Civil Vengeance

Civil Vengeance offers a new way of conceptualizing early modern revenge and its relationship to civility. In its attention to what constitutes vengeance, the book makes visible a more comprehensive spectrum of retaliation and examines quotidian acts of revenge that support sociality and enhance the power of civil institutions. Rather than relegating vengeance to the social periphery, the book uncovers how facets of civil society—church, law, and education—rely on the dynamic of revenge to augment their power. Through its innovative readings of conduct manuals, medical tracts, legal writings, and sermons, the book proposes a revised lineage of revenge literature and places these texts alongside traditional revenge plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Shifting attention from episodic revenge to quotidian forms, Civil Vengeance theorizes anew the manner in which retaliation informs identity formation, interpersonal relationships, and the construction of the social body.

The effects of outward and inward negative emotions on consumers’ desire for revenge and negative word of mouth

Purpose All previous research seldom considered the proliferation process from the perspective of consumers or from a negative perspective to examine the desire for revenge and negative word of mouth (WOM) caused by deficiencies in innovative products. The purpose of this paper is to investigate consumers’ subsequent behaviors after they have outward and inward negative emotions such as anger and regret. The objective of this study is to explore the different effects of customers’ anger and regret on desire for revenge and negative WOM. Design/methodology/approach This research uses structural equation modeling to analyze 226 samples. Findings The results showed that regret has significant and positive effects on desire for revenge and negative WOM but anger has only a significant and positive effect on desire for revenge. Moreover, desire for revenge has a significant and positive effect on negative WOM. In addition, the desire for revenge plays a crucial mediator between anger and negative WOM as well as regret and negative WOM. Practical implications Corporations can use tangled emotions among consumers to predict the development of the desire for revenge and immediately implement remedies for deficiencies to prevent consumers from developing the desire for revenge and spreading negative WOM regarding the corporation or product, or engaging in other revenge behaviors. Corporations can easily detect and prevent the path between anger and revenge behaviors simply based on the desire for revenge. In contrast to the outward negative behavior that is anger, regret is implicit and internal. Originality/value This study explored two negative emotions of affect (anger and regret) based on affection and conation/action of the tricomponent attitude model and their different effects on consumers’ revenge behaviors such as desire for revenge and negative WOM. The contributions of this research are to clarify the different relationships between outward negative emotion (anger) and desire for revenge/negative WOM as well as inward negative emotion (regret) and desire for revenge/negative WOM.

Servants

Servants in early modern drama have increasingly been investigated less as objects of domination than as subjects capable of affective and ethical relations with their masters. Both sorts of interpretation depend upon the assumption that actual early modern servants are straightforwardly represented in drama of the time. Observing that common players were themselves patronised and liveried servants, and that the theatre itself appeared as a form of mercenary service, this chapter shows how procedures of dramatic figuration implicate identification of the servant in a complex dialectic of discernment. With roots in various sorts of contemporary social anxiety, such difficulties are at their most intense in revenge tragedy. In many places reading revenge plays involves confronting their ability to undo the social concepts used to grasp their historical content.

‘[A]dore my topless villainy’: Metatheatrical Rivalry in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge

Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge is a self-reflexive tragedy with characters who speak and act like characters familiar with the conventions of Elizabethan revenge plays. This article argues that Marston's use of metatheatricality allegorizes the competitive nature of commercial theatres. As Marston's characters seek to emulate and surpass their theatrical models, revenge becomes a medium for aesthetic achievement, a showcase for acting and rhetorical skill. The play expands the theatrum mundi trope, imagining the world not as a single stage but as a marketplace of rival stages wherein playwrights vie for applause and seek recognition for their theatrical brilliance.

‘She’s Turned Fury’: Women Transmogrified in Revenge Plays

This chapter explores early modern responses to Hecuba, arguing that whereas Euripides’ Hecuba is a sympathetic tragic heroine and successful avenger, this model was not replicated in early modern plays. Instead the two aspects of Hecuba’s role, that of lamenting mother and ruthless avenger, bifurcate in English revenge tragedy. Pitiful, mourning mothers such as Isabella from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are unsuccessful, while savage ones, such as Tamora from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, are abhorrent and aberrant, inflicting violence from a position of power. In contrast to Germany and France – where artistic treatments of the Biblical Judith decapitating General Holofernes offer a heroic, political image of female vengeance – the chapter argues that in early modern England revenge was definitively not a woman’s business.

Interiority

This chapter traces the history of theatrical interiority and shows when and why early modern theatre became invested in it. More specifically, it examines the way the enclosure of the theatres made possible not only a newly commercialized drama but also characterization and plot-structure that depended on an implied but unrevealed depth. The chapter first considers the analogy between round amphitheatres and ‘round’, complex characters before discussing the culture of the money box to establish the link between early modern theatrical economics and its aesthetics. It then looks at the play’s resistance to closure, its messiness and overcomplication, and the ‘interiority’ of its characters and how characters in later revenge plays construct interiority as negative space. It argues that characters are not people so much as playhouses, propagating the illusion of depth after depth has run out, and explains how ‘interiority’ in the early modern theatre begins as merely its exterior reinscribed—its circle reduced into the body of the actor until it became a point, elemental and ‘inviolate’.

‘Sprinkled Among your Ears’: Ben Jonson, John Marston and the Cultivation of the Listening Connoisseur

This chapter argues that Ben Jonson, John Marston, and others positioned city comedy as a sophisticated sonic alternative to the booming (in every sense) revenge plays of the 1580s and 90s. To hear and appreciate city comedy was said to require a more selective ear, being able to tune out unwanted noises while making sense of the sounds that matter. Listening well becomes in these plays one of the social skills that must be mastered in order to participate fully in city life -- in short, it becomes the stuff, or the subject matter, of city comedy. Ultimately, city comedies train men and women to hear in the very ways they suggest only the privileged few could, introducing playgoers to new auditory practices that could fundamentally transform their experience of London’s soundscapes.