Abstract
The three “GRAND THEMES OF WESTERN LITERATURE,” ACCORDING TO Susan Jacoby in Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, are love, “the acquisition of worldly goods” and power, and revenge.’ As much as love, as much as power, as much as wealth, revenge is a primary motive for the behavior of many dramatic characters and remains one of the major themes of world drama. A cataloging of the great plays of world drama demonstrates that revenge was an early, common, and important theme. Beginning with the Greeks and plays like Medea and continuing through the theatre of Rome, where Seneca’s plays of revenge such as Thyestes later served as a model for the Renaissance dramatists, the Western theatrical tradition is firmly rooted in revenge.
No more tears now; I will think upon revenge.
—Mary, Queen of Scots, on hearing of Riccio’s death (March 9, 1566)
Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind, And makes it fearful and degenerate; Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.
—Queen Margaret, Henry VI (act 2, bk. 4, scene 4, lines 1–3)
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Notes
Susan Jacoby, Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 14.
Ueno Yoshiko, ed., Hamlet and Japan (New York: AMS, 1995); Kawatake Toshio, Nihon no Hamuretto (Tokyo: Nansōsha, 1972).
Laurence R. Kominz, Avatars of Vengeance (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 1995); James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter, eds., Kabuki Plays on Stage, Volume 2: Villainy and Vengeance, 1773–1799 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002). Although the subtitle of volume two indicates that several of the plays contained therein focus on revenge, several other revenge plays, including several discussed in this book, are also in the third volume, Kabuki Plays on Stage, Volume 3:Darkness and Desire, 1804–1864 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002).
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 14.
Ibid. Girard is being rather Eurocentric on this point, as in many non-Western cultures revenge is not only not proscribed, it is morally mandated.
Linda Anderson, A Kind of Wild Justice: Revenge in Shakespeare’s Company (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 13; Ikegami Eiko, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 215.
Sasayama Takeshi, “Tragedy and Emotion: Shakespeare and Chikamatsu,” in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (London: Associated Universities Press, 1994), 141.
John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 20–21.
Ashley H. Thorndike, “The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays,” PMLA 17, no. 2 (1902): 125–220.
English Renaissance revenge tragedy, while a fluid genre, includes Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587); Kyd’s Hamlet and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (both 1589); Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1591); Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (both 1600); Chettle’s Hoffman (1602); Chapman’s The Tragedy of Bussy d’Ambois (1604); Middelton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606); Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1610); Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy, Middleton’s The Maiden’s Tragedy and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (each 1611); Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Valentinian (1614) and The Bloody Brother (1619); Drue’s The Bloody Banquet (1620); Middleton’s Women Beware Women; Massinger’s The Duke of Milan and The Unnatural Combat and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changling (each 1621); Goffe’s Orestes (1623); D’Avenant’s Albovine and Shirley’s The Maid’s Revenge (1626); Heminge’s The Jew’s Tragedy (1628); Heminge’s The Fatal Contract (1630); Shirley’s The Traitor (1631); Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Massinger’s The Fatal Dowry (both 1632); Glapthorne’s Revenge for Honour (1640); and Shirley’s The Cardinal (1641).
Lily B. Campell, “Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England,” Modern Philology 28 (1931): 281–96; Fredson Bowers, “The Audience and the Revenger of Elizabethan Tragedy,” Studies in Phililogy 31 (1934): 160–75, and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587–1642 (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1959); Elinor Bevan “Revenge, Forgiveness, and the Gentleman,” Review of English Literature 8, no. 3 (1967): 55–69; Ronald Broude “Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England,” Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975): 38–58; Charles A. and Elaine S. Hallett, The Revenger’s Madness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980); Harry Keyishian, The Shapes of Revenge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1995); and Eileen Allman, Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999).
Jagannath Chakravorty, The Idea of Revenge in Shakespeare (Calcutta: Jadavpur University Press, 1969), 2; Mary Bonaventure Mroz, Divine Vengeance: A Study in the Philosophical Backgrounds ofthe Revenge Motif as It Appears in Shakespeare’s Chronicle History Plays (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1941), 3; Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973); Peter Mercer, Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987).
Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge, 71–72.
An example of this would be Macbeth, which features several vendettas, not least of which is Macduff’s and Malcolm’s against Macbeth because Macbeth killed Macduff’s wife and children and Malcolm’s father. Ghosts are present, accusing those who killed them. For all this, however, the play does not follow the traditional revenge format. Revenge is not at the center of the play, and the making of the revenger does not really occur. Macduff has no moral uncertainly about killing the man who killed his family.
Arthur Wise, The Art and History of Personal Combat (Greenwich: Arma, 1971).
For more on the similarities on English and Spanish revenge dramas, see Louis Fothergill-Payne and Peter Fothergill-Payne, Parallel Lives: Spanish and English National Drama, 1580–1680 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), especially the essays by Sharon Dalgren Voros and Frederick A. de Armas.
D. E. Mills, “Kataki-uchi: The Practice of Blood-Revenge in Pre-Modern Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 10, no. 4 (1976): 528–29.
Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (New York: New American Library, 1946), 116.
Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, 247.
Ibid., 244.
Ibid., 248.
Ibid., 249.
Ibid., 250.
Mills, “Kataki-uchi,” 531.
Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, 251.
For assertions of this privileging, see Samuel L. Leiter, New Kabuki Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 372; and Stanley Jones, Jr., “Vengeance and
Its Toll in ‘Numazu’: An Eighteenth Century Japanese Puppet Play,” Asian Theatre Journal 7, no. 1 (1990): 42.
Kominz, Avatars of Vengeance, 8.
See Kominz, Avatars of Vengeance Appendix C (250–51) for a complete listing of the Soga nō plays.
See Barbara E. Thornbury, Sukeroku’s Double Identity: The Dramatic Structure of Edo Kabuki (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 1982) for an extended analysis of Sukeroku’s double identity as himself and a Soga brother. See Brandon, Kabuki: Five Classic Plays (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1975) for an English translation of Sukeroku: Flower of Edo.
A translation and analysis of Ya no ne can be found in Kominz, Avatars of Vengeance, as well.
Kominz, Avatars of Vengeance, 226. Haruo Shirane reports on the popularity of the theme of vendetta in gōkan, nineteenth-century bound picture books, and kibyōshi, late eighteenth-century picture books (Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 [New York: Columbia University Press, 2002], 80). From the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, Shirane argues, vendetta remained a popular theme in much of early modern Japanese literature. When one combines the influence of popular literature with the prevalence of vengeance in the theatre, one begins to understand how deeply revenge was entrenched in Japanese popular culture.
Maruyama Saiichi, Chushingura towa nanika (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1984), 243.
Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, 224.
Donald Shivley, “Bakufu Versus Kabuki,” in A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance, ed. Samuel L. Leiter (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 34.
Numerous sources give the story of the Akō vendetta. The editor recommends Donald Shively, “Tokugawa Plays on Forbidden Topics,” in James R. Brandon’s Chūshingura: Studies in Kabuki and the Puppet Theatre (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1982); and Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, chapter 11 of which is entitled “The Vendetta of the Forty-Seven Samurai.”
Shively, “Bakufu,” 35.
Donald Keene, “Introduction,” in Chūshingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 6.
David Bell, Chūshingura and the Floating World: The Representation of Kanadehon Chūshingura in Ukiyo-e Prints (Richmond: Japan Library, 2001).
Brian Powell, Kabuki in Modern Japan: Mayama Seika and His Plays (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 158.
Ibid., 174.
Quotation is taken from the publicity material for the symposium, organized by Henry D. Smith II, one of the contributors to this volume and an authority on Chūshingura. The program included a film series, an exhibition of prints and books, and a series of lectures and panels. Several of the contributors to this book also presented work at the symposium.
An English language translation of act 6, “Numazu,” which is the best known and most popular section of Chikamatsu Hanji’s play, was made by Stanleigh
H. Jones, Jr. and published in Asian Theatre Journal (See Stanleigh H. Jones, Jr., “Vengeance and Its Toll in ‘Numazu’: An Eighteenth Century Japanese Puppet Play,” Asian Theatre Journal 7, no. 1(1990): 42–75).
An English translation of this play by Paul M. Griffith is available in Brandon and Leiter, Kabuki Plays on Stage: Volume 2.
An English language version of this play, translated and with an introduction by Alan Cummings, can be found in Brandon and Leiter, Kabuki Plays on Stage: Volume 2.
An English translation of the play by Mark Oshima can be found in Brandon and Leiter, Kabuki Plays on Stage: Volume 2.
See Kominz’s Avatars of Vengeance for an extended analysis of the Soga Brothers in nō and kabuki.
Paul B. Kennelly, “Ehon Gappō ga Tsuji: A Kabuki Drama of Unfettered Evil by Tsuruya Nanboku IV” Asian Theatre Journal 17, no. 2 (2000): 149.
Ibid.
Paul B. Kennelly lists the Nanboku plays, as well as giving a summary of adauchi kyōgen in the Kasei period, in his introduction to his translation of Ehon Gappō ga Tsuji (An Illustrated Picture Book of the Crossroads of Gappō, 1810), which is another of Nanboku’s adauchi kyōgen (“Ehon Gappō ga Tsuji: A Kabuki Drama,” 149–89). Tenjiku tokubei ikoku-banashi (The Tale of Tokubei from India), one of Nanboku’s four most popular plays has been translated by Kennelly in Brandon and Leiter, Kabuki Plays on Stage: Volume 2.
It should be noted that zankoku no bi is a modern term, developed by modern kabuki scholars, not to be understood in the same way as classical terminology, in much the same way that the term “revenge tragedy” was coined centuries after the Renaissance. One might note that even the scholarship of revenge drama has some parallels.
Jacoby, Wild Justice, 9.
Leonard C. Pronko, Theatre East and West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 162.
Brandon and Leiter, Kabuki Plays on Stage: Volume 2, 19.
For a full explanation of the dual identity of Sukeroku as himself and Soga brother, see Barbara E. Thornbury, Sukeroku’s Double Identity: The Dramatic Structure of Edo Kabuki (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1982).
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 143.
Alan Cummings, “The Revenge at Tengajaya: Introduction” in Brandon and Leiter, Kabuki Plays on Stage: Volume 2, 136.
Sasayama Takeshi, “Tragedy and Emotion: Shakespeare and Chikamatsu,” in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (London: Associated Universities Press, 1994), 140–41.
Alison Findlay, A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 29.
Ibid., 50, 51, 53.
Ibid., 72.
Friedrich Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1989), 88.
Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 139, 140. Dollimore’s essay is also reprinted in Stevie Simkin, Revenge Tragedy (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Dollimore, 149.
Although this formulation is a gross oversimplification, the early and established link between the theatre and the cinema in Japan is undeniable. Keiko McDonald, Japanese Classical Theatre in Films (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1994); Friends of Silent Films Association, The Benshi: Japanese Silent Film Narrators (Tokyo: Urban Connections. 2001).
Shirane, Early Modern Japanese Literature, 259.
Okamoto Shiro, The Man Who Saved Kabuki: Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censorship in Occupied Japan, trans. Samuel Leiter (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 112.
Ibid., 58–59.
James R. Brandon, “Myth and Reality: A Story of Kabuki During American Censorship, 1945–1949,” Asian Theatre Journal 23, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 64.
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© 2008 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
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Wetmore, K.J. (2008). Introduction: “Thinking Upon Revenge”. In: Wetmore, K.J. (eds) Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611283_1
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