3 - Balancing the books: revenge, commercial mathematics, and the balance of trade

Summary

Blessed fates I thank you: I shall die revenged.

Mulleases the Turk

The celebrated stage direction Enter a messenger, with two heads and a hand in Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, flags an elaborate scheme of repayment. When Titus' sons are beheaded, he obliges the queen to eat her sons' heads, baked in a pie. The numeric equivalency (each parent taunted with two sons' severed heads) underscores the principle of fair payment: this is exactly what the foe deserves. Society was preoccupied with just deserts, and balancing the books were bloodthirsty revengers with the methodical minds of accountants, whose ledgers register not pounds and pence but amputated body parts.

Decapitational parity echoes overall bilateral symmetry. Markus Marti notes, “The score is 6 to 6”: major figures killed are, “in Titus' camp: Mutius, Bassianus, Quintus, Martius, Lavinia and Titus himself; on Tamora's side: Alarbus, Demetrius, Chiron, Saturninus, Tamora herself, and Aaron [about to die].” Similarly, five of The Spanish Tragedy's dead are bound for Elysium (Andrea, Horatio, Isabella, Bel-Imperia, Hieronimo) and five for Hades (Don Cyprian, Lorenzo, Balthazar, Serberine, Pedringano). Kyd's tally-keeper omits Villuppo, who would have unbalanced the Elysium/Hades ledger.

In Shakespeare's history plays, revengers' mental accounts of heirs killed on each side of the vendetta resemble the tallies of injuries and retaliations that cemented family solidarity in Friuli, where vendetta was “a medium of collective memory, a way of structuring clan history around deeds of infamy and of valor” (Muir 90).