Introduction: On Revenge Tragedy and the Shaping Influence of Classical Philosophy

This chapter examines how the modern creation of revenge tragedy as a genre has estranged theatrical revenge from most forms of philosophical inquiry in our critical hermeneutic. The first half of the introduction reveals how the constellation of conventions used to identify "revenge tragedy" imprecisely fits the plays it ostensibly describes. After charting how this contributes to obscuring the deeper philosophical investments of theatrical revenge, the chapter briefly summarizes the argument of each of the book’s chapters. The introduction argues that revenge dramatists tether their revenge narratives to specific ontological assumptions about how the worlds they create work and, in doing so, create a sense of retribution as fitting, as seeming consonant with those worlds’ most fundamental operations.

‘Vein by Vein’: The Pneumatics of Retribution in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge

This chapter argues that John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge adopts a Galenic understanding of corporeal pneumatics to debunk Stoic apatheia and reveal it as inherently incompatible with nature. Marston’s play not only represents the body’s subtlest operations as instinctively countering the trauma wrought by tragedy through its pneumatic systems. He also, by affiliating revenge with a pneumatic process of instinctive self-healing, undercuts Stoicism's broader cosmological notion of pneuma as a “containing cause,” a pervasive force that imbues the universe with rationality and provides for the Stoic sage tranquility amid suffering. By appropriating Galen's theory of corporeal pneumatics and sharing the physician-philosopher's anti-stoic sentiment, Marston creates an ontological framework for his play that situates Antonio's final vengeance as acting in accordance with how his world, at its most rudimentary levels, operates. Drawing on Galenic medical theory and anti-stoic philosophy, Marston surprisingly figures retribution as physiologically beneficial, a visceral response to trauma that addresses the body’s intrinsic need for constitutional equilibrium. In doing so, Marston’s play introduces a therapeutic register to revenge attentive, unlike the rigors of Stoicism, to the body's inherent impulse – extending even to its most attenuated material components – toward attaining palliation for the debilitating effects of physical and emotional trauma.

Fixing Moderation: Titus Andronicus and the Aristotelian Determination of Value

This chapter draws on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to argue that Shakespeare structures Titus Andronicus around the variable ways the concept of an ethical mean —the theoretical point of moral equilibrium between two diametrically opposed, immoral extremes — finds instantiation in embodied action, depending upon context. By embedding within this grotesque drama a set of prevailing ontological assumptions about the nature of genuine moderation, Shakespeare creates a narrative of retribution that – even as it horrifies – resonates as appropriate and that aligns with a predicating notion of value recognized by both Romans and Goths – even if, at key moments in their abrogation of it – as indeed integral to the very mechanics governing the world they inhabit.

‘A Fine Pate Full of Fine Dirt’: Hamlet Among the Atomists

This chapter situates Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a late sixteenth century atomism increasingly shorn of its atheist metaphysics and Epicurean ethics. Making available new ways of thinking about matter as theoretically compatible with theistic ideas, early modern atomism provides a set of ontological assumptions that governs the playworld and shapes the course of Hamlet’s revenge. Paying special attention to two strands of atomist thought – namely, the body as particularized and the functions of perception, memory, and time as material imprints – this chapter reads Hamlet’s understanding of the dissolvable body and his attempt to remold the court's collective memory, the most proximate record of historical time, as of a piece. Hamlet's revenge, consonant with his prior ways of conceptualizing embodied existence, functions as a kind of material accretion to the past. In his brooding and revenge, Hamlet seeks comfort, then, in the prospect of a reassuringly enduring materiality but a comfort that remains theoretical and contingent. The most intense poignancy of his tragic demise emerges from Hamlet’s surprisingly persistent refusal to abandon the tantalizing, if elusive, consolations proffered by the material world itself.

Oeconomia and the Vegetative Soul: Thomas Kyd’s Naturalisation of Revenge in the Spanish Tragedy

This chapter uncovers a lost philosophical substructure for Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, one which shapes the play's central class antagonisms. Through his sophisticated revision of Aristotelian faculty psychology, Kyd appropriates early modern understandings of the vegetative soul – the imperceptible source of all reproduction, nutrition, and growth inherent in all living things – to reveal middling ambition as a natural phenomenon. By presenting the latent desire for growth and development as the consequence of an innate psychology, Kyd’s play transforms revenge into an understandable outgrowth of thwarted ambition, a type of reproduction by absence, when all lawful means of material advancement become foreclosed. Revenge thus appears throughout The Spanish Tragedy as instinctively reproductive, a naturalization of retribution accomplished via the dramatist’s clever situation of the revenge narrative within a complex, though accessible, ontological framework that subtly exerts its force on the audience throughout the play.

Prohairesis on the Inside: The Duchess of Malfi and Epictetian Volition

This chapter traces the indebtedness of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi to Epictetian philosophy. For Epictetus, those who assent to false impressions, or phantasiai, enslave themselves, lessening their humanity. Conversely, those who reject false impressions remain free and fully human, however physically enslaved they might otherwise be. While the doctrines of Epictetian philosophy may seem a retreat from the political sphere into the untouchable recesses of an imperceptible interiority, Webster's play reveals the threat such a radical notion of liberty might pose to a repressive political system. For the playwright subtly depicts the prospect that solidarity across the various strata of society, built upon a shared sense of interior liberty, could prevail, where secret defiance and violent rebellion had not, in displacing systemic inequity. By aligning Bosola's revenge, as well as the Duchess' remarriage and death, with a strain of Epictetian prohairesis, Webster tethers the play's multiple acts of resistance into a complex yet coherent ontological ground. In doing so, he figures the imperceptible stirrings of human volition as a potent political force – if distributed broadly among the dehumanized and dispossessed – rife with revolutionary potential.

Epilogue: A Kind of Sensible Justice

This brief epilogue revisits prominent early modern commentaries on revenge in order to show how theater, by doing philosophy in the ways illuminated in the book, investigates in a more expansive manner the relation between ontological assumption and embodied action found in the era's expository prose. Early modern authors commonly describe justice, in whatever form it takes, as the sensible scourges delivered by the invisible hand of God. In closing, this chapter discusses theater's distinctive capacity for exploring – with considerable more latitude than possible in didactic texts centered on religious, legal, or political theory – the complexities inherent in tracing embodied action to its various ontological roots.