Revenge and Gender in Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Literature by Lesel Dawson Fiona McHardy

Author:Lesel Dawson,Fiona McHardy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

CHAPTER 9

‘Women’s Weapons’: Education and Female Revenge on the Early Modern Stage

Chloe Kathleen Preedy

‘My tables! Meet it is I set it down’, exclaims the most famous revenger of the early modern theatre, as he employs the study methods he has acquired at university to record a ghost’s lesson of murder and retribution.1 While initially promising that ‘thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain’ (1.5.102–3), Hamlet will later rely on his prior learning to test the truth of his uncle’s guilt, composing ‘a speech of some dozen lines’ that, inserted into The Murder of Gonzago, enables him to try the king and ‘tent him to the quick’ (2.2.477, 532). This association between words and violent action, the humanist education system and the pursuit of revenge, became even more emphatic in Jacobean drama, when the figure of the malcontent – often depicted as a socially ambitious scholar whose prospects for advancement have been blocked by entrenched aristocratic privilege – gained in popularity.2 From De Flores in The Changeling and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, to Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy and the eponymous protagonist of Antonio’s Revenge, Jacobean revengers invite audiences to reflect on the relationship between humanist learning, with its emphasis on proper governance and moral education, and the violent retribution that they enact upon corrupt rulers and unjust societies. Hinting at early modern doubts about whether humanism would be able to live up to its ideals in practice,3 such characters are credited with the ability to ‘manipulate a fluid and contingent world with a dramatist’s inventiveness and authority’; as John Kerrigan has shown, the early modern revenger becomes a ‘surrogate artist’, ‘transmuting creative ambition into narrative and stage action’.4 The educational heritage that these fictional characters share with their creators is especially significant. Early modern playwrights and their metatheatrical protagonists both drew inspiration from classical models: the Roman author Seneca’s influence on Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge drama has long been recognised by critics, while Tanya Pollard’s chapter in this collection demonstrates how early modern authors responded to and reworked the legacy of ancient Greek tragedy.5 Yet the significance of the associations between humanist education and revenge action for the female avengers of sixteenthand seventeenth-century drama have not yet been fully addressed. Examining the revenge plots of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, this chapter argues that women’s literacy and classical knowledge play a crucial role in scripting vengeance, enabling educated women to participate actively in the process of revenge rather than being banished to the margins.6

If the consequences of humanist learning concerned some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers, women’s education was an especially controversial topic. Although some humanist commentators suggested that education would aid a female pupil’s moral development, others argued that there was something ‘intrinsically indecorous’ about a woman who violated the ‘social code of modest silence’.7 The educated woman was often ambiguously portrayed in humanist texts, popular pamphlets, and plays as a potentially unruly figure: ‘a threat in the social and sexual sphere’.

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