The Revenger's Tragedy

The revenger's tragedy by Cyril Tourneur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Takes the revenge tragedy genre established by Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy to its limit and beyond – stripping out any potential for pathos or catharsis and replacing it with farce. Middleton (more likely to have been the dramatist than Tourneur) was best known for acerbic heavily-plotted city comedies, and those inclinations are present here – with disguises creating absurd situational comedy and the revengers deploying wildly inventive methods of murder. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus had a similar blackly comic tone, but The Revenger’s Tragedy refines the formula and introduces a contempt for the machinations of courtly life that points towards Webster’s nihilistic White Devil and Duchess of Malfi. A lot of fun.

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Hamlet

Hamlet by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The last time I read Hamlet I came away thinking it was a play haunted by depression and suicide rather than revenge. This time around, what struck me was how the Ghost sets up a theological mystery that Hamlet needs to investigate. It is only with the staging of the play within the play that Hamlet can see the Ghost is honest and the King is a regicide. But that reveals his hand, and gets him packed off to England. Revenge is deferred because of Hamlet’s probing at the workings of heaven. It is after seeing Fortinbras marching with his army to fight over “an eggshell” that he lets go and surrenders to what may be. The sea voyage turns him into a creature of impulse – “the readiness is all”. In the final scene the deaths feel random. Providence takes over and resolves the feud where Hamlet’s intellectualising could not. His antic disposition enters a new lighter mode in Act 5. The angst is replaced by a sense of comic absurdism, where weighty matters of death are treated as skulls to be thrown about. But in his last moments he suddenly starts caring about his reputation, contradicting his earlier claim that not knowing what might happen after death means he is ready for it. Fundamentally this character fascinates more than any other not just because of the poetry he is capable but because of the several transformations he undergoes.

The Arden 3rd edition’s textual notes are excellent. A lot of the introduction and appendixes focus on the decision to present the different versions of the play separately, rather than conflating them. That is new and interesting, but it leaves less room to explore the historical context and staging history of the play.

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The Spanish Tragedy

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first big hit of Elizabethan drama, and still absolutely captivating. The scene constructions and rhetorical flourishes may strike some readers as offputtingly artificial. I thought they were impressively thought out, and rich in interpretative possibilities. Kyd gives us a play within a play within a play. The personification of Revenge orchestrates the action, coming to embody the protagonist Hieronimo who in turn stages a play that enacts his revenge. The pivotal scene in which he discovers the letter revealing the murderers of his son, which can feel quite arbitrary, can be staged in such a way that has Revenge come in to press his thumb on the scale and kickstart the revenge plot. The guiding hand of providence makes good in the end, delivering a sense of poetic and dramatic justice. It must have felt powerfully cathartic to an audience who were used to burying their children to have a figure embody and enact extra-worldly justice on the stage, although the disaster that ensues might complicate the response of a modern audience. Anyone interested in Shakespeare or the theatre of his day needs to read this play.

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The White Devil

The White Devil by John Webster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Extremely plot-heavy to its detriment. Webster doesn’t have his characters explain themselves to the audience in soliloquy so it’s often hard to determine why they are doing what they are doing. The general sense conveyed is of courtiers and lovers driven to hysteria and madness as a result of serving the whims of their powerful patrons. Poison pervades the court and few escape it. The sham trial in the middle of the play is its finest moment. The ending is very confused.

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The Duchess of Malfi

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hard to find a character in literature that embraces chaos more than Bosola – a scholar and a soldier who turns himself into a spy and assassin before rediscovering a sense of morality at the end, when it’s too late. The play continually makes reference to the melancholic humour of the characters – a kind of worldly depressive attitude that leads to ethical nihilism. It is the Duchess who provides an alternative model of being – confident in asserting her desires and dutiful towards her family. She is a shining light in the darkness, and cannot survive the maniacal melancholics who surround her. This play is not quite as outrageous as John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity, but it comes close. I’m all for it.

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The Tamer Tamed

The Tamer Tamed by John Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rare case where the sequel improves on the original, showing that The Taming of the Shrew’s dodgy sexual politics were questioned even in Shakespeare’s day. Fletcher turns the tables on the flamboyant “wife-breaker” by having the women in the play group together to go on strike and demand conditions for better treatment. There’s a bit of balancing there, as some of the demands seem then as now quite frivolous – Maria making free with her husband’s wealth in a way that doesn’t quite square with the responsible management of the household. But arguably this is just another ploy to “break” Petruchio’s will. Once achieved, Maria promises mutuality and obedience, although as the play’s beginning suggests, these promises at a play’s end don’t always last a marriage.

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The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Solidifies my theory that Shakespeare didn’t write any great plays in the first seven years of his career, with the possible exception of Love’s Labour’s Lost (and even then I find that play hard to like). Emma Smith makes a good case for the fundamental ambiguity of whether Katherine is in fact tamed by Petrucio – the text leaves options open for different stagings. For what it’s worth, Katherine’s extended capitulation speech at the end of the play suggests to me an acceptance of her fate, rather than an ironic and hostile attitude to it. Shakespeare would grow out of the urge to humble his active and opinionated heroines, and his plays became better for it.

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Othello

Othello by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Othello's constant vows to heaven and his romantic view of himself sets up his marriage to Desdemona in such idealised terms that they demand interrogation – which the villainously sceptical Iago is more than happy to provide. The play was written in close proximity to Measure for Measure, which is very interested in how moral purity turns people into hypocrites – Angelo and Isabella are maneuvered by the 'Duke of dark corners' into sordid compromises. In Othello, sexual jealousy is the rotten apple in the barrel. Othello and Desdemona are more sympathetic figures than Angelo and Isabella, and Iago is more straightforwardly evil than Duke Vincentio, but there's a similar dynamic of heavenly ideals being dragged by the devil into hell. Iago's resentment is the driving factor in this process – all ideals must be torn down as a result of being overlooked for promotion. The real hero in the story is his wife Emilia, who betrays and exposes him in the end, but also shows Desdemona a more realistic attitude to love and marriage, one that reflects Rosalind's lectures to Orlando in As You Like It. Between heaven and hell is the world, and to live in it requires abandoning the absolutist attitudes that destroy the couple in the play.

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The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this play after The Jew of Malta does give an insight into Shakespeare’s temperament in my view. Marlowe’s villain is a caricature that nonetheless delights the audience with the audacity of his evil plots. Marlowe’s flamboyant personality and unorthodox opinions shine through. Shylock is also clearly a villain, but Shakespeare cannot help but fill out the sense of grievance that motivates his desire for revenge. He is in successive scenes abhorrent, pitiful and a figure of fun. Shakespeare is a man that sees all the angles. The ambiguity of his depictions in his plays I suspect reveals the reticence of his judgements in real life.

The Merchant of Venice isn’t quite as finely balanced as more political plays like Richard II or Julius Caesar. Antonio, the titular Merchant, is clearly a more heroic figure than Shylock, even if he does spit at and berate him. The play contrasts the self-interested practice of usury with Antonio and Bassanio’s open-hearted generosity. The financial metaphors for love that abound in the play ironise this liberality, but ultimately the play celebrates it. Shylock’s greatest sin may be his miserliness. It is incumbent on the fortunate to give and forgive freely.

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