The sacralization of revenge in Antonio's Revenge.(John Marston)(Critical essay)

Among all John Marston's plays, Antonio's Revenge seems to be the hardest to pin down. Critics have long disagreed about whether the play is moral, immoral, or amoral; whether it accepts or rejects the idea of revenge; and even whether it is meant to be a serious play, a comic parody, or an early version of the theater of the absurd. (1) To be sure, it follows many of the conventions of the revenge play of its time--a blood crime to avenge, a ghost, a ranting hero, feigned and real madness, a long-suffering woman or two, and, finally, the drawn-out death of the villain--but it also violates many of the conventions, the most important of which is that the revenger himself must die at the end of the play. Indeed, so widespread is this last convention that Fredson Bowers, in his seminal work on revenge tragedy, seems to forget about Antonio when he outlines the conventions, stating categorically, "No slayer in Elizabethan drama escaped some penalty, and that penalty was usually death." (2) Only later must Bowers acknowledge that Antonio seems not to have been punished at all; but he makes no attempt to account for the anomaly, other than attributing it to "Marston's Senecan morality." (3) Other critics, both before and after Bowers, have similar difficulty with this anomalous ending to the play, disagreeing with each other and at times with themselves, and also have difficulty with another scene in the play, Antonio's killing of young Julio. Each critic's reading of the play's final "message" about revenge shapes his or her reading of the scenes, so that ultimately the individual scene analyses become begged questions: either we are supposed to be sympathetic to Antonio, or we are supposed to be revolted by him, or, in the recent postmodern readings, we are supposed to see his whole world as absurd and not really care.

In this essay, I do not propose to settle forever the larger questions of authorial intent, although I hope to make at least as good a guess as that of anyone else. What I do propose is a closer scrutiny of the two problem scenes, not only in the context of their own play, but also in the context of other revenge plays of the time, plays that might have shaped the expectations of Marston's audience. Within those contexts, for whatever reason, it appears that Marston is going beyond the attempts of other playwrights to justify the sensational violence in their plays and even to allow the audience to retain some admiration for the revenger without falling afoul of the censor. Through the visual effects of the Julio scene and the scene in which Pandulpho brings the corpse of Feliche to Antonio, together with the final vengeance scene and the closing passages in which the revenge quartet takes leave of Venice and the audience, Marston uses both Old and New Testament imagery to sacralize revenge.

It is important, then, to establish exactly what does happen in the closing passages of this play, passages that mark the part of a play in which playwrights traditionally signal their audiences how to view what has gone before. The primary anomaly, noted by all critics, is simply that Antonio, alone of all Renaissance revengers, survives his revenge. But even more to the point are two other events: the praise of Antonio by the Venetian senators, and the determination of Antonio and his friends to retire to a monastery. Notably, the senators do not merely find extenuating circumstances for the slaying of a tyrant, or pity for the revenger's wrongs, or even admiration for the slayer who, nevertheless, must die or in some other way pay for his role in the killing. Rather, they offer Antonio a triumph, a cash reward, and a role in Venetian government: "First Senator: What satisfaction outward pomp can yield, / Or chiefest fortunes of the Venice state, / Claim freely" (5.3.140-42). (4) Furthermore, before this practical offer is made, the Second Senator has virtually canonized Antonio and his friends, making them not just good citizens but patron saints of Venice: "Blessed be you all; and may your honors live, / Religiously held sacred, even for ever and ever" (5.3.127-28). And Antonio himself refers to himself as "Standing triumphant over Beelzebub" (5.3.138), as a kind of latter-day Saint Michael--or, as we may have occasion to speculate later, Christ. Only after all this religious approval does he receive the offer of a more tangible reward.

This type of reward is unparalleled in revenge drama. George Geckle has pointed to Titus Andronicus as another play in which "the living conspirators" are rewarded; (5) but in Titus the actual revenge killing has been done by Titus, who is dead. Marcus has done no killing at all, and Lucius has returned with an army to oppose tyranny, and has killed only in response to seeing his father slain before his eyes, that is, as a defense against attack rather than "revenge" as it would be understood in these plays. In all other plays, the revenge killers die, no matter how evil their victims may be and no matter how much the onlookers may pity their own suffering.

Barbara Baines claims that the "outrageous exoneration" of Antonio at the end of the play is meant to show the audience what is wrong with him and with revenge play conventions; (6) throughout the play, Marston has placed deliberate echoes of other revenge plays, and has made many of the characters refer to their world as "tragedy" "plays" and "art" to call the audience's attention to the amorality of revenge conventions and of acceding to them. But she never shows, nor is it easy to find, any place in the play where Marston has a character speak such a warning. Plays of the period that wish to call revenge conventions or revenge itself into question provide commentators within the play who make the point specifically, either by contrasting plays with real life, as in Hamlet, or by commenting on what has gone wrong with the revenger, as in Titus Andronicus or Henry Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman. It is more likely, as critics such as Geckle, Fredson Bowers, and Charles and Elaine Hallett have claimed, that Marston means to have Antonio emerge at the end not only alive but as a hero. (7)

In any case, it is…