As emerging states began to centralize their power and monopolize revenge, another development became necessary so that people would not readily reclaim their ancient right. This development was the removal of emotion from state punishment and the purgation of the victim’s desire for punishment. States needed to insure that even the desire for revenge would be unacceptable. One of the most effective devices for this suppression and silencing was shame, the instructing of each citizen to be ashamed of any citizen, including himself or herself, who might give importance to a desire for revenge. Citizens were taught to believe that they could seek justice (dispassionate state punishment) but not revenge, severing any original nexus that the two might have shared. The situation in Western Europe, particularly in England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, provides an example of the cultural strategies employed to change the perception of revenge. Religion, philosophy, and literature were enlisted to convince people to keep the urge for personal revenge restrained. Wherever people gathered—in churches, theaters, and educational institutions—they encountered some sort of argument, subtle or otherwise, against personal revenge.
In their sermons and religious writings, ministers and theologians reinterpreted the biblical practice and approval of revenge depicted in both the New and Old Testaments. No longer was the emphasis on God’s wrathful vengeance, on his “sword steeped in blood.” Instead theologians roundly denounced revengers and predicted damnation for anyone who took revenge into his or her own hands; the revenger “strips himselfe of Gods protection.”2 Elizabethan England was described as a New Jerusalem, in which “there is now no thirsting for reuenge. The law of Retribution is disanuld amongst them…. An eie no longer for an eie; a tooth no longer for a tooth.”3 Influential theologian Joseph Butler (in an interesting foreshadowing of Nietzsche) preached that revenge, which stems from resentment, is contrary to religion and that while “every man naturally feels an indignation upon seeing instances of villainy and baseness,”4 at the same time “indulgence of revenge”5 has the tendency to propagate itself and thus must not be engaged in “by any one who considers mankind as a community or family, and himself a member of it.”6
Much of the popular drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries set up a similar stark contrast between revenge and justice, often with bloody depictions of revenge and equally bloody portrayals of its consequences. A culture bent on suppressing destructive revenge impulses had to encourage the emergence of stories that contrasted revenge with justice, stories that created the cautionary cultural narrative arguing that revenge and justice are mutually exclusive and, thus excluded, the desire for revenge is shameful and requires suppression. In seeking an extinction of the passion for revenge, the extremes of vengeful behavior were presented, with revenge often portrayed as being sought for trivial wrongs and in excess. Popular dramas portrayed revenge as an agonizing burden that invariably pushed even good people into madness with cataclysmic results. If the notion of revenge entered a hero’s life, it would inevitably “warp his character [and] drive him to insanity.”7
Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1589) was the “most prodigious success of any drama produced and printed between 1580 and 1642.”8 In The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd portrays a variety of revengers: the noble but paralyzed Hieronimo who must avenge his murdered son, as well as the malicious Balthazar and Lorenzo, who kill for selfish reasons and trivial wrongs. The actions of all the revengers, good and evil, bring down the state and result in multiple deaths. At the close of the play, the Ghost of Don Andrea, a slain warrior, speaks to a character called Revenge and delineates, with gruesome pleasure, the multiple revenge murders that have occurred:
I, now my hopes have end in their effects,
When blood and sorrow finnish my desires:
Horatio murdered in his Fathers bower,
Vilde Serberine by Pedringano slaine,
False Pedringano hangd by quaint device,
Faire Isabella by her selfe misdone,
Prince Balthazar by Bel-imperia stabd,
The Duke of Castile and his wicked Sonne,
Both done to death by olde Hieronimo.
My Bel-imperia falne as Dido fell,
And good Hieronimo slaine by himselfe:
I these were spectacles to please my soule.9
Nine deaths and the end of the possibility of peace between Spain and Portugal are the fruits of the drive for revenge. In The Spanish Tragedy and in many of the plays that the English audiences attended for several generations, “The act of revenge does not correct an imbalance and restore order … with the even exchange of an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. Revenge is itself an act of excess.”10 In The Spanish Tragedy, revenge does not restore a balance; it destroys the possibility of one.
The perverse nature of revenge appears in another popular drama of the time, John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (ca. 1601). The evil Piero opens the play covered in blood having just murdered Andrugio because many years earlier Andrugio was his rival for the hand of Maria, who had chosen Andrugio. Piero brags, “I am great in blood, / Unequal’d in revenge”11 and plots even more bloody acts. Andrugio’s son, Antonio, bid by the ghost of his father to avenge his murder, acts, it would seem, out of an ancient sense of duty, honor, and justice. But those values become perverted as Antonio, as part of the revenge, murders Piero’s completely innocent son Julio as Julio begs for his life—“Pray you do not hurt me.”12 The motive for revenge begins in duty and transforms into excess and cruelty.
A study of over twenty revenge plays produced in England between 1562 and 1607 concludes that in most of them revenge is “unmistakably condemned,”13 and the plays constitute an intense propaganda campaign against revenge because of the establishment’s fear of the civil disorder that could result from private revenge.14 By the mid-seventeenth century, revenge had few advocates, and bloody acts of revenge in dramas were put into the hands of villains, buttressing a general and unceasing propaganda against revenge.15
By the eighteenth century, the original connection between personal revenge and state punishment had become obscured to the extent that the focus of any rationale for the state’s right to punish bypassed the victim and focused on the duty of the sovereign and the moral status of the perpetrator. The philosophical stances of Kant and Hegel toward punishment capture the prevalent mood of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Kant’s work, for example, punishment by the state is deontological, the absolute right and duty of the state. The law concerning punishment is one of Kant’s categorical imperatives. The state has a duty to punish and for a sovereign to fail to punish, to grant clemency, is itself an act of injustice: “woe to him who rummages around in the winding path of a theory of happiness looking for advantage to be gained by releasing the criminal from punishment or by reducing the amount of it.”16 A victim’s personal emotions, regarded as “brute forces” by Kant, have no place in punishment, either for severity or mercy. Human beings may be forgiving (placabilitas), but being forgiving should not be confused with tolerating wrongs, “for then a human being would be throwing away his rights and letting others trample on them, and so would violate his duty to himself.”17
Hegel developed Kant’s advocacy of the deontological nature of punishment by refining the idea of balancing that was originally found in feelings about revenge: “crime … contains within itself its own nullification, and this appears in the form of punishment.”18 Rather than the “absurdity” of “specific equality” required by lex talionis