Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps

ought properly to be vested in those with the requisite authority, that authority must lead to action: “if an individual is grievously offended either by the public or by a private person, and does not receive due satisfaction, he will, if he lives in a republic, seek to avenge himself, even if it lead to the ruin of that republic.”⁴⁰ While Francis Bacon deplored revenge, writing in a much-quoted line “Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature was to it, the more ought law weed it out,”⁴¹ he also tempered his harsh judgment of revenge by adding in a less quoted line “The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy.”⁴² An influential Elizabethan writer maintained that private revenge was appropriate “when violence is offered, and the Magistrate is absent…. In this case, God puts the sword into the priuate mans hands.”⁴³ These writers supported the view that the state was the appropriate enactor of punishment for a wrong, but if the state failed to act, an individual was justified in taking revenge. Despite the predominant cultural voice that condemned revenge, there existed another countervoice that insisted that the desire for revenge was not per se evil and even tolerated revenge under some circumstances. Such writers arguably attempted to restore the collapsed distinction between just feelings of resentment and barbarous emotions run amok.

      Some, in fact, saw the desire for revenge as a noble and worthwhile emotion. Adam Smith, who, unlike Kant and Hegel, promoted the guidance of the emotions as being critical to good judgment,⁴⁴ found resentment and hatred against someone who has wronged us to be a necessary part of human nature. He, nonetheless, qualified those instances in which the urge for revenge is appropriate: “if we yield to the dictates of revenge, it is with reluctance, from necessity, and in consequence of great and repeated provocations. When resentment is guarded and qualified in this manner, it may be admitted to be even generous and noble.”⁴⁵ Smith sees anger and resentment, as long as they are legitimately provoked, as part of the underpinnings of a moral community, as safeguards against wrongdoing “to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and to chastise the guilty.”⁴⁶ Smith’s position on revenge draws its imagery from Senecan revenge tragedies:

      His blood [one slain], we think, calls aloud for vengeance. The very ashes of the dead seem to be disturbed at the thought that his injuries are to pass unrevenged. The horrors which are supposed to haunt the bed of the murderer, the ghosts which, superstition imagines, rise from their graves to demand vengeance on those who brought them to an untimely end, all take their origin from this natural sympathy with the imaginary resentment of the slain…. Nature … has in this manner stamped upon the human heart … an immediate and instinctive approbation of the sacred and necessary law of retaliation.⁴⁷

      For Smith, there is something natural in humankind that needs some kind of revenge, something “stamped upon the human heart” that requires a state with laws and procedures that can fulfill the “sacred and necessary law of retaliation.”⁴⁸

      Carlyle, who deplored reformers arguing for humane prisons, declined euphemistic language and openly defended the urge for revenge: “‘Revenge,’ my friends! revenge, and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to revancher oneself upon them and pay them what they have merited: this is forevermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man. Only the excess of it is diabolical; the essence I say is manlike, and even godlike.”⁴⁹ Similarly, the Victorian jurist James Fitzjames Stephen resisted the move into viewing punishment as for deterrence alone and insisted that the desire for revenge was natural to “healthily constituted minds.”⁵⁰ A good criminal justice system recognizes this need and should be “an emphatic assertion of the principle that the feeling of hatred and the desire for vengeance … are important elements of human nature which ought … to be satisfied in a regular and legal manner.”⁵¹

      Even these more nuanced positions, though, finally are exhortative rather than seriously prescriptive: that is, these writers, in their efforts to create a perfect society and ideal justice, speak to the state, not to its citizens, warning those in power to enact justice for the citizens, or else. They do not realistically confront what should occur if the state actually does nothing. They do not envisage a weak, impotent state that cannot judge and punish. They imagine an ideal strong state that has the capacity to be vigilant in exacting punishment. Because they seemingly cannot conceive of a state that cannot or will not act, they naturally do not provide any alternative to violence if the state does so fail.

      Perhaps the best portrayal of this ambivalent feeling about revenge and the failure of the state can be seen in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, in which he dramatizes the complex nature of revenge and the conflicted, if underground, attitude toward it. Like other playwrights of his time, Shakespeare was obsessed by revenge, his representations evolving from the barbaric excesses of Titus Andronicus (1594) to Prospero’s abandonment of revenge in favor of reconciliation in The Tempest (1623). In Hamlet, his greatest and most complex play, Shakespeare depicts his intellectual prince as hesitant to take revenge yet obsessed with the need to do so. Using the conventional Senecan symbols of revenge tragedy—a ghost, madness, delay, hesitation, a play- within-a-play, the failure of the law, uncertainty, multiple murders, and the avenger’s death⁵²—Shakespeare creates a complicated hero whose inner psyche contains both the ancient duty to take revenge and the modern repulsion toward it.⁵³

      In the characters of the ghost and Laertes, Shakespeare represents, in different ways, the idea central to heroic societies that taking revenge is requisite to a loving relationship. The ghost of Hamlet’s father demands, “If thou didst ever thy dear father love … / Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.”⁵⁴ The naturalness and even appropriateness of revenge is woven throughout the play in that line and others such as, “If thou hast nature in thee, bear it [the murder] not.”⁵⁵ King Hamlet, a good and noble man unjustly betrayed and murdered (we “shall not look upon his like again”)⁵⁶ speaks these lines, not a murderous villain in a Kydian treatment. Because they are spoken by someone we are supposed to admire, we are instructed to take this sentiment seriously and, like Hamlet, to turn it over in our mind. This ghost does not demand the excess characteristic to contemporaneous dramatic versions of revenge that left the stages littered with corpses of the innocent and guilty alike. Instead he admonishes Hamlet to restrain himself (“Taint not thy mind”),⁵⁷ and limit his bloody revenge to Claudius alone. Speaking of Gertrude, he advises, “Leave her to heaven.”⁵⁸ The convention of the ghost demanding revenge, borrowed from Seneca⁵⁹ and familiar to revenge dramas of Shakespeare’s time, is a variation of the Furies of Aeschylus, creatures from another world insisting that the unjustly murdered be avenged. The dignified and honorable ghost of King Hamlet approaches the image sought by Aeschylus of the Furies at Wisdom’s side, a far more complex and ambiguous image than the polarized revenge and justice, passion and reason, of lesser plays. As Charles and Elaine Hallett note, “The Ghost in Hamlet … symbolizes that justice which is naturally intuited by the individual psyche.”⁶⁰

      In Laertes, Shakespeare personifies the ancient, uncomplicated response to a wrong committed against a family; Laertes sees his course clearly. Hamlet has killed Laertes’s father, Polonius, and driven his sister, Ophelia, to madness and suicide; Laertes will have his revenge. His course is so direct that he is easily used by Claudius for Claudius’s own, less nobly inspired, ends. Claudius pointedly questions, even goads, Laertes: “Laertes, was your father dear to you? / Or are you like a painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?”⁶¹ If Laertes really loved his father, in Claudius’s schemed version, he must act. If he does not act, it is evidence he did not love his father. In the understanding of the old dispensation, love for a slain family member requires bloody revenge. Moreover, in Claudius’s view (which aligns him with the revenge-seeking villains of contemporaneous plays), “Revenge should have no bounds.”⁶²

      On the other hand, Shakespeare, influenced by Elizabethan ethical teaching that insistently condemned revenge,⁶³ endows Hamlet with a more modern resistance to private revenge.⁶⁴ At first Hamlet reacts to his father’s demand for revenge with predictable emotion: “I, with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge.”⁶⁵ He hesitates