Wild justice: The dynamics of gender and revenge in early modern English drama

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of the stage in cultural debate about revenge in early modern England. The theme of retribution was hugely popular in early modern drama, at a time when the emerging nation state sought to strengthen its sovereignty by monopolizing the right to punish. The stage's wide array of representations of revenge shaped the ways in which early modern culture thought about revenge.

Unlike previous literary criticism, which debated whether an Elizabethan audience approved or disapproved of acts of revenge and whether these dramatic performances would have strengthened or subverted the power of the state, Kristine Steenbergh is interested in points of conflict and shifts in thinking on revenge in the period. She does not seek to determine which concept of revenge was dominant in early modern society, but examines the contested position of the revenger in all its aspects.

Proceeding from recent work in gender studies, she argues that gender is a useful tool in mapping the stage's role in these early modern debates about revenge, conducted as they are on the cusp of such terms as civilization and barbarity, human and animal, passions and reason - oppositions that are often conceived of in gendered terms.

In three case studies, this thesis examines the dynamics of gender and revenge in early modern drama. Kristine Steenbergh shows how the dramatic tradition of the Inns of Court shaped a discourse in which private revenge is represented as feminine, passionate and excessive, and contrasted to a rational and masculine law. In the second case study, she argues that in revenge tragedy, contrasting notions of selfhood function politically in a cultural debate over the aristocracy's right to revenge. These conflicting notions of selfhood are central also to anxieties over the performance of revenge in the theatres. Finally, she analyses the role of the private London theatres in debates about the duel in early modern England.