The Shapes of Revenge: Victimization, Vengeance, and Vindictiveness in Shakespeare.

Watson, Robert N.

By Harry Keyishian. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995.

Let's all thank whatever powers we worship for a book that is neither glitzy nor Luddite, cares about social questions without offering the modish answers, acknowledges reparative as well as destructive aspects of Renaissance culture, becomes neither snippy nor slobbery in its footnotes, and evinces a determination to think and write clearly. Such a book is The Shapes of Revenge.

As a bonus, the book is interested in big ideas. Revenge raises urgent issues "of character, morality, value, and selfhood," and Harry Keyishian argues provocatively that "the revenge theme" is what actually "opened the world of human motivation" to Shakespeare (135). Like Rene Girard before him, Keyishian finds in revenge a window into the fundamental problems of human existence.

For Girard, revenge is a threat to every human community, controllable only by the sacrificial ritual. For Keyishian, the threat is to the moral character of every human individual. He proves to be less interested in the shapes of revenge--how it is performed--than in its dynamics: what provokes it, what justifies it, what concludes it. Keyishian argues convincingly that the injured parties attempt "to restore their integrity--their sense of psychic wholeness--and stabilize their identities, often by restructuring them around their new roles as revengers" (2). Like progressive theorists of the penal system, Keyishian insists that violence generally has its roots in humiliation, that the vengeful response has less to do with an evil spirit than with a symbolic struggle to remake the damaged self, to achieve psychic survival rather than material advantage.

This permits Keyishian to expand his category of revenge far beyond the usual instances, to include any character who suffers any real or perceived loss of status, and who--even if only as an implicit reproach--confronts the thief of that status. "Apemantus' poverty seems itself to be a main avenue of reproach and revenge, since in his view it incites the gods against those who practice excess" (146). Few of us would think of The Winter's Tale as a revenge drama, but both Leontes and Hermione become revengers in Keyishian's formulation; so does the Shakespeare who wrote sonnets 33-35. In his eagerness to make King Lear a redemptive revenger, Keyishian spends considerable time failing to convince me that the killing of Cordelia's hangman is a "splendid achievement," a device "to reward him, and us, for Lear's suffering," "a dazzling personal achievement" of reparative revenge, "a wonderful, exhilarating, heroic act" (68-76). Since it does not repair Cordelia, occurs offstage, and is reported and dismissed amid a number of other hollowed-out consolatory conventions that decisively fail to console, this seems to me one instance where the orthodoxy Keyishian assails proves unassailable.

Although its interests are thus psychological, this book is "resolutely unpsychoanalytical" (ix): Freud makes one cameo appearance, in the second half of the book, though his ideas about mourning and melancholia seem germane from the opening epigraphs onward. The book also never dares speak the name of feminism, though some of its insights are markedly feminist: a section in the first chapter explores "The Price of Powerlessness: the Duchess of Gloucester, Ophelia, Desdemona, and Hermoine," without ever mentioning that these characters all happen to be women. That is hardly a mere coincidence, though perhaps it is too obvious to merit comment.

Finally, Keyishian also avoids aligning himself with historicist critics, though he is clearly interested in how literature helped Tudor-Stuart England understand and regulate the vindictive impulse. The first sentence of the book promises a foundation in "Renaissance works on the passions," a foundation that, in practice, consists of checking in periodically with a focus group consisting of Francis Bacon, de la Primaudaye, Edward Reynolds, and sometimes Robert Burton.

Keyishian is surely right to resist old historicist assumptions that Christianity universally and unequivocally overrode any reflexive sympathy with the vengeful impulse. He wryly notes that "Drake named the sea vessel he led against the Armada not Forgiveness or The Turned Cheek but The Revenge" (7). The book further shows that Plato anticipated the Christian project of transcending revenge, offering new principles of self-valuation to enable that transcendence.

But for Keyishian as for so many of us, Shakespeare provides an unstable if exalted platform for peering into the past. One problem with using figures such as Titus, Lucrece, and Coriolanus prominently in such a study is that their vengeful responses are surely refracted through classical rather than Renaissance cultural patterns, at least as Shakespeare understood them.

Though the book abjures moralizing, it repeatedly attempts to distinguish "authentic revenge--just retaliations for real injuries--from portrayals of vindictiveness, acts of ill will motivated not by true wrongs but by a character's evil disposition" (2). That goal is occasionally in conflict with the psychological premise of the argument: namely, that the injury and its apt repayment must be measured by the inward suffering of the wronged party, rather than by some objective measure of visible harm. While Cordelia may be wronged far more severely than Iago, is it clear she feels more deeply humiliated?

As the argument moves from redemptive avengers such as Macduff, Lucrece, and Titus to ambivalent cases such as Hamlet and Lear (and an unusually dark reading of Marc Antony in Julius Caesar), finally to the merely vindictive (Shylock, Malvolio, Coriolanus, and of course Iago), the line of moral descent appears uneven. Keyishian cannot quite decide whether there exists a neat taxonomy, in which Shakespeare "distinguishes--sharply and qualitatively--between authentic revenge and vindictiveness" (4), or whether there exists a full spectrum, from those seeking justice to those propelled by a disproportionate and incurable malice; from reparative revengers, to confused ones who miss their valid targets, to mere vandals who have no valid target.

Keyishian also assumes that the distinction is clear between characters (such as Malvolio) who are inwardly narcissists, and hence upset to be devalued, and those (such as Iago) who are full of self-hatred, and therefore similarly sensitive. Isn't the relationship between narcissism and abjection more dialogic than that? Does Richard III's "inflated self-image" expose him to embittering humiliations that create self-hate, as Keyishian asserts (133), or does the self-hate cause the bitterness that manifests itself in an inflated self-image? Again my point is not that Keyishian has it wrong, only that the lines of causation and the poles of opposition in the psyche are harder to locate decisively than this argument sometimes admits.

This book pays very little attention to genre, and it would be worthwhile for Keyishian to ask whether Leontes, Malvolio, and Coriolanus are actually so different except in their contexts, social and literary. Couldn't we imagine plays that would honor each of these campaigners against human degradation? Coriolanus certainly considers himself what Keyishian (quoting Linda Anderson) identifies as "the comic revenger," who "functions as the restorer of the social order threatened by the actions for which he or she--often a she--takes vengeance" (8).

The Shapes of Revenge is written in a vigorous, graceful, straightforward style that only very rarely gets the sociological staggers ("Dramatic characters . . . have particular personal lifestyles and employ a set of interpersonal strategies in their relationships with others," 12). Concluding remarks do occasionally sound like social science abstracts: "In Titus Andronicus as in The Rape of Lucrece, the issues of identity, violation, and vindication are developed in relation to societies that have betrayed individuals of integrity" (52), These moments reduce what Keyishian has so magnificently revealed in the preceding argument. For example, he compares Edgar to Hamlet as both "driven to severe and illuminating introspection before coming to positions of metaphysical security--a security provided by the playwright's thematic priorities and narrative strategies--from which they may acknowledge and submit themselves to a providence that delivers their enemies to their hands." The next sentence reads, "Perhaps their most powerful common tool for surviving victimization and pursuing revenge is to create alternative personas that help them deal with their psychic distress and confront feelings they cannot express openly" (76). What a falling off is there!

All along the way, Keyishian offers wonderful enlightenments. "And what offends Oberon about Demetrius is that he mistreats Helena, a woman who is behaving just as he wishes Titania would behave" (32). Right after "the cures wrought by the touch of the good King of England were described . . . it is Malcolm's turn to prove his royalty by curing Macduff of his despair" (37). Keyishian shows why Feste chooses his particular lines of attack on Malvolio, and shows why Leontes has a kind of anaphylactic overreaction to Polixenes' reluctance to extend his visit: it recalls his previous hurtful exposure to Hermoine's reluctance to marry (138). He demonstrates that "the challenge, in terms of the Shakespearean ethos, is not whether Prospero will triumph over his foes but whether he will survive his triumph" (166), which he does by choosing "an optimal, rather than a maximum, victory" (156). Keyishian suggests shrewdly that, for Marc Antony to succeed against the conspirators, the Roman people "must wish to avenge not only Caesar but themselves" (87); and he illuminates the dark mob violence against Cinna (89). He is eloquent in comparing Antony to Iago, and in contrasting Iago to Othello (92-93). He offers an elaborate rationale for Titus' strange laughter (48). He points out that Shakespeare allows Hamlet to escape from the revenger's dilemma by moving him "from a Machiavellian world order to a providential one" (54)--a sort of ethical deus ex machina that Keyishian understandably faults, leading to the brilliant observation that this may be a fortunate fault, that "Shakespeare has tried to deproblematize the revenges of Hamlet and Edgar by casting them as servants of higher authorities. I think he has not quite succeeded, and that is fortunate. . . . in the overwhelmingly interrogative tone of Hamlet and the final devastation of Lear, many will continue to see the issues raised by revenge as surviving the playwright's efforts to bring them to closure" (79). Keyishian offers the fascinating and generative observation that "Platonists generally win out in romantic and problem comedies and romances," while "Aristotelians win out in satiric comedies and farces" (153). And he observes that "a characteristic Shakespearean strategy for portraying victimized women whose virtue lies in enduring their martyrdoms without complaint is to pair them with aggressive women who articulate their grievances for them" (156).

For the sake of any few of these insights a reviewer would spare a book with far graver sins than this one has (I couldn't find more than a single typo); and together these revelations vindicate Keyishian's claim for the centrality of revenge, broadly understood, to Shakespeare's characterizations and ethics. The ethical lesson is elusive--the late chapter on "Solving the Problem" recommends answering affronts with a virtuous kindness designed to humiliate the offender (153-54), which by Keyishian's own psychological formula would only provoke further affronts. Still, this is finally a book with admirably high hopes about human perfectibility, and despite the various minor objections I have raised, it renews my hope that Shakespeare scholarship can be, if not perfect, at least a deeply thoughtful and deeply affectionate enterprise.