SOURCE: Prosser, Eleanor. “Shakespeare and Revenge.” In Hamlet and Revenge. 1967. Reprint, pp. 74-94. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971.

[In the following essay, Prosser surveys a number of examples of Shakespearean characters who either choose or decline to pursue personal vengeance. She finds no evidence that Shakespeare's plays portray private revenge as divinely sanctioned, required by a code of honor, or justified by social convention; instead, she argues, they repeatedly link revenge with such pernicious traits as irrationality, impulsiveness, and madness.]

Even though revenge was generally condemned in the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, theatrical convention is not a certain guide in interpreting a given play. Obviously Shakespeare was not bound by a tradition that saw King John as a pre-Reformation hero or Hal as a raucous, thieving wastrel. We cannot understand Shakespeare's Lear by analyzing audience reaction to the sentimental penitent of the old King Leir. In these and other cases, Shakespeare transformed an old convention. The extended analysis of non-Shakespearean revenge plays just completed has had only one purpose: to correct the assumption that Shakespeare's contemporaries automatically considered revenge a duty of both piety and honor. His audience and other playwrights on the whole clearly did not. But what of Shakespeare himself? If it were true, as Bertram Joseph asserts, that “in Shakespeare's work in general we cannot find an overwhelming condemnation of revenge,” such a break with the dominant ethical, religious, and even dramatic code of his day would be of great significance.¹ But is it true?

A comprehensive study of revenge motifs throughout the Shakespearean canon would deserve an entire book, for the elements of revenge—injury with its accompanying retaliation, whether intended or actually inflicted—appear in almost every play.² For our purposes, a brief survey of the characters who face a situation in some way analogous to that of Hamlet will suffice. To this end, let us first eliminate all out-and-out villains: characters whose motive for revenge is flimsy at best (Iago, Shylock), wholly invalid (Cornwall and Regan), or merely rhetorical (Aaron, Duke Frederick, Don John).³ Such characters are personifications of evil, merely revenging themselves on virtue, and thus are irrelevant to the case of a virtuous character who has sustained a real injury. It is worth noting, though, how useful a motive Shakespeare found revenge to be. Aaron has no defined motive, and yet he rivals any genuine revenger in his rhetoric:

Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.

(II.iii.38-39)

Perhaps we are to assume that his capture provides sufficient cause, but apparently the matter of motive is unimportant in the play. Aaron is a villain; therefore Aaron seeks revenge.⁴

Just as villainous revenges on virtue are irrelevant for our purposes, so too are comic revenges on folly. In passing, though, we should note that even in such cases as the revenges on Malvolio in Twelfth Night, on Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor, and on Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well, compassion tempers retribution. In such cases, moreover, we see a social unit exposing a wrong in order to restore social health, not a private man inflicting pain in order to revenge a wrong. The sanity of Windsor welcomes Falstaff back with laughter; Illyria seeks only Malvolio's goodwill, and with such charming people it may win him over; under Lafeu's tender care, there may even be hope for Parolles.

The many revenge motives of warring factions, most clearly seen in the tangled threads of the Henry VI plays, are also tangential to our discussion. For the most part, the issues in war are not private revenge, but power—despite the passionate vows of vengeance that echo across Shakespearean battlefields.⁵ Remove the rhetoric of revenge and the wars would continue. This fact, however, indicates once more how useful Shakespeare found the motive to be in establishing an atmosphere of horror. One has only to think of “fell” revenging Clifford slaughtering the boy Rutland, or of the “she-wolf” Margaret, glorying in York's tears and offering him a napkin dripping with the blood of his son (3 Henry VI, I.iii, I.iv). Or consider the ambiguous Antony of Julius Caesar. He has not yet assumed his role as Shakespeare's spokesman when he kneels by the dead body of Caesar and speaks the bloodcurdling prophecy of impending chaos:

                    Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war.

(III.i.270-73)

Surely this speech does not indicate moral approval of revenge. The monstrous power shortly to be unleashed is seen as rising from hell, rising “hot” with rage to cry for wanton destruction. That this speech is not merely colorful rhetoric in the classical tradition, and thus inadmissible as evidence of the play's ethical perspective, is made clear by Antony's tactics at the funeral. He appeals to the mob not to save Rome from the pollution of the murderers, not to effect justice, not even to punish: he appeals solely to personal motives, arousing his listeners by presenting Caesar as a friend who has deserved their loves and thus their loyalty. We immediately see the results in the maddened shrieks “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!” (III.ii.208) and in the insane butchery of Cinna the poet. At this point in the play we have little doubt that Antony is a ruthless demagogue who has tricked the mob into serving his own terrible purpose, and tricked them by appealing to one of man's most dangerous emotions: the desire for revenge.

Despite the several clues noted, the three types of revenge motif discussed—villainous revenges on virtue, comic revenges on folly, and revenge motives incidental to power struggles—are all irrelevant to the problem that Hamlet faces. Our concern is with the basically virtuous character who sustains (or thinks he sustains) a serious injury but has (or thinks he has) no recourse to the law. Three groups of characters are relevant: those faced with a supposed injury (Othello, Leontes, and Posthumus); those faced with a genuine injury, ranging from an affront to honor to the death of a close friend (Romeo, Hotspur, Henry V, the Trojans in Troilus and Cressida, Lear, Coriolanus, and Prospero); and those faced with the wanton murder of immediate kin (Titus, John of Gaunt, Isabella, Edgar, Macduff, and Hermione).⁶

Moving from the least to the most relevant, let us first touch upon the trio of revengers-for-false-cause: Othello, Leontes, and Posthumus. At first glance, it may seem pointless to consider these three. Obviously each man is dreadfully wrong to doubt his wife's faithfulness. Obviously the audience deplores each man's “revenge,” for, like the villain-revenger, each is in reality attacking virtue. For that reason, the ethics of revenge would seem to be beside the point. But what if the three wives in question were indeed as faithless as their husbands' black imaginings have painted them? Would we then watch the ensuing events with satisfaction? I do not think so. In each play, the error is not merely the gullible belief in an obvious falsehood; it is the violence in each man that leads him not to seek punishment with justice but to inflict revenge.

Consider the close connection of the destructiveness of revenge with the destruction of Othello himself. At the climax of the temptation scene, Othello is finally overcome. In a wild roar, he delivers his will to the “demi-devil” Iago as he utters a terrible vow:

                                                                                                              Look here, Iago;
All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven.
'Tis gone.
Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell!(7)
Yield up, O love, they crown and hearted throne
To tyrannous hate!

(III.iii.444-49)

And then, his “bloody thoughts” swelling “like to the Pontic sea,” with horrible irony he takes a sacred vow by Heaven never to pause “till that a capable and wide revenge / Swallow them up” (453-60). Were Desdemona guilty, I doubt that our horror and pain at the complete disintegration of Othello would be any the less.

So too with Leontes. His mad jealousy awakens a greedy obsession with revenge, not a desire for justice. When obscene images first rise in his seething mind, he immediately orders the murder of his wife's supposed lover; when that plot fails, he decides, “for present vengeance, / Take it on her” (The Winter's Tale, II.iii.22-23). The purpose of the “just and open trial” he announces is not to determine Hermione's guilt, for in the same breath he adds that his heart will be burdened until she is dead (II.iii.205-6). As in Othello, doubting a faithful wife is folly, but taking upon oneself the right to punish is madness.

Cymbeline might almost be considered an answer to those critics who see Othello's and Leontes' error primarily in terms of their credulity. Posthumus too believes a lie; he too tortures himself with lewd imaginings; he too rages for revenge; he too devotes himself to the service of hate. But he honestly and deeply repents. If this change were merely a convention Shakespeare used because he was then in his “reconciliation period,” he might easily have had Posthumus repent after learning the truth, a familiar expedient in the seventeenth-century drama. He does not. Still believing Imogen guilty, Posthumus comes to see that his guilt in ordering her death was the greater.⁸ The extended repentance scenes, including the “forgiveness” masque, are usually drastically cut in performance, and with good reason. They can pull the play out of focus. Instead of relying on last-minute conversion, Shakespeare develops Posthumus's penitence into two full scenes, writing for it some of his most moving lines (V.i.1-17, V.iv.3-29). The conclusion seems unavoidable that his interest in the ethical issues outweighed his dramatic instinct.

Nonetheless, it might be argued that the cases of Othello, Leontes, and Posthumus cast no light on the audience's attitude toward revenge per se, since their attention, as well as the playwright's, is focused on the fact that each man's revenge is predicated on an untruth. More relevant to the issue in Hamlet are several primarily virtuous characters who have sustained a real and serious injury. Let us first turn to those whose injury, though severe, is less so than Hamlet's; less severe, that is, than the murder of immediate kin.

The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet has its roots in the Italian vendetta, the blood feud nourished by revenge. The almost reflex action of Lady Capulet in demanding an eye for an eye shows the vendetta to be a way of life to her (III.i.181-86). With complacent ease, she promises vengeance on Romeo for killing Tybalt, contentedly assuming that the mere assurance of bloody retaliation will stop the tears of a grieving young girl (III.v.88-93). Her perversion of values is chilling. It is this code of death and hate that dooms the lovers—and not wholly as an external force over which they have no control. Romeo himself makes the tragedy inevitable by doing the one thing he fervently did not want to do: he surrenders his will to the claims of his emotions and kills a Capulet. From the moment that Romeo throws rational patience back to Heaven and gives himself to rage, the lovers are doomed:

Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!

(III.i.128-29)

Benvolio later tells us that Romeo had not desired to take revenge on Tybalt until that very moment; but that one moment of fury does, indeed, make him “fortune's fool” (141). The destruction of the lines of both Montague and Capulet is fittingly viewed as “a scourge” that Heaven has “laid upon [their] hate” (V.iii.292).

In Hotspur, we have another fool of fortune whose anger provides the fuel for his own destruction. Even though he is a highly sympathetic character, the determination of this “wasp-stung and impatient fool” to “revenge the jeering and disdain'd contempt” of his King gives impetus to the forces of rebellion (1 Henry IV, I.iii.236, 183). No matter whose side has the greater justice in the issue of ransoming Mortimer, the ensuing civil war is, at best, born of a desperate gamble for honor over an eggshell. Of course, Hotspur's motives of “honor” differ from those of Worcester and Northumberland. The point is that this glowing young hothead's passion for revenge allows him to be manipulated.

When the issue is not an eggshell but a country, and the motive and cue for passion thus infinitely greater, Henry V responds not with fury, but with reason and humanity. In the increasingly popular attempt to blacken the character of Henry, several critics have viewed the traitors' scene as evidence of Henry's egotism and vindictiveness (II.ii.12-181). Nothing could be further from my reading of the scene. It is quite clear that Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey must be executed for the abortive plot to murder their King, and in Holinshed Henry summarily pronounces sentence when he learns of their treachery. In Shakespeare, the “trick” by which Henry gets the men to sentence themselves is not to be viewed as a petty cat-and-mouse game. It is a device by which the traitors, in their own malice, pronounce their own doom. Throughout the scene, as I envision it, Henry is struggling to rise above his personal feelings, and on the whole he succeeds. Of course he is human. Of course he is hurt. But his “I will weep for thee” to Scroop betrays no anger. “Touching our person seek we no revenge,” he insists, and the context suggests that we are to believe him. When he dismisses the traitors to death, he expresses no satisfaction that they are going to the Hell they richly deserve; instead, he prays that God forgive them, that He grant them “patience to endure, and true repentance.”

The entire scene is constructed to make it clear that genuine repentance has been awakened in each of the traitors, and awakened precisely because of Henry's control and compassion. Before Henry's speech detailing their guilt, the three men have shown only hypocrisy and malice. After his speech, they are different men. Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey all repent their guilt in heavily doctrinal language familiar to every member of the audience.⁹ In all their speeches, they recognize that it is the greater mercy of God to punish the sinner rather than let him continue in evil, a theme that later would prompt some of Shakespeare's richest poetry.¹⁰ They are thankful that Divine Providence has arrested their evil (“Our purposes God justly hath discover'd. … But God be thanked for prevention”). They repent their treason because it was a sin, not because they fear punishment (“I repent my fault more than my death. … My fault, but not my body, pardon, sovereign”). They rejoice in their contrition and punishment (“I in sufferance heartily will rejoice. … I do at this hour joy o'er myself”). These three professions are each voiced twice, in the manner of a musical fugue. We know nothing of the men themselves or their motives. Seemingly the only motivation for repentance is their impending death—which motivation they deny—and the King's speech. The extended scene thus serves to show the kingly grace of Henry instilling the love that must be added to fear before man can truly repent.¹¹ In Henry's situation, he could be enraged at treason without alienating audience sympathy. As God's vice-regent on earth, he is the agent of divine revenge. Yet the movement of the scene implies that the “sacred duty” here is not to inflict revenge on the man but to aid in the salvation of his soul.

As scholars have increasingly remarked, the debate between Troilus and Hector in Act II, Scene ii, of Troilus and Cressida is directly relevant to Hamlet's dilemma.¹² Also deserving attention is the revenge theme at the core of the play. The original cause of the pointless conflict was not Paris's lust for Helen, but simple revenge. Paris had been commissioned merely to take a Greek captive, any captive, in retaliation for the Greeks' capture of an old “aunt,” who is never even named in the play. Hector voices the play's perspective on all ensuing events when he charges that “pleasure and revenge / Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice / Of any true decision” (II.ii.171-73). The issue was tainted from the beginning.

Throughout the play, revenge is the nurse of barbarism and irrational frenzy. Troilus, scorning Hector's “vice of mercy” in granting life to Greeks he has downed in battle, dedicates himself to “venom'd vengeance”—a policy that the temperate Hector rejects as “savage” (V.iii.37-49). A few moments later Hector's position is vividly confirmed. Achilles, “arming, weeping, cursing, vowing vengeance” (V.v.30-35), is so maddened by Patroclus's death that he descends to bestial savagery, setting his rat-pack of Myrmidons on the defenseless Hector. We cannot hope that the insanity is over when, at the play's end, Troilus takes new strength in “hope of revenge” (V.x.31).

The association of revenge with madness is highly significant. Though Achilles may not be clinically insane, he loses all rational control as he rages forth, “crying on Hector.” In a brief emblematic parallel, Ajax, who has also lost a friend, “foams at the mouth,” “roaring for Troilus” (V.v.35-36). So too with Othello. In the moment that he vows revenge, he loses his power to reason, his self-possession. Indeed, Othello loses his mind, in a symbolic sense at least, in a violent seizure. Thus it is especially significant that in King Lear, Shakespeare's one major treatment of true madness, we can identify the exact moment at which the mind begins to crack—and that moment coincides with the first vow of vengeance. As his two daughters stand revealed before him, Lear first sees the abyss begin to open. Though he prays to the heavens for patience, he defies tears—“women's weapons,” the only consolation that resignation would offer—and surrenders himself to rage:

                                                                      No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall—I will do such things,—
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.

(II.iv.281-85)

His mind is sputtering as if short-circuited. And at this point the storm breaks.

Though many questions of “right” and “wrong” are ambiguous in Coriolanus, its hero's plan to take revenge on all Rome seems clearly judged. The decision to embrace his enemy as a means to that revenge is hopelessly, even childishly, stupid. But more, the decision to take such revenge, whatever the means, is morally wrong. It is, as in King Lear, “unnatural.” It leads him to reject all natural ties (“Wife, mother, child, I know not” [V.ii.88]), to humiliate his dearest friend, to embrace his and Rome's enemy, and to plot the destruction of his native land. Though the issues are not black and white, we cannot for a moment believe that the argument of the play vindicates Coriolanus against all the bonds of kin and country.

In all of the cases discussed thus far, revenge—both the child and the nurse of rage—inevitably leads to mental, physical, and spiritual destruction. The health of man and society requires patience. But on what is patience based? Stoic elimination of the emotions that feed revenge? The most familiar Shakespearean quotation on revenge denies the Stoics' view. Prospero, challenged by the compassion of Ariel, is finally moved to pardon his enemies:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance. …

(The Tempest, V.i.25-28)

This rather cryptic speech is illuminated by a passage from Montaigne's essay “Of Crueltie”; in fact, several parallels of diction and idea (here italicized) suggest that Florio's translation was Shakespeare's actual source.

Methinks Virtue is another manner of thing, and much more noble than the inclinations unto Goodnesse, which in us are engendered. … He that through a naturall facilitie and genuine mildnesse should neglect or contemne injuries received, should no doubt performe a rare action, and worthy commendation: but he who being toucht and stung to the quicke with any wrong or offence received, should arme himself with reason against this furiously blind desire of revenge, and in the end after a great conflict yeeld himselfe master over it, should doubtlesse doe much more. The first should doe well, the other vertuously: the one action might be termed Goodnesse, the other Vertue. For it seemeth that the very name of Vertue presupposeth difficultie, and inferreth resistance, and cannot well exercise itself without an enemie.

Editors of The Tempest often gloss Prospero's use of “virtue” as “forgiveness,” but such a gloss is slightly misleading.¹³ Shakespeare's meaning is that Prospero's specific type of forgiveness is a “rarer action” than that of a patient Griselda, who forgives easily because she feels no anger. Prospero is no Stoic. He deeply feels the injury, yet his reason is now in command. In electing to take the part of his “nobler reason” against the claims of his fury, he has acted with the “virtue” defined by Montaigne. As was noted with Cymbeline, the rejection of vengeance has often been dismissed as irrelevant to Shakespeare's earlier plays and considered an attitude limited to his later “reconciliation period.” When we recall Henry V speaking words of compassion to the traitors, even though he too is “struck to th' quick,” we find exactly the same spirit of mercy and forbearance.

Let us turn now to those characters who face a situation closely analogous to that of Hamlet: Titus Andronicus, John of Gaunt, Isabella, Macduff, Edgar, and Hermione. Each of them is, at least at the opening of the play, predominantly virtuous; each has suffered the murder of a close member of his family, knows the identity of the killer, and has no recourse to the law.

Titus Andronicus is a very curious play, and its hero a very puzzling character.¹⁴ At first glance it seems ludicrous to speak of Titus and Hamlet as related, yet they are at least cousins, if not brothers: as Fredson Bowers has shown, both are direct offspring of the Kydian revenge play.¹⁵ Although few scholars would offer Titus as evidence that Shakespeare and his audience unquestioningly approved of personal revenge, the character is sufficiently ambiguous to require close attention.

The first act offers either a very fuzzy characterization of Titus as a noble hero or a very subtle characterization of him as a rash and self-indulgent man who is potentially dangerous. It is difficult to determine which. A useful guide may be found in an eighteenth-century chapbook in the Folger Library: The History of Titus Andronicus, The Renowned Roman General. … It appears to be a late descendant of a very old version, and may even represent Shakespeare's source. If it does, Shakespeare made several significant additions and changes. Not one of Titus's decisive actions in the first scene is based on the chapbook. Each of them seems to have been added to establish a specific characterization.

First, Titus's decision to resign his title and bestow it on Saturninus is clearly unwise. In a twenty-line exchange immediately preceding Titus's entrance, the characters of the two candidates have been revealed to the audience: Saturninus is violent and arrogant; Bassianus is dignified and humble. Although Titus's decision seems motivated by humility and patriotism, his choice of Saturninus is fraught with danger. Second, Titus's decision to sacrifice Alarbus is seen as barbarous, even though it is ascribed to pious motives. The audience's pity would align it with Tamora: not only because she is a terrified mother (automatically the odds are on her side), but also because her noble plea for mercy is juxtaposed to the vicious eagerness of Lucius to “hew [her son's] limbs.”¹⁶ We agree with Tamora that even if Titus's motives are religious, the sacrifice is a “cruel, irreligious piety” (I.i.129-30). Third, Titus's killing of his own son Mutius is also treated unsympathetically. In theory, one might justify the act as a sign of Titus's loyalty, on the grounds that Mutius has just defied his newly established sovereign by helping to steal the emperor's intended bride for Bassianus. In production, however, I doubt that the audience would see the killing in this light. Saturninus is an embryonic tyrant. Bassianus, though rash in seizing his betrothed, is clearly a wronged hero. No matter how good Titus's motives, our sympathy is with Bassianus and Mutius. Moreover, even Titus's motives are suspect. As he attempts to stop the escaping lovers, Mutius bars his way. In a swift reflex action, he stabs his son, crying “What, villain boy! / Bar'st me my way in Rome?” (I.i.290-91). The deathblow is not the necessary but regretted stroke of justice; it is a brutal retaliation for an affront to Titus's prerogatives. He later attributes his action to honorable motives, but his concern is with having been personally dishonored. Although I do not think that Titus is intended to be as “overbearingly proud and haughty” as Bowers suggests, he is surely to be interpreted as rash, headstrong, and self-centered.¹⁷

Despite the suggestion of certain negative traits in Act I, Titus moves through the next three acts in the role of oppressed virtue. He suffers blow upon blow, each successive torture undeserved, each inflicted by the most fiendish villainy. This virtuous posture is marred only by excessive grief, which is explicitly judged by all as dangerous. In the first scene of Act III, we find the first hint that his passion exceeds the bounds of moderation. Pleading to the senators and tribunes of Rome for mercy to his falsely accused sons, he “lieth down,” a movement of abandon that Shakespeare later found useful for Constance and Richard II. When Titus sees his ravished, mutilated daughter, understandably his grief “disdaineth bounds” (III.i.71). Left to his own instincts, no member of the audience would coolly judge the wails of lamentation as irrational; nonetheless, Shakespeare warns both the audience and Titus through Marcus:

O brother, speak with possibilities,
And do not break into these deep extremes. …
But yet let reason govern thy lament.

(III.i.215-19)

Finally, when Saturninus scornfully returns Titus's severed hand and the heads of his sons, he throws off all control and breaks into mad laughter. Throughout these first three acts, Titus is primarily a good man whose genuine wrongs have led him to excessive grief and thus to madness. The audience is undoubtedly sympathetic, but it must be uneasy when Titus shows Lavinia how to commit suicide without using her hands, when he stabs wildly at a fly, when he shoots his arrows with messages to the gods—Marcus, all the while, commenting on his frenzy.

Despite his wrongs, his grief, and his madness, Titus withstands the temptation to revenge for three and a half acts. Even when two of his sons are killed, he does not turn to private revenge. True, he sends his exiled son Lucius to raise an army among the Goths, but he himself does nothing. Seeking the aid of Rome's enemy is scarcely the act of a patriotic Roman, but the assault by the Goths never takes place. That thorny problem is kept offstage and thus outside the audience's real awareness. Even when Lavinia reveals the names of her ravishers, Titus does not act. Marcus, our norm, makes it clear that we are not to attribute his inaction to cowardice, sloth, or madness (IV.i.123-29). No matter how great Titus's cause, how great his sorrows, he is “yet so just that he will not revenge. / Revenge, ye heavens, for old Andronicus!” Making a clear allusion to the Biblical injunction against private revenge, Marcus cries out to the heavens to “hear a good man groan,” for Titus himself is still trusting to heaven, despite the inexplicable delay of divine justice. He continues to bide his time, relieving his tortured spirit by sending riddling taunts to his enemies.

But the heavens delay too long. IV.iii is a scene of choice that explains how we are to view Titus's bloodthirsty revenge in the fifth act. Now wholly insane, Titus has brought his family and friends to the fields, all of them equipped with bows and arrows. Justice, he tells them, has fled the earth. Some he sends to cast nets for her in the ocean; others he orders to dig down to Pluto's kingdom and seek her there. Humoring his lunacy and hoping, with Marcus, to convince Titus to join with the Goths, the digging kinsmen return him Pluto's message: Justice is not in hell,

                              but Pluto sends you word,
If you will have Revenge from hell, you shall:
Marry, for Justice, she is so employ'd,
He thinks, with Jove in heaven, or somewhere else,
So that perforce you must needs stay a time.

At this, Titus finally rebels:

He doth me wrong to feed me with delays.
I'll dive into the burning lake below,
And pull her [Revenge] out of Acheron by the heels.

(IV.iii.37-44)

With that decision, he begins wildly shooting arrow-borne messages to the gods, and the scene closes as he sends a clown to Saturninus with another riddling letter, an action that results in the death of the innocent fool.

When we next see Titus, he is completely “rational” in the modern sense (that is, in contact with reality); he sees through Tamora's disguise as “Revenge,” coolly tricks her into leaving her sons as hostages, and forthwith slits their throats. From this point on he is, if not a “villain-revenger,” at least a tainted revenger who has forfeited our sympathy. The murder of Tamora's two vicious cubs would, in itself, undoubtedly call for our instinctive applause. But when Titus, not content with merely slaying them, stops their mouths to prevent any pleas (a typical villain's device in Renaissance drama) and then taunts them with his ghastly plans to make mush of their bones and blood, mold it around their severed heads, and serve the tempting “pasties” to their mother—the stomach of the most hardened spectator would surely rise.

This grisly speech is nothing, however, compared to the final catastrophe. First, Titus's killing of Lavinia is treated in such a way as to alienate sympathy. In the chapbook, Lavinia begs her father to kill her. In the play, Shakespeare treats her killing as a sudden, shocking slaughter, not as a requested act of mercy. To be sure, Titus recalls the example of Virginius, generally epitomized as a noble Roman father compelled by love and honor to kill his daughter. Nonetheless, Titus's argument is that the living presence of a dishonored daughter would bring constant shame and sorrow not to the suffering girl, but to the father. Even before the final horror, Titus has lost all claim to virtue.

But there is one more blow that, when reading the play, we may overlook. As Titus turns to the banquet table to gloat over Tamora, we read that she “hath daintily fed” already of the two loathsome “pasties” (V.iii.61). Without seeing a production, we can only dimly sense the impact of this scene. In the excitement of Lavinia's death, we have forgotten the bloody banquet already begun. Now we are reminded—and in a sudden wave of nausea remember that Tamora has already eaten.¹⁸ Mercifully, Titus immediately stabs her (an actress could not maintain the required violent reaction for long) and, again mercifully, Titus is immediately killed. The audience could stand no more.

Any assumption that Shakespeare automatically conceived of blood revenge as a “sacred duty” must grapple with Titus Andronicus. It must also face the fact that among all the potential revengers-for-murdered-kin remaining to be considered, not one is so portrayed as to suggest that vengeance is commanded by God, required by honor, or expected by custom.

The decision facing John of Gaunt in Richard II is not strictly relevant to Hamlet. Gaunt is urged to rebel against an anointed king whose right to the throne is unquestioned. The issue is clearly political.¹⁹ Nonetheless, Gaunt's argument against killing the man who ordered his brother's murder is pertinent to our investigation:

Since correction lieth in those hands
Which made the fault that we cannot correct,
Put we our quarrel to the will of heaven. …

(I.ii.4-6)

When the Duchess of Gloucester charges that his forbearance is not patience but “pale cold cowardice” and despair, he answers, “God's is the quarrel” (l. 37). Though the primary issue here is civil obedience, Gaunt echoes the traditional injunction against private revenge.

The relevance of Isabella in Measure for Measure is apparent. Few critics today would argue that she is either a paragon of virtue or the epitome of selfish prudery. Somewhere between the two extremes, wherever we see the truth to lie, most would agree that the basic plot line is concerned in some way with a change in Isabella for the better. And however we define that change, it is expressed by a decision to reject revenge. Hearing of her brother's supposed execution, our gentle novitiate explodes in an extravagant threat against Angelo: “O, I will to him and pluck out his eyes!” The Duke cautions her with the familiar exhortation to patience: “Give your cause to heaven” (IV.iii.124,129). She endeavors to control her vindictiveness, but her fury breaks forth when she publicly confronts Angelo with his perfidy. It is against this violence that we see the full significance of her eventual plea for mercy to Angelo. All human instinct understandably urges her to demand a life for a life. The Duke makes this point emphatically:

Against all sense you do importune her:
Should she kneel down in mercy of this fact,
Her brother's ghost his paved bed would break,
And take her hence in horror.

(V.i.438-41)

Family loyalty, natural emotion, common sense—all human considerations preclude charity. But Isabella takes that suprahuman step to the “rarer action,” forgiveness.

Macbeth and King Lear both provide test cases, for they have been cited as evidence that Shakespeare unquestioningly accepted the morality of revenge. Patrick Cruttwell is not alone in believing that “the whole moral weight of Macbeth is behind the personal and bloody vengeance which Macduff vows and takes on the man who has killed his wife and children, and the whole moral weight of Lear is no less behind Edgar's challenging and killing of Edmund.”²⁰ This study suggests that, on the contrary, Shakespeare carefully avoided imputing motives of personal vengeance to either character.

In Macbeth, only one passage can be offered in support of a revenge ethic. In his soliloquy on the battlefield, Macduff roars for Macbeth to show himself, swearing that if someone else has stolen from him the right to kill the tyrant, “my wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still” (V.vii.14-23). In the light of the rest of the play, I find the speech a contradiction. Elsewhere, the denial of personal revenge motives to Macduff is explicit. The dominant note is struck when we hear that Macduff has joined Malcolm in England, where he has gone to beg the King's help in liberating Scotland. In the messenger's report, there is no hint of vengeful vows or of righteous fury aching to be unleashed. There is only the hope—“with Him above / To ratify the work” (III.vi.32-33)—of freeing the bleeding land from tyranny in the name of the legitimate heir. Lennox gives the mission religious sanction: he will send “some holy angel” to England to warn that caution is needed to hasten the day when “a swift blessing” returns to Scotland (III.vi.45-59).

In the extended dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff, the emphasis is entirely on love of country. We hear not one word of vindictive hatred for Macbeth. He is called “treacherous,” “untitled tyrant,” and “devilish,” but the most objective observer could say no less. Almost all the emotion in the first part of the scene is aroused by grief for Scotland. Even when Macduff learns of the slaughter of his wife and children, his major reaction is stunned grief. He is angry at himself for exposing them to danger, not at the man who murdered them. The nearest thing to a vow of personal revenge is Macduff's prayer that the heavens give him the opportunity to kill “this fiend of Scotland” in battle (IV.iii.230-33). It is clear, however, that all is surrendered to the will of Heaven. The forthcoming campaign is to be seen as a divine mission, not as a campaign of personal vengeance.²¹

A word should perhaps be said about Malcolm. It is true that he offers the “medicines of our great revenge” as comfort to the stricken Macduff (IV.iii.214), but in context the word has no force. Malcolm is treated solely as the divinely appointed agent of God's punishment. Had Shakespeare wished, he could easily have given Malcolm a blood revenge motive. Following the murder, he has an uneasy suspicion of Macbeth, but Shakespeare never makes his suspicion explicit. As with Macduff, Shakespeare seems to be avoiding an obvious motive.

In King Lear, the case of Edgar is unequivocal. He neither desires nor takes revenge in any way whatsoever, other than to effect the “revenge” of outraged order on evil. There is not one suggestion in his wanderings as poor Tom that he awaits an opportunity for personal vengeance. On the contrary, his is the voice of patience despite the most painful afflictions (III.vi.109-17). When he intercepts Goneril's letter revealing the plot on her husband's life and Edmund's role in it, he resolves to go to the British camp solely to expose the treachery. It is for this reason alone that he enters the lists. Edgar's purpose is not to kill the brother who wronged him but to prove by combat that Edmund is a traitor to his King. That his motive is in no way vindictive is shown by his first words when he reveals himself to the dying Edmund: “Let's exchange charity” (V.iii.166). Saviolo, it will be recalled, believed single combat legitimate only for the justifying of a truth and only if the challenger proceeded in the proper spirit. Edgar fulfills these criteria. He proceeds without hatred, motivated by “love of virtue, and regarde of the universall good and publique profite.” Edgar acts, “as it were, the minister to execute Gods devine pleasure.”²²

In The Winter's Tale we have another of Shakespeare's late “reconciliation plays,” and again the reconciliation is not effected by the mere trickery of romance conventions but motivated by the familiar ethical and religious concepts with which we have been concerned. Leontes' repentance is couched in thoroughly orthodox terms, and Hermione's forgiveness is carefully prepared. If one wished to be hard-headed about the play—and who does?—one might wonder what on earth could possess the woman to forgive her husband. On the other hand, if one were Christian enough to expect her to forgive Leontes, one might ask why she waited for so many years. The answers are found in Hermione's magnificent defense in the trial scene. No one could accuse her of having no “objective correlative” for her grief and outraged dignity. She minutely inventories Leontes' many wrongs, culminating, as she believes, in the outright murder of her newborn child. She is proud, even gloriously defiant, as she stands unbending, secure in the conviction of her known integrity. This regal creature, made of steel, is no sentimental Griselda who will welcome her penitent husband with clucks of tenderness one minute after he learns of his error. She will wait until the wound heals. And yet, fully aware of her husband's guilt and mitigating it not one jot, she closes her defense with words of charity:

The Emperor of Russia was my father:
O that he were alive, and here beholding
His daughter's trial! that he did but see
The flatness of my misery, yet with eyes
Of pity, not revenge!

(III.ii.120-24)

In all this evidence—over thirty characters, drawn from most of the Shakespearean canon—we find no suggestion that Shakespeare expected his audience to accept without question the validity of private blood revenge. The evidence suggests, rather, that his plays rely on the orthodox ethical and religious injunctions against it. Despite a maturing of both dramatic skill and thought between Titus Andronicus and The Tempest, the portrayal of the revenger seems to remain constant. Titus and Prospero are two sides of the same coin: Titus in his madness embracing revenge and thus descending to the hell of barbarism and destruction; Prospero in his sanity exercising his nobler reason and thus rising to forgiveness and reconciliation.

Revenge motifs recur throughout the plays. Again and again the surrender to revenge is seen as the surrender of reason, the surrender at least to rashness and at most to madness. Similarly, a decision to take revenge is often accompanied by an explicit rejection of some clear virtue or good. Just as Lear denies his daughters, Coriolanus predicates his revenge on the total rejection of the natural bonds of family (“Wife, mother, child I know not”). The rejection may take the form of symbolically flinging virtue back to heaven before vowing vengeance: Othello blows “all [his] fond love … to heaven” and Romeo cries, “Away to heaven respective lenity.”

Of special pertinence is the frequency with which revengers associate their motives and actions with Hell and the demonic. In Titus Andronicus we hear that the man who seeks private revenge must dive to the bowels of hell. In his madness, Titus takes that plunge. Antony envisions Caesar's spirit, an epitome of revenge, rising “with Ate by his side come hot from hell.” Othello calls up “black vengeance, from the hollow hell.” Coriolanus resolves to pursue his revenge “with the spleen / Of all the under fiends.” None of these characters is originally demonic in purpose, as are Iago and Aaron. The language is not the mere rhetoric of villainy.

In none of the foregoing do I intend to suggest that Shakespeare was a dour, inflexible moralist, consigning his revengers to Hell with grim satisfaction. At a given moment in a play—the moment when Romeo stabs Tybalt, when Coriolanus defies the screaming mob, when Hotspur rages at personal insult—we often instinctively identify with the very action that later, when we are released from emotional involvement, we see in ethical perspective. Shakespeare's plays show a deeper penetration into the nature of the ethical dilemma involved in revenge and a greater compassion for the revenger than do the plays of his contemporaries. Even so, they bear out Cutwolfe's view that revenge in Elizabethan drama was “continually raised from hell.”

With—let us note—the possible exception of Hamlet. In his treatment of the Ghost, Shakespeare breaks new ground, demanding a fresh response by transforming a theatrical convention. If we approach the play with certain preconceptions, we may be blind to a radical change in ethical perspective. This chapter has not attempted to use Shakespeare's other plays to interpret Hamlet. It has merely questioned one particular preconception: that Shakespeare's plays in general reflect an approved code of private blood revenge.

On the contrary, on the subject of revenge, his plays reflect agreement with sermons, moralist tracts, poetry, and other plays of his day. No matter how base the injury, no matter how evil your enemy, no matter how dim all hope of legal redress, leave the issue to Heaven; “God's is the quarrel.” In Richard III, Clarence's words to his murderers succinctly state a plea implicit in play after play:

If God will be revenged for this deed,
O, know you yet, he doth it publicly:
Take not the quarrel from his powerful arm;
He needs no indirect nor lawless course
To cut off those that have offended him.

(I.iv.221-25)

Notes

1. Conscience and the King (London, 1953), p. 44.

2. To my knowledge, no comprehensive study has been made of revenge motifs in Shakespeare's plays. Fredson Bowers's important study, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, was concerned primarily with the Kydian convention and thus discussed only Hamlet and Titus Andronicus. The chronicle histories provided a focus for Divine Vengeance, by Sister Mary Bonaventure Mroz (Washington, D.C., 1941). Sister Mary compiled a valuable history of the revenge motif from pagan times to the Renaissance, but her analysis of the plays should be approached with caution. Attitudes are often attributed to Shakespeare on the authority of atypical views or early Renaissance codes repudiated in Elizabeth's day.

3. Concern about anti-Semitism has too often led us to gloss over Shylock's real motives for exacting revenge. Yes, he has been taunted, but, it is emphasized, for his usury. He is thoroughly frank about his motives: Antonio has hurt his thriving business by lending money without interest (III.i.50-52) and, an even greater injury, has helped to save Shylock's debtors from impending foreclosure (III.iii.21-24). His revenge is motivated solely by malice, not by any desire for justice, and thus is villainous in intent.

4. Shakespeare's early sensitivity to the association of revenge with villainy may be seen in a minor change in King John. In the source play, the Bastard's anger at the imposed peace with France is motivated primarily by his own desire for personal revenge against Austria (for dishonoring his father, Coeur-de-Lion). Shakespeare apparently cut the vindictive personal motive in order to strengthen the Bastard as a hero devoted solely to his country's cause. Though the change is a small one, it suggests that Shakespeare questioned the wisdom of associating revenge with a norm figure.

5. The campaign planned by Coriolanus, the wars of Hotspur, Malcolm, and Macduff, and the combat of Edgar and Edmund are special cases, to be discussed below.

6. Edgar sits uncomfortably in this list, for of course Gloucester was not “murdered.” However, if we were to put Laertes in Edgar's position, I think we would grant him the potential motives of a blood revenger. On the other hand, Malcolm is omitted because he never has positive knowledge that his father was murdered. He will be touched on only incidentally in the discussion of Macduff.

7. Craig and Qq: thy hollow cell. The Folio reading seems much more probable. Shakespeare's frequent reference to “hollow earth” and “hollow ground” makes the adjective a logical description for Hell (e.g., Taming of the Shrew, Induction, ii, 48; Richard III, III.ii.140, and Othello, IV.ii.79). Either reading obviously means Hell, but the present study suggests that Shakespeare probably used the explicit word. As noted in Chapter II, a conventional vow of revenge often took the form of defying Heaven and invoking Hell. Later in this chapter we will note Shakespeare's use of the same convention in Titus Andronicus and a modification of it in Romeo and Juliet and other plays. Othello is not merely contrasting “vengeance emerging from its lair and love enthroned and crowned” (M. L. Ridley, new Arden Othello, Cambridge, Mass., 1958, p. 120). He is flinging his love back to Heaven and invoking Hell, surrendering his will to the service of hate.

8. In his penitence Posthumus recognizes that Imogen should have been saved to repent. This is one of the explicit arguments offered against revenge by most Renaissance thinkers.

9. There is abundant evidence that both Shakespeare and his audience would have recognized the specific points of doctrine used in this scene. The same matters are repeated again and again, and in remarkably similar language, not only in such treatises as Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity but in popular manuals for meditation and prayer (such as Thomas Becon's The Sick Man's Salve, John Norden's A Progress of Piety, and William Perkins's A Golden Chaine), in the familiar Book of Common Prayer, and in countless sermons (see especially the works of Bradford and Sandys, and, of course, the extremely influential homilies appointed to be read in the churches). With only minor differences, the same points were familiar to Catholics. Moreover, it is impossible that the language used in this scene is chance rhetoric. A recognizable core of repentance doctrine is heard throughout the plays: e.g., in the Prayer Scene in Hamlet, in Edgar's healing of his father's despair, and in the penitent speeches of Angelo, Leontes, and Posthumus.

10. E.g., Posthumus's prayer in Cymbeline (V.iv.11-28).

11. “Fear worketh no man's inclination to repentance, till somewhat else have wrought in us love also.” Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, The Works …, ed. the Rev. John Keble, 3d ed. (Oxford, 1845), III, 9. Apparently we are to believe in As You Like It that Orlando's “kindness, nobler ever than revenge,” not only saved Oliver's life but also effected his miraculous conversion (IV.iii.129). In Rosalynde, the evil brother fully repents before entering the forest.

12. See below, pp. 169-70.

13. Montaigne's Essays, trans. John Florio, II, 119. Of course, Montaigne's point is slightly different: he is distinguishing true patience from the passivity of an amiable nature. See my article on “Shakespeare, Montaigne, and ‘the Rarer Action,’” Shakespeare Studies, I (1966), 261-64.

14. For our purposes, let us consider that the play is by Shakespeare. Even if he had no hand in it at all (which seems impossible), an analysis of it is pertinent in our understanding of the early Elizabethan attitude toward revenge.

15. Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, pp. 109ff.

16. Tamora herself requires no close attention here. Though she is introduced sympathetically, from Act II on she is revealed as a mere pawn of the demonic Aaron. Her revenge-for-a-son motive is dropped. As a villain-revenger she is thus eliminated from discussion.

17. Bowers, p. 112. Bowers suggests a parallel with Lear in Titus's decision to relinquish his title, but Titus's choice is not so flagrantly for reasons of personal gratification as Lear's. Even so, the decision is imprudent at best.

18. I have never seen a production of the play but wonder if the killing of Lavinia might not be almost ignored by the audience, once the actual feast has started. The scene requires very careful direction.

19. As Lily Bess Campbell has noted, all of Act I, Scene ii, of Richard II is Shakespeare's invention, a scene inserted solely to emphasize the doctrine of passive obedience (Shakespeare's “Histories,” San Marino, Calif., 1947, pp. 195-97). In Holinshed, Gaunt and York plan vengeance on Richard but wait to see if he might reform. Shakespeare has Gaunt explicitly reject all thought of revenge.

20. “The Morality of Hamlet—‘Sweet Prince’ or ‘Arrant Knave’?” Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 5 (London, 1963), p. 119.

21. Later Mentieth says that “revenges burn” in Malcolm and Macduff, but he is reporting on offstage action (V.ii.3). When we see the two men leading their forces at Dunsinane, both are unemotional and efficient, devoting full attention to battle plans.

22. See above, pp. 14-15.