Calvinism as tragedy in the English revenge play

Abstract

What did it mean to live in a culture where imputation from below was systematically thwarted by a Calvinist political ideology that withheld justice (in the sense of a normal expectation) from a comprehensively fallen humankind? The question is addressed here through the popular phenomenon of the English revenge play. The genre is seen as paradoxical in its very nature: on the one hand indulging revenge, anger, imputation and resistance; yet on the other, demonizing them in a bid for politico-theological compliance. Uncertainty about its polarity – in addition to changes in audience taste and constituency – is taken to be the force driving the revenge play from one iteration to the next. While the form approaches a justicial “myth of accusation” (in The Spanish Tragedy) and even endorses a best-case of revenge in Hamlet, it largely reverts to compliance in plays of the Jacobean revival by Marston, Webster and Tourneur, in which a genuine (as distinct from carnivalized) imputation emerges ironically if at all. Throughout these switches of generic direction, the invocation of theological motifs plays a key role in the plays, either signalling compliance or justifying deviance from the norm in theological terms. Analysis of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays is rounded off by The London Merchant (1731), which is read as a retrospective critique of the form from the vantage of the following century in which the hold of Calvinism had been broken by the new emotional language and virtue ethics of Shaftesbury.

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