Revenge Tragedy

Overall thesis

Early modern revenge tragedy uses bodily fragmentation and dismemberment to dramatise moral instability, patriarchal power, and anxieties surrounding interiority and exteriority.

How is early modern revenge tragedy’s manipulation of bodily fragmentation realised in John Webster’s the Duchess of Malfi?

The Duchess of Malfi self-consciously interrogates and resists patriarchal constructions of the female body, ultimately sanctioning female desire and subjectivity

How is early modern revenge tragedy’s manipulation of bodily fragmentation realised in John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore?

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore uses bodily violence to render female interiority visible, making it legible and controllable within patriarchal logic.

Claire Kimball ‘Staging Dismemberment in Early Modern Drama‘ - early modern anxieties about bodily fragmentation

The threat of physical fragmentation

Duchess’ hand as symbol - QUOTE The Duchess to Antonio during the betrothal scene

raise yourself, or if you please, my hand to help you: so

Claire Kimball on the significance of the Duchess’ hand in the betrothal scene

typically subservient female hand commits an unusual (and to her brother Ferdinand an unforgivable) act”

Ferdinand’s hyperfixation on Duchess’ honour realised in hand imagery

You have shook hands with Reputation, And made him invisible

Claire Kimball - these displays of bodily violence also ground the play in the performative experience of word and action

assaults to hands, hearts, tongues and eyes, not only provide bloody, exciting displays, but also anchor the play’s themes in a simultaneous experience – the truly performative experience – of word and action, cause and effect, or truth and consequence

Annabella’s heart as the site of transgression

“my captive heart”

Annabella and Giovanni’s love is configured in terms of the physical body

Giovanni - the heart as a place of secrecy/ incest as tied to secrecy and confession

“rip up my bosom, there thou shalt behold a heart in which is writ the truth I speak”

Susan Wiseman ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore: Representing the Incestuous Body’ - the female body as the site of punishment

‘Annabella’s body rather than Giovanni’s which comes to bear the meaning of their transgression”

How Annabella’s heart is referred to once it is no longer inside her body

a heart

Judith Haber ‘The Space of the Feminine in the Duchess of Malfi’- the Duchess’ redefinition of female integrity by framing chosen penetration as agency

“her integrity as subject consists not in remaining impenetrable but in choosing who may ‘enter’ her”

Duchess to Antonio - inversion of conventional penetration

I ent’red you”

Haber on Duchess and Antonio’s inversion of sexual dynamics

“she effectively positions herself (and Antonio) both as subject and as object, both as penetrator and as penetrated”

Conclusion

Ultimately, revenge tragedy becomes a medium for dramatists to test the fluid bounds between interiority and exteriority, subsequently illuminating how dismemberment is weaponised as an attack on female subjectivity and agency.