Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- English revenge plays discussed in this book
- Standard MLA abbreviations for Shakespeare's plays
- Note on the text
- PART I RAMPANT REVENGE
- PART II ECONOMIC UNFAIRNESS: REVENGE AND MONEY
- 3 Balancing the books: revenge, commercial mathematics, and the balance of trade
- 4 Payback time: reward, retaliation, and the deluge of debt
- 5 The goddess with the scales – and the blindfold
- PART III POLITICAL UNFAIRNESS: REVENGE AND RESISTANCE
- PART IV SOCIAL UNFAIRNESS: VENGEANCE AND EQUALITY
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Payback time: reward, retaliation, and the deluge of debt
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- English revenge plays discussed in this book
- Standard MLA abbreviations for Shakespeare's plays
- Note on the text
- PART I RAMPANT REVENGE
- PART II ECONOMIC UNFAIRNESS: REVENGE AND MONEY
- 3 Balancing the books: revenge, commercial mathematics, and the balance of trade
- 4 Payback time: reward, retaliation, and the deluge of debt
- 5 The goddess with the scales – and the blindfold
- PART III POLITICAL UNFAIRNESS: REVENGE AND RESISTANCE
- PART IV SOCIAL UNFAIRNESS: VENGEANCE AND EQUALITY
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Strokes received, and many blows repaid.
3 Henry VIWho e'er knew / Murder unpaid?
The Revenger's TragedyRevengers are often embittered over unrewarded merit. The Andronicus family give Rome military service, the lives of twenty-six young Andronici, two heads, three hands, and a tongue; and yet the emperor spurns its patriarch, leaving him no recourse but revenge. Hoffman avenges his father, whose heroic military service was neglected. Revenge plays rectified unfairness of reward by meting out fair punishment. This society didn't distinguish restitution firmly from punishment: “reward” could mean cash or a flogging; one could “pay” money or a beating. Reward and punishment belonged to the same system. Avengers talk like bookkeepers partly because the imperative to avenge a relative was a debt, analogous to money owed.
Conceiving of revenge as a debt helps make sense of a revenger's desire to exceed the crime he avenges. Muir notes the widespread idea that “escalation of retaliatory killings” is “a kind of interest payment” (68). This had special meaning in Renaissance England, which witnessed an epidemic of personal and family indebtedness. As Craig Muldrew shows, few Englishmen paid cash for anything:
After 1530 consumption expanded, and as the amount of buying and selling increased, marketing structures became more complex. With limited amounts of gold and silver in circulation, this economic expansion was based on the increasing use of credit … As chains of credit grew much longer and more complex in a relatively short time, defaults became much more common.
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- English Revenge DramaMoney, Resistance, Equality, pp. 84 - 105Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010