[In the following essay, Neill discusses the theme of revenge in Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. He asserts that Hamlet and Macbeth are antitypes—the first seeking to preserve the past and the second to obliterate it—and contends that both are destroyed by their obsession. By contrast, Neill suggests, Prospero redeems the past not by revenging it but by restoring it.]

In this paper I shall be looking at three plays—Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest—as versions of revenge tragedy. I am not proposing any contentious reclassification. Shakespeare's contemporaries did not envisage a distinct species of drama called ‘revenge tragedy’: and the ‘genre’ is really only a modern abstraction from a recurrent set of conventions, all of which make their individual appearance in plays we should not normally think of labelling ‘revenge tragedies’ at all. In choosing to emphasise those aspects of my three plays which link them to a ‘revenge tradition’, I want only to place them in a fresh perspective:¹ in so doing I hope also to suggest some new ways of thinking about this tradition—about the importance it had for Renaissance Englishmen and for Shakespeare in particular. Prospero's renunciation of ‘vengeance’ in the name of ‘virtue’ marks the conclusion not just of his own moral pilgrimage, but of his creator's long meditation on man's relation with his past, on the significance of remembrance and revenge.

The ostensible concern of revenge tragedy, as Fredson Bowers has taught us to understand it, is with the problematic conflicts between the code of honour and the code of law.² These it exposes by imagining some crisis in which the justice of the state proves unable or unwilling to satisfy an individual's demand for retribution. The action of the play then seeks to define the limits which secular and spiritual orders must put upon the ‘wild justice’ of blood-revenge if society is to survive. There can be little question that such problems were real enough for Shakespeare's audience—exacerbated (as Bowers argued) by the rising fashion of duelling. But I doubt if this is enough to explain the hold which revenge plays exercised upon the English imagination. It is significant that the duello, for instance, played a much more important part in the coterie theatre of Fletcher and his successors than in revenge drama proper. I would suggest that if we turn our attention away from this surface preoccupation with the ethics of revenge towards the underlying structural conventions of the genre, we may find it embodying much deeper forms of social anxiety.

Typically, it seems to me, revenge tragedy involves a struggle to control and dispose of time: the opponents in this struggle are the politician (tyrant or usurper) and the revenger. The first is a new man whose drive to possess the future requires that he annihilate or rewrite the past: the second is a representative of the old order, whose duty is to recuperate history from the infective oblivion into which his antagonist has cast it. He is a ‘remembrancer’ in a double sense—both an agent of memory and one whose task it is to exact payment for the debts of the past. The emblem of his double function is the memento that he treasures—corpse, cadaver or skull—at once a warning to his enemies (a ‘terror to fat folks’) and a physical proof of the past which they deny. Clois Hoffman keeps ‘the dead remembrance of my living father’, its skull burnt from a red-hot crown, hanging in his grove:³ soon there will be another, identically scarred, beside it. The paradox displayed here—that the revenger's obsession with the past leads him to imitate the new man he detests—is central to the genre. The usurper is an aggressive individualist who assaults ‘the great work of time’⁴ in order to recast society in his own mould; the revenger is a traditionalist whose attempt to restore the values of community ironically renders him the most painfully isolated of individuals. By virtue of his isolation the revenger is driven to employ the very methods of his antagonist: he too must ‘smile and smile and be a villain’. The justifying act of revenge epitomises the appalling contradiction of his being—it is an act which symbolically revives the violated past by re-enacting the crime of violation. Again and again the revenger (Hieronimo, Titus, Antonio, Hoffman, Vindice) comes to resemble what he seeks to destroy.⁵

Seen as dramatising a struggle between the representatives of radically opposed social ideologies, revenge tragedy can be understood as one response to the traumatising upheavals of sixteenth-century history. The figure of the tyrant—usurper joins a whole gallery of fierce individualists—politicians, usurpers and entrepreneurial Tamburlaines, from Barabas and Shylock to Volpone and Overreach—who represent the nightmares of a feudal society in uncomfortable transition. The revenger on the other hand bears a strong generic resemblance to those ‘social bandits’ whom Eric Hobsbawm identifies as a perennial expression of resistance to such painful social transformations. Like Hobsbawm's bandit the revenger frequently adopts a distinctive form of dress as a sign of his alienation:⁶ stripped of his veneer of courtly sophistication, he is revealed as a bandit made conformable to the aristocratic decorum of tragedy. The type is most nakedly presented in Chettle's Hoffmann, whose protagonist has been driven from the ‘civil’ world to become an outlaw, leading a ‘savadge life … amongst beasts’⁷—a living picture of Bacon's ‘wild justice’. Hoffman sees himself as the scourge, not only of his father's enemies, but of all those ‘That wring the poore, and eate the people up … such as have rob'd souldiers of / Reward, and punish true desert with scorned death’:⁸ the claim highlights the social dimension of the revenger's mission. Like the social bandit, he is bound to ‘right wrongs [and] avenge cases of injustice’: more than that, he too is a ‘revolutionary traditionalist’, committed to ‘the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things “as it should be” (which … means as it is believed to have been in some real or mythical past)’.⁹ Something of this largeness of scope seems to be implied in Florio's glossing of ‘Vendice’: ‘a revenger of wrongs, a redresser of abuses, a defender, one that restoreth unto liberty and freeth from dangers, a punisher’.¹⁰ In the apocalyptic violence which infects the revenger's fantasies of punishment, we can even find an echo of the millenarian desperation which frequently accompanies social banditry.¹¹ Because he is trapped, like the bandit, ‘within a framework of accepted wealth, power and social superiority’ controlled by his antagonist, his frustration characteristically issues in ‘excessive violence or cruelty’,¹² which frequently acquires (as in Hieronimo's ‘Fall of Babylon’) the devastating force of a private apocalypse. From any rational perspective, the revenger's emotion is always (as Eliot might have realised) ‘in excess of the facts as they appear’:¹³ Claudius, a supremely rational man, makes precisely that complaint. But the revenger stands for all those elements in society whose powerlessness puts their cause beyond the solutions of reason.¹⁴

At the same time one might suggest that the revenger's preoccupation with a suppressed and violated past answered to a more specific psychological need—that the genre provided a way of imaginatively confronting the repressed guilts and anxieties created by the crises of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and even by the questionable legitimacy of the usurping Tudor dynasty itself. Such anxieties may be reflected in a pervasive Fall mythology which makes of the initial murder a kind of primal sin which has polluted an entire society. As a result the individual passion for retribution is complicated and intensified by a profound nostalgia for a vanished pre-lapsarian order. The Spanish Tragedy, in so many ways the model for later revenge drama, is dominated by the image of a violated garden, Hieronimo's ‘sacred bower’ where Horatio is hanged, and which the bereaved Isabella reduces to a Babylonic wasteland;¹⁵ the same emblematic structure appears in the play-scene of Hamlet, where it figures forth the ‘unweeded garden’ of Hamlet's imagination—an Edenic state which the ‘serpent’ Claudius has turned to wilderness, possessed by ‘things rank and gross in nature’.¹⁶ Claudius himself identifies his crime with the Genesis myth: ‘It hath the primal eldest curse upon't—/ A brother's murder’ (III. iii. 37-8). The speculative connection between this pattern and the guilts of Reformation England is suggestively supported by the ironic nemesis of Arden of Feversham, where the new man, Arden, ends butchered on those sequestrated Abbey lands from which his wealth and status have derived.

By all this I do not mean to imply any conscious reaction against the public enthusiasms of the Tudor and Stuart state—only that such cataclysms are bound to exact their unconscious toll even on those who most unambiguously support the new order. The claustrophobic need to speak of what cannot be spoken is one reason why madness, real or feigned, is important to the action of so many revenge plays (‘Break my heart, for I must hold my tongue’)—madness imagined as linguistic breakdown which simultaneously embodies a disintegrating inner tension, and allows a kind of inarticulate expression to the unspeakable.¹⁷ Of the many examples (Kyd's Hieronimo, Marston's Antonio and Malevole, Webster's Ferdinand, Ford's Meleander and Penthea, and of course Hamlet himself) it is perhaps Ophelia who most clearly reveals the connection between madness and the repressed past. Her breakdown follows the obscure death and interment of Polonius, both kept ‘hugger-mugger’ for the politic convenience of the king. In her mad scenes, as she distributes her emblems of memory and repentance, she gives a paradoxical substance to the annihilated past, providing what Laertes calls a ‘nothing … more than matter’, ‘A document in madness thoughts and remembrance fitted’ (IV. v. 171, 175). Characteristically, what he interprets as persuasions to revenge are expressed as desperate yearning for a violated and irrecoverable past: ‘He will never come again.’¹⁸

Revenge drama, then, covertly expresses certain ways of feeling about the past which its audience could no more allow themselves to articulate than the revenger could publicise his intolerable memories. The only release it offers to such pent-up emotion is through the fantasy of apocalyptic destruction of the ruthless world which has replaced the lost paradise. But in this destruction the revenger, infected with the taint of his opponent, is almost invariably destroyed. He is the agent of that remembrance on which society is felt to depend: but he has ceased to be a social man—like Hamlet he ‘forgets himself’.

Of the three plays I am concerned with, Hamlet and Macbeth explore the mirror predicaments of the revenger and his antagonist, while The Tempest seeks in the act of remembrance itself an alternative to the revenger's apocalypse. The focus of Hamlet is upon the agony of the revenger condemned to sweat under the ‘fardels’ of memory in a world of ‘bestial oblivion’. This indeed provides the burden of his first soliloquy (‘Must I remember?’—I. ii. 143): the torturing disparity between the version of the past known by the mind, and the version declared by the outer world. Even before the Ghost saddles him with its terribly repeated injunction, ‘Remember me’ (I. v. 91-111), Hamlet ‘sees’ his father (I. ii. 184). Yet from the perspective of those around him the vision is as much a ‘fantasy’ as Horatio once supposed the Ghost. To the King and Queen what Hamlet insists on seeing makes him seem deranged even before he adopts his crafty madness; to Hamlet their denial of what he sees makes them blind. The contradiction becomes open confrontation in Act III, scene iv, where sight is both a metaphor for memory and its literal agent (‘Have you eyes?’—65). The Ghost appears as though conjured up by Hamlet's evocation of his father's heroic form—an incarnation of the past, decorously attired ‘in his nightgown’ for a visit to his wife's closet. ‘Do not forget!’ the Ghost urges; but the Queen is oblivious:

HAMLET:
Do you see nothing there?
QUEEN:
Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.

(III. iv. 131-2)

Not for Hamlet the comfortable certainties of a world defined by the ruthless pragmatism of that present tense (‘all that is’); for him the ‘is’ must include the ‘was’—the ‘bodiless creation’ of memory.

Gertrude, Claudius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are all, from Hamlet's point of view, conspirators in a plot to violate the sanctity of a common past.¹⁹ Claudius is the principal agent of oblivion: his first speech, even as it pays lip-service to ‘the memory’ of his brother's death, characteristically perverts the very meaning of ‘remembrance’ by attaching it resolutely to present interest—‘remembrance of ourselves’ (I. ii. 1-7).²⁰ The bland obliquity of this speech, denying incest by erecting a barrier of magniloquent syntax between past and present fact (‘sometime sister. … Taken to wife’), perfectly epitomises the surreptitious violence which Claudius has done to time, rendering it radically ‘out of joint’. His usurpation simultaneously dislocates the political law of ‘fair sequence and succession’,²¹ and the moral law of ‘consequence’ (‘thinking too precisely on th'event’—IV. iv. 41); for what Claudius dismisses as ‘obsequious sorrow’ (I. ii. 92) commits Hamlet to brood obsessively on temporal chains of cause and effect. In so far as he is his father's son, he represents the future of a past that Claudius has ‘cut off’. Thus his repeated determination to ‘follow’²² the Ghost in Act I, scene iv is an enactment of his commitment to the claims of past on present and future—to memory, consequence and succession.

Yet the Ghost is also a usurper of a sort—that is what Horatio first calls it (I. i. 46-9); and the tale it pours in Hamlet's ear usurps his ‘wholesome life’ as surely as the poisons of Lucianus and Claudius.²³ Hamlet's formal rite of memory after his first encounter with the Ghost is also an act of oblivion, expunging ‘all forms, all pressures past / That youth and observation copied there’ (I. v. 100-1)—an act which casts a harshly ironic light on his denunciation of Ophelia.²⁴ For Hamlet, her decision to re-deliver his ‘remembrances’ is a repudiation of the past which exposes her as another bafflingly changeful Gertrude; for Ophelia, in her turn, Hamlet's own denials (‘I did love you once. … You should not have believ'd me’—III. i. 115-17) render him equally unrecognisable. ‘That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth’ which she recalls (III. i. 159) is precisely the self which we have seen sacrificed to the usurpation of the Ghost. Hamlet's obsession with the past, though maintained in the name of integrity (asserting the permanence of what ‘is’ against the transience of what merely ‘seems’) becomes an agent of disintegration, disjointing. It is in this sense that he can speak of having ‘forgot himself’ to Laertes, can attribute the murder of Polonius to a time when he was ‘not himself’ (V. ii. 76, 227).²⁵ Gertrude and Ophelia are right to call his condition ‘ecstasy’ (ecstasis) (III. i. 160; III. iv. 139), for he is incapable of resting in any securely imagined self; and it is consciousness of this inner disjointing which seems to render coherent action impossible:

                    I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing's to do’,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,
To do't.

(IV. iv. 43-6)

The violent insistence on logical sequence (‘cause … will … strength … means … do’) is undercut by the illogical dissipation of self in those conflicting pronouns (the ‘I’ which lives, the ‘I’ which acts, the ‘I’ which contemplates itself). It is not only the boy players who seem to ‘exclaim against their own succession’: in a world of ‘innovation’ nothing ‘follows’ any more. So the ‘chameleon’, the shape-changer who lives on nothing:

CLAUDIUS:
These words are not mine.
HAMLET:
No, nor mine now.

(III. ii. 94-5)

As Hamlet's mentor, Montaigne, put it: ‘there is as much difference found betweene us and our selves, as there is betweene our selves and other. … Man is a thing of nothing’.²⁶

Yet if the revenger's obsession with memory contains its own nemesis, so too does his antagonist's greed for the future. Not even Claudius can free himself forever of the ‘heavy burden’ of remembrance (III. i. 54); and the prayer scene forces him to acknowledge an inexorable moral logic—his fault is ‘past’ and yet, by virtue of its ‘effects’, unremittingly present (III. iii. 51-6). This paradox, underscoring the futility of the usurper's coup, is the heart of Macbeth's agony.

In Macbeth, even more clearly than in Hamlet, usurpation is imagined as an attack on the order of time itself. News of the witches' prophecies ‘transports’ Lady Macbeth ‘beyond / This ignorant present’: ‘I feel now / The future in the instant’ (I. v. 53-5). Macbeth's crime is conceived as an attempt to ‘o'er-leap’ the present (I. iv. 49), as though by outpacing temporal sequence he might outreach the ‘deepest consequence’ of which Banquo speaks (I. iii. 126), and make of instant ‘success’ a substitute for due ‘succession’:

                    If th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success …
We'd jump the life to come.

(I. vii. 2-7)

The leap projects him into a world of nightmarish ecstasy where ‘nothing is but what is not’ (I. iii. 141), a world of air-drawn daggers, seen but never possessed. Ambition in the end overleaps only itself, and so in effect ‘exclaims against its own succession’. The usurper ‘With Tarquin's ravishing strides’ (II. i. 55) attempts through murder of the past a kind of rape upon the future, but succeeds only in rendering himself (like the revenger) an impotent slave to the past: while possession of the future eludes him in the perpetual recession of ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’.

By killing Duncan, Macbeth has not consigned the past to oblivion, but ‘murdered sleep’, destroyed the very possibility of oblivion. The murder is fittingly prefaced by the drugging of Duncan's grooms:

That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbec only. When in swinish sleep
Their drenched natures lie as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform …

(I. vii. 65-9)

The symbolic meaning of the act (indicated by the subliminal connection between grooms and ‘warder’, drunken sleep and the sleep of security) is confirmed when its image returns to haunt Macbeth in Act V:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

(V. iii. 40-5)

Just as Claudius's anguish is registered in his sense of the mocking ambivalence of ‘past’, so the Macbeths' disintegration can be traced in their vain struggle to fix the pastness of a particle:

If it were done when 'tis done …

(I. vii. 1)

I go, and it is done …

(II. i. 62)

I am afraid to think what I have done …

(II. ii. 51)

What's done is done.

(III. ii. 12)

What's done cannot be undone.

(V. i. 65)

The irreducible doubleness of the word corresponds to the doubleness of a self shaken from its ‘single state of man’ (I. iii. 139):

Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

(I. vi. 51-3)

To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself.

(II. ii. 73)

The eye which Macbeth's imagination obsessively ‘scarfs up’ to render ‘sightless’ is that of memory: it is incarnated in the glaring ghost of Banquo whose ‘speculation’ Macbeth must deny (III. iv. 93-6), since it is the speculation of conscience upon a past that will not be buried (III. iv. 71-3). Banquo is Macbeth's true ‘remembrancer’ as surely as Lady Macbeth (to whom he gives the title, III. iv. 37) is the agent of oblivion. The metaphoric substance of the memory he brings is blood:²⁷ and the scene ends with an image of the terrible immobility to which Macbeth's leap has brought him—a man about to be drowned in the bloody tide of his own past:

                    I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

(III. iv. 136-8)

The protagonists of these two plays, then, present distorted mirror-images of one another. Both are disjointed beings: in terms of Augustine's tripartite division of the soul (Memory, Understanding, Will), one tries to live through Memory alone, the other through Will.²⁸ Without Understanding, each succeeds in rendering the present uninhabitable and the future unattainable; each in his way becomes a prisoner to a past whose unalterable pastness and unavoidable presence seem to epitomise the absurdity of his fate. Together their vain ecstasies reveal the poor condition of mankind as Montaigne had described it: ‘We are never in our selves, but beyond’; either ‘Our Affections Are Transported Beyond Our Selves’ to an unreal future or we become denizens of an equally unreal past—‘Death possessing what ever is before and behind this moment, and also a good part of this moment’.²⁹

The revenger devises a characteristic escape from this impasse, seeking to vivify the past in a witty memorial—the play, an apparent fiction which he converts to an image of the truth. His play is an articulate substitute for the anarchic language of madness, subduing its metaphoric allusiveness to the intelligible form of art. More than that, it is a kind of enacted pun which works ‘tropically’ to redefine the present in a representation of the past. In it (whether we think of Hieronimo's ingeniously cast ‘Soliman and Perseda’, or Vindice's fiendishly equivocal puppet-play with the painted skull) the revenger, ‘plotting’ for himself the course of time, contrives a brilliant contraction of that very process of ‘consequence’ which his antagonist has denied. As his recreation of the past possesses the creatures of the present, his play acquires a double function as both memorial and memento mori. The revenger-dramatist, then, moves between those antitypes of the Hamlet world, the Gravediggers and the Players, those who inter the dead and those who resurrect them.³⁰ Hamlet's own play-memorials are at once more ingenious and more ambiguous than others of their kind. The first of them, ‘Aeneas' tale to Dido’, is an elaborate memorial oration which ‘lives’ in Hamlet's memory partly because it contains in Priam an avatar of his murdered father, in Hecuba an idealised image of his bereaved mother, and in the avenging Pyrrhus a model for himself. But its equivocal representation of ‘the hellish Pyrrhus’ is telling—when combined with the contradictory function of Priam as Old Hamlet/Claudius, it reminds us of the way in which the revenger is likely to become his antagonist's double. Precisely the same doubling confuses ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ whose poisoner is both Claudius and Hamlet himself. As a result, while Hamlet is confident with the memorial function of his play, to which he refers in his prologue-meditation of great men's monuments (‘a' must build churches then; or else shall a' suffer not thinking on’—III. ii. 127-8), he is less easy with its threatening memento mori aspect which is reduced to mere fantasy: the magical conjunction of past and present is avoided. Significantly the centrepiece of his play is a speech (arguably of Hamlet's own composition) on ‘memory’, ‘purpose’, ‘enacture’ and the melancholy disjunction between ‘thoughts’ and ‘ends’.

Hamlet's play remains a mere ‘fiction’ or ‘a dream of passion’ (II. ii. 545), ultimately ineffectual because he confines himself to the purely passive role of ‘chorus’—just as in the Hecuba speech his true surrogate was not Pyrrhus, but Aeneas, the mere nuntius or chronicler. Because its points of reference remain solely past and future, it leaves its inventor without a holdfast on the present, a prey (like his antitype, Macbeth) to ‘restless ecstasy’—that state in which the individual is literally beside himself, displaced, out of stasis. If the reluctant hero finally quells his ecstasy and puts to rest the perturbed spirit of the past, it will only be through abandonment of the revenger-dramatist's claim to ‘plot’. Claudius is allowed to become the equivocating plotter of the final ‘play’, while Hamlet is content to leave the managing of consequence to the inscrutable dramaturgy of ‘providence’: ‘If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come’ (V. ii. 213-15). The paradoxes of the restless search for rest can be resolved, Montaigne had suggested, only by rolling ourselves into ourselves, by learning to sit ‘upon our own taile’.³¹ Hamlet's ‘A man's life's no more than to say “one”’ (V. ii. 74) paraphrases Montaigne's philosophy of the instant; and, in its echo of that stroke of ‘one’ which heralds the first appearance of the Ghost, collapses the action of the play into a single moment of time—making of a whole life that ‘instant’ which Montaigne had described: ‘but a twinckling in the infinit course of an eternall night’.³² Hamlet's ataraxia speaks of a rejointed self in which Memory, Understanding and Will, past, present and future, can become ‘one’.

For Macbeth, the annihilator of memory, the stage stands for the ephemeral futility of experience, its meaningless ‘sound and fury’. For Hamlet, possessed to the end by that sense of ‘audience’ which dominates even the most private moments of this play, its memorials constitute a bulwark against oblivion and a guarantee of personal integrity: at the last he consigns his ‘name’ to the ‘story’ which Horatio, prologue-like, announces. Yet even in Hamlet the status of theatre remains equivocal; and the same is true of memory itself. The revenger ‘must remember’ if the past is to be rescued from oblivion; but if he is the agent of memory—the hectic in the usurper's blood—memory is also the poison poured in his own ear, the poison which destroys him. Time is rejointed only in the instant of extinction; Hamlet can be at one only in the atonement of death. The play ends where it began, in darkness and ‘silence’; the hero's longed-for ‘rest’ accomplished only in the arbitrary ‘arrest’ of death. All that remains is the play itself: a ‘story’ and an ‘audience’, mute.

In The Tempest, a revenge tragedy turned to the benevolent ends of tragicomic romance, Shakespeare re-interprets the functions of both memory and theatre. The whole play might be read as a gloss on Donne's luminous aphorism ‘the art of salvation, is but the art of memory’.³³ Its protagonist is a reformed revenger who finds ‘the rarer action … / In virtue than in vengeance’ (V. i. 27-8), a remembrancer whose very name suggests hope for the future (Pro-spero) rather than obsession with the past. In place of corpse or skull, the memento he treasures is a living daughter. Like his predecessors, he must make use of the politic arts of his antagonist, and his ‘plots’ lead him naturally into the familiar role of Machiavellian dramatist:³⁴ but his most accomplished work is the Masque of Ceres, a spell for future prosperity introduced by the figure of Hope (Iris) and presided over by the Goddess of Memory (Juno)—a wedding masque which turns its back on the past to evoke the brave new world of a restored garden-state;³⁵ and his final ‘show’, the tableau of young lovers which he discovers to his antagonist in Act V, is a deliberate inversion of the bloody ‘spectacles’ contrived by revengers like Hieronimo and Hoffman.³⁶ Prospero remains in the fullest sense a ‘minister’ of remembrance, and his mission is to those, like Antonio and Alonso, who have ‘made sinner[s] of [their] memory’ (I. ii. 101). But, though he too seeks a re-formation of the violated social order, a re-jointing of time, he has learnt that this must be contingent on the self-renewal of individuals—the rediscovery of lost selves that Gonzalo celebrates.³⁷ Where the ‘mighty opposites’ of revenge tragedy were divided by their almost exclusive concentration on Memory and Will, in The Tempest they are brought together by the mediation of the missing third term, Understanding:

                    Their understanding
Begins to swell, and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore. …

(V. i. 79-81)

The Tempest, notoriously, is a play most of whose action belongs to the past—to the memories in which Prospero soberly instructs his household in scene ii.³⁸ The result is that, in terms of revenge convention, the plotting is effectively confined to that part of the action in which the usurper confronts the past that has returned to punish him. The last movement of Hamlet begins with the Avenger's return from the sea which should have carried him to oblivion; The Tempest begins with Tyrant and Usurper cast ashore to encounter a past which the sea is supposed to have destroyed. In a sense, of course, their rescue re-enacts Prospero's own providential delivery; and the parallel initiates an elaborate motif of repetition which reflects the designs of Prospero as memorial-dramatist. A series of usurping conspiracies, of possessions and dispossessions, of bereavements and restorations, of shipwrecks and rescues, combines to suggest a kind of time in which the past is not merely re-enacted, but actually re-directed, made new. The Tempest is a play which makes use of the potent imagery of New World discovery to talk about miraculous rediscovery of an old world, a play about men's present responsibility to the past on which their future prosperity must depend.³⁹

At the centre of the play is the typological figure upon which its notion of redeemed time is founded—the Communion service. In its Anglican form the Eucharist may be said to have a triple function: it is a memorial ceremony (‘a perpetual memory of that his precious death’, as the Prayer of Consecration has it)—a function emphasised by the incantatory ‘Do this in remembrance … eat this, in remembrance … ‘drink this in remembrance’; it is a ritual of repentance and forgiveness, an exemplification of Donne's holy ‘art of memory’, which through ‘remembrance’ of sins leads to forgiveness of ‘all that is past’, refreshment and ‘newness of life’; finally, as the name ‘Communion’ suggests, it is a celebration and re-affirmation of Christian community, assuring its participants that they are ‘very members incorporate in thy mystical body, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and be also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom’.⁴⁰ In Hamlet revenge is finally accomplished in the monstrous anti-sacrament of the poisoned chalice;⁴¹ in Macbeth the Eucharist is glimpsed again in the motif of the interrupted banquet, signifying the tyrant's alienation from human community. Here, in The Tempest, the analogies are at once more elaborate and more profound: they centre upon Ariel's banquet in Act III. The feast is offered and then withdrawn from the ‘men of sin’ in a manner which immediately recalls the Prayer Book's prohibition of any ‘open and notorious evel liver’ from the Communion Table ‘until he have openly declared himself to have truly repented and amended his former naughty life’.⁴² Ariel, who identifies himself as a ‘minister of Fate’ (III. iii. 61), enjoins repentance in a speech made rich with echoes of the liturgy.⁴³ Calling on them to ‘remember’ their past crimes, he warns against the vengeance of ‘the pow'rs … whose wraths to guard you from … is nothing but heart's sorrow, / And a clear life ensuing’ (III. iii. 68-82). The motif is carried through into the low plot by the ritual of ‘King Stephano's’ inauguration; Stephano's bottle, drawn from the butt of sack which has been his literal salvation in the shipwreck (II. ii. 112-13), is administered to Caliban in a coarse parody of the Eucharist: ‘Come on your ways; open your mouth; here is that which will give language to you, eat: open your mouth. … Come—Amen!’ (II. ii. 77-88). Like the wine of Communion, the ‘celestial liquor’ which Caliban tastes (109) is presented as a gift of the Word;⁴⁴ it promises, however, not ‘inheritance through hope of [an] everlasting kingdom’, but rather that ‘we will inherit here’ (165); and where the true Communion service is a ritual of remembrance, Stephano's is a debauch of oblivion. Caliban's ‘newness of life’ depends on his once again making a sinner of his memory, and turning his back on the master who has sought to educate it:

                    'Ban, 'Ban, Ca-Caliban
                    Has a new master—Get a new man.
Freedom, high-day!

(II. ii. 173-5)

At this point Caliban traditionally discards his burden of remembrance—the emblematic ‘burthen of logs’ which he shares with the play's other bereaved and disinherited son, Ferdinand.⁴⁵

Their two unburdenings are carefully paralleled: just as Act II, scene ii opened with the entry of ‘Caliban, with a burden of wood’, so Act III, scene i opens with ‘Ferdinand, bearing a log’. The past which weighs on Ferdinand includes the burden of his father's crime and the memory of his death, upon which Ariel played in Act I (‘This ditty does remember my drown'd father’—I. ii. 407); it is relieved not by supernatural intervention, but through the medium of human love. The ‘wonder’ of Miranda's presence ‘quickens what's dead’ (III. i. 6) and brings Ferdinand to a blessed kind of forgetfulness (13) which contrasts with the brutish oblivion produced in Caliban by the ‘wondrous’ Stephano (II. ii. 154). Caliban's ‘freedom’ brings him to a worse slavery than ever, his new life mimicking the old; Ferdinand's servitude, interpreted as ‘service’ to his mistress, becomes, through ‘a heart as willing / As bondage e'er of freedom’ (III. i. 88-9), the enactment of a familiar Christian paradox.

The Prince's gift of new life⁴⁶ prefigures the restorations of Act V, the penance of the son atoning for the sins of the father, and his patience (contrasted with the vindictive rage of Caliban) breaking the vicious cycle of crime and revenge. Patience is the virtue exemplified by Gonzalo, who guides Alonso through the wilderness of despair towards penitence, forgiveness and grace; and it is to ‘patience’ that Prospero appeals when Alonso is once more tormented by the sharp point of ‘remembrance’ (V. i. 138-44). But Prospero's justification of the appeal by his own ‘like loss’ corresponds to a crucial redefinition of the traditional virtue. If the figure of Prospero on his island at first suggests the well-known icon of the patient wise man alone on his rock amid the tempests of life,⁴⁷ the play deliberately removes the solipsistic suggestions of that emblem. Patience here, as a counter to the lonely fury of revenge, is conspicuously an expression of social man. Patior transforms to compatior, patience to compassion (suffering with); and patience becomes possible only through remembrance—not just of who you have been, but of what you are: properly understood ‘remembrance of ourselves’ implies participation in the common suffering of mankind. In this lies the importance of Gonzalo's innocent fantasy of a ‘commonwealth’ where ‘All things in common nature should produce’ (II. i. 153). In the storm, it is Gonzalo who finds time to remember the plight of others—‘For our case is as theirs’ (I. i. 51); it is Gonzalo who reminds his master, isolated in despair, that ‘Our hint of woe / Is common’ (II. i. 3-4); and it is ‘holy’ Gonzalo whose ‘sociable’ tears, by evoking ‘fellowly drops’ from the avenging Prospero, finally ‘dissolve’ his punitive charm (V. i. 63-4). The imaginative sympathy which is the basis of the old man's patience is a foundation of the play's meaning, and closely relates to Shakespeare's new understanding of the memorial function of theatre. Greatest of the miracles which the castaways experience in their brave new world is the rediscovery of their own lost selves—a discovery which is shown as contingent on the discovery of others, the recognition that ‘our case is as theirs’. Such a recognition is fostered by—and in the last analysis depends upon—the kind of theatrical empathy expressed in Miranda's response to the spectacle of the wreck: ‘I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer’ (I. ii. 5-6). This, in Prospero's words, is ‘The very virtue of compassion’: it is the simple wisdom towards which Hamlet was moving (‘by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his’—V. ii. 77-8); and it suggests a way by which ‘remembrance’ can free us from the burden of the past into a blessed kind of oblivion (‘Let us not burden our remembrance with / A heaviness that's gone’—V. i. 199-200).⁴⁸ In The Tempest memory becomes re-membering, rejointing the divided self, reincorporating it in the membership of community; and the theatre, for its part, becomes Communion: Prospero's final words, echoing the Priest's invitation to the Table, summon us all, audience as well as actors, to participate in the celebration of human community restored: ‘Draw near’.⁴⁹

Notes

1. Connections between the plays have, however, been suggested before. See, for example, Maynard Mack Jr, Killing the King: Three Studies in Shakespeare's Tragic Structure (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1973) p. 149 (‘Macbeth it has been sometimes said, is Hamlet told from Claudius's point of view’); Nigel Alexander, Poison, Play and Duel: A Study in Hamlet (London, 1971) p. 38 (‘It is possible … to describe both Hamlet and The Tempest as revenge plays’); G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest (London, 1971) p. 255 (‘The drama of temptation, treason, and murder of kingly sleep—the Macbeth vision repeated’).

2. Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (Princeton, N. J., 1940; reprinted Gloucester, Mass., 1959).

3. Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, the Malone Society (Oxford, 1950/1) I. i. 8. In Antonio's Revenge, Pandulpho (like Hieronimo before him) hoards up the body of his son: the more civilised Hamlet keeps a picture, but later exchanges it for a skull.

4. The phrase is from Marvell's celebration of Cromwell's innovation in the ‘Horatian Ode’: Cromwell is one of those who understands, like Machiavelli, that ‘In a City or Province which he has seized, a New Prince should make Everything New’ (Discourses, i. 26). Compare the world of innovation created by Laertes's followers in Hamlet:

   And, as the world were now but to begin,
   Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
   The ratifiers and props of every word,
   They cry ‘Choose we; Laertes shall be king’.

   (IV. v. 100-3)

5. Predictably, the ironic symmetry is most perfectly developed in Fletcher's tragedy, Valentinian, where the revenger, Maximus, is transformed to a complete mirror-image of the Emperor he kills. Cf. also Alexander, Poison, Play and Duel, p. 116: ‘in order to achieve the revenge that he most deeply desires Hamlet must become like Claudius, the man he most detests and loathes’.

6. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London, 1972) pp. 35-6.

7. Hoffman, I. i. 143-4.

8. Hoffman, V. iii. 2615-19; in this context it is significant that Hamlet should (like Laertes) enjoy ‘the great love [of] the general gender’ (IV. vii. 18). Antonio is significantly seen as a Hercules ‘ridding huge pollution from our state’ (Antonio's Revenge, V. vi. 13).

9. Hobsbawm, Bandits, pp. 26-7.

10. John Florio, Queen Anna's New World of Words (London, 1611).

11. Hobsbawm, Bandits, p. 29.

12. Ibid., pp. 63ff.

13. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London, 1961) p. 145.

14. The social banditry common in many parts of Europe was not, except on the Celtic fringe, a serious problem in Tudor or Stuart England. But it could be argued that the government's ability to curb such expressions of social dislocation would only have made the vicarious satisfactions of revenge drama more compelling. Hobsbawm (Bandits, pp. 37ff.) identifies a similar mythic surrogate for true banditry in the highwayman of popular legend. A good Elizabethan example of the type was Gamaliel Ratsey, gentleman, ex-soldier and highwayman, whom folk-tales invested with an aura of glamour: fittingly, he seems to have nourished a peculiar passion for Hamlet. See Arthur Freeman, Elizabeth's Misfits (New York and London, 1978) pp. 112-13.

15. The Spanish Tragedy, II. iv and III. viii. There is good reason to suppose that the arbour appears again in IV. iv as part of Hieronimo's concluding ‘spectacle’: he will draw the curtain (like Hoffman after him) to show his son once again ‘hanging on a tree’ in his ‘garden plot’ (IV. iv. 88-113). The motif is repeated in Antonio's Revenge, I. iii. For a detailed discussion of the garden pageantry in The Spanish Tragedy see S. F. Johnson, ‘The Spanish Tragedy, or Babylon Revisited’, Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honour of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (London, 1963) pp. 23-36. In The Revenger's Tragedy the violated garden is secularised in Vindice's picture of a countryside looted to feed the corrupted appetites of a court where women ‘Walk with a hundred acres on their backs, / Fair meadows cut into green fore-parts’ (II. i. 316-17); while Vindice's skull is given the name Gloriana, another nostalgic invocation of a lost Golden Age.

16. The Bad Quarto (1603) specifies that the Player King ‘sits downe in an Arbor’ in the Dumb Show. The image of the violated garden is one that clearly links Hamlet with Shakespeare's histories, notably Richard II. For discussion of this, see Mack, Killing the King, pp. 83-4, and John Wilders, The Lost Garden (London, 1978) pp. 137-8. In Macbeth a comparable nostalgia for a lost garden-world is created by the brief lyricism of Duncan's arrival at Macbeth's castle and Macbeth's helpless yearning for the style of kingship embodied in ‘the gracious Duncan’.

17. The connection between madness, linguistic breakdown and social disintegration is most forcefully displayed in The Spanish Tragedy, culminating in the bizarre emblem of Hieronimo's biting out his own tongue. See the essay by Johnson, cited above, note 15; and cf. Scott McMillin, ‘The Figure of Silence in The Spanish Tragedy’, ELH, A Journal of English Literary History, vol. xxxix (1972) pp. 27-48, and Jonas A. Barish, ‘The Spanish Tragedy, or the Pleasures and Perils of Rhetoric’, in Elizabethan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, gen. eds John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1966) vol. ix, pp. 58-85. Cf. also the mutilated tongues of Titus Andronicus, Antonio's Revenge and The Revenger's Tragedy.

18. In Ford's The Broken Heart Penthea's nostalgic invocation of a garden world (‘Remember, / When we last gathered roses in the garden, / I found my wits; but truly you lost yours’—IV. ii. 119-21) is similarly interpreted by Orgilus as an oracular ‘inspiration’ to revenge (124-33).

19. In the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ‘of so young days brought up with him’ (II. ii. 11), their gross betrayal of past intimacy is given strong dramatic emphasis by the ease with which Hamlet slips into a common idiom with them in II. ii.

20. Compare his final degradation of the word in II. ii. 26, where ‘a king's remembrance’ amounts to a cash bribe. Cf. also Piero's attempt to corrupt Maria, Gertrude's counterpart in Antonio's Revenge: ‘… remember to forget’ (II, iv. 28).

21. The phrase is York's in Richard II, II. i. 199.

22. I. iv. 63, 68, 79, 86. ‘Follow’ is among the key-words in this play, where it occurs more frequently than in any other play in the canon, except King Lear. We may think of Gertrude ‘following’ Old Hamlet's coffin, only to desert his memory (I. ii. 148); of the marriage that ‘followed hard upon’ that funeral (I. ii. 179); of Horatio and Marcellus ‘following’ Hamlet (I. iv. 88, 91); of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ‘following’ Hamlet to his execution (IV. iii. 54); of those who ‘follow’ the mad Ophelia (IV. v. 72); of the woes that ‘follow’ woes (IV. viii. 165); of Claudius and Gertrude ‘following’ the enraged Laertes (IV. vii. 192, 193); of the procession ‘following’ Ophelia's funeral (V. i. 212, 214). In the final scene Hamlet's purposes ambiguously ‘follow the king's pleasure’ (V. ii. 194): he dispatches Claudies to ‘follow’ his mother into death (319) and himself ‘follows’ Laertes (324). These last followings in effect knit up the various sequences ruptured at the beginning of the play: for Hamlet, Denmark is a world where ‘thrift may follow fawning’ (III. ii. 60), but where nothing else properly ‘follows’: his mad logic-chopping with Polonius enforces this point (‘Nay, that follows not’—II. ii. 408). Polonius inhabits a world where things complacently ‘follow, as the night the day’ (I. iii. 79): but the Denmark described in the opening scene which makes ‘the night joint-labourer with the day’ (I. i. 78) will scarcely accommodate his proverb. In The Revenger's Tragedy the unjointing of time is suggested by a similar confusion of day and night (I. iv. 26-7; II. iii. 46-7; III. v. 18-19).

23. My colleague, Dr Kenneth Larsen, suggests a connection between the motif of poison through the ear and the notion that the Holy Ghost (the Word) entered Mary through the ear. In so far as the Ghost here is memory incarnate, it may be worth recalling that the tripartite Augustinian division of the human soul links memory with the Holy Ghost: see The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953-62) vol. ix, p. 84.

24. Ophelia's own spontaneous self has been equally usurped by the memories which her father and brother impose on her (I. iii. 84-5, 104-5).

25. Compare the state described by Gonzalo in The Tempest, ‘When no man was his own’ (V. i. 213). Donne (Sermons, vol. ii, pp. 74-5) speaks of the necessity for Christian self-remembrance: ‘There may be enough in remembring our selves; but sometimes, that's the hardest of all; many times we are farthest off from our selves; most forgetfull of our selves … [thou] wondrest why the Lord should be angry with thee? Remember thy self well, and thou wilt see, it is because of thy sins.’ A different view of Hamlet's memory is taken by James P. Hammersmith, ‘Hamlet and the Myth of Memory’, ELH, A Journal of English Literary History, vol. xlv (1978) pp. 597-605: ‘for Hamlet the very act of remembering keeps time unified’ (p. 598).

26. Montaigne's Essays, tr. John Florio, 3 vols (London, 1965) vol. ii, pp. 14, 199.

27. Cf. I. vii. 8-10: ‘we but teach / Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return / To plague th' inventor’.

28. Aquinas's parallel division of Prudence into Memoria, Intelligentia and Providentia is also pertinent here—see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1969) p. 81. Macbeth's will, like that of many a Jacobean Machiavel, expresses itself as a false providence. In a virtuous Machiavel like Prospero the providence of human will becomes an expression of the providence of Divine Will.

29. Florio's Montaigne, vol. i, p. 25; vol. ii, p. 232.

30. To an age which habitually thought of poetry in monumental terms, tragedy naturally presented itself as a memorial genre. Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra are transcendent versions of those gilded monuments in which the action of each concludes; The Tempest incorporates those ‘lasting pillars’ emblazoned with letters of gold, imagined by Gonzalo (V. i. 207-8); in Julius Caesar the conspirators commit their fame to the ‘lofty scene’ of tragedy; and the high ‘stage’ to which the tragic corpses of Hamlet are carried is ultimately that of our own theatre. But just as the most splendid monuments of honour could be read (like the prominent tomb in Antonio's Revenge, II-III) as souvenirs of mortality, so tragedy might combine its memorial function with the morbid didacticism of morality drama. Richard Helgerson in ‘What Hamlet Remembers’, Shakespeare Studies, vol. x (1977) pp. 67-97, has argued that Hamlet as ‘antic’ fulfils the role of Death in medieval ‘summoning plays’ like Everyman (pp. 85-93). Cf. also Hammersmith, ‘Hamlet and the Myth of Memory’, pp. 599-602 for a discussion of memory and the graveyard.

31. Florio's Montaigne, vol. iii, p. 386.

32. Ibid., vol. ii, p. 232.

33. Donne's Sermons, vol. ii, p. 73. In this sermon Donne explicitly links the two kinds of remembrance required by the Communion Service: remembrance of Christ's sacrifice and remembrance of our own sins. Memory here, as in The Tempest, is presented as a means to freedom: ‘Being lock'd up in a close prison, of multiplied calamities, this turns the key, this opens the door, this restores him to liberty, if he can remember’ (p. 74).

34. Cf. Richard Abrams, ‘The Tempest and the Concept of the Machiavellian Playwright’, English Literary Renaissance, vol. viii (1978) pp. 43-66.

35. The Masque, however, retains elements of the revenger's memento mori play in Prospero's moralising ‘epilogue’ (IV. i. 148-58). There is, of course, an old iconographic connection between island and enclosed garden which Gaunt's speech in Richard II trades upon.

36. Prospero, like Hoffman and Hieronimo, will draw a curtain to reveal his ‘show’, placed in a ‘cell’ which may well have borne some formal resemblance to the arbour.

37. Cf. above, note 25. Compare the kingdom created by Macbeth, a ‘poor country, / Almost afraid to know itself’ (IV. iii. 164-5). Typologically Prospero's is the opposite of another enchanter's realm, Circe's island, where bestial oblivion results in utter self-loss.

38. For discussion of memory in The Tempest, see Douglas L. Peterson, Time, Tide, and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino, 1973) pp. 222ff.

39. Cf. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York and London, 1965) pp. 130-3. The play's concern with a new kind of time and consequence is mirrored in its carefully balanced iteration of words referring to redemption of the past (remembrance, remorse, relief, requit, restore, refresh, rejoice, resolve, release) and to prosperous construction of the future (providence, provision, prescience, promise, prologue, foretell, foresee).

40. Citations from the Prayer Book are to The Book of Common Prayer 1559, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville, Va., 1976).

41. Hamlet's sarcasm ‘Is thy union here?’ (V. ii. 318) may look back to Claudius's coronation (his union with Denmark) and marriage (his union with Gertrude)—both ceremonies would normally have included the celebration of Communion.

42. See R. G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York and London, 1965) pp. 233-4. Hunter convincingly rebuts those critics who have treated this episode as a Banquet of Sense.

43. Compare the Prayer Book's ‘You that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and be in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life. … Draw near. … We do earnestly repent, and be heartily sorry for these our misdoings. The remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable’ (italics added).

44. Stephano has Trinculo and Caliban swear ‘by this bottle’ (111), adjuring them to ‘kiss the book’ (132) as though it were scripture; as they kiss his Bible they imbibe its Word—considerately he promises to ‘furnish it anon with new contents’ (133).

45. As bereaved and dispossessed sons Caliban and Ferdinand are competitors for the Hamlet-role in the play, potential revengers. Caliban appeals for Stephano's assistance in revenge with a ludicrous burlesque of chivalric romance:

    I thank my noble lord. Wilt thou be pleas'd to hearken once again to the suit I made to thee. … I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.

    (III. ii. 36-42)

    It is the voice of the suppliant, summoning the Knight to his heroic imitation of Christ. We should also notice that the expulsion of Sycorax, pregnant with Caliban, from Argier, parallels the expulsion of Prospero and Miranda from Milan.

46. At V. i. 195 Ferdinand speaks of having ‘Receiv'd a second life’ from Prospero—the obvious contrast is with the ‘new creation’ of the usurping Antonio by which Prospero's subjects were ‘new form'd’ (I. ii. 81-3) and with the ‘new’ world celebrated in Caliban's drunken catch.

47. For versions of this emblem see Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, tr. Sir John Stradling (London, 1595) p. 14, and the frontispiece to Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentleman (London, 1641). Lipsius's version is worth quoting: ‘steere thy ship unto this porte, where is fecunditie and quietnesse, a refuge and a sanctuarie against all turmoyles and troubles: where if thou has once moored thy ship … let showers, thunders, lighteninges and tempestes fall around thee, thou shalt crie boldly and with a loude voyce, I lie at rest amid the waves’.

48. Compare the condition of Marston's revengers in Antonio's Revenge. Seeing themselves as ‘The downcast ruins of calamity’ they remain the prisoners of their past, committed to a life of meditation ‘on misery, / To sad our thought with contemplation / Of past calamities’ (V. vi. 46-53; quoted from the Revels edition, ed. Reavley Gair, Manchester, 1978).

49. Booty emphasises the socio-political importance of the Anglican Communion Service: ‘Communion and commonwealth go together; they are contiguous ideas. And it is possible to regard the Book of Common Prayer as a vital instrument for the creation of a Christian commonwealth in England’ (The Book of Common Prayer 1559, p. 372). The epilogue, with its echo of the Lord's Prayer, continues the Communion motif: it is a plea for absolution.