American Voice: Violence and The Jacobean Tragedy
By Lizzie Stern, Literary Manager
March 17, 2020
At the direction of Queen Elizabeth I, in 1601, a historian named John Hayward was locked in the Tower of London to face the guillotine. His crime was documenting one year in the reign of King Henry IV, entitled First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV. In the introduction, Hayward states his purpose: education. His students were The People, young and old, who were generally under-informed of England’s history — of all the calculations and compromises that altogether make up a nation’s life, the good and the bad. But notably absent from Hayward’s mission statement is any mention of “good” vs. “bad.” He was telling it like it was rather than as it ought to have been. And that’s what got him in trouble.
The Queen was declining in both health and popularity, and in leaving a less-than-perfect legacy (a series of depleting wars, a downturn in England’s economy, and no children to take over), she was of the mind that the less people knew, the better. And Hayward was part of a larger movement, a new trend in scholarship called “politic history,” intended to teach folks about tenets, rules, and procedures of England’s administration. Politic history, according to scholar S.L. Goldberg’s 1955 essay “Sir John Hayward,” was fact-based historiography without moralism, which posed a perceived threat to the Queen. So Hayward became a cautionary tale for the movement, which was, by that point, gaining horsepower behind Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon — and an ambitious thirty-something playwright named William Shakespeare.
“But the theater did not, in fact, elude a critique of political violence; instead, it found new ways to marshal it.”
By the winter of 1600, Shakespeare had written ten plays about English history which, like Hayward’s scholarship, laid bare the lives of past monarchs. And the Queen, now in the final three years of her life and reign, had waged war on free speech — in not only academia, but theater. According to Rowland Wymer’s 2000 essay “Jacobean Pageant or Elizabethan Fin-De-Siècle?”, the Queen banned the publishing of all English histories that didn’t meet her approval, as well as all printed satires. She restricted the number of adult acting companies to two and revived, in their place, boys’ companies whose bubbly and innocuous repertoires were akin to, say, Spongebob Squarepants: The Musical — fun enough for kids, smart enough for adults, and above-all pitched to delight. The adult companies, meanwhile, took mainly to tragedies: woeful, violent dramas whose portraits of kings and queens were narratively ahistorical enough to pass muster. From all of this, it may seem that the theater scene, as it crested into the Jacobean period under King James I, emerged somewhat neutered from its chrysalis of Elizabethan censorship. But the theater did not, in fact, elude a critique of political violence; instead, it found new ways to marshal it.
With cathartic five-act structures, Jacobean Tragedies are familiar for their suffering, vengeance, bloodshed, madness, murder, and sugar-sweet moralism drizzled atop a colossus of cruelties (not for the faint of heart, an incomplete list includes adultery, rape, incest, necrophilia, patricide, matricide, fratricide, and a chain reaction of hot-blooded murder). But this in-your-face brutality belies a hidden and more penetrating violence — one that’s much harder to pin down.
In his 2008 book Violence, Slavoj Žižek indexes several types of violence, and draws a line between what’s “visible” and what’s “invisible.” Visible, or “subjective” violence as he calls it, is anything that upsets our sense of normalcy (everything from a street mugging to a mass shooting, or from Anthony Weiner’s sexts to Trump’s Ukraine call). Invisible, or “objective” violence, meanwhile, is much more elusive — and in some ways, much more important. Like “dark matter” in physics, it’s everything that mobilizes and structures the systems which make visible violence possible in the first place. It is, frankly, terrifying to consider this: that the water we’re drinking and the air we’re breathing are poisonous in ways that elude diagnosis. But mercifully there is a diagnosis, of some kind, and it can be found in art. Žižek, borrowing a phrase from the poet Wallace Stevens, calls this type of art “description without place,” as it floats between time, person, or place, and, as a result, has the power to make visible the invisible. I think of it like an optical illusion, the kind that toggles between two images: a young girl becomes an old woman, or a vase becomes the couple whose kiss it parts. From the negative space, a second image suddenly emerges with life and texture so vivid, it’s hard to believe it had been there all along. Jacobean Tragedy has a similar trick up its sleeve.
Jacobean Tragedy took many forms. Shakespeare’s included Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, among others while other dramatists opted for a less character-driven approach. Let’s take The Revenger’s Tragedy (credited, in an unresolved debate, to both Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Middleton), which centers on Vindice, a man with one goal: to avenge his fiancée’s murder. Along with John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, it is the poster child for the genre’s most visible – and, more pertinently, least visible – violence. The play, as vivisected in a 1975 essay by Larry S. Champion, offers Vindice virtually no soliloquies, and sets him on a bloodthirsty path so relentless that it’s only “justifiable” insofar as it’s direct retribution for even worse offenses from his eight antagonists. Audiences have little access to any character’s interiority, and their journey through the play is hardly paved in empathy. Like an optical illusion, the tragedy toggles between its characters, unveiling an otherwise hidden sphere: the “objective,” or invisible violence, which is silently motivating and scaffolding everyone’s evils.
In the wake of the Queen’s censorship, Jacobean Tragedy was an earthquake – a quiet kind, low on the Richter scale, which may not knock a painting off the wall, but silently conjures a much worse horror: the awareness that, invisibly and all the time, the ground beneath us is not firm, but vulnerable, and something beyond our grasp, too massive to conceive and too far below to see, is shifting and dangerous. Or, as Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney put it in his essay “An Apology for Poetry,” tragedy has the ability to open “the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue [and] that maketh kings fear to be tyrants.”
“To cloak, in youthful purity, the titillating experience of I shouldn’t be watching this is to grant permission: to reveal parts of the human experience elsewhere repressed.”
Meanwhile, all across London, the boys’ companies were building their fan base – and to a similar end. With the innocence of adolescence on their side, they put on buoyant pageants of song and dance, and, inside them, performed satires and explored social taboos like homoeroticism. Watching boys play adults, audiences were alighted to the artifice of theater, driven away from an empathic journey, and exposed to thematic territory otherwise verboten. To cloak, in youthful purity, the titillating experience of I shouldn’t be watching this is to grant permission: to reveal parts of the human experience elsewhere repressed, and make visible the invisible. Or, as Emerson put it in his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
What’s remarkable about Jeremy O. Harris’s A Boy’s Company Presents: “Tell Me If I’m Hurting You” A Jacobean Revenge Tragedy A Pageant of My Woes is that, in stitching together Jacobean Tragedy and the theater of the boys’ companies – two art forms, sly in their incendiary power - Jeremy describes both without place. In an irreverently anachronistic, dissociative pageant of queer adolescent heartache, brimming with homages to a generous spectrum of queer artists, which Ashley Chang catalogs a few pages earlier in this bulletin, A Boy’s Company is the essence of “description without place,” as it floats among genre, gender, and time. And, animating the illusive space between them all, it opens an underworld of human suffering: the objective violence of falling in love.
