Fashioning English Whiteness in The Revenger’s Tragedy

PA RT T W O History and Topicality 33802_05_CH05.indd 111 22/05/2017 14:51 33802_05_CH05.indd 112 22/05/2017 14:51 5 Fashioning English Whiteness in The Revenger’s Tragedy Katherine Gillen About to protest that he cannot stand to watch his bastard son have sex with his wife, the Duke in Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy utters the words ‘I cannot brook –’ (3.5.219), at which point the avenger Vindice interrupts him with the punning line, ‘The brook is turned to blood’ (3.5.219). Vindice’s quip attests to the massive quantities of blood that wash through the Italian court, as variants of the words ‘blood’ and ‘bleed’ appear thirty-six times. Often this blood is physical, used in the sense of ‘Blood which is or has been shed’ (OED 2a), but this usage is complicated by other connotations of the word that pertain to personal, familial or national character. Lussurioso explains his lechery, for example, with the excuse that ‘It is our blood to err, though hell gaped loud’ (1.3.74), while Vindice states that he will ‘Venture [his] lands in heaven upon’ the ‘blood’ of his sister and mother (1.3.185). The play’s instances of ‘blood’ frequently have a class dimension, as in OED deinition 9a, ‘Aristocratic birth; “good” family or 33802_05_CH05.indd 113 22/05/2017 14:51 114 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY parentage; gentility’, an association underscored by the frequent rhyming of ‘blood’ and ‘good’ in The Revenger’s Tragedy and throughout the Middleton canon. Supervacuo asserts that ‘The Duchess’ sons are too proud to bleed’ (3.1.21), and when the Duchess’s youngest son is about to be executed, he asks ‘Must I bleed, then, without respect of sign?’ (3.4.77), indicating that one’s aristocratic essence, rooted in the blood, is diffused when one bleeds, dissolving identity. Blood in The Revenger’s Tragedy, moreover, is associated with semen, another bodily luid thought to contain one’s essence and to transmit aristocratic lineage. Spurio, for instance, imagines murdering his father in lagrante delicto and predicts, ‘After your lust, O, ’twill be ine to bleed’ (2.2.125), linking blood loss to ejaculation. Throughout, The Revenger’s Tragedy’s generic concern with violently spilled blood converges with cultural understandings of blood as ‘the inherited characteristic (later as the vehicle of hereditary characteristics) distinguishing members of a common family, nation, breed, etc., from other groups’ (OED 5). As Jean Feerick has demonstrated, discourses of blood were integral to early modern thinking about race, as blood functioned as ‘a repository of sacred principles and properties, the locus of a family’s virtue and social standing’.1 Although the term ‘blood’ was originally associated with high social rank, it evolved throughout the early modern period to inform emerging understandings of race that emphasized ethnicity and phenotype. Though imagined as a stable source of familial essence, blood was also considered volatile, one of the four humours and a material substance that could not easily be contained within the body. Early modern writers, Feerick contends, emphasize this unstable aspect of blood, ‘actively interrogating its status as a transcendent signiier, the cornerstone of the social hierarchy structuring England from within’.2 By disaggregating blood from social class, these writers rethink race as a category to which they, and not just elites, could belong, and they begin to think about cultural outsiders as belonging to alternate races. The Revenger’s 33802_05_CH05.indd 114 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 115 Tragedy, I argue, participates in this cultural shift by marshalling the genre’s bloody thematics to interrogate residual class-based understandings of race and to explore the implications of emerging racial ideologies in which shared blood linked not only all English people but, potentially, all Europeans. English chastity and Italian corruption The Revenger’s Tragedy’s engagement with questions of race is shaped by its Italian setting, as Italy igured centrally within England’s negotiation of national identity. Admired as the centre of humanist learning but also reviled as a hotbed of court intrigue, lechery and idolatry, Italy simultaneously represented England’s cultural aspirations and functioned as the Catholic other against which Protestant England deined itself. As such, the Italy of the English stage is ideologically overdetermined, neither signalling the historical Italy nor functioning as a simple mirror of English politics, but rather acting as a complex construct deployed to navigate the challenges of modernity as well as questions of religious, cultural and national difference.3 A mercantile crossroads and cultural contact zone, Italy often relects anxieties about England’s increased involvement with foreign nations. These fears intensiied as James I departed from Elizabeth I’s insular foreign policy in his attempts to forge the union of Great Britain, make peace with other European countries, and expand England’s colonial reach in the Americas.4 In addition, Italy igured prominently in England’s relationship to emerging ideologies of pan-European whiteness. According to Mary Floyd-Wilson, the English sought to revise the Classical geohumoural system that took Italy as its centre and depicted the English as ‘impressible, barbaric, and inversely deined by the traits and temperament of dark peoples on the other side of the world.’5 As a result, England sought to position 33802_05_CH05.indd 115 22/05/2017 14:51 116 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY itself as central rather than peripheral to the world order; in the process, the English racialized Italians as marginally white even as they hoped to create ‘a European race that united a wide range of colors and complexions under an invisible badge of inherited superiority’.6 This paradigm, I argue, informs the racial politics of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Revenge tragedy is not often considered to speak to questions of race, as noted by Ayanna Thompson in an essay on Titus Andronicus: ‘In a genre that is obsessed with bodies, corpses, and body parts it is amazing how uninterested revenge tragedies are in race.’7 Thompson is of course correct that revenge tragedies rarely feature black bodies (with Aaron in Titus as an obvious exception); however, The Revenger’s Tragedy points to the racial implications of the genre’s conventions and thematic concerns. In particular, The Revenger’s Tragedy explores England’s fraught relationship to Italy, presenting Italy alternately as representative of foreign corruption and as a potential partner in the project of instantiating pan-European whiteness. The Revenger’s Tragedy approaches these questions of racial mixing in gendered terms, presenting a series of fair, chaste women who are violated or pursued by racialized Italian men. Deploying Elizabethan iconography in which the chaste woman’s body represents the boundaries of the nation, the play associates these women with England – most notably in the case of Gloriana, whose name evokes the idealized image of Elizabeth I. Cultural exchange is thus presented as the contamination of English blood, suggesting that union with Italy may adulterate and even subsume England’s national identity. Even as it raises such fears, however, The Revenger’s Tragedy undermines the English obsession with purity, both by associating chaste whiteness with death and by showing blood itself to be a volatile substance with the potential to compromise personal and national integrity. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s discourse of blood is informed by its preoccupation with adulterous sexuality, which is presented as a symptom of court corruption and a cause of aristocratic decline. With the Duke, the ‘royal lecher’ (1.1.1), at its head, 33802_05_CH05.indd 116 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 117 the court encourages adultery, a tendency manifested in Lussurioso’s attempt to seduce Castiza, in the Duchess’s youngest son’s rape of Antonio’s wife, and in Spurio’s willingness to have sex with his stepmother. Such behaviour is engendered by the consumptive practices of the court; the bastard Spurio attributes paternity to the food itself, claiming, ‘Some stirring dish / Was my irst father [. . .] I was begot in impudent wine and lust’ (1.2.179–80, 190). In turn, Spurio embodies adulterating chaos; he explains his decision to sleep with the Duchess by saying, ‘Adultery is my nature’ (1.2.177) and suggesting that ‘a bastard by nature should make cuckolds / Because he is the son of a cuckold-maker’ (1.2.201–2). By this logic, adultery multiplies, further corrupting bloodlines; as Vindice exclaims, ‘Now cuckolds are / A-coining, apace, apace, apace, apace’ (2.2.139–40). Adulterous sexuality connotes unnatural exchange, which produces illegitimate spurs in the family tree that challenge the sanctity of aristocratic blood and threaten to dismantle the system of primogeniture. Moreover, as Michael Neill points out, adultery in The Revenger’s Tragedy is literally adulterating, with ‘Bastardy constitut[ing] a form of adulteration because it [is] the fruit of forbidden mixture, polluting the “pure” blood of legitimate descent.’8 As it corrupts family lineages, adulterous sexuality compromises the landed aristocracy, disrupting the social hierarchies deemed essential to national stability. Vindice accuses the gentry of selling their land to buy clothing for their mistresses; loose women, he comments, ‘Walk with a hundred acres on their backs, / Fair meadows cut into green foreparts’ (2.1.210–11). As Neill notes, The Revenger’s Tragedy’s anxieties about legitimate lineage centre on the female body, as ‘the very deinition of a bastard as “whore’s son” implies that the anxieties surrounding bastardy had a great deal to do with its disruption of the proper line of paternity through the creation of a child that could only be deined as its mother’s son’.9 In Vindice’s comment, patriarchal lines of inheritance are disrupted by open female bodies, while the land, the bedrock of the aristocratic class, is commoditized, alienated by 33802_05_CH05.indd 117 22/05/2017 14:51 118 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY the impecunious sexual impulses of its owners. Vindice-asPiato brags, ‘I have seen patrimonies washed a-pieces, / Fruitields turned into bastards’ (1.3.51–2). Sold to facilitate adulterous exchanges, the ields are themselves bastardized, transformed into illegitimate pieces of patrimony no longer connected to the larger aristocratic landscape. The presumed supremacy of the aristocracy, their superior blood, loses its ideological grounding as landed estates are destroyed. As Feerick contends, such narratives of degeneration relect the fracturing of the period’s older racial paradigm, in which the aristocracy’s blood was intimately linked to and derived from the land.10 Vindice attributes this degeneration to adulterous sexuality, which drains aristocratic bank accounts, partitions estates and corrupts bloodlines. The Revenger’s Tragedy further links this degeneration with emerging racial paradigms by blaming the aristocracy’s decline on adulterous liaisons with those who are coded as foreign outsiders. Because Italy functions simultaneously as a mirror of Jacobean England and as a site of racial foreignness, aspects of the play’s action, setting and characters appear more English, while others seem more Italian. In this context, adultery has racial as well as class-based consequences, and the bastard’s status as ‘a corrupt hybrid, or species of monster’ is compounded by his mixed racial composition.11 Although the landed estates to which Vindice refers are technically Italian, purity – of both land and bodies – is coded as English, though it is threatened by Italianate forces. This dynamic is made explicit in the igure of Gloriana, Vindice’s deceased lover whose marvellous chastity resembles that of her namesake Elizabeth I and whom the Duke poisoned ‘Because [her] purer part would not consent / Unto his palsy lust’ (1.1.33–4).12 Gloriana’s chastity, moreover, is associated with whiteness, the fairness of her unadorned beauty contrasting with the ‘bought complexion[s]’ (1.1.22) of the court women. That Gloriana lacks ‘complexion’, igured in terms of cosmetic alterations that signal transgressive sexuality, positions English whiteness as a pure, naturalized state, free of adulterating corruptions. Gloriana is subjected to corruption, 33802_05_CH05.indd 118 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 119 however, when she is poisoned by the Duke, a stereotypically Italian method of murder.13 Her poisoning indicates that Italian blood has iniltrated English purity, racially as well as sexually. A similar dynamic is evident in the dismantling of aristocratic estates, wherein English patrimonies are destroyed by courtiers’ penchant for Italian whores whose ‘bought complexion[s]’ are incommensurate with England’s ideal of natural integrity. Female chastity thus comes to represent English purity and social stability, whereas female sexuality is coded as foreign and destructive because it facilitates the adulterous mixtures that compromise national identity. Revisiting Lucretia: violated chastity and the construction of national identity Even as it functions as an originary moment that inspires revenge, ostensibly establishing a dichotomy between English purity and Italian lechery, Gloriana’s death by poison underscores the porousness of bodies, the body politic as well as the physical body. Gloriana’s death has national implications, for her body, like that of Elizabeth I, relects the contained yet vulnerable boundaries of the English nation.14 As Mary Douglas argues, ‘the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious’.15 The body of the chaste woman comes to represent not only the nation, but also whiteness itself, as chastity, stemming from the Latin carere, ‘to be cut off from or lack’, connotes the condition of being protected from contact or contamination.16 In part for this reason, whiteness is most commonly associated with women, as Kim Hall notes, with the quality of fairness acquiring notable racial signiicance during the early modern period.17 In The Revenger’s Tragedy, chastity is igured as resisting the racialized Italianate forces that threaten it. Women in the play 33802_05_CH05.indd 119 22/05/2017 14:51 120 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY are generally igured as penetrable, leaking, and excessive, verbally as well as sexually – ‘Tell but some woman a secret over night’, Vindice avers, ‘Your doctor may ind it in the urinal i’th’ morning’ (1.3.84–5). Whereas these women secrete the nation’s essence and function as conduits for foreign contamination, the chaste woman regulates and denies such exchange. In the play’s degenerating culture, however, such contained purity invites repeated assault, suggesting that established national and racial borders are dificult to maintain. The national implications of violated chastity are further emphasized in the rape and suicide of Antonio’s wife. Raped by the Duchess’s youngest son, the wife is linked to Gloriana through her sexual violation by a member of the ruling family. Antonio draws this connection to Gloriana on a linguistic level when, lauding his wife’s decision to kill herself, he states that ‘Violent rape / Has played a glorious act’ (1.4.3–4). As with Gloriana’s poisoning, the rape of Antonio’s wife has damaging consequences for the state, as her ‘name has spread such a fair wing / Over all Italy’ (1.2.56–7). As a result, the Duke admits, if disingenuously, that the son’s ‘violent act has e’en drawn blood of honour / And stained our honours, / Thrown ink upon the forehead of our state’ (1.2.2–4). As the youngest son bloodied the wife’s body, he also bloodies the state, thus afirming the national implications of female chastity. It is this atrocity, moreover, that inspires revenge: joining the play’s metaphorics of chastity and blood, Vindice and his compatriots vow to avenge the rape if the judges ‘spare the blood’ of the perpetrator (1.4.61). The case of Antonio’s wife largely mirrors the story of Lucretia, in which the rape and suicide of a chaste woman leads to rebellion against the tyrannous Roman state. Antonio reports that his wife’s prayer book was open to a line expressing Lucrectia’s rationale, ‘Melius virtute mori, quam per dedecus vivere’ (1.4.14), ‘Better to die in virtue than to live with dishonour.’ As with the raped Lucretia, Antonio’s wife serves a sacriicial function, her violation mobilized to purify the state. Women were frequently considered natural candidates for 33802_05_CH05.indd 120 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 121 sacriice; just as their menstrual blood was believed to restore health to the body, the blood resulting from their deaths restores the health of the body politic.18 The rape sacriice thus enables the fantasy that a puriied, ‘chaste’ condition can be restored, both to the female body and to the state itself, once corrupting inluences have been expelled. As such, the legend of Lucretia encourages what Stephanie Jed has termed ‘chaste thinking,’ a mode of thought that divorces an idea or identity from the ideological messiness that undergirds it.19 Middleton interrogates these dynamics in his earlier narrative poem The Ghost of Lucrece (c. 1600), in which Lucrece tells her story from the underworld. Rather than maintaining an idealized image of Lucrece’s bodily integrity, the poem presents her as corrupted by the rape, her body leaking with excessive tears and blood. After recounting the ‘tide of blood’ (122) that results from her suicide, Lucrece states that she has ‘made [her] breast an ivory bowl / To hold the blood that streameth from [her] vein’ (124–5), and she instructs Tarquin to ‘Drink to my chastity, which thou hast slain’ (126) and ‘Instead of milk, suck blood and tears and all’ (137).20 Lucrece’s blood becomes a sign of her damaged and porous body rather than of her purity, and her depleted chastity lacks the power to restore the body politic. Middleton returns to these themes in The Revenger’s Tragedy where he critiques the cultural obsession with violated chastity, showing it to be both morbid and fantastical. The Revenger’s Tragedy, moreover, underscores the racial aspects of chaste thinking, already implicit in the association of Lucretia’s sexual purity with whiteness that is then transferred to the state. As Arthur Little argues, Lucretia’s ‘selfsacriice, sustaining the iction that it is simply taking back her virginity and whiteness, also manages to imbue that same virginity and whiteness with national and imperial deinition, signiicance, and purpose’.21 The Revenger’s Tragedy draws out the racial dynamics present in the Lucretia story, as Vindice associates rape with racial contamination and hopes to mobilize this fear in the interests of overthrowing a tyrannous state. Even though the rapists are cultural insiders they, like 33802_05_CH05.indd 121 22/05/2017 14:51 122 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY Tarquin, are depicted in racialized terms, their moral and physical darkness contrasted with the whiteness of the fair female body. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus conirms Little’s contention that ‘The miscegenational rape or the possibility of it sits right at the basis of national, imperial, familial, and social fears.’22 Speciically, the rape of Antonio’s wife, like the poisoning of Gloriana, raises the threat that racialized Italians, the degenerate progeny of Rome, will infect English purity. By mobilizing the chaste thinking implicit in the Lucretia story, Antonio and the avengers promote the fantasy that Englishness, whiteness and even the conceptual boundaries of the nation can remain pure, uncomplicated by material realities. The Revenger’s Tragedy presents all sexual exchange, not just rape, in terms of national corruption. This tendency becomes most evident when Castiza, the play’s allegorical embodiment of chastity, is pursued by Lussurioso. On a structural level, Castiza is herself a cultural hybrid, possessing Gloriana’s fairness and purity along with a clearly Italian name. As such, she provides the play’s closest approximation of unmarked European whiteness, presumably possessing the ‘Fair skins’ if not the ‘new gowns’ that Vindice calls ‘the best of wishes to [her] sex’ (2.1.28–9). Like female characters such as Portia and Rosalind who blend English and Italian traits to create a transcendent sense of whiteness, Castiza is a virgin of marriageable age who presents the potential for procreative exchange, exchange that registers culturally as well as sexually. However, The Revenger’s Tragedy largely rejects the chaste thinking implicit in pan-European whiteness, in which union with Italy ostensibly occurs without contaminating exchange. In contrast to her comedic sisters, Castiza’s chastity possesses no restorative power in the degenerate world of The Revenger’s Tragedy, where all intercourse is presented as corrupting. Sex with Lussurioso, the Duke’s son and ‘[t]he next of Italy’ (2.1.56), would be unequivocally damaging, depicted by Vindice in terms of the unnatural exchanges of usury and prostitution. This exchange is racial as well, as Vindice asserts that ‘Many a maid has turned to Mohamet / With easier working’ (2.2.27–8), 33802_05_CH05.indd 122 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 123 indicating that Castiza’s potential turn toward Lussurioso entails conversion away from fair, English chastity and toward racialized license, an implication present in the English cultural obsession with ‘turning Turk’.23 Although Castiza ultimately maintains her chastity, preserving it from the sexual violence inlicted on Gloriana and Antonio’s wife, she remains embattled. ‘A virgin honour is a crystal tower,’ she states, ‘Which, being weak, is guarded with good spirits’ (4.4.152–3), thus attesting to virginity’s signiicance as vulnerable site of purity. In this degenerate society in which ‘All thrives but Chastity, she lies a-cold’ (2.1.220), it is the dead virgin, lying literally acold, who operates as the play’s most eficacious purifying force. Following the logic of the Lucretia story, a dead woman such as Antonio’s wife who ‘lived / As cold in lust as she is now in death’ (1.4.34–5) is the most assuredly chaste woman and, for this reason, Vindice and his fellow avengers seek to channel the force of her inert chastity to inspire revenge against the tyrannous state. Such thinking is rendered macabre in Vindice’s fetishization of Gloriana’s skull, which he carries with him as a spur to revenge. The skull’s association with death animates its power, as it functions as a memento mori that forces people to consider their sins. It can ‘fright the sinner / And make him a good coward, put a reveller / Out of his antic amble / And cloy an epicure with empty dishes’ (3.5.92–5). This purifying power is most evident in the murder of the Duke. As Vindice says of the skull, he ‘ha[s] not fashioned this only for show / And useless property. No, it shall bear a part / E’en in it own revenge’ (3.5.100–2). An eficacious stage property, the skull brings about the Duke’s death, with Vindice dressing her as a prostitute and putting poison on her lips for the Duke to kiss. In Vindice’s vision, the dead woman does not simply inspire revenge, as do Lucretia and Antonio’s wife, but literally enacts it, the chaste essence of Elizabeth I transformed into a murderous purgative. Vindice’s use of Gloriana’s skull, moreover, suggests that the chaste thinking at the heart of the Lucretia myth is both perverse and fantastical. The very fact that he fetishizes the skull, hoping 33802_05_CH05.indd 123 22/05/2017 14:51 124 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY that it will stand in for a living woman, points to the absurdity of the cultural valorization of dead women. As Christine M. Gottlieb contends, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy deconstructs the category of the dead chaste woman and shows the absurdity of applying our notions of sexual propriety to dead objects.’24 In its critique, the play registers disgust at the Catholic veneration of relics. If absolute sexual purity can be embodied only by a piece of bone, then national and racial purity are shown to be similarly perverse, fetishes that prove damaging as well as unrealistic. In addition, the chastity ascribed to Gloriana’s skull is compromised by its participation in the murder.25 Earlier in the play Vindice remarks to the skull that, because the court is asleep, ‘Thou mayst lie chaste now;’ (3.5.90), linking its chastity to its inert state and suggesting that this quality will recede with activity. The skull’s chastity is further compromised by its prostitute’s garb and by the poison it transmits. As with the Duke’s initial poisoning of Gloriana, the poisoning of the Duke also signals corrupting intercultural exchange, as Gloriana ‘shall be revenged / In the like strain and kiss his lips to death’ (3.5.104–5). Reversing the power dynamics of her own death, in which Italian poison/semen iniltrates English purity, Gloriana now effects the dissolution of the Italian Duke, causing his lips and tongue to dissolve. Not even the purgative skull – the sign of absolute, inert purity – can escape cross-cultural exchange. Read allegorically, Gloriana’s fate indicates that, even if England acquires the supremacy it desires, national purity will be impossible to maintain, as the very act of rooting out impurities involves intercultural contact. Unstable semiotics of blood and the impossibility of chaste thinking Myths of cultural purity are further undercut by The Revenger’s Tragedy’s translation of the Lucretia myth’s blood motif to the genre of revenge tragedy, where spilled blood refuses to stay 33802_05_CH05.indd 124 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 125 contained in a manner conducive to national or racial integrity. Vindice imagines that taking revenge will reinforce the national character of the avengers and he encourages his compatriots to ‘strike old griefs / Into other countries / That low in too much milk and have faint livers, / Not daring to stab home their discontents’ (5.2.1–4). Here Vindice assumes Brutus’s role in the revenge plot by acting as a castigator lacrimarum who encourages rebellious action over lamentation.26 He distinguishes between effeminate nations, those associated with mother’s milk, and those nations whose masculine virtue is proven through their willingness to phallically stab their enemies and draw blood. Employing similar rape imagery, Hippolito avers in reference to Antonio’s wife’s body that ‘ ’Twere pity / The ruins of so fair a monument / Should not be dipped in the defacer’s blood’ (1.4.66–8). Here he reverses the imagery of rape in which the perpetrator ‘dips’ his phallus in the woman, sullying her white body with semen and its analogue blood; instead, he contends that the wife’s chaste body should be dipped in the blood of the rapist. Hippolito’s statement calls attention to the paradoxical nature of blood as both purifying and contaminating, a sign of bodily integrity as well as its undoing. Marking the wife’s body with blood simultaneously repeats the contamination of the rape and attests to the damaged bodily integrity of the perpetrator, recalling the adulterous capacity of blood to transgress corporeal boundaries. In this way, Hippolito inadvertently questions the logic of chaste thinking, which as Jed notes enables the separation of mind from body that undergirds ideologies of contained, Classical masculinity.27 Read in racial terms, the ‘fair monument’ of the wife’s corpse is corrupted by the implicitly darker blood of the Italian noble, her marked body visibly manifesting her inner sexual stain. The purgative bloodletting central to the Lucretia myth, therefore, ceases to function properly, as it both fails to purify the wife’s body and extends the quality of vulnerability to men. Whereas depictions of penetrable female bodies traditionally delect attention from men’s vulnerable bodies, The Revenger’s Tragedy draws on the generic emphasis on retributive violence to underscore the susceptibility of male bodies to 33802_05_CH05.indd 125 22/05/2017 14:51 126 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY penetration – penetration that, in the logic of the play, is cultural as well as physical. Hippolito’s imagery also foreshadows the play’s violent ending, in which revenge against the tyrannous state proves incapable of bringing about cathartic puriication. The culminating massacre further highlights the unstable nature of blood, as the multiple killings conducted by two sets of murderers result in a chaotic bloodbath that undermines any claims to moral or cultural purity. Vindice imagines his coup d’état as a purifying bloodletting that will occur during the revels, the epitome of the court’s effeminate, consumptive vice: ‘In midst of all their joys,’ he proclaims, ‘they shall sigh blood’ (5.2.22). The avengers seek to redress chastity’s violation by obliterating the Duke’s family and, in so doing, violently establish the court as a space of renewed sexual, moral and national purity. As Jed points out, ideologies of purity – and I would add of whiteness – invite violation, which in turn inspires ‘the violent reestablishment of more chaste and cut-off spaces’.28 This endeavour is complicated, however, both by the inherently unstable nature of blood and by the competing murder plot, in which the Duke’s sons kill one another in hopes of advancing in the line of succession. This comically excessive counter-plot, also enacted by means of the masque, highlights the problematic aspects of Vindice’s plan to bring about purity through theatrical violence. Just as the idea of killing the heir to the throne results in a potentially unending series of murders, the logic of killing to achieve purity ultimately unravels, creating moral as well as material messiness and provoking retribution. The ensuing deluge of blood compromises the stable boundaries that Vindice wishes to maintain. As the murder plots converge, the several deaths – of Lussurioso and three nobles by Vindice’s gang and then of Supervacuo, Ambitioso and Spurio – blend together, following upon one another in quick succession. The identities of the murderers and victims become virtually indistinguishable as the blood merges; when Lussurioso states, ‘Those in the masque did murder us’ (5.3.67), it is unclear to whom he refers. Initially presented as the site of essential 33802_05_CH05.indd 126 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 127 character and family lineage, blood proves incapable of being contained; once spilled, it becomes diffuse and transgresses boundaries, mixing avenger with tyrant, virtue with vice, English with Italian. This inal mingling of the blood of the avengers with that of the corrupt Italians underscores Vindice’s own problematically hybrid status. A combination of English Puritan and conniving Italian, Vindice revels in the theatricality, sexual depravity and violence he claims to abhor. This paradox is encapsulated in his disguise as the bawd Piato, in which he nearly succeeds in prostituting his sister to Lussurioso even though he claims to act in the interests of preserving her virtue. Vindice’s internal conlict is ultimately untenable, as shown when he is hired to kill Piato, causing a moment of existential crisis in which Hippolito exclaims, ‘Brother we lose ourselves’ (4.2.199). The conlict is again made evident when Vindice cannot help but confess his role in the murders. Vindice is unable to die a stoic death, to maintain his own bodily boundaries, because he falls prey to the verbal incontinence he identiies in women, insisting on ‘be[ing] bold / To speak it now’ and boasting about the brothers’ role in the plot that ‘ ’Twas somewhat witty-carried’ (5.3.96–7).29 Vindice attempts to secure his and his brother’s identities as avengers, proclaiming that they will submit to execution because they ‘hate / To bleed so cowardly’ (5.3.122– 3) and gloating that they ‘die after a nest of dukes!’ (5.3.125). Despite Vindice’s attempt to distinguish between cowardly and valiant bleeding, however, his comments indicate that he and Hippolito will join the collective bleeding of the court, with the blood leaving their compromised bodies iguratively joining that of their victims. The Revenger’s Tragedy thus makes literal the generic commonplace in which the avenger’s actions implicate him in the ethical morass he wished to eradicate. More broadly, the inal massacre undermines the chaste thinking that fuelled the revenge plot. It exposes pure chastity as unattainable and, by emphasizing the open male body, destabilizes the gender binary that posits female sexual purity as the basis of both the integrated male body and the contained 33802_05_CH05.indd 127 22/05/2017 14:51 128 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY borders of the nation state. Further, the play’s ending exposes the reality occluded by myths of national and racial purity that blood, like semen, is not in fact a discrete entity comprising the character of a person, family, or nation. Blood is diffuse: it exceeds the boundaries of the body, family and nation, and it comingles in acts of violence as well as through procreation. Although Antonio, ‘the hope / Of Italy’ (5.3.84–5), concludes the play by praying that the ‘blood’ of ‘[t]hose tragic bodies’ will ‘wash away all treason’ (5.3.127–8), it seems unlikely that this blood retains its purgative potential. Rather, according to the logic of rape in which The Revenger’s Tragedy trafics, blood functions as the antithesis of purity, the sign that chastity has been compromised. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s ambivalent racial politics Despite pathologizing cultural exchange as the cause of aristocratic decline, The Revenger’s Tragedy’s rendering of racial dynamics remains ambivalent as it depicts the maintenance of national boundaries as untenable. Symbolized by Gloriana’s death’s head, the ideal of national purity is exposed not only as nostalgic, but as the necrophilic worship of a condition so inert that it cannot sustain life. Preserving such purity proves impossible, as both blood and chastity resist reiication as markers of stable identity. Additionally, the play’s critique of James I’s court gestures toward the possibility that cultural corruption may actually be generated from within; despite his association with foreignness, James I, like Tarquin and the lecherous Italian nobles of the play, is the consummate insider. The King’s court may seem Italianate, but it is nonetheless resolutely English. The Revenger’s Tragedy proves only slightly more open to emerging discourses of pan-European whiteness. In Castiza we see the potential of incorporating upper and middle class 33802_05_CH05.indd 128 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 129 Europeans into one white race, as her sexual purity translates into a whiteness that is marked neither by Englishness nor Italianness. Not even Castiza’s unmarked white chastity, however, can facilitate productive generation in her degenerate society. In this way, The Revenger’s Tragedy resists the chaste thinking implicit in ideals of pan-European whiteness, which posits a shared racial composition while denying, or cutting off, the intercultural exchange that makes this ideal possible. In contrast to the Lucretia myth, in which chastity is seamlessly linked to national purity, The Revenger’s Tragedy exposes the complex dynamics of exchange that undergird – and at the same time undermine – sexual, national and racial constructions. As such, neither nationalism nor pan-European whiteness ultimately provides a satisfactory rejoinder to the decline in aristocratic blood. Middleton’s play, moreover, points to the racial dynamic present in revenge tragedy more broadly. The genre’s emphasis on cycles of retributive justice inspires interrogations of exchange, as warring factions inlict blows that, though intended to reinforce division, result in increased contact and interaction. Attempts to maintain personal, familial, or cultural integrity inevitably break down as violent acts of revenge compromise the very stability they are intended to protect. Bodies – symbolic of bounded cultural units – are disintegrated, penetrated and dismembered through acts of rape and murder. This fascination with the breakdown of ontological boundaries speaks to anxieties about race and racial hierarchies. The popular Italian settings of revenge tragedy make further manifest the racial dimensions of this paradigm, as abstract questions of exchange intersect with topical socio-political concerns engendered by England’s expanding empire. On one hand, the very act of staging Italians in England and having them speak in English verse constitutes an act of cultural appropriation, claiming for England a cosmopolitan status if not national supremacy.30 On the other hand, the prevalence of Italian settings in English plays indicates the extent to which Italianness has iniltrated England’s sense of its own national 33802_05_CH05.indd 129 22/05/2017 14:51 130 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY identity, making it dificult to identify what traits are properly English and which are Italian imports. The Revenger’s Tragedy, as I have shown, exploits the racial implications of its genre and Italian setting to interrogate emerging ideologies of whiteness. Historically, English racial supremacy struck an uneasy balance between pan-European whiteness and a more nationalist English whiteness that drew on England’s pastoral roots. Though these ideologies often worked in tandem to fashion Britain’s imperial identity, The Revenger’s Tragedy exposes issures in this racial project, dramatizing a moment in which pan-European whiteness threatened to subsume and adulterate England’s national character – or, in the discourse of the play, its blood. As such, the play participates in the history of race, delineating conlicting ideological strains within an emerging English whiteness that was deined not only in opposition to dark-skinned people, but also in relation to European allies and rivals. In keeping with its genre, moreover, The Revenger’s Tragedy reminds us that whiteness is itself violent, as it must carve out spaces of ideological and physical purity. These spaces are forged through chaste thinking that cuts them off from complex webs of sexual, cultural, economic and literary exchange; such chaste spaces invite violence and are maintained through violence, as their boundaries must be vigilantly policed. The Revenger’s Tragedy is, therefore, a tragedy of whiteness: even as Vindice gloriies racial purity, Gloriana’s skull reminds us of the pathological nature of white supremacy, in both its nationalist and cosmopolitan varieties. Notes 1 Jean E. Feerick, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 14. 2 Ibid., 21. 3 For an in-depth discussion of the English stage’s use of Italy, see Michele Marrapodi et al., eds, Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of 33802_05_CH05.indd 130 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 131 Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 4 Kim F. Hall makes this point in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 126–7. 5 Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. 6 Ibid., 19. 7 Ayanna Thompson, ‘The Racial Body and Revenge: Titus Andronicus’, Textus 13.2 (2000): 325–46. 8 Michael Neill, ‘Bastardy, Counterfeiting, and Misogyny in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature 36.2 (1996): 397–416, esp. 399. 9 Ibid., 398. 10 Feerick, Strangers in Blood, 16. 11 Neill, ‘Bastardy’, 399. 12 For a fuller analysis of the play’s invocation of Elizabeth I, see Steven Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45.2 (1994): 139–62. 13 For a discussion of the association of poison with Italy, see Tanya Pollard, ‘Drugs, Poisons, Remedies and the Theatre’, in Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 287–94, and Mariangela Tempera, ‘The Rhetoric of Poison in John Webster’s Italianate Plays’, in Marrapodi, Shakespeare’s Italy, 229–50. 14 For discussions of this dynamic, see Susanne Scholz, ‘Textualizing the Body Politic: National Identity and the Female Body in The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 132 (1996): 103–43, and Susan Frye, ‘The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury’, Sixteenth Century Journal 23.1 (1992): 95–114. 15 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 115. 16 For a discussion of this etymological connection, see Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucrece and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 8. 33802_05_CH05.indd 131 22/05/2017 14:51 132 THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY: THE STATE OF PL AY 17 Hall, Things of Darkness, esp. 3–4, 9. 18 For a discussion of the link between menstruation and sacriicial blood, see Helen King, ‘Sacriicial Blood: The Role of the Amion in Ancient Gynecology’, Helios 13 (1987): 117–26. 19 Jed, Chaste Thinking, 12. 20 Thomas Middleton, The Ghost of Lucrece, ed. G.B. Shand in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1985–98. 21 Arthur L. Little Jr, Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacriice (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2. 22 Ibid., 44. 23 See Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave, 2003). 24 Christine M. Gottlieb, ‘Middleton’s Trafic in Dead Women: Chaste Corpses as Property in The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Lady’s Tragedy’, ELH 45.2 (2015): 255–74. 25 For discussions of the way that Vindice’s manipulation of the skull compromises claims that it represents sexual or representational purity, see Kathryn R. Finin, ‘Re-Membering Gloriana: “Wild Justice” and the Female Body in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Renaissance Forum 6.2 (2003): 1–34, and Karin S. Coddon, ‘ “For Show or Useless Property”: Necrophilia and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, English Literary History 61.1 (1994): 71–88. 26 For Brutus’s role in the Lucretia myth, see Jed, Chaste Thinking, 10–11, 18–50. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 Ibid., 45. 29 For a reading of Vindice’s verbal incontinence in relation to the play’s depiction of carnivalesque female bodies, see Peter Stallybrass, ‘Reading the Body: The Revenger’s Tragedy and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption’, Renaissance Drama 18 (1987): 121–48. 33802_05_CH05.indd 132 22/05/2017 14:51 HISTORY AND TOPICALITY 133 30 For the argument that, by making English the dominant language of Italy, dramatists attribute to the language a desired international status, see A.J. Hoenselaars, ‘ “Under the dent of the English pen”: the language of Italy in English Renaissance Drama’, in Marrapodi, Shakespeare’s Italy, 272–91. 33802_05_CH05.indd 133 22/05/2017 14:51 33802_05_CH05.indd 134 22/05/2017 14:51