Elizabethan Revenge

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2009

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests Jonathan Bate, Julie Sanders and Janet Clare discuss Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. From Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy to Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Elizabethan stage was awash with the bloody business of revenge. Revenge was dramatic, theatrical and hugely popular. It also possessed a fresh psychological depth in the way vengeful minds were portrayed through a new dramatic device: the soliloquy. But these tales of troubled individuals, of family wrongs and the iniquities of power also spoke to an audience for whom the vengeful codes of medieval England were being replaced by Tudor legal systems, by bureaucracy and the demands of the state above those of the individual. Therefore, the heady brew of hatred, madness, violence, evil deeds and righteous anger found on stage reflected the passing of something off stage.Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick; Julie Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham; Janet Clare is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Hull.

Transcript

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0:44.1	Hello in Thomas Kids Play the Spanish Tragedy a father seeks redress for the
0:49.3	murder of his son he declares revenge on them that murdered my son.
0:54.0	Then will I rend and tear them thus, and thus, shivering their limbs in pieces with my teeth.
1:00.0	He's caught Ironimo, and he wasn't alone. From Hamlet to the
1:03.7	changeling the Spanish tragedy to Titus Andronicus, the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage was
1:08.8	a wash with the bloody business of revenge. Revenge was dramatic, theatrical and hugely popular, but also
1:15.9	it reveals a world in which codes of medieval vengeance were being replaced by
1:20.6	Tudor legal systems and so the brew of hatred and madness, evil deeds and righteous
1:25.4	anger found on stage mirrored and perhaps mourned the passing of something off stage.
1:30.6	With me to discuss Elizabethan Revenge I Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham,
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