Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England by Rieger Gabriel A.; Ostovich Dr. Helen ;

Author:Rieger, Gabriel A.; Ostovich, Dr. Helen ;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Much of the action of The Revenger’s Tragedy echoes the themes and spirit of the Danse Macabre, including its mordant contempt for the living body and its pleasures. In this tragedy, bodily pleasure is constantly being attacked and reconstructed as vehicle for damnation—the drunkard suffers “wet damnation,” the epicure is “cloy[ed]” with empty dishes, and the lecher is corroded alive when he kisses a poisoned skull. In this reading, Gloriana gets to “kill” her poisoner, corrupting him as he attempted to corrupt her. Gloriana takes the upper hand sexually, seducing the Duke just as he attempted to seduce her. The irony of this dynamic is richly satisfying for Vindice, as well as for his audience.

It is important to remember here that this echoing of the Danse is not mere spectacle, at least in the Renaissance conception. Holbein’s woodcuts are certainly spectacular and are highly entertaining, but they were originally intended to serve as devotionals. The primary purpose of the memento mori was to help prepare the sinner for his death. As Michael Neill tells us, their purpose was “to induce pious meditation on the ephemerality of life and the insubstantial nature of worldly success” (165). In the hands of the Calvinist Thomas Middleton, this piety, while it is not diminished by the new context which the playwright provides (the play is filled with admonitions to the sinner to repent), is reconstructed as something more vibrant and both more viscerally and intellectually engaged. The playwright builds upon the satiric impulses of the Danse and uses them to heighten the force of his own dramatic satire, drawing upon the pervasive sense of irony, ridicule, and bodily contempt (in particular the imagery of the pox) to construct a world which is irredeemably damned by corporeal desire.

Neill explains that the thrust of the Danse Macabre is “as much secular as pious” since Death “takes a sardonic relish in the terror and humiliation he inflicts upon the great”(166). This is certainly to Vindice’s purpose as he attacks the court. Like the medieval Death, Vindice is the satirist, and in his attack against the empowered court he draws upon not only the devotional imagery of Holbein and others but also upon the traditional duality of the satirist - he is at the same time the saint and the sinner, the moralist and the murderer. He gets to enact terrible crimes and engage all manner of vice, and yet he is justified because he is doing so in the service of virtue. At the same time, however, this duality is not without its cost. Vindice cannot attack the court with perfect detachment; he suffers in his role as satiric aggressor, particularly when he must corrupt his own mother. He also cannot attack the court with perfect impunity; dramatic orthodoxy requires that he be punished at the tragedy’s end.

When Vindice finally does take his vengeance upon the Duke, he does so in language which, like the language he employs at the play’s opening, mimics the condition of the pox.

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