Dr. Heather Hirschfeld Awarded Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Her project, "Satisfactions of the Renaissance: Revenge Tragedy and the English Reformation," examines English Renaissance revenge tragedy in the context of Reformation doctrinal debates about the agency of the human will in the committing, punishing, repenting for, and forgiving of sin. The principal and organizing claim is that early modern revenge tragedy dramatizes a spiritual and psychological dilemma, unleashed in the wake of the Reformation, about how to make and experience satisfaction.
What is enough? What is satisfying? The problem of defining human fulfillment and determining commensurability, whether addressed by ancient philosophic enquiries into the “good life” or by contemporary theories of desire and drive, is transhistorical and transdiciplinary. But because early Protestantism fundamentally revised Catholic understandings of divine grace and the role of the human being in penitential activity, the Reformation period and the religious debates associated with it gave these questions special nuances and emphases. This study explores these questions by focusing on revenge tragedy, a classical genre whose simultaneous insistence on commensurate, eye-for-an-eye justice as well as amplified, excessive punishment and pain offered Renaissance playwrights a uniquely appropriate structure for dramatizing the (lost) possibility of satisfaction and its allied concepts of necessity, sufficiency and excess. At the core of the revenge genre is the desperate pursuit of getting evenwhat Hamlet calls “setting things right” and what juridical and theological systems, according to legal scholar William Ian Miller, consider “a matter of satisfaction” (140). But insofar as this pursuit leads only to further imbalance, revenge is never over and satisfaction remains elusive: “What kind of payback really restores the spirit?...is all satisfaction a bit dissatisfying?” (144). The project charts the ways in which Renaissance revenge plays dramatize these questions as part of an urgent meditation on the tragic possibilities and limitations of fulfillment.