madness. In some form or another mental imbalance crops up in many, if not most revenge tragedies.¹⁶ This was, of course, incorporated as a highly successful dramatic device by Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy, the madness of Hieronymo providing a good deal of the theatrical interest of the play, to the extent that it was subtitled ‘Hieronymo is Mad Again’. It is likely that this accounted for much of the play's success in the theatre, and it is easy to see why madness became part of the formula of this popular form of tragedy. It is never entirely clear whether Hieronymo's madness is genuine or not. Shakespeare in both Hamlet and Titus Andronicus adopts a Kydian formula in associating madness with the main protagonist of each of these plays in a very equivocal way. Madness clearly has to be treated very carefully, since it threatens always to remove its victim from legitimate consideration as a dramatic figure. A clear example of this is Lady Macbeth, who, as soon as she loses her wits, ceases to contribute motive force to the play and is reduced to an emblem of mental suffering. If madness is introduced into these plays it therefore has either to be in some way in the background or to be connected with the principal protagonists in an ambiguous way, and this appears to be the way in which it is usually handled. Overt manifestations of madness occur in The Changeling, the sub-plot of which includes a troupe of madmen practising a dance; The Duchess of Malfi, in which the Duchess is tortured mentally by a parade of madmen; and The White Devil, in which Cornelia, the mother of the intriguer Flamineo, is seen in a cameo distracted with grief over the murder of her younger son. In each of these cases and particularly the latter two, in which the mad scenes occur near the climax of the action, the atmosphere of the plays is made more nightmarish by the presence of this element. However, more important is the suggestion of madness which is often present in the principal protagonists. In The Malcontent Malevole is described by Pietro in these terms: ‘th' elements struggle within him; his own soul is at variance within herself’ (I.ii) and the manic quality of his machinations and pronouncements in the play bear this out, notwithstanding that the role of a malcontent is a guise. In The Atheist's Tragedy d'Amville, though an intelligent philosopher, suffers from a fixation of ambition that compromises the sanity of his actions, and this is intensified towards the end of the play, especially in VI.iii, where he enters ‘distractedly’. In The Revenger's Tragedy Vindice's obsessional qualities and the baroque nature of his schemes speak for themselves, as do Flamineo's The White Devil. In The Duchess of Malfi Duke Ferdinand's persecution of the Duchess is associated with the developing disease of lycanthropy, and the Duke's descent into madness corresponds with an increasingly nightmarish complication of horror and guilt towards the end of the play. The presence of this element of madness in revenge tragedy presents another interesting challenge to the assumptions which underlie the masque. While the action of the masque is rarely supported by a process of logical reasoning, the mystification of power summons up a higher motivation for and justification of action. The retreat from reason is thus sanctified and dignified by recourse to a higher authority which takes a divine or mythological form. There is also in the masque a claim to harmony or regulation or both which is associated with royal power or the idealised status quo. Hence the chaotic and disordered world of the antimasque can be banished at a stroke by the simple assertion of this order, as in The Masque of Queens. The ethos of revenge tragedy, with its implications of a dark irrationality never far from the surface of human behaviour, is a direct challenge to this. Madness is not amenable to authority and undermines any sense of system. Thus the revenge genre offers a view of social relations, order and authority which subverts and undermines that of the masque and the political philosophies which inform it.

A few words might be said in conclusion about the presence of masques within revenge tragedies. It is a curious fact that several tragedies have masques inserted in them, frequently at climactic points of the action.¹⁷ One can turn again to The Spanish Tragedy for an early instance of the inclusion of court entertainment in this drama, but the manifestations in later plays show a greater use of music and dance, conventional elements in the Jacobean court masque. The practice of including masques in tragedy has been examined in several studies, from a number of points of view, including the dramaturgical and generic implications and the ideas engendered by the juxtaposition.¹⁸ However, what remains to be considered are the political implications of the conjunction of two forms constructed, as they are, around such fundamentally conflicting notions of power and social relationships. A significant point to be remembered in this is the normal ideological function of the masque. The placing of a form which essentially presents an idealised view of the status quo within a theatrical cosmos which exposes the corruption of power in the state cannot but subvert the idealisation and the ideology which sustain it. Of the plays discussed in this essay, six include a masque: Marston's two Antonio plays, The Maid's Tragedy, The Atheist's Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy and Women Beware Women. (Additionally, The Duchess of Malfi includes a masque of madmen, although it is not actually referred to as such, and a masque of madmen is prepared for though not executed in The Changeling.) In each case the celebratory function of the masque in the context of state in which it occurs becomes heavily ironic, which is interesting since the ideology of the masque itself substantially excludes irony. In the plays considered here, the irony emerges either from a contrast between the ideal harmony connoted by the dramatic entertainment and the corruption behind the scenes (as in The Maid's Tragedy, but there is an element of this in all these plays), or from the way the masque conceals the final stages of the murderous intrigue (as in The Revenger's Tragedy or Women Beware Women). It is not that the inner theatrical episode in some way makes the outer frame of the play appear more valid or real, but rather that the whole basis of trust in representation is undermined and shown to depend purely on an ideological construction of reality. The inclusion of the court masque in the nightmare, Machiavellian world of revenge-theatre Realpolitik completes its demolition of the idealised and harmonious world presented by the courtly entertainment.

Antonio's opening speech in The Duchess of Malfi restates James's ideology of the royal court as the fountainhead of harmony and order in the state. In talking of the king of France he says,

In seeking to reduce both State and people
To a fix'd order, their judicious King
Begins at home. Quits first his royal palace
Of flattering sycophants, of dissolute,
And infamous persons, which he sweetly terms
His Master's master-piece, the work of Heaven,
Considering duly, that a Prince's court
Is like a common fountain, whence should flow
Pure silver drops in general.

This suggests the ideal, but in the play it remains just that, isolated in a strange world of corruption. The exaggeratedly and theatrically extreme events of the play work to present the diametric opposite of this, thus reducing the sacrosanct political ideal to a dramatic contrast, as remote in its fictional extremity as the baroque world of horror is in opposition to it. As a cultural product, revenge tragedy might be considered to exist in a similar relation to the masque. In terms of simple contrast it exposes the fictiveness of the masque's construction of reality by erecting a contrasting conception of power in the state, and, in terms of dramatic method, it calls into question the reliability of dramatic representation through its own theatricalism, thus undermining the masque's claim to authority.

Notes

1. Among the writers who produced court masques as well as tragedies for the public theatre were Jonson, Middleton, Beaumont, Chapman and Marston.

2. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1975) p. 38.

3. Ibid., p. 55.

4. Discussions of this inconsistency in the characterisation of Bosola include C. G. Thayer, ‘The Ambiguity of Bosola’, Studies in Philology, LIV (1957); and I. Ribner, Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order (London: Methuen, 1979) pp. 110-16.

5. For an interpretation of the preoccupation with the macabre in one play, see S. Schoenbaum, ‘The Revenger's Tragedy: Jacobean Dance of Death’, Modern Language Quarterly, XV (1954) 201-7.

6. See L. G. Salingar, ‘The Revenger's Tragedy and the Morality Tradition’, Scrutiny, VI (1938) 402-24.

7. See G. P. Gooch and H. J. Laski, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898) p. 61.

8. Lists of plays performed at court may be found in M. Steele, Plays and Masques at Court, 1558-1642 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1926); and G. E. C. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (London: Oxford University Press, 1941) pp. 94, 173, 194, 213, 249, 299, 322 and 336.

9. Several writers, including Jonson and Marston, either suffered penalties under both Elizabeth and James, or took active steps to avoid it by modifying what they wrote. Fulke Greville destroyed his tragedy Antony and Cleopatra for fear of official retribution. For accounts of the sensitivity of Elizabeth and James to the subject matter of literature and drama, see D. Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960) pp. 8-9, 12-13; and J. Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) pp. 1-3.

10. An account of the corruption and prodigality of the Jacobean court can be found in G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant or the Court of James I (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962) chs 14 and 17.

11. See L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) pp. 267-74.

12. A contemporary comment on James's chastity with women and his predilection for handsome young men is to be found in Sir John Oglander, A Royalist's Notebook, ed. Francis Bamford (London: Constable, 1936) pp. 174 and 196. Caroline Bingham also discusses James and his favourites in James I of England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981) pp. 76-87.

13. See L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979) pp. 152-4.

14. Jonathan Dollimore discusses the demystification of state power in The White Devil in his Radical Tragedy (Brighton: Harvester, 1984) pp. 231-46.

15. Quoted in R. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450-1650 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1984) p. 20. The chapter entitled ‘Removed Mysteries’ (pp. 20-41) deals with the mystification of power in masques and festivals.

16. That the drive for revenge is in itself a form of madness is argued in C. A. and E. S. Hallett, The Revenger's Madness (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).

17. See S. P. Sutherland, Masques in Jacobean Tragedy (New York: AMS Press, 1983).

18. Sutherland reviews the work on this (ibid., pp. 1-8).