Books by Derek Dunne
Revenge tragedy’s common ancestry with law on both sides – through the subject matter of revenge,... more Revenge tragedy’s common ancestry with law on both sides – through the subject matter of revenge, and through the medium of theatre – makes the genre an ideal testing ground for the staging of the law in the early modern period. Yet there has been no systematic study of how legal terms, courtroom scenes and questions of evidence and jurisdiction operate within the genre. This monograph firstly shows the radical socio-political potential of revenge tragedy, often featuring as it does groups of citizens taking the law into their own hands. It also marks an important intervention in the field of law and literature, by challenging the cherished image of early modern English law as ‘participatory’ and open to all.
By connecting English revenge tragedies to major crises within the early modern legal system, a persistent legal critique is revealed to be at work, from Kyd’s seminal work, The Spanish Tragedy (late 1580s) right up to Middleton’s self-reflexive The Revenger’s Tragedy (c.1607).
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Articles by Derek Dunne
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Shakespeare Bulletin (forthcoming 2016)
If she be made of white and red,
Her faults will ne'er be known,
For blushing cheeks by faults ... more If she be made of white and red,
Her faults will ne'er be known,
For blushing cheeks by faults are bred
And fears by pale white shown.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.2.94
In the precocious Moth’s ‘dangerous rhyme’ Shakespeare pinpoints the troubling ambivalence of the female face. It is a theme to which he frequently returns, for example when Claudio says of Hero: ‘Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty’ (Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1.40). Shakespeare’s works would appear to confirm the idea that there is ‘no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’ (Macbeth, 1.4.11). Yet in the early modern period criminal defendants were routinely denied legal counsel, due to a persistent belief in the legibility of the face: ‘if the partie himselfe defend it, peradventure his conscience will prick him to utter the truth, or his countenance or gesture will show some tokens thereof’ (Pulton, De Pace Regis et Regni, 1609). The early modern blush sits at the fulcrum of these opposing views; at once thought to be involuntary and natural, while also being the stock-in-trade of the early modern actor; as Hamlet incredulously says of the player’s emotive ability, ‘all his visage warmed…And all for nothing?/ For Hecuba?’ (2.2.549 Folio).
This paper explores the Janus-faced blush from both a dramatic and forensic perspective, by examining the appearance of the blush in trial settings. Focusing on Shakespeare’s Othello, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Webster’s The White Devil, I investigate the ways in which early modern dramatists perpetuate, manipulate and undermine the link between the appearance of a blush and the performance of guilt. Female characters like Vittoria Corombona eloquently complicate the law’s insistence that guilt is so easily discerned: ‘O you mistake./ You raise a blood as noble in this cheek/ As ever was your mother’s’ (The White Devil, 3.2.53).
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Hamlet, at once the most well-known of all revenge tragedies and a significant departure from its... more Hamlet, at once the most well-known of all revenge tragedies and a significant departure from its predecessors, occupies a unique and complicated place within the genre of revenge tragedy. This article seeks to approach the question of Hamlet’s exceptional status through the prism provided by law and literature. Instead of arguing that Hamlet is more complex than his fellow revengers when it comes to legal matters, I demonstrate that Hamlet shows comparably less concern for the law and its intricacies. Despite that fact that Hamlet is unprecedented for the attention it has garnered from legal critics, I seek to demonstrate how Shakespeare deliberately downplays questions of law and justice throughout his most famous revenge tragedy. In the process, I suggest that other revenge tragedies of the period have far more to say on the subject of early modern law, but have suffered unfairly through comparison with Shakespeare’s melancholy prince.
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‘Oh…Millions of deaths’ complains the Duke as he expires in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (3... more ‘Oh…Millions of deaths’ complains the Duke as he expires in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (3.5.186), thus fulfilling Vindice’s fantasy of ‘constant vengeance’ (3.5.109). John Kerrigan and others have long recognised the excessively reciprocal nature of revenge on the early modern stage. This article seeks to quantify that process, or rather to survey the quantities that recur with surprising frequency in the genre of revenge tragedy.
In Antonio’s Revenge, Pandulpho wishes to prolong his enemy’s death ‘till he hath died and died/ Ten thousand deaths in agony of heart’ (5.5.78), while Hamlet’s Laertes curses whoever has made his sister mad: ‘O, treble woe/ Fall ten times double on that cursed head’ (5.1.235). On the one hand this can be linked to the competitive intertextuality of the genre itself, where each author tries to outdo his predecessor – the logical conclusion of Renaissance emulatio. But might it also point to a deeper psychology of revenge, that struggles to equate life with life, and refuses to accept parity?
In King Lear Shakespeare demonstrates how love cannot be quantified, through the motif of Lear’s diminishing train of knights: ‘Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty,/ And thou art twice her love’ (2.2.448). Revenge tragedy is similarly interested in arithmetic, where the variable is not love but vengeance.
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Trial by jury has been lauded as the defining feature of English common law since at least the fi... more Trial by jury has been lauded as the defining feature of English common law since at least the fifteenth century, considered by common law jurists to be far superior to Continental legal models. Yet there is evidence for a growing disdain for the jury in the early modern period, which was compounded by the introduction of numerous legal procedures designed to circumvent the need for trial by jury. These include multiple arraignments, the introduction of plea-bargaining and increased powers of justices of the peace for summary conviction. Little by little, such changes to the administration of justice undermined the central place traditionally afforded to the jury, and in the process significantly altered the participatory structure of English common law. Meanwhile, the tension between judge and jury in the early modern courtroom is a recurring theme in the legal history of the period. The early modern jury sits at the fulcrum of tensions between legal professionals and lay persons in this crucial period. Such a shift is of interest to legal historians, but it is also germane to the study of early modern literature, since law formed such an important interface between citizen and state in the period.
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[Extract]
This early seventeenth-century text was translated by William Bedwell (1563-1632), and... more [Extract]
This early seventeenth-century text was translated by William Bedwell (1563-1632), and printed by Richard Field in 1615, based on an Arabic text printed in Rome during the 1570s (the original author is unknown). As the title suggests, Bedwell’s translation into English of Mohammedis Imposturæ is largely unsympathetic in its view of Islam and its prophet Mohammed. Yet Bedwell’s pious disapproval of the Muslim faith is clearly in conflict with his love of the Arabic tongue, a contradiction that continually makes its presence felt between the lines of these three texts. Appended to the translation of three supposed dialogues ‘betweene two Mohametans’ is Bedwell’s own Arabian Trudgman, which is a basic dictionary of Arabic terms and nomenclature, as well as an index to the chapters of the Koran, designed to facilitate further study.
Bedwell himself was one of the foremost scholars and teachers of Arabic studies in early modern England. As G. J. Toomer succinctly puts it:
"Bedwell’s own attainments in Arabic were modest, but his contributions to the promotion of the study of the language and its literature, especially in England, were substantial."
In undertaking to translate Mohammedis Imposturæ, Bedwell brings together his translation skills with the more polemical purpose of discovering the ‘manyfold forgeries, falshoods, and horrible impieties of the blasphemous seducer Mohammed’. Even Bedwell’s index to the Koran is described in oppositional terms, as its purpose is to facilitate ‘the vnderstanding of the confutations of that booke’, according to the title page.
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Book chapters by Derek Dunne
Revenge tragedy has long been seen as blood-thirsty and atavistic in its representation of vigila... more Revenge tragedy has long been seen as blood-thirsty and atavistic in its representation of vigilante justice, displaying ‘the dehumanising power of the revenge impulse’ (Semenza, 2006). Yet it is often overlooked that revengers first sue for justice through perfectly legal means: ‘I will go plain me to my lord the king,/ And cry aloud for justice through the court’ (The Spanish Tragedy, 3.7.69). In my re-evaluation of the genre, I focus on the corrupt legal institutions that force citizens to take justice into their own hands. I relate this to anxieties surrounding the professionalisation of law and the threat of legal partiality in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century. Revengers such as the former Knight Marshal Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, or the eponymous Titus Andronicus are scrupulously judicious in their pursuit of vengeance (Hutson, 2007), and this is juxtaposed with a host of corrupt and partial judges. Take for example the King of Spain judging his own son’s actions (The Spanish Tragedy, 1.2), or the Duke in The Revenger’s Tragedy giving his step-son a stay of execution (1.2). The partiality displayed by these guarantors of justice is the last thing one expects from a genre intent on showing the evils of revenge, thus forcing us to rethink the relation between early modern theatre and courtroom.
Jurists like Sir Edward Coke or William Lambarde stress the need for an impartial judiciary: ‘Partialitie in a Iudge, is a Turpitude, which doth soyle and stayne all the Actions done by him’ (Coke, 1607). Revenge tragedy illuminates the discourse of impartiality through the interplay of biased judges and equitable revengers on the early modern stage.
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Impact by Derek Dunne
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Reviews by Derek Dunne
Theatre for A New Audience, Brooklyn NYC, 2014
[extract taken from Cahiers Élisabéthains review]
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Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, 2014
[extract taken from 'Around the Globe' review]
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Bórd Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin 25 Sept 2014
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Project Arts Centre (Cube), 14 July 2014
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Goodenough College, 3 March 2013
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Programme Notes by Derek Dunne
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Books by Derek Dunne
By connecting English revenge tragedies to major crises within the early modern legal system, a persistent legal critique is revealed to be at work, from Kyd’s seminal work, The Spanish Tragedy (late 1580s) right up to Middleton’s self-reflexive The Revenger’s Tragedy (c.1607).
Articles by Derek Dunne
Her faults will ne'er be known,
For blushing cheeks by faults are bred
And fears by pale white shown.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.2.94
In the precocious Moth’s ‘dangerous rhyme’ Shakespeare pinpoints the troubling ambivalence of the female face. It is a theme to which he frequently returns, for example when Claudio says of Hero: ‘Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty’ (Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1.40). Shakespeare’s works would appear to confirm the idea that there is ‘no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’ (Macbeth, 1.4.11). Yet in the early modern period criminal defendants were routinely denied legal counsel, due to a persistent belief in the legibility of the face: ‘if the partie himselfe defend it, peradventure his conscience will prick him to utter the truth, or his countenance or gesture will show some tokens thereof’ (Pulton, De Pace Regis et Regni, 1609). The early modern blush sits at the fulcrum of these opposing views; at once thought to be involuntary and natural, while also being the stock-in-trade of the early modern actor; as Hamlet incredulously says of the player’s emotive ability, ‘all his visage warmed…And all for nothing?/ For Hecuba?’ (2.2.549 Folio).
This paper explores the Janus-faced blush from both a dramatic and forensic perspective, by examining the appearance of the blush in trial settings. Focusing on Shakespeare’s Othello, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Webster’s The White Devil, I investigate the ways in which early modern dramatists perpetuate, manipulate and undermine the link between the appearance of a blush and the performance of guilt. Female characters like Vittoria Corombona eloquently complicate the law’s insistence that guilt is so easily discerned: ‘O you mistake./ You raise a blood as noble in this cheek/ As ever was your mother’s’ (The White Devil, 3.2.53).
In Antonio’s Revenge, Pandulpho wishes to prolong his enemy’s death ‘till he hath died and died/ Ten thousand deaths in agony of heart’ (5.5.78), while Hamlet’s Laertes curses whoever has made his sister mad: ‘O, treble woe/ Fall ten times double on that cursed head’ (5.1.235). On the one hand this can be linked to the competitive intertextuality of the genre itself, where each author tries to outdo his predecessor – the logical conclusion of Renaissance emulatio. But might it also point to a deeper psychology of revenge, that struggles to equate life with life, and refuses to accept parity?
In King Lear Shakespeare demonstrates how love cannot be quantified, through the motif of Lear’s diminishing train of knights: ‘Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty,/ And thou art twice her love’ (2.2.448). Revenge tragedy is similarly interested in arithmetic, where the variable is not love but vengeance.
This early seventeenth-century text was translated by William Bedwell (1563-1632), and printed by Richard Field in 1615, based on an Arabic text printed in Rome during the 1570s (the original author is unknown). As the title suggests, Bedwell’s translation into English of Mohammedis Imposturæ is largely unsympathetic in its view of Islam and its prophet Mohammed. Yet Bedwell’s pious disapproval of the Muslim faith is clearly in conflict with his love of the Arabic tongue, a contradiction that continually makes its presence felt between the lines of these three texts. Appended to the translation of three supposed dialogues ‘betweene two Mohametans’ is Bedwell’s own Arabian Trudgman, which is a basic dictionary of Arabic terms and nomenclature, as well as an index to the chapters of the Koran, designed to facilitate further study.
Bedwell himself was one of the foremost scholars and teachers of Arabic studies in early modern England. As G. J. Toomer succinctly puts it:
"Bedwell’s own attainments in Arabic were modest, but his contributions to the promotion of the study of the language and its literature, especially in England, were substantial."
In undertaking to translate Mohammedis Imposturæ, Bedwell brings together his translation skills with the more polemical purpose of discovering the ‘manyfold forgeries, falshoods, and horrible impieties of the blasphemous seducer Mohammed’. Even Bedwell’s index to the Koran is described in oppositional terms, as its purpose is to facilitate ‘the vnderstanding of the confutations of that booke’, according to the title page.
Book chapters by Derek Dunne
Jurists like Sir Edward Coke or William Lambarde stress the need for an impartial judiciary: ‘Partialitie in a Iudge, is a Turpitude, which doth soyle and stayne all the Actions done by him’ (Coke, 1607). Revenge tragedy illuminates the discourse of impartiality through the interplay of biased judges and equitable revengers on the early modern stage.
Impact by Derek Dunne
Reviews by Derek Dunne
Programme Notes by Derek Dunne
By connecting English revenge tragedies to major crises within the early modern legal system, a persistent legal critique is revealed to be at work, from Kyd’s seminal work, The Spanish Tragedy (late 1580s) right up to Middleton’s self-reflexive The Revenger’s Tragedy (c.1607).
Her faults will ne'er be known,
For blushing cheeks by faults are bred
And fears by pale white shown.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.2.94
In the precocious Moth’s ‘dangerous rhyme’ Shakespeare pinpoints the troubling ambivalence of the female face. It is a theme to which he frequently returns, for example when Claudio says of Hero: ‘Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty’ (Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1.40). Shakespeare’s works would appear to confirm the idea that there is ‘no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’ (Macbeth, 1.4.11). Yet in the early modern period criminal defendants were routinely denied legal counsel, due to a persistent belief in the legibility of the face: ‘if the partie himselfe defend it, peradventure his conscience will prick him to utter the truth, or his countenance or gesture will show some tokens thereof’ (Pulton, De Pace Regis et Regni, 1609). The early modern blush sits at the fulcrum of these opposing views; at once thought to be involuntary and natural, while also being the stock-in-trade of the early modern actor; as Hamlet incredulously says of the player’s emotive ability, ‘all his visage warmed…And all for nothing?/ For Hecuba?’ (2.2.549 Folio).
This paper explores the Janus-faced blush from both a dramatic and forensic perspective, by examining the appearance of the blush in trial settings. Focusing on Shakespeare’s Othello, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Webster’s The White Devil, I investigate the ways in which early modern dramatists perpetuate, manipulate and undermine the link between the appearance of a blush and the performance of guilt. Female characters like Vittoria Corombona eloquently complicate the law’s insistence that guilt is so easily discerned: ‘O you mistake./ You raise a blood as noble in this cheek/ As ever was your mother’s’ (The White Devil, 3.2.53).
In Antonio’s Revenge, Pandulpho wishes to prolong his enemy’s death ‘till he hath died and died/ Ten thousand deaths in agony of heart’ (5.5.78), while Hamlet’s Laertes curses whoever has made his sister mad: ‘O, treble woe/ Fall ten times double on that cursed head’ (5.1.235). On the one hand this can be linked to the competitive intertextuality of the genre itself, where each author tries to outdo his predecessor – the logical conclusion of Renaissance emulatio. But might it also point to a deeper psychology of revenge, that struggles to equate life with life, and refuses to accept parity?
In King Lear Shakespeare demonstrates how love cannot be quantified, through the motif of Lear’s diminishing train of knights: ‘Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty,/ And thou art twice her love’ (2.2.448). Revenge tragedy is similarly interested in arithmetic, where the variable is not love but vengeance.
This early seventeenth-century text was translated by William Bedwell (1563-1632), and printed by Richard Field in 1615, based on an Arabic text printed in Rome during the 1570s (the original author is unknown). As the title suggests, Bedwell’s translation into English of Mohammedis Imposturæ is largely unsympathetic in its view of Islam and its prophet Mohammed. Yet Bedwell’s pious disapproval of the Muslim faith is clearly in conflict with his love of the Arabic tongue, a contradiction that continually makes its presence felt between the lines of these three texts. Appended to the translation of three supposed dialogues ‘betweene two Mohametans’ is Bedwell’s own Arabian Trudgman, which is a basic dictionary of Arabic terms and nomenclature, as well as an index to the chapters of the Koran, designed to facilitate further study.
Bedwell himself was one of the foremost scholars and teachers of Arabic studies in early modern England. As G. J. Toomer succinctly puts it:
"Bedwell’s own attainments in Arabic were modest, but his contributions to the promotion of the study of the language and its literature, especially in England, were substantial."
In undertaking to translate Mohammedis Imposturæ, Bedwell brings together his translation skills with the more polemical purpose of discovering the ‘manyfold forgeries, falshoods, and horrible impieties of the blasphemous seducer Mohammed’. Even Bedwell’s index to the Koran is described in oppositional terms, as its purpose is to facilitate ‘the vnderstanding of the confutations of that booke’, according to the title page.
Jurists like Sir Edward Coke or William Lambarde stress the need for an impartial judiciary: ‘Partialitie in a Iudge, is a Turpitude, which doth soyle and stayne all the Actions done by him’ (Coke, 1607). Revenge tragedy illuminates the discourse of impartiality through the interplay of biased judges and equitable revengers on the early modern stage.
Episode 1: Patrick Gray
Patrick Gray is Associate Professor of English at Durham University. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
https://ecasurvival.com/podcasts/
1.55 The job apocalypse
3.33 From the Platonic ideal of an education to working the ranch
8.20 Popping caps on Heinekens with a PhD
12.00 Expectations vs Reality of Grad School
14.10 Pushing yourself (with bonus near-death experience)
19.30 How does UK compare to US for an ECA
25.00 Submitting applications without burning through your social capital
28.50 Time Traveller Question
33.35 Alternative lives
36.50 What would you like to see change/stay the same in academia?
40.30 ‘Are you the widget that we are trying to produce?’
What is #ECASurvival?
by Derek Dunne, Lecturer in English Literature, Cardiff University
If you had told me on the day of my viva in 2012 that it would be over 5 years before I had a permanent job, I might have just walked out the door and not looked back. Lucky for me that wasn’t the case, but plenty of us struggle post-PhD with how to get from ‘Dr.’ to ‘Dr.’ who can afford to pay rent, or ‘Dr.’ who knows where they’ll be living in 6 months’ time.
There is no ‘one way’ to make it as an academic, and we are having to be increasingly inventive in how we go about staying within the profession. I hope that over the next twelve months (of funding) and beyond we can start talking about the challenges we are facing both individually and collectively. After all, if our profession can’t take care of its newest members, then those members – highly skilled, driven & talented individuals – will look elsewhere for their livelihood. This initiative is about sharing stories, crowdsourcing advice, and opening up a dialogue about what it is to be an ECA in academia today.
(Personally I find the ECA terminology unhelpful, as it groups together those with little or no support with those lucky enough to have secure employment – but that’s a topic for another day.)
I’m keen to hear others’ stories either in person, here on the blog, or through the #ECASurvival hashtag on Twitter. Let’s talk.
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say yourself, My God! What have I done?
— David Byrne, Talking Heads
'they vvill carry a certificate...about them from some Iusticer of the peace, with his hand and seale vnto the same, how he hath beene whipped and punished for a vacabond according to the lawes of this Realme, and that he must returne to C. where he was borne or last dwelt.'
However all this is ‘famed’ i.e. false, to allow the rogue free passage through unsuspecting villages. The rogue’s (forged) licence is thus fundamental to the (figurative) licences they take with other people. This textual mimicry is a more dangerous infringement of authority than the mere gulling of citizens, as it destabilises the basis of that authority. By replicating official legal documents, rogues successfully use the tools of their containment to evade detection. As there is no practical way to distinguish legitimate from falsified documents, their holders too remain uncategorisable.
'So that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors.'
Anon., Gesta Grayorum
This sentence is most often quoted as evidence for a performance of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn. But the account of the ‘night of errors’ is embedded within a much larger narrative of theatrical and subversive behaviour. The students take it upon themselves to elect a ‘Prince of Purpoole’, whose first order of business is to grant a general pardon, as the text challenges notions of acceptable behaviour, authority and even legality. By paying attention to Inns of Court revels, I wish to to productively problematize both drama – as something confined to the theatre – and pedagogy – as something that can teach insubordination as well as obedience.
While the public theatres are well known for staging all manner of dissent, I wish to investigate the challenge to authority that we witness at Gray’s Inn. Not only do we have the staging of monarchy travestied by the ‘inthronization’ of the Prince, in the aftermath of the entertainments a mock-trial is held, complete with lawyers being taken to the Tower. And yet, this subversion of authority is meticulously stage-managed and controlled by the students themselves. Such flagrant parodying of hallowed institutions and ceremonies within the legal system itself must modify any account of early modern drama’s didactic potential, issuing as it does from the law’s own heart of darkness.
Case studies from Shakespeare's work will be complemented with a wide variety of early modern authors and images drawn from contemporary art.
I also want to look at the idea of playing in parts, as elaborated by Tiffany Stern among others, as a way of re-evaluating Shakespearean drama as performance-based art rather than textual artefact. The reconstructed Globe stage has enabled many hypotheses to be tested and new discoveries to be made (which are in fact old discoveries). However questions still remain, and we must be always aware of the gap between Shakespeare and ourselves.
This paper sets out to resituate Hamlet within the genre of revenge tragedy more generally. Without a full appreciation of the legal sophistication and political charge of earlier revenge tragedies, much of the generic innovation in Hamlet is lost. Rather than arguing that Shakespeare’s second revenge tragedy covers the same ground as other plays in the genre but in a more sophisticated way, I put forward the theory that Hamlet in fact displays less of an engagement with certain legal issues than other revenge tragedies. For example, the idea of revenge as a metaphor for political action brought about by the failings of a judicial system does not impinge on Hamlet’s deeply personal struggle to be revenged. At the same time some concern for a wider populus is displaced onto the figure of Laertes who arrives ‘in a riotous head’ (4.5.101). This leads me to question such a Hamlet-centric approach to revenge tragedy, particularly when it comes to the genre’s engagement with early modern law.
[Extract]
In Shakespeare’s day, the Inns of Court were a powerful institution in the political landscape of London, earning them the collective name of ‘the third university’, after Oxford and Cambridge. The Inns acted as a training ground for politicians and poets, as well as being home to the most important English common law practitioners. The Inner Temple alone counts John Selden, Sir Thomas Littleton and Sir Edward Coke amongst its members. While Coke is famously remembered for having clashed with James I in open court over the question of royal prerogative, other Inner Temple members were even more confrontational towards the throne. Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, attempted to stage a coup in 1601 after a disastrous campaign in Ireland, and was beheaded for treason. Shakespeare’s company were drawn into the fray after being commissioned to stage Richard II at the Globe to foment rebellion. This reportedly prompted Queen Elizabeth to say to an advisor: ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’
Drama and politics were never far apart in Elizabethan London, and again the Inner Temple played a vital role in this. Not only did Sir William Catesby feature in Shakespeare’s Richard III, many Inner Temple members were authors and dramatists themselves. Sir Christopher Hatton had a hand in the writing of Gismond of Salerne, an early revenge tragedy staged before Queen Elizabeth at the Inner Temple in 1588. Francis Beaumont’s legal legacy may be slight, but he wrote and collaborated on over a dozen dramas, many of which continue to provoke critical interest. And the centrality of Sackville and Norton’s Tragedy of Gorboduc can hardly be overstated in terms of both political impact and dramatic influence.
But instead of reading this in purely gendered terms, I would prefer to link it to a larger network of images where silence, blindness and deafness threaten to overwhelm the play’s characters. Aaron describes the scene of Lavinia’s rape as ‘ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull’ (1.1.628), Lavinia pleads with Tamora to ‘[o]pen thy deaf ears’ (2.3.160), while Titus later says of his daughter’s death that he has ‘[k]illed her for whom my tears have made me blind’ (5.3.48). It is my contention that this loss of sensory perception raises questions about the veracity of the evidence of our own senses, and the business of interpretation more generally.
If Lucius maintains that ‘[m]y scars can witness, dumb although they are’ (5.3.113), I would argue that we can learn a lot by listening to the silences in this play.
In contrast, Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman has been sidelined as a poor knock-off, capitalising on the success of Shakespeare’s masterpiece but of little intrinsic value. This may be due to the fact that Hoffman does not dwell on the question of ‘To be or not to be’, and instead gets on with the job of slaughtering everyone connected with his pirate-father’s execution. However, Chettle’s play exhibits a complex and ambivalent approach to early modern legality, through its representation of piracy, insurrection and revenge. In this short paper, I want to look at how Hoffman challenges conventional binaries (revenge v law; criminal v magistrate; rebellion v authority), drawing on contemporary crises within late Elizabethan England. Chettle uses the revenge genre to open up questions of sovereignty, legitimacy and jurisdiction in a way that Hamlet never does, lampooning the figure of the melancholic, dispossessed, and over-educated prince in the process.
[Extract]
‘O my ducats! O, my daughter!’ (2.8.15):
The Merchant of Venice is a play that declares from the outset that money makes the world go ’round. The title doesn’t give us a name, like Hamlet or Othello, only a profession: merchant, someone who buys and sells for a living. And in the mercantile world of Renaissance Venice, everything is up for sale.
The clearest example of this is Shylock’s bond with Antonio, where instead of accepting late payment for the debt of 3,000 ducats, he insists on a pound of Antonio’s flesh. On the one hand, the fact that human flesh has become part of a business contract shows how wrapped up we all are in the cash nexus – we cannot escape it and live. On the other hand, Shylock is offered a sum far larger than the 3,000 ducats owed to let Antonio live; his refusal suggests that there are some things more important than money, in this case revenge. The challenge for us as readers is to decide which is worse.