Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England.

Anderson, Thomas P.

Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England, by Timothy Rist. Aldershot, U.K. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008. Pp. 165. Hardback $89.95.

Timothy Rist's study of Jacobean revenge tragedy moves in two directions. First, the book examines the myriad forms of funerary commemoration that populate revenge tragedies by important early modern dramatists such as Shakespeare, Kyd, Middleton, Webster, and Marston. In Rist's analysis, the sheer plentitude of forms of commemoration in putatively reformed plays is evidence that the plays enact a Catholic longing. The book's second objective is to "systematically" (2) revise the relatively recent critical trend that argues revenge tragedy, indeed the early modern stage in general, is a reformed genre that both reflects and actively encourages Catholicism's waning influence in early modern London. Because of the book's strident insistence on the second objective, it risks rendering moot its most insightful observations about the persistence of unreformed funerary ritual and scenes of mourning in revenge tragedy.

With its emphasis on the style of the enacted devotions to the dead, Rist's book is part of Ashgate's Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama series that, according to the series editor, focuses on performance "in defiance of theatrical ephemerality." In establishing a performative dimension to Renaissance funerary commemoration, Rist locates an "aesthetics of mourning" unique to Renaissance revenge drama which encourages acts of judgment by theatergoers (15). And, according to Rist, as the early modern spectator sat in judgment on scenes of mourning in the aftermath of violent events on stage, theological considerations determined the gap between the "performative ideal" and the degree to which the acts of mourning were actually reformed (22). Rist establishes a conceptual frame in a wide-ranging introduction that touches on many important points in current scholarship on the historical, cultural, and political impact of the Reformation in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Drawing on Frances Yates's influential study of the art of memory, Rist's central assumption is that death in the period was "remembrance's 'animating impulse'" and that "England's Reformed challenge to Christian 'memoria' was an earthquake" (4, 5).

Arguing that traditional aides-memoires for the dead--churches and monasteries, including the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars--were increasingly put to theatrical use, Rist's study contemplates the effect of this transformation on purpose-built playhouses. Chapter 2 of Rist's book looks at the playhouse at St. Paul's and its production of Antonio's Revenge as a model for this blend of theater and religio-politics. This chapter proves to be the book's most interesting section, providing an analysis of how physical space, theatrical performance, and ritual commemoration work together to undermine the sense of reform that putatively characterizes revenge drama. For Rist, St. Paul's embodies "shrouded remembrance," a "contested monument containing subsidiary, contested monuments" that simultaneously bears on the theatricality of the age and the complicated, contradictory processes of remembrances of the dead (77, 76). Performed in a monumental space with conflicted significance, Marston's play, Rist concludes, presents a "divided view of remembrance" that highlights "a development in the emphasis of revenge tragedy and an insight into a divided, Protestant mentality, even as the presentation of mourning in a monument reveals theatre and church entwined" (95).

The other two chapters in Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England offer readings of revenge drama that privilege Catholic interpretations of scenes of mourning and commemoration, arguing that overt and covert Catholic affect is the plays' sincere expression of re-ligio-political sensibility. As an accumulation of Catholic readings of plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The White Devil, and The Duchess of Malfi, Rist's book counters the prevailing trend that views the Renaissance public stage as one characterized by its reformed and reforming sensibilities. However, the book's hostile stance against what the author describes as a Broudian school of criticism, named after Ronald Broude's influential argument about the reformed nature of revenge tragedy over thirty-five years ago, at best distracts from many of Rist's interesting revisionist readings--and at worst turns disinterested argument into biased polemic. If it is the case that Broude's classic theory of early modern revenge drama is indeed "simplistic" (1), as Rist maintains in the introduction, then what is to be gained by establishing a Broudian reading as the impetus for each chapter's insistence on unreformed interpretations of acts of mourning and commemoration?

As an example of the unnecessary polemical tone of the attack on Broude and those influenced by his work, Rist begins the book's first chapter by addressing Broude's Protestant interpretation of The Spanish Tragedy, as well as Eugene Hill's more recent analysis of the play based on Broude's 1971 argument. Rist begins the chapter "without apology" with a consideration of the flaws Broude's and Hill's less persuasive, local readings of the play and promises to offer an unreformed reading that more holistically addresses Kyd's revenge tragedy--and the entire genre more generally--by focusing on commemoration and mourning (27).

The polemical tone, highlighted by a gratuitous exclamation point following a challenge to Broude's approach (29), and the premise that critical conversations might require apologies prove distracting to the Catholic readings that follow. Describing another critic who sees anti-Catholic imagery in Kyd's play as "too far under the influence" of a Broudian approach, Rist runs the risk of lumping competing critical voices into one facile category that diminishes their substance and nuance (36). Indeed, Rist's insistence that revenge drama expresses unreformed desires that overshadow reformed sensibility seems itself a limiting hermeneutic that ignores the productive religio-political ambiguity that more recent critics have identified in revenge tragedy.

In recent years, historians such as Eamon Duffy and David Cressy have written persuasively about the residual impact of the lingering traces of Catholic ritual in Protestant England not to claim an identifiable unreformed truth in English identity. Instead, their recent work suggests, that dominant cultural formations such as Catholicism persisted in residual cultural articulations even as emergent social formations such as Protestantism attempted to supersede it.

Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England succeeds as a polemical attempt to counter critical tendencies that read reformed sensibilities in revenge tragedy at the expense of a pronounced residual Catholic legacy most evident in acts of commemoration and mourning. Rist's book, however, falls short of advancing the critical conversation that in recent scholarship has begun to reconsider dichotomous interpretations of the religio-political status of early modern revenge drama.

Reviewer: THOMAS P. ANDERSON