Elizabethan Revenge Drama: Cultural Representations, Signifying Practices, and the Rise of Protestant Middle-Class Discourse

Focusing on Pikeryng’s Horestes , Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy , Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Hamlet , Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge , and Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman , the present study shows that Elizabethan revenge drama reflects the archetype of the dispossessed son to articulate a crisis of cultural representation.

This crisis may be attributed to an authority struggle within the Elizabethan state apparatus: the class-related competition of the representational codes of England’s old feudal elite, the upstart courtly aristocracy, and the emerging Protestant middle classes. Feudal authority, represented by patriarchal lineage and filial primogeniture, faces a twofold challenge in this context: first, by aristocratic Self-Fashioning, which represents authority via theatrical spectacles of power as an artificially constructed (and thus, unreliable) reality-effect; second, by the rise of the Protestant middle classes, who attribute absolute truth and authority to God’s word written down in the Bible to keep the unreliability of aristocratic performances of meaning in check.

Elizabethan Revenge Drama shows that the dramatic debate of revenge fused with the dispossessed son archetype offers a bricolage-like makeshift language to address this authority struggle, which – in the time span of becoming ‘real’ – escaped semiotic and discursive representation. Functioning as sociocultural laboratories, Elizabethan revenge plays debate all kinds of imaginable scenarios of how this representational crisis may turn out and affect the future.


Table of Contents

Note on the Texts, List of Plays in Chronological Order, Illustrations ......................... ix

1. Introduction: Spectacles of Challenge – Challenged Spectacles ...................... 1
1.1 Representational Change, the Rise of Protestant Middle-Class Discourse,
and Elizabethan Revenge Drama ........................................................................... 6
1.2 The Importance of the Hamlet-Pattern of the Dispossessed Son ......................... 10
1.3 State of Research and Heuristic Framework........................................................ 12

2. Semiotic and Discursive Representational Modes
in Early Modern Revenge Drama .................................................................... 20
2.1 Semiotic Representation: Feudalism :: Icon – Courtly Aristocracy ::
Index – The Emerging Middle Classes :: Symbol ............................................... 22
2.2 Discursive Representation: Reformation – Authorship – Legal Practices –
The Human Subject – Family Structure .............................................................. 30
2.3 ‘Aesthetics of Transition’ – The Plotting of Revenge and
Early Modern Drama: Diegesis & Mimesis – Observed Observation –
Meta-Drama – Sister Arts: Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait .............. 41

3. The Dramatic Debate of Revenge ..................................................................... 58
3.1 John Pikeryng, Horestes (1567) – Magisterial Revenge
and the Anglican Ideal of the Christian Humanist Prince .................................... 58
3.2 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (1587) –
An Apocalyptic ‘Endgame’ Triggered off by Puritan Zeal ................................. 79
3.3 William Shakespeare & George Peele, Titus Andronicus (1594) –
An Apocalypse Wrought by a Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation
Associated with the Pope as a Machiavellian Anti-Christ ................................. 108
3.4 John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge (1600) – A Hamlet-Play with a
‘Pre-Reformed Turn’ and a Vindication of Machiavellian Discourse
as a Tool of Equitable Revenge ......................................................................... 148
3.5 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1601) – The Protestant Culture of
the Written Word Challenged by the Catholic Veneration of Images:
The Virginal Conception of Jesus Debased as ‘Anti-Christ-Like’
Machiavellian Deception ................................................................................... 189
3.6 Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman or a Revenge
for a Father (1602) – Early (‘Post’-)Modern Recycling
of the Tradition of Elizabethan Revenge Drama ............................................... 243

4. Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 263

Tables ........................................................................................................................ 267

Works Cited and Referred To .................................................................................... 275