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Revenge as a topic occurs frequently in Shakespeare’s theatre. However, he wrote only two fully-fledged revenge plays: an early play called Titus Andronicus, and then of course the great play Hamlet. The revenge motif crops up repeatedly in the other tragedies but not in the sense that any of them could be called a revenge play. Hamlet probes the question of revenge even as it enacts it, and perhaps even goes so far as to show a distaste for it.
One might think that comedy is not a natural genre for depicting revenge, but in fact many of Shakespeare’s comedies raise the topic even if only fleetingly or sporadically. The Merchant of Venice treats of revenge in a more thoroughgoing way, and the determination of Shylock to take the life of his enemy Antonio casts a dark shadow over almost the whole of the drama. Whereas the ancient Greek example of revenge seems to insist on a kind of equality, such as a life for a life, Shakespeare’s comic example shows that the revenge instinct is often disproportionate to the offence given. The merest slight or humiliation may be enough for a man to want to kill his adversary. This is true of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
We will examine such questions of revenge motivation in the two plays. Since Shakespeare is a supreme poet, however, we will pay close attention to the quality of his language and the richness of his verse, his use of image and metaphor, and his deployment of metre. Along with thematic considerations, then, we will look at how the plays perform poetically and dramatically.
Recommended editions of the plays:
William Shakespeare. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Philip Edwards. Updated Edition. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-521-53252-5
William Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. M. M. Mahood. Third Edition. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-316-50664-6 |
