Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest

Abstract

In this paper I shall be looking at three plays — Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest — as versions of revenge tragedy, I am not proposing any contentious reclassification. Shakespeare’s contemporaries did not envisage a distinct species of drama called ‘revenge tragedy’: and the ‘genre’ is really only a modern abstraction from a recurrent set of conventions, all of which make their individual appearance in plays we should not normally think of labelling ‘revenge tragedies’ at all. In choosing to emphasise those aspects of my three plays which link them to a ‘revenge tradition’, I want only to place them in a fresh perspective:[1] in so doing I hope also to suggest some new ways of thinking about this tradition — about the importance it had for Renaissance Englishmen and for Shakespeare in particular. Prospero’s renunciation of ‘vengeance’ in the name of ‘virtue’ marks the conclusion not just of his own moral pilgrimage, but of his creator’s long meditation on man’s relation with his past, on the significance of remembrance and revenge.