The Revenger’s Tragedy: Mirror and Dagger

Abstract

The homily on human corruption delivered by Marston’s Antonio as he stands poised on the edge of his revenge seems oddly superfluous. The evil that he faces emanates specifically from the villain, not from the general condition of humanity. And such moralising is a strange preface to an act so savage that it far exceeds any conceivable moral justification. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, however, written perhaps six or seven years after both Antonio’s Revenge and Hamlet, moral outrage at the vices of mankind, far from being an uneasy intrusion, itself drives the revenge action; indeed, it energises the whole play. It has long been recognised that the peculiar tone of Tourneur’s play* springs from its deep dependence upon medieval traditions both of drama (the Moralities) and satire (the literature of complaint). So John Peter has argued that Vindice is not cynical about virtue but, simply, passionately concerned about sin.¹ Far from exhibiting a cynical and horrible vision of life peculiar to Tourneur (as Eliot thought), the play is entirely orthodox. A homiletic tradition that had, by the late sixteenth century, grown somewhat threadbare in its antique misanthropy has here been transformed into what Peter considers ‘something commendably close to an ideal satiric play’.²