As the early modern statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon writes in his Essays, ‘Revenge is a kinde of Wilde Justice; which the more Mans Nature runs to, the more ought Law to weed it out. For as for the first Wrong, it doth but offend the Law; but the Revenge of that wrong, putteth the Law out of Office’ (“Of Revenge”). In Bacon’s view, revenge is not only a matter of personal satisfaction; it is a destructive force that is liable to unravel the fabric of the whole legal system and to shake the very foundations of society.
Late Elizabethan theatregoers were evidently fascinated by this gravitational pull of revenge and its representations on stage, as is attested by a vogue for so-called revenge tragedies in the late Elizabethan period, the crowning achievement of which is undoubtedly Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The aim of this seminar is to offer an introduction to Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy in the context of such theatrical trends and generic precursors – but also in light of Shakespeare’s own development as a dramatist. To this end, we will work our way towards Hamlet via Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587), one of the foundational texts of Elizabethan revenge tragedy and an important model for Hamlet, and via Titus Andronicus (c. 1588-93), one of Shakespeare’s earliest offerings to the stage, which allows us to trace his development in a genre that he revisited years later, in his maturity, with Hamlet (c. 1600-01).
Revenge tragedy is spectacularly violent, action-packed, and haunted by the dead, who have a habit of returning as ghosts. However, it also raises profound questions about the nature of justice, its relationship to law and divine providence, and the effects of violence in theatrical performance. Set against the backdrop of Spanish-Portuguese conflict in the Iberian Peninsula, The Spanish Tragedy explores how amorous and political intrigues push a grieving father over the edge to take justice into his own hands, while Titus Andronicus, set in a fictionalised version of the Late Roman Empire, depicts the political and moral decay of Rome in murderous political infighting. Finally, we will consider the ways in which Shakespeare’s Hamlet is indebted to The Spanish Tragedy and the tradition of revenge tragedy more generally. However, with its brooding protagonist, fashionably melancholic and given to existentialist musings instead of exacting revenge for the murder of his father, Hamlet is also a good example for Shakespeare’s habit of putting his own spin on popular theatrical forms.
- Enseignant·e: Kilian Markus Schindler