ABSTRACT
In The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, being ‘theatrical’ or ‘melodramatic’ in remembrance of the dead carried a positively construed sense of being ‘extensive’ in such performance, the plays thus denoting and championing popish ‘excesses’ in Protestant England. However, a question that arises is how a Protestant more ideologically committed than Kyd and Shakespeare thus might have written a revenge tragedy, a genre extravagant even in its classical origins, and therefore likely to present ‘excessive’ remembrances?1 Written by John Marston, who suffered public censorship by Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft in 1599 before taking ‘Anglican’ orders in 1609,2 Antonio’s Revenge (c.1599-1601) provides an answer. Crucially, it reduces the dramatic centrality and impact of mourning in two ways. First, in place of the view that extensive funerary ritual ‘fits’ in remembrance of the dead, its absence justifying revenge, Marston presents in Pandulpho an active dissenter from such ritual, which he persistently and openly criticizes as inappropriate. Second, in presenting ‘Piero Sforza’ (‘rapacious’ or ‘forceful Peter’) as the corrupt power of the play, Marston implies a corrupt ‘Peter’ – coming to suggest, as we shall observe, the See of Peter – lies directly behind the remembrance challenged by Pandulpho. This proto-Reformer does not by any means have it all his way, but Antonio’s Revenge thus distinguishes itself from the plays of the previous chapter through a sustained contrast of views on remembrance,3
1 I considered such classical origins in relation to remembrance in my Introduction to the study on p. 10-11.
