Revenge and Shakespeare: So Overt It's Covert

Upon reflection of the four plays we’ve read so far this semester, I was overcome with a wave of pity upon remembering Timon, the naïve and generous Athenian whose vast underestimation of the affection of his friends resulted in his irrevocable transformation into the worst of misanthropes. The second half of Timon’s tale revolves almost entirely on his hopes to utterly destroy (with the exception of Flavius) not only those who have wronged him, but all of mankind . Whether it be funding Alcibiade’s campaign to bring about the slaughter of every breathing person in Athens or encouraging prostitutes to keep up with their profession so that they may transmit lethal diseases, Timon’s plots for revenge are beyond overdramatic.

            With this in mind, I turned to the Concordance to see just how many times the word “revenge” appeared in Timon. Imagine my surprise when I found that out of 160 possible matches in all of Shakespeare’s plays, “revenge” is used only twice in Timon, and each time he is not the speaker. Slightly bemused, I decided to try various synonyms of the word such as vengeance (no match), spite (3 matches, two of which belong to Apemantus), hatred (no match), rancour (no match), wrath (3 matches) and curse (5 matches). By this point, I was a bit frustrated because it was absolutely clear to me that Timon hated mankind with a passion and I could find few, if any, word-for-word instances to prove it (I did however find that “plague” resulted in 10 hits, most of which involved Timon using the word in “A plague upon thee!” context).

            What’s interesting is that when I ran these same words again in relation to other plays centered on vengeance such as Hamlet or Titus Andronicus, I also found few matches (although “revenge” does pop up in the latter almost 30 times). In fact, in all of Shakespeare’s plays there are more occurrences (sometimes even hundreds more) of words such as “peace”, “pardon”, and “forgive” then there are of “revenge”, “hate”, and so forth. I found these results to be quite fascinating. One of the many reasons people continue to read Shakespeare is because his work is always contemporary and relevant to human nature. And, like it or not, revenge is a significant and relatable aspect of human nature. I think it would be very interesting to look more into the topic of revenge and its (c)overtness in Shakespeare’s work.