vengeance, and recompense”—Deut 32:35), and the hoped-for right, after wrongdoing,
can seem distant (48, 49-51).
In drama, in the West, interest in revenge plots often is argued to have been
influenced, as well, by the rediscovery of the works of Roman-era writer Seneca (c. 4
BCE- CE 65). His tragedies set a pattern that long has supported Western revenge
plots and that flowers in the English Renaissance (for brief histories, see Maus and
Winston). Seneca, critics purport, not only presents stage business to adopt —violence,
ghosts, heightened speech, duplicities—but a mood in the on-stage world that supports
extra-legal pursuits. Perhaps as a result of his own having risen through the Roman
political structure and seen its dishonesties firsthand, Seneca elaborates plots that, as
one expert sums, “confront the nature of kingship and tyranny, along with such themes
as regal clemency; the adaptability and insecurity of courtiers; the dangers of public life;
the inevitable corruption, instability, and evanescence of power; the treachery that
surrounds it; the resentment bred of arbitrary rule; the constant possibility of
assassination” (J. P. Sullivan qtd. in Winston 37). Jonathan Crew sums that Seneca
places on stage a specific kind of reality: “that of which the culture at large simply
cannot or will not speak [. . .] and which it cannot or will not consistently represent”
(100).
In short, revenge plots say to audiences, “This is what we really feel about our
ability to receive justice.” Such plots echo modern insecurities regarding the role of the
state in righting wrongs. They explain, to some degree, as well, John Kerrigan notes,
the health of pop-culture genres like “vigilante movies in America.” That is, revenge
plots alarm audiences with the recognition that the impulses debated by Hamlet—to
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