Description
Book SynopsisWhat is revenge, and what purpose does it serve? On the early modern English stage, depictions of violence and carnagethe duel between Hamlet and Laertes that leaves nearly everyone dead or the ghastly meal of human remains served at the end of Titus Andronicusemphasize arresting acts of revenge that upset the social order. Yet the subsequent critical focus on a narrow selection of often bloody revenge plays has overshadowed subtler and less spectacular modes of vengeance present in early modern culture.
In Civil Vengeance, Emily L. King offers a new way of understanding early modern revenge in relation to civility and community. Rather than relegating vengeance to the social periphery, she uncovers how facets of societychurch, law, and educationrelied on the dynamic of retribution to augment their power such that revenge emerges as an extension of civility. To revise the lineage of revenge literature in early modern England, King rereads familiar revenge tragedi
Trade Review
This is an enjoyably ambitious, sophisticated, and subtle rethinking of the ways in which revenge permeated and preoccupied early modern English culture.
* Modern Language Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note on Citation
Introduction: Playing the Long Game
1. Teaching Revenge: Social Aspirations and the Fragmented Subject of Early Modern Conduct Books
2. Feeling Revenge: Emotional Transmission and Contagious Vengeance in Donne's Deaths Duell
3. Fantasizing about Revenge: Vagrancy and the Formation of the Social Body in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI and Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller
4. Commemorating Revenge: Mourning, Memory, and Retributive Alternatives in the English Interregnum
Afterword: What Remains of Civil Vengeance?
Bibliography
Index
