The dissertation investigates early modern English revenge tragedy against the backdrop of the complicacies of the English reformation. The discussion is built on two basic theoretical pillars: on cultural memory studies, and the theory of collective trauma. These two approaches are informed by a third, historical angle, which is the revision of the English reformation. The fundamental cultural turn that the incessantly fluctuating tides of the English reformation brought about is described by an increasing number of scholars as traumatic.
It is argued that the impact of the English reformation amounts to the magnitude of a collective trauma. Thus, the investigation scrutinizes the life of a community, as opposed to the personal, psychological approach of trauma. In keeping with the collective trauma framework, the object of scrutiny is representation, and not repression. The representation of different trauma narratives take place in the conflicted arena of culture, where the hegemonic state-narratives of trauma vie for dominance in opposition to the censored, silenced, but regularly (re)surfacing trauma-narratives.
The Reformed calendar or the desolate ruins of the Catholic past are witnesses to this cultural-collective trauma. But the most important witness of all is revenge tragedy, with its uncanny revenants, mad revengers, and maimed bodies. The main contents of this collective trauma are the thanatological crisis and the sacrificial crisis. The sacrificial crisis is manifest in the Eucharist Controversies, and the ambivalence around the martyrs’ scaffold. These tenets of religious trauma are mapped onto five early modern revenge tragedies in the analytical part of the dissertation: Thomas Kyd The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare Titus Andronicus, John Marston Antonio’s Revenge, Thomas Middleton The Maiden’s Tragedy, John Webster The Duchess of Malfi.