Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Textual note
- Introduction: consummate play
- Part I “COME … AND PLAY”: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, BESIDE THE POINT
- Part II DESIRING WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
- 5 “How strangely does himself work to undo him”: (male) sexuality in The Revenger's Tragedy
- 6 “My body bestow upon my women”: the space of the feminine in The Duchess of Malfi
- 7 “I(t) could not choose but follow”: erotic logic in The Changeling
- 8 “Old men's tales”: legacies of the father in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore
- 9 The passionate shepherdess: the case of Margaret Cavendish
- Afterword: for(e)play
- Notes
- List of Works cited
- Index
5 - “How strangely does himself work to undo him”: (male) sexuality in The Revenger's Tragedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Textual note
- Introduction: consummate play
- Part I “COME … AND PLAY”: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, BESIDE THE POINT
- Part II DESIRING WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
- 5 “How strangely does himself work to undo him”: (male) sexuality in The Revenger's Tragedy
- 6 “My body bestow upon my women”: the space of the feminine in The Duchess of Malfi
- 7 “I(t) could not choose but follow”: erotic logic in The Changeling
- 8 “Old men's tales”: legacies of the father in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore
- 9 The passionate shepherdess: the case of Margaret Cavendish
- Afterword: for(e)play
- Notes
- List of Works cited
- Index
Summary
If Marlowe's poems and dramas continually flirt with the idea of never consummating, The Revenger's Tragedy consummates continually. It plays with and parodies – but nevertheless participates in – the model of a self-defining, self-defeating phallic orgasm and death that is central to conventional tragedy. While the text effectively anatomizes and criticizes the structures of misogyny and the erotics of patriarchy, it simultaneously delights in them, never seriously attempting to imagine an alternative.
Images of swelling and detumescence pervade the play: revenge and rhetoric, as well as conventional sexuality (from which they seem inseparable), are conceived in these terms. The bastard Spurio, for example, exclaims at one point:
When base male bawds kept sentinel at stair-head
Was I stol'n softly – oh damnation met
The sin of feasts, drunken adultery.
I feel it swell me; my revenge is just,
I was begot in impudent wine and lust.
(1.2.186–90)In this speech, the action of “swelling” seems – to use another central term in the play – to “slide” between adultery and revenge (as it does in fact: Spurio's revenge is to sleep with his father's wife). The “brain” of the play's hero, Vindice, similarly “swell[s] with strange invention” as he “works” himself up verbally – and then is cut off in mid-sentence (1.3.120–4). As J. L. Simmons and Peter Stallybrass have noted, tongues are repeatedly associated throughout the play with phallic assertiveness and deflation.
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- Information
- Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England , pp. 61 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009