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Vengeance clipping the Eagle’s wings: Jan Vos’s Aran en Titus (1641), Hugo Grotius’s De Republica Emendanda (c. 1600) and the political implications of private, public and divine revenge

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Abstract

The present article explores how private, public and divine vengeance relate to each other in Jan Vos’s blockbusting revenge tragedy Aran en Titus, of Wraak en Weerwraak (Aran and Titus, or Revenge and Counter-revenge, 1641), and investigates what are considered to be their respective political implications. Vos’s play is a demonstration of how people can be blinded by their adherence to private revenge. This results in a tremendously cruel chain reaction of massacres, which ushers in the end of the play’s political status quo. As such, Aran en Titus not only shows the destructive character of vengeance to physical bodies (of self and others) but also to the body politic. The relationship between revenge and politics proved to be a complex issue which was topical in the early modern period. To indicate this, Aran en Titus will be read alongside Hugo Grotius’s De Republica Emendanda (On the Emendation of the Dutch Polity, c. 1600). Both Aran en Titus and Grotius’s tract affirm that divine providence (and thus: divine vengeance) should overrule human authority (and thus: private revenge). However, whereas Grotius propagates faith in divine providence in an attempt to eradicate private revenge, Vos stages a protagonist whose frustrated belief in divine providence only leads him to pursue personal (counter-)revenge. The third mode of revenge at play in the texts (a public revenge entrusted to the rightful ruler by God) is shown to be prone to political manipulation. Whereas Grotius regards public revenge as a necessary evil to guarantee civil order, the public revenge committed in Vos’s play only disperses the body politic and is one of the direct causes for the Empire’s disintegration.

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Notes

  1. See also De Chickera (1962), Broude (1975) and Kerrigan (1997).

  2. For a more recent discussion of the relation between private, public and divine retribution, see Steenbergh (2007: 20–23).

  3. For the relationship between Aran en Titus and Titus Andronicus, see Braekman (1968) and Helmers and Smith (2016). For an extensive comparison of the contents of both plays, see Wagner (1913).

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on an earlier version of this article.

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The funding was provided by Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds (BE) (Grand No. BOF18/DOC/078).

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  1. Section of Dutch Literature, Department of Literature, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Tom Laureys

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Laureys, T. Vengeance clipping the Eagle’s wings: Jan Vos’s Aran en Titus (1641), Hugo Grotius’s De Republica Emendanda (c. 1600) and the political implications of private, public and divine revenge. Neohelicon 47, 97–115 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-019-00510-4

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