Elizabethan Tragedy: Revengers and Over Reachers

by David Hamilton (September 2012)

The great period of English tragic drama was the Elizabethan period when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne. There were two principle forms: Revenge and Over Reachers tragedies. I examine two of each to introduce a new audience to these great plays.

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd is a neglected masterpiece but began the fashion for one of the two principle forms of Elizabethan tragic drama the Revenge play. The other was the Over Reacher and begun coterminously by Christopher Marlowe. Spanish Tragedy is very theatrical and uses highly formalised language in a line by line movement of blank verse for the sinister parts and prose for the comic patches. It is not hum drum because of the theatrical action presented and the dramatic declamatory speeches. The use of rhyme would have made the form humdrum, but not the action. The dramatic method is primitive but the plotting is ingeneous. Public executions were popular at the time and often carried out in theatres.

The Spanish Tragedy mixes theatricality from Latin writer Seneca with traditional elements of dramaturgy from Morality plays. The ghost is from Seneca who uses the ghost of the Greek mythological character Tantalus to frame Thyestes. Spanish Tragedy is framed by the ghost and Revenge, an abstract character influenced by the abstract characters of Morality plays.

Oh sacred heauens, if this vnhallowed deed,
If this inhumane and barberous attempt,
If this incomparable murder thus
Of mine, but now no more my sonne
Shall pass vnreueald and vnreuenged passe,
How should we tearme your dealings to be iust,
If you vniustly deale with those that in your iustice trust?

The ougly feends do sally forth of hell,
The cloudie day my discontents records,
Early begins to regester my dreames
And driue me forth to seeke the murtherer.
Eies, life, world, heauens, hel, night and day,
See, search, show, send, some man, some meane, that may!

The characters emotions are externalised in rhetoric and the representation of grief is formalised.

Hieronimo imagines Bazulto as Horatio come back from the dead as Lear later sees Gloucester as Goneril and projects his obsession on the outside world.

Acts 1 and 2 lead up to revenge for Andrea but end in the death of Horatio. Andrea was having a relationship with Bel-Imperia which her family see as a disgrace. He was from a lower social rank. Bel-Imperia is destined for a dynastic marriage. Her family tries to rule her but she is strong willed.

Whats heere? a letter? Tush, it is not so!
A letter for Hieronimo.
Me hath my haples brother hid from thee.
Reuenge thy-selfe on Balthazar and him,
For these were they that murdered thy sonne.
Hieronimo, reuenge Horatios death,
Proof comes when Hironimo is brought a letter of confession from one of the murderers, Pedringano. There is a dark irony here as Pendringano has been duped into thinking that he will be pardoned, but is hung.

Vindicta mihi! Ay, heaven will be revenged of every ill, Nor will they suffer murder unrepaid: Then stay, Hieronimo, attend their will, For mortal men may not appoint their time. ?

The notion of final justice is revealed in the supernatural frame:

Andrea:

Revenge:

Then haste we down to meet thy friends and foes:
To place thy friends in ease, the rest in woes.

The Revenger's Tragedy

He devises an intrigue and lures his opponent while disguised as a malcontent and provokes discord amongst his enemies leading them to plot against each other. His disguise allows him to act as a detached, satirical and didactic commentator on the folly and evil of the others. The form is loose enough to allow the sequences to unfold at length 1, iii, ll.1, lV.ii.

Vindice is quite mad when he dons his disguise and his hired by Lechery to seduce what is actually his own sister. This sets up a nice irony as he is hired again later as himself to murder his disguised self which is comical on the stage. Black comedy was not a type then though this is simila. In Kyd the method of managing the masque is irony but here it is dark comedy. ?

Their names show their characters and Vindici embodies revenge. These emblamatic names de-individualise the characters rendering them types. Vindici shows what the desire for vengeance might lead to. He intended to revenge the death of his betrothed and his father who died of discontent and had the desire to purge society of evil. He believed his motives to be pure and retained the characteristic heroic stance.

Vindice is no tragic hero like Hamlet and has no conflict with his planned revenge or hesitation as Hieronimo at the inception of the genre. He neither develops or decreases in morality, nor gains self-knowledge. His revenge draws the meditative passages into a terrible focus. The intensity of the killing of the Duke sustained by the allusive and vivid imagery is what makes the writer a tragedian. Melancholy was associated with madness as well as dark moods. It was thought to be physiological and prompted by frustrated ambition or injustice Stage-thunder represented the wrath of God in the early Revenges. Vindici showed Hippolito the skull as Hamlet does Horatio.

The exponent of Over Reachers was Christopher Marlowe. Two fine examples are The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine the Great. Marlowe gives the impression that he came early and established grand, heroic speeches. There is a sense of opening out. The over reacher over reaches in an act of Hybris by challenging the gods or thinking he is one.

Tamburlaine the Great

Is based on the life of a 14c Turk from central Asia, Timur. It is in two parts. The first part is a drama of conquest. We first see him as an obscure shepherd chieftain who defeats the King of Persia, Mycetes and then his brother Cosroe. Then he defeats Bajazet, Emperor of Turkey and finally takes Damascus from the Soldan of Egypt. These victories show the triumph of energy and ruthlesness over weak and decadent civilisations.

Part 2 was probably written because of the success of Part 1.

The first part of Tamburlaine the Great is not tragic in the formal sense as it ends with a marriage. It is serious in spirit and elevated in tone and without scenes of comic relief. These qualities allow it to be classed as a tragedy. For many other characters it is a tragedy as they are either killed or commit suicide so though the central story is not formally a tragedy, there are many tragedies around it.

It has a classical structure and is divided into 5 Acts and separate scenes and the Senecan influence on the declamatory speeches is notable. The set speeches on the bloody contents and the rejection of the comic are derived from Seneca and mingle with influences from native dramatic traditions.

Tamburlaine has to face the truth that though he thinks his energy inexhaustable he can not beat death. He first loses his wife, then he too is stricken. This play is a tragedy: Tamburlaine feels himself to be immortal, but is mortal.

Marlowe was 23 when he wrote and dismisses the work of his predecessors in the prologue:

The reaching aspiring qualities are wonderfully expressed, but after the objective, the earthly crown is a let down. He refers to the woman who will become his wife. She would be carried around in a golden sarcophagus. He speaks of his feelings for her before the wedding.

What daring god torments my body thus,
And seeks to conquer mighty Tamburlaine?
Shall sickness prove me now to be a man,
Techelles and the rest, come, take your swords,
And threaten him whose hand afflicts my soul:
Come, let us march against the powers of heaven,
And set black streamers in the firmament,
To signify the slaughter of the gods.
Ah, friends, what shall I do? I cannot stand.
Come, carry me to war against the gods,
That thus envy the health of Tamburlaine.

Then:

Why, shall I sit and languish in this pain?
No, strike the drums, and, in revenge of this,
Come, let us charge our spears, and pierce his breast
Whose shoulders bear the axis of the world,
That, if I perish, heaven and earth may fade.
Will him to send Apollo hither straight,
Between those defiant railings Theridamas advises:

Ah, good my lord, leave these impatient words,
Which add much danger to your malady!

Then came the reality:

Ah, friends, what shall I do? I can not stand.

A few lines on the first physician is telling him he has viewed his urine and its thickness and obscurity mean this is his end. The conqueror of the world is subject to mortality, the humiliating ordinariness of thick urine.

Doctor Faustus (c1592-4)

This was performed by The Admiral's Men twenty-five times between October 1594 and October 1597. It is based on a medieval legend of a necromancer Doctor George Faust. He was a scholar who wanted to understand more than academic facts and turned to magic. The Devil sends his agent Mephistopholes in the form of an ugly beast who is commanded to change his shape to a friar. The bargain is that Lucifer will give him 24 years of life with Mephistopholes as his servant. Then Lucifer will claim him body and soul.

These high emotions are spoken in language of an equivalent stature but the scenes where Faustus has grapes brought to him and when horses are turned into bales of straw is in prose and feeble compared to the imaginative, poetic passages. ?

It has features of a medieval morality play yet it is a Renaissance play in its treatment. The psychology of Faustus and Mephistopholes shows an insight which is moving.

Is this intentionally or unintentionally bathetic? ?

The opening of Doctor Faustus shows the aspiring mind at its most vigorous. Tamburlaine sought his satisfaction through physical power, Faustus through intellectual power and knowledge.

We admire his vain strivings and are appalled by the narrow chorus but the hopelessness of his quest is always in mind. There is a sense of moral ambiguity about Faustus and Tamburlaine generated by the gap between their aspirations and our response to those, and the means they use to pursue them and our response to those means.

(1) ?The Spanish tragedy ?

http://www.archive.org/stream/spanishtragedy030372mbp/spanishtragedy030372mbp_djvu.txt

http://www.tech.org/~cleary/reven.html

(3) Tamburlaine the Great

http://www.online-literature.com/marlowe/tamburlaine-the-great-part-i/

http://www.online-literature.com/marlowe/tamburlaine-the-great-part-ii/

(4) The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/cmarlowe/bl-cmarlowe-faust.htm

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