The Revengers Tragedy

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The Revengers Tragedy

• Or, Middleton misses the great political drama

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Pope Clement VII (Guilio de Medici) dies 1534
Cellini kissing the feet of the dying Pontiff
Overnight, his corpse, lying in state in the
Vatican, is transfixed with a sword, excrement
is smeared on the cataphalque
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Alessandro de Medici, the Popes son (dies in
1537)
Florence, notionally a Republic, had him
installed as Duke. Without his father to restrain
him, builds a huge fortress in Florence, and runs
amok
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And his assassin, Lorenzacchio

• Lorenzino, or
• Lorenzacchio
• (Bad Lorenzo)
• Debauchee, playwright, author, murderer
• (The original Vindice!)

Arrives in Florence from Rome. Shares
Allesandros debaucheries and violence
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Apology for a Murder a new edition!
Lorenzinos account of his tyrannicide
1537 Lorenzacchio tells Alessandro that
whoever can seduce Caterina Soderini Ginori,
the virtuous wife of an elderly husband, is a
real man. Persuades Alessandro that he can bring
her to him. A. leaves his bodyguard, waits in
bed But instead of sex, he gets death
Lorenzacchio arrives with an assassin named
Scoroncolo they stab him to death.
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Tyrannicide?

• Across Europe, a debate about Lorenzacchios
  motives was it a tyrannicide like Brutuss, or
  an act of petty personal hatred?
• Carries the idea of the debauchee trapped by
  exploitation of his own depraved desires

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The Lorenzacchio Story

• From his own Apology, into Marguerite of
  Navarres Heptameron (1558), and on into a
  translation in George Painters collection, The
  Palace of Pleasure (1575), Middletons source. In
  the course of this, the rape victim (Caterina
  Soderini Ginori) turns into the murderers
  sister, then fiancée (Gloriana). The story
  de-politicises into a drama of family honour.

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The political masterpiece

• Alfred de Musset, Lorenzacchio, 1834. The
  greatest French Romantic historical drama. In it,
  to gain Alessandros confidence, Lorenzacchio
  pretends to be a libertine but is corrupted by
  his own pretence, and turns into a real
  debauchee. Finally kills the Duke, when only the
  act of murder still ties him to his earlier
  idealistic self.

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Anonymous printing, 1607
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Middletons play

• Since D. J Lake, The Canon of Middletons Plays,
  1975.
• Vindices revenge on the Duke for the death of
  his fiancee, Gloriana. He carries her skull
  around as a reminder, the duke will die by being
  brought to kiss the masked, poisoned skull the
  bony lady with somewhat a grave look about her

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Somewhat like this
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• Missing the political dimension, Middleton turns
  his Lorenzacchio-Vindice play into a play about
  revenge.
• Revenge is always morally problematic (take not
  the quarrel from His powerful arm Vengeance
  is mine, saith the Lord)
• Middletons satire further complicates the effect

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The problematic morality of the revenger moral
compromise in revenge

• Duke What are you two?
• Vindice Villains all three! The very raggèd bone
  
• Has been sufficiently revengd
• (III v 150ff)
• Vindice has reduced Gloriana to a villain,
  just as he himself has declined from full
  humanity into a monomaniac

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John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy

• From Aeschylus to Armageddon
• The symmetry of revenge when B, injured by A,
  does to A what A did to him, he makes himself
  resemble the opponents he has blamed, while he
  transforms his enemy into the kind of victim he
  once was
• Middletons plot equates the perpetrator and the
  victim the Dukes corpse is dressed in Piatos
  (ie, Vindices) clothes.

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The masked skull

• The central emblem of the text.
• BUT, it has two competing levels of meaning
• 1. Vicious intention lurking behind a sumptuous
  mask the plays satirical message many major
  speeches turn on court finery, clothes which are
  sinful in their extravagance, adorning the
  immoral.

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Dance Macabre

• 2. The masked skull as a moral emblem from the
  dance of death tradition, Death suddenly
  revealing itself to the sinner
• Duality of effect
• the sinner behind the gorgeous exterior
• retribution arrives to surprise the sinner.

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Give me thy last breath, thou infected bosom!

• Jacobean sex-horror the syphilitic embrace, the
  poisoned kiss.
• Poisoned kiss as a motif in Middleton end of
  Women beware Women, and in The Second Maidens
  Tragedy, where the necrophiliac tyrant dies when
  he kisses the Ladys corpse, made-up by the
  hero.

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Mad Jacobean Courtly splendour
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Trevor Nunns debut direction, 1966
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Did I not draw the model of his death?
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Tis murders best face when a vizards on.
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Alex Coxs film, 2002
Derek Jacobi as the depraved Duke, Christopher
Eccleston as Vindice
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Does the silk worm expend her yellow labours for
thee?
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Walk with a hundred acres on their backs Fair
meadows cut into green foreparts
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Whome we thinke are, are not, we mistake
those,Tis we are mad in sense, they but in
clothes.
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Still sighing over deaths vizard?
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See, ladies, with false forms You deceive
men, but cannot deceive worms
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A film recommendation poisoned kisses, the full
works
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Venetia Stanley (Digby) on her death-bed, by Van
Dyck
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Sir Kenelm Digby, 1633

• 'is the Master peece of all the excellent ones
  that ever Sir Anthony Vandike made, who drew her
  the second day after she was dead and hath
  expressed with admirable art every circumstance
  about her, as well as the exact manner of her
  lying, as for the likenesse of her face and hath
  altered or added nothing about it, excepting
  onely a rose lying upon the hemme of the sheete,
  whose leaves being pulled from the stalke in the
  full beauty of it, and seeming to wither apace,
  even whiles you looke upon it, is a fitt Embleme
  to express the state her bodie then was in'.

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In this cold Monument lies one,        
That I know who has lain upon,         The
happier He her Sight would charm,         And
Touch have kept King David warm.         Lovely,
as is the dawning East,         Was this
Marble's frozen Guest         As soft, and
Snowy, as that Down         Adorns the
Blow-balls frizled Crown         As straight
and slender as the Crest,         Or Antlet of
the one beam'd Beast         Pleasant as th'
odorous Month of May         As glorious, and
as light as Day.         Whom I admir'd, as soon
as knew,         And now her Memory pursue
        With such a superstitious Lust,        
That I could fumble with her Dust.         She
all Perfections had, and more,         Tempting,
as if design'd a Whore,         For so she was
and since there are         Such, I could wish
them all as fair.         Pretty she was, and
young, and wise,         And in her Calling so
precise,         That Industry had made her
prove         The sucking School-Mistress of
Love         And Death, ambitious to become
        Her Pupil, left his Ghastly home,
        And, seeing how we us'd her here,
        The raw-bon'd Rascal ravisht her.
        Who, pretty Soul, resign'd her Breath,
        To seek new Letchery in Death.
Cotton, Charles, 1630-1687  An Epitaph on M. H.
as a farewell piece of 17th century
sex-and-death