Four Revenge Tragedies: The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore and The White Devil

by Thomas Kyd, John Ford, John Webster

Francis Bacon described revenge as a 'kind of wild justice'. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions, each of these plays presents a unique social and cultural milieu where dark fantasies of revenge are variously played out.

In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy a grieving father seeks public justice for the murder of his son by envious princelings. When his attempts are thwarted he turns a court spectacle of murder into the 'real' thing. Blackly comic in its tone and style, The Revenger's Tragedy (anon.) presents vengeance as mimetic art, witty and cruel. Ford's ' Tis Pity She's a Whore represents an innovative re-working of the genre as a brother's love for his sister leads to his spectacular revenge on his rival, her husband, in a society in which brutal retaliation for perceived wrong is the norm. In Webster's The White Devil crimes of passion ignite revenge in the courts of the Italian city states.

This student edition contains fully annotated, modernized texts of each play together with an introduction discussing the dramatic and poetic style of each play, focusing on its action and play of ideas.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Classics

596 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Thomas Kyd (baptised 6 November 1558; buried 15 August 1594) was an English dramatist, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama.

Although well known in his own time, Kyd fell into obscurity until 1773 when Thomas Hawkins (an early editor of The Spanish Tragedy) discovered that Kyd was named as its author by Thomas Heywood in his Apologie for Actors (1612). A hundred years later, scholars in Germany and England began to shed light on his life and work, including the controversial finding that he may have been the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's.

Reviews

[Mark Fuller Dillon]

John Ford, 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE (1633).

By critical consensus, the plays of John Ford represent either a last echo of popular Jacobean theatre, or early examples of a Caroline theatre designed not for the crowds, but for private viewings in palaces or in houses of the wealthy. Whatever the label, most critics agree that by this time, the vitality, the broad appeal of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy was dead, that Ford was one of the few interesting writers of this period who retained something of Jacobean vigour, and that his most interesting, most lively play, 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE, remains one of the best from its period.

I would call it a hand grenade, to be handled carefully at the risk of losing several fingers or an eye.

One reason for caution: the play's topic.

GIOVANNI:

Must I not praise

That beauty which, if framed anew, the gods

Would make a god of if they had it there,

And kneel to it, as I do kneel to them?

FRIAR:

Why, foolish madman!

GIOVANNI:

Shall a peevish sound,

A customary form, from man to man,

Of brother and of sister, be a bar

'Twixt my perpetual happiness and me?

Say that we had one father, say one womb

(Curse to my joys!) gave both us life and birth:

Are we not therefore each to other bound

So much the more by nature, by the links

Of blood, of reason (nay, if you will have't,

Even of religion), to be ever one,

One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?

[Act I, Scene i]

Like many teenagers before and since, Giovanni knows that he knows everything, and that his will, his desires, transcend social norms and accepted customs.

GIOVANNI:

What I have done I'll prove both fit and good.

It is a principle, which you have taught

When I was yet your scholar, that the frame

And composition of the mind doth follow

The frame and composition of the body;

So where the body's furniture is beauty,

The mind's must needs be virtue; which allowed,

Virtue itself is Reason but refined,

And Love the quintessence of that. This proves

My sister's beauty, being rarely fair,

Is rarely virtuous; chiefly in her love,

And chiefly in that love, her love to me.

If hers to me, then so is mine to her,

Since in like causes are effects alike.

[Act II, Scene v]

What Giovanni ignores is the weight of the world's countering opinion.

FRIAR:

O ignorance in knowledge! Long ago

How often have I warned thee this before!

Indeed, if we were sure there were no deity,

Nor heaven nor hell, then to be led alone

By nature's light -- as were philosophers

Of elder times -- might instance some defence;

But 'tis not so. Then, madman, thou wilt find

That nature is in heaven's positions blind.

[Act II, Scene v]

Luckily (or unluckily) for Giovanni, his beloved sister is more than willing to love him back. For Annabella, the long line of suitors eager to win her hand might as well not exist; her one true love is her brother.

ANNABELLA :

This noble creature was in every part

So angel-like, so glorious, that a woman

Who had not been but human as was I,

Would have kneeled to him, and have begged for love.

You -- why you are not worthy once to name

His name without true worship, or indeed,

Unless you kneeled, to hear another name him.

[Act IV, Scene iii]

The first unsettling aspect of this play is the implication that these lovers are indeed sincere. Despite the hardships that eat away at their secret union, they remain devoted and loyal to each other.

The second unsettling detail is the brutal ferocity of the other characters towards Annabella. Like the enemies of the Duchess in John Webster's THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, these men seem to resent her mainly because she openly, honestly, and courteously follows her own path. Circumstances are complicated (perhaps over-complicated) by plotters in disguise, by daily betrayals, by feuds between the suitors, but in all of this, Annabella, despite her incest, comes across as the better human being.

Yet as we know, history is written by the victors. The final judgement of the victors in this play is that Annabella was a despicable whore, which ignores her actions and her personality. Whether this harsh assessment of her character was also John Ford's remains impossible to tell, but much of the lingering bitterness of this play comes from the unfairness, the cruelty of the men.

If Annabella seems more innocent, more pure than the men around her, Giovanni carries the weight of a more complex mind. At the play's end, he becomes a full revenger against those who persecute his sister, yet his own "solution" to the challenge of his love is just as brutal as theirs. The play foreshadows this end in many lines, but it remains horrific. For some readers, this might seem over the top, but in the traditions of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy, the spectacle of gore fits right in.

While John Ford shares with Webster and Shakespeare this passion for bloodshed, he lacks their genius for metaphors and imagery. Instead, he offers a smoothly elegant dramatic language that brings pleasures of its own.

ANNABELLA:

Methinks you weep.

GIOVANNI:

I do indeed: these are the funeral tears

Shed on your grave; these furrowed up my cheeks

When first I loved and knew not how to woo.

Fair Annabella, should I here repeat

The story of my life, we might lose time.

Be record all the spirits of the air,

And all things else that are, that day and night,

Early and late, the tribute which my heart

Hath paid to Annabella’s sacred love

Hath been these tears, which are her mourners now.

Never till now did Nature do her best

To show a matchless beauty to the world,

Which in an instant, ere it scarce was seen,

The jealous Destinies required again.

Pray, Annabella, pray. Since we must part,

Go thou white in thy soul to fill a throne

Of innocence and sanctity in heaven.

Pray, pray, my sister.

ANNABELLA:

Then I see your drift.

Ye blessed angels, guard me!

GIOVANNI:

So say I.

Kiss me. [They kiss] If ever after-times should hear

Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps

The laws of conscience and of civil use

May justly blame us, yet when they but know

Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour

Which would in other incests be abhorred.

Give me your hand. How sweetly life doth run

In these well-coloured veins! How constantly

These palms do promise health! But I could chide

With Nature for this cunning flattery.

Kiss me again. Forgive me.

ANNABELLA:

With my heart. [They kiss]

[Act V, Scene v]

What we have, then, is a play of elegant poetry, undeniable power, and an overwhelming bitterness. Readers will respond as they will; for my part, I admire the play even as I wince at the sting of its venom.

[Danielle Seay]

[he kisses the skull]