The Revenger's Tragedy Film
A Cyberpunk Version of a Seventeenth-Century Horror Play
A cast including Eddie Izzard, Christopher Ecclestone and Derek Jacobi camp and snarl their way through Middleton's violent and satirical revenge tragedy.
The Revenger’s Tragedy, (by either Cyril Torneur or Thomas Middleton) was written in 1607, as a frenetic and self-parodic example of the gruesome revenge tragedy genre. Nearly four hundred years later, Alex Cox directed a film which attempted to bring the play’s lurid mayhem to modern audiences.
The Revenger’s Tragedy was not a straight-faced play. Though it tackled issues such as the apparent absence of God from human affairs, the corruption of authority and the hideous ingenuity of humans in doing each other harm, it was essentially satirical, rather than truly tragic. It is difficult to read passages like the one below with a straight face:
SUPERVACUO: Then I proclaim myself. Now I am duke.
AMBITIOSO: Thou Duke! Brother thou liest.
[stabs SUPERVACUO]
SPURIO: Slave! So dost thou.
[stabs AMBITIOSO]
4 LORD: Base villain, hast thou slain my lord and master?
[stabs SPURIO]
VINDICE: Pistols, treason, murder, help, guard! My lord the duke!
(Act V, Scene iii)
Cox doesn’t attempt to play The Revenger’s Tragedy straight – for a start, he casts Eddie Izzard in one of the main roles. The setting is post-apocalyptic, with the Duke’s sons in cyber-punk gear and Christopher Eccleston as “Vindice”, the titular revenger with no name who returns from exile to avenge his dead fiancee. Eccleston throws himself into the role of deranged angel of death with enthusiasm, gurning and posturing his way through the ridiculous plot. He is by turns amusing and terrifying, depending on whether he is cracking a joke or torturing Derek Jacobi’s aged Duke – he brings the same edgy grin to both activities. Izzard, by contrast, throttles back on his usual wide-eyed, arm-flailing humour, and delivers his lines dryly with one sardonic eye on the camera at all times. Jacobi himself plays the Duke as if already embalmed, his lipstick, powdered skin and painted nails blending seamlessly with the lace gloves and tacky shades with which the costume department provides him.
The script is not exactly the same words which Middleton (or Torneur) wrote in the early 1600s. The screenplay adds exclamations, tags to explain existing speeches, or even lengthy new passages of dialogue, but the overall effect is of a movie in Jacobean English. (Though no textual scholar to date has suggested that Vindice’s brother calls him a “f***ing c***” when he reappears from exile.) Unlike most Shakespeare films, there is no dwelling on elegant speeches, and the language and texture of the original Revenger’s Tragedy is hurried over during the relentless action of the movie.
Cox has abandoned the emblematic tendencies of The Revenger’s Tragedy: the set-pieces borrowed from medieval morality plays, the echoes of the continental Dance of Death, and has put in their place a shiny, brittle vision of Vindice’s death-wish. The movie doesn’t stake any claim to deep resonance with the human condition, as productions of King Lear or Hamlet frequently demand, but treats death and corruption in much the same way as the first productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy; as entertaining, inevitable, visceral and farcically repeatable.
