Oh, Vindictive Vindice
Comments(3) Revenging against one’s enemy makes one the enemy. Vindice’s fiancé is raped and murdered. Antonio’s wife is raped and commits suicide. How each seeks revenge on his offender determines his fate.
Antonio praises his wife for committing suicide, by choosing to sustain her chastity in death rather than living a life of shame. While his logic is muddled, he still accepts her death and moves on.
Vindice, on the other hand, can not let go of his wife—literally. By morbidly carrying around her skull like it’s a cameo carved in her likeness, his grief festers into a violent anger. He decides that the only cure for his pain is to murder the Duke and the Duke’s heirs.
In the end, Vindice divulges his bloody conquests to Antonio, expecting him to be pleased with his actions, given that Vindice also fueled the murders of all the brothers of Antonio’s wife’s rapist. Rather than patting Vindice on the back, however, Antonio has him arrested and put to death. The last man standing—and alive—is the real hero of Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, not the one we’ve been rooting for all along, who slowly morphed into the very villains that offended him.
I think that this play is a wonderful display of what happens when you try too hard. The skull that Vindice carried made it crystal clear that he was not over the death of Gloriana. The man is so bent on getting his revenge in the same fashion in which the lusty Duke claimed his fiancee, that he wields her skull as proud as a knight would a shield and sword. I guess this plays on how Vindice says “if justice were the shape of a woman.” In this play it is, as Vindice dresses his fiancee’s remains to get his revenge on the Duke which turns out to be a morbidly humorous scene. After the Duke is taken care of, however, this leaves me asking, what the heck is Vindice going to do for the rest of the play? He has been pitied as well as cheered on by the reader and he has done what he has come to do, so what’s left? The answer seems to be to hurl himself into the opposite direction. By seeking revenge on the Duke’s heirs, Vindice turned heel and left the reader sorting for a hero. Antonio’s decision to have Vindice arrested and sentenced to death makes me almost want to sigh with relief that Vindice will not be able to try and kill more than just the Duke’s lineage. I think this play is trying to tell us that the hero is the person who does not create a tragedy of his own in his revenge.
I also agree that Vindice went a little overboard with his revenge, and if any revenge at all- killing the Duke should be sufficient to satisfy his venegeance. Instead, he decides to take advantage of the opportunity that presented itself, and i am not even sure if he actually planned it all, or it just kind of happened in his favor like that. I believe this is also the reason he got punished at the end. If he just stopped at murdering the Duke, would he end up differently?
This is really late, but in writing my paper I noticed something really interesting that Vindice Says.
After the 1st noble is arrested for confessing that he left the Duke with Piato, who everyone thinks was his killer, Vindice says “Could you not Stick? see what confession doth: who would not lie, when men are hanged for truth?” (5.1, 135-136)
This brings up an interesting point as to the outcome of the play. In the end, Vindice willingly tells Antonio as to his revenge plot and is arrested for it. After making that earlier statement though, Why would Vindice confess unless he wanted to die?. Now that his revenge was complete, there was no more reason for Vindice to live. He had completed his cycle and it was time for him to go, which he recognized in the end.