Family and the State in Early Modern Revenge Drama

Economies of Vengeance

Chris McMahon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415807753
• eBook ISBN: 9781136496288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this book, McMahon considers Early Modern revenge plays from a political science perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of family and state institutions. Plays set for close study are The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Malcontent and The Duchess of Malfi. The plays are read as unique events occupying positions in historical process concerning the privatisation of the family (by means of symbolism and concrete household strategies such as budgeting and surveillance) and the subsequent appropriation of the family and its methods by the state.

The effect is that family becomes an unofficial organ of the state. This process, however, also involves the reform of the state along lines demanded by the private family. McMahon's critical method, derived from the theory of Bourdieu, Bataille, and Girard, maps capital transactions to reveal emotionally charged, often idiosyncratic responses to issues of shared concern. Such issues include state corruption, the management of women, the performance of roles according to gender, the uses of surveillance, and the ethics of sacrifice.

1 Introduction

Hamlet: Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral bak’d meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

(1.2.180)

THE ANOMALY OF REVENGE DRAMA IN CONTEMPORARY DISCOURSE

Revenge plays are structured around contests involving what René Girard calls “reciprocal violence” (which is to say, exchanges in violence). Though stage revenge is usually pursued on behalf of family (e.g., Hamlet’s father) and often against those at the highest levels—duke, prince or king—criticism has so far been blind to what early modern revenge drama has to say about such topics as the structure of the family, the proper relation between the families that supposedly compose civil society and the constitution of the state and government that tries to regulate their conduct vis-á-vis each other and the state itself. To look for information about the early modern family or state, critics have turned to contemporary sources such as works of philosophy, treatises on government, or speeches made by monarchs, as well as sermons, pamphlets, conduct books and manuals on household management but have ignored what revenge plays have to say about households and governments.

Yet early modern revenge drama presents an exceptional opportunity for the analysis of how family and state were conceived (which is to say, constructed). Because revengers so often are concerned with the honour and dignity of their families, while also emotionally committed to other family members (if not intimately affectionate), it should not be surprising that these plays have a lot to say about families and households. Similarly, since revengers are forced to take justice into their own hands because the state is incapable or unwilling to punish wrongdoers, they often have a lot to say about proper government.

Early modern revenge plays imagined and re-imagined dramas about relations between families and the state. As such, these plays can tell us a lot about how the family and the state were constructed in early modern England but, even more importantly, in ways that “official” texts such as works of philosophy, treatises on government, speeches of monarchs, sermons, pamphlets, conduct books or manuals on household management do not.

Early modern revenge drama offers a unique standpoint that exposes the “shadow,” “flipside,” or “underbelly” of contemporary discourses on family and state (as those institutions were proposed in official texts). This is largely because stage drama exploits aspects of discourse that would be considered weaknesses in classical rhetoric. In other words, drama is more exciting because people are in conflict (presenting opposing concepts convincingly), which in “official” discourse would be considered self-refuting, “unclear” or “confusing.”

Plays, furthermore, can actually work against the “official” discourse on family or state in ways that are complex and unique. Legal, philosophical, instructional or theological texts are substantially “monological.” Those sorts of documents are generally prescriptive and present arguments with at least an appearance of logical consistency. In other words, a position of authority is generally adopted and arguments are constructed without obvious contradictions. Plays, by contrast, are “dialogical” texts in which many voices compete for credibility. Indeed, in plays, not only do many characters speak, they often adopt different discourses over the course of the play and can be found contradicting themselves often enough. Thus, because of their dialogical nature, revenge plays are capable of presenting families and states in ways that threaten to deconstruct more monological mediums and discourses.

Revenge plays do not depict family and state in terms of their ideal function but rather in times of crisis. In revenge plays, we see the family and state malfunctioning (or “dysfunctional”). It would be a serious mistake, however, to read this operation in functionalist terms. These plays do not simply model what is right and proper. Rather, they are staging conflicts in such a way as to make certain arrangements seem proper or improper, correct or incorrect, beneficial or malign, just or unjust. This is usually achieved not by showing what good government looks like but by showing us images of bad government in action—images that imply a need for change. To a certain extent, it might be argued that it is easier to criticise the status quo than to suggest a viable alternative but depicting misgoverned societies enables playwrights to create more dramatically compelling works. Instead of showing us revengers who are simply wicked or mistaken, these plays stage morally ambiguous contests where ideas of right or wrong are interrogated by means of sociopsychologically compelling stories. The plays thus deny pat answers but instead articulate crises of belief about domestic and civil practices. In this way, early modern revenge plays transformed contemporary discourse on family and state.

In general, like most household manuals and political treatises on the subject, revenge plays saw the family as a discrete social unit. Indeed, in early modern political treatises, household manuals, conduct books, sermons and tracts, institutions of family and state are often conceived as bounded “economic” entities. Thus by “privatising” the family (making the family into a discrete social unit), these texts sought to reconstruct the family and the state and thereby improve the relation between those institutions (often arguing that a well-governed state comprises well-governed families). Household practices such as budgeting and supervision, especially, were theorised in household manuals and sermons. Concepts of state organisation were presented by politicians, priests and philosophers. Such texts, however, were patently prescriptive, advising filial, conjugal, civil and religious obedience.

While the family might be a “fiefdom within the state” or even a “little commonwealth” in household manuals,¹ it would be disingenuous to say, with Tennenhouse, that these writers thought “the monarch had little or no authority” over private families (Power on Display 172). The family was, most definitely, often imagined as a “self-enclosed political unit,” but the writers of household manuals generally saw these units as owing obedience to the crown.² In the words of Wendy Wall, the “household was routinely touted as the foremost disciplinary site of the period” (Staging Domesticity 1). Indeed, it was imagined that the family, when properly managed, was the primary school for the production of good citizens and churchgoers. In Upon this Condition of the Family, being the Seminaire of all other Societies (1609), for example, William Perkins attests that

it followeth that the holy and righteous government [of the family], is a direct meane for the good ordering, both of Church and Commonwealth, [ … ] the laws [of the family] prepare and dispose men to the keeping of order in other governments. (qtd. in Staging Domesticity 1)

Perkins goes on to explain that the rules for the proper management of the family are to be found in the Bible. All moralists agreed on this point. The image of Christ as a bridegroom was always used to explain why wives should submit to their husbands and that husbands should love their wives. Children, likewise, are typically exhorted to obedience in keeping with the Fifth Commandment.

Even so, potential for conflict between private families and state apparatuses lurks within these constructions. In revenge drama, these conflicts are made overt. Instead of being obedient to the crown, figures like Hieronimo, Chettle’s Hoffman, Marston’s Antonio, Vindice and even Hamlet wage private wars against the incumbent authorities. In short, they champion familial relations against the state even, quite often, consciously going against what they themselves admit to be Christian teaching.

Thus revenge drama does not dispute the privatisation of the family but rather performs as the “shadow” of more monological discourses promoting that process. Indeed, the privatisation of the family is essential to most revenge plays. For revenge drama the potential in this privatisation is not only conducive to obedience, prosperity, piety and civil harmony but also to disobedience, ruin, pride and discord. Revenge plays are thus capable of discovering, in the privatisation of the family, secrets “non-literary” texts forbid themselves.

The politics of revenge plays should not be reduced to those of “extra-literary” texts such as household manuals. Plays simply do not serve the same social function as, say, a sermon. We can profitably contextualise revenge plays, as appropriate, by thinking about how “extra-literary” sources handled the same issues, but we should not force the plays into conformity with the outlook of those “extra-textual” sources. These plays are not simply another case of the dominant thinking of the day; they utilise revenge as a way to disturb and break contemporary paradigms. Revenge plays are, therefore, of especial value when we come to examine early modern treatments of family and state. The study of revenge drama offers to broaden our understanding of early modern shifts in family and state organisation because these plays transformed contemporary debates. Restructuring representations of society for a wide cross-section of the public, these plays helped their audiences construct themselves as family members and citizens.

HETEROGENEOUS WORKS IN DIALECTICAL RELATION

When a hero confronts the villain, it is more dramatic if they both have something powerful to say. The hero might eventually triumph, and perhaps we are led to endorse his or her theory of government rather than the villain’s theory of, say, anarchy. The technical term for such an operation is sublation.³

Sublation (or aufhebung, to use Hegel’s name for it) is a dialectical operation in which two ideas (or “texts”) meet in struggle. As a function of this struggle, one term rises up and becomes superordinate, co-opting the other term as subordinate. In the example given, “good government” rises up and subordinates “anarchy.” Good government thus becomes the superordinate term in a larger system incorporating the idea of anarchy as a subsystem. There will be a chapter on anarchy in the textbook and the spectre of anarchy will be forever waiting in the wings, ready to appear whenever anybody raises difficult questions about “good government.” As such, the evolution of ideas does not always mean the extinction of outdated notions or literary cul de sacs as more robust ideas outcompete them in the marketplace of truth.⁴ The technical term for the incorporation of a subordinate idea (or “text”) as a working subsystem in a superordinate text is co-option.⁵ In our example concerning good government, the anarchist discourse is similarly reproduced (though often in a mutated form more amenable to the uses of official discourses on good government).⁶ Moreover, the superordinate term (or dominant discourse) will have been elaborated by means of its co-option of the subordinate text. Indeed, this co-option might be so thoroughgoing that the superordinate text actually comes to resemble, at many points, the text it has co-opted (an irony that makes “deconstruction” possible).⁷

And if it is ironic that in philosophy—or in sermons or treatises on government—the official version comes to take on the arguments and terms of conquered foes, in stage plays this moral ambiguation is not so much ironic as necessary to the drama. In the words of one analyst, literature that does not involve evil rapidly becomes boring (Bataille, Television Interview). For, in a stage play, the extent to which the villain is allowed to speak convincingly marks the degree to which he or she might actually win some adherents. If so, it seems that our imaginary melodrama is not simply ideological. More precisely, if Bataille is right, the dramatic effectiveness of a play (or novel, for that matter) appears to be inversely proportional to its ideological function. Yet could it not be even more true to remark that our imaginary play is an even more powerful ideological tool because it activates our fear of (or desire for) transgression so powerfully?

In this case, the historical function of the text would not simply be an effect of what the hero says (a hero whose brave words might be quoted whenever the spectre of anarchy returns). It would be the effect of the “dialogue” being staged. This dialogue, which gives the play its logical structure (and emotional force), offers to create a new psychosocial settlement. In early modern revenge plays, it is often hard to tell whose statements are being endorsed. On other occasions, it is possible to see how antagonistic discourses are being “shut down,” contained or discredited. Sometimes it becomes apparent how an idea has been forcibly marginalised or even silenced. In all these plays, however, a historical process is at work concerning, among other things, the management of families, the constitution of states and jurisprudence. The plays, furthermore, contribute to these processes not in despite of their dialogical pattern but because of that very structure.

Dialectical operations, furthermore, are not restricted by the boundaries of a text. Given that texts always require interpretation by other texts, it is difficult in any case to situate the borders of a text. Rather, a text is always artificially extracted from its contexts, set aside by means of boundaries that can never be firmly situated. Dialectics, as such, is not simply a process limited by the confines of a given text but a series of transactions, infratextual and intertextual. There may well be no great historical dialectic. There are, however, dialectical processes at work in texts and, therefore, also in history.

Early modern plays use reciprocal violence as a problematic to explore institutions of family and state in a wide variety of ways. This is to say that the plays are taken as showing moves on a playing field, with the proviso that we are dealing with open rather then closed codes (i.e. new moves are always possible and can reshape the structure of the field). For these plays occupy a wide range of political positions. If the diversity and sophistication of these texts is to be accommodated, therefore, plays must be independently scrutinised. Looking at specific plays in detail reveals, in fact, fundamental political differences traversing theme and genre. Thus, several plays receive close attention in the chapters to follow. Compared and contrasted, these plays represent markedly different approaches to issues of shared concern.

In The Spanish Tragedy, the family is violently isolated and revalorised, thereby creating a crisis regarding the symbolic superiority of the king. In Hamlet, an attempt is made to neutralise a crisis by subsuming the struggle of the private family into a struggle to legitimate primogenitural rule. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, the cause of the private family is reasserted in association with an elaborate regime of household management. This regime of household management is co-opted by the state in The Malcontent, in which the private family becomes an informal state apparatus. In The Duchess of Malfi, the private family is linked to a reassertion of “middle-class” interests.

Each play thus takes a substantially different approach to the politics of family and state, constructing these institutions in varying ways and staging the relations between these institutions according to opposing political outlooks. The plays, nevertheless, can be seen as responding to each other by means of an identifiable mechanism of negation and co-option (i.e. dialectical processes). Simply put, negation and co-option correspond to conversational strategies of disagreement, restatement and subsequent agreement—with the proviso that the proposition is subordinated to a “larger” viewpoint. Variations in plot, characterisation, setting or rhetoric are often highly significant and reveal that the plays are actively engaged in an ongoing debate over the proprieties of family and state. As such, the plays do not merely interrogate “non-literary” discourses but, when compared, negate and co-opt each other’s constructions. Indeed, the plays seem especially responsive in that regard (possibly due to competition between playwrights and acting companies). Regardless, taken all together, these plays tend to move from the aggressive privatisation of the family, through contestation of state authority, towards the elaboration of the private household as an informal state apparatus. In other words, as a sequence, the plays I have chosen for close study can be taken as heuristic (their arrangement tracing the process whereby the private family becomes an organ of an emerging leviathan, the modern nation state). Emphatically, this arrangement is heuristic of an early modern ideational process rather than an artificial, anachronistic or merely “studio” dialectic.

Minimally, the chapters that follow may be entertained as essays on the politics of a number of important plays. In overview, however, the dialectic I am proposing advances the legitimacy of the family as a private unit because the family augments the state “organism.” This emergent “commonwealth” is not disrespectful of private families but rather seeks to empower the family as an informal state apparatus.⁸ In fact, this is exactly what Perkins means when he describes the private family as a “school” in which human beings learn obedience (qtd. in Wall, Staging Domesticity 1). Meanwhile, the state seeks to become more pervasive by co-opting management practices that the private family initially developed in order to preserve itself from debts and defend itself in the face of growing state authority.

This narrative departs substantially from the usual representation of the state stamping out private vengeance as told, f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Family and Judiciary in The Spanish Tragedy
• 3 Competition and Grace in Hamlet
• 4 Surveillance and Consumption in The Revenger’s Tragedy
• 5 Education and Autocracy in The Malcontent
• 6 Meritocratic Reform in The Duchess of Malfi
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index