‘When the Bad Bleed, then is the Tragedy Good’: Politics, Morality and Revenge

Abstract

The previous two chapters have identified ways in which a play such as The Revenger’s Tragedy or a film such as Dirty Harry might be read to discover both how they reflect aspects of their immediate social contexts, and how they might have had an impact on that context: how did their contemporary audiences approach them, and how did they respond to them? If popular culture is a major contributor to the ways in which individuals, and society, construct their identities, what does the revenger figure, in its various forms, tell us about ourselves? Sam Peckinpah claimed that his film Straw Dogs was ‘about the violence within all of us. The violence which is reflecting on the political condition of the world today.’ In response to a letter from a viewer complaining that the level of violence made the film impossible to enjoy, Peckinpah responded, ‘I didn’t want you to enjoy the film, I wanted you to look very close at your own soul.’¹ Remarks such as these may give us pause, and provoke us to consider how the revenge narrative, which is after all one of the most ancient and powerful of all Western story structures, works on us. In her introduction to her collection of Four Revenge Tragedies (1995), Katharine Eisaman Maus suggests that ‘the revenger’s problem must be shared, albeit in an attenuated form, by the spectators to his tragedy … his dilemma must condense some more widely experienced anxiety into an artistically persuasive form’.²