The Books That Take Revenge, Centuries Later
Revenge is a dish best served cold, but how cold? Can we set that dish to cool for 400 years? Satisfaction so long deferred might seem beside the point. We want to watch our enemies humbled in an instant, to see their heads bowed low before our rage burns clean.
In A Treacherous Secret Agent, the prominent Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber proposes a subtler and far slower model of revenge. Garber’s subject is the role of literature in the Red Scare of the 1950s, a period during which artists and writers suspected of Communist sympathies were scapegoated, blacklisted, and hauled in front of investigative committees. In transcripts of hearings of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Garber finds an upwelling of voices from the literary past, among them Christopher Marlowe, the revenge dramatist Thomas Kyd, and, from first to last, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare.
The words of these long-dead playwrights and poets, Garber argues, “echo and reecho at key moments in an uncanny counter-testimony,” often in ways that embarrass or undermine Senator Joseph McCarthy, the government’s staunchest anti-Communist at the time. Literature, in her imagining, is like a snake curled in the shadows of a doorway, silent, biding its time, until in a writhing flash it strikes its target. Garber’s new book is a study not of “poetic justice,” she clarifies, but of “poetic revenge.” The “agent” of revenge is not the author but the literary work itself, uncoiling across the centuries.
Most of us are familiar with writing as a vehicle for vengeance. These days, revenge literature arrives most often as a sordid memoir or roman à clef in which grievances are recounted, villainy exposed, and relevant facts set forth. The scope is typically intimate or familial. Erotic betrayal is a fertile theme: One recent well-chronicled dalliance, among a quartet of writers, destroyed two marriages but spawned three books. Alternatively, a cruel parent might receive, on the page, their comeuppance (as in Jennette McCurdy’s startlingly titled blockbuster memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died). The wounds and humiliations of private life can rarely be redressed by law; literature offers a parallel tribunal in which those hurts are litigated and, if possible, imaginatively overcome. When justice recedes, revenge rears its bloodstained head.
The revenge literature Garber favors works on a longer timeline and a more ambitious scale, targeting not private malefactors but figures of authority. Its signature move is the exposure of publicly proclaimed values as impoverished, hypocritical, or morally deficient. In her telling, the literature of the past lays traps into which the rich and powerful, the boorish and sadistic, inevitably stumble.
Current political events offer a seemingly endless procession of cruelties worth avenging. Yet literature, Garber’s agent of revenge, seems more impotent than ever. Literature’s loss of cultural authority is due in part to funding cuts, book bannings, and political attacks on higher education, but the overwhelming driver of its diminishment may be our own indifference. Garber’s book offers reason to think that the decline of reading and the rise of authoritarianism are twinned forms of disempowerment. By revealing human truths under the guise of fiction, literature gives readers the verbal and imaginative equipment they need to challenge the stories their rulers spin. Opponents of McCarthyism, in Garber’s telling, did just that. In her account of the period, when a brave citizen speaks out, a volume of Shakespeare is likely close at hand.
The hostility to literature felt by some of the architects of the Red Scare is well established. Harold Velde, an Illinois representative who became the chair of HUAC in 1953, spoke against funding a mobile library service for rural citizens by warning, “Educating Americans through the means of the library service could bring about a change of their political attitude quicker than any other method. The basis of Communism and socialistic influence is the education of the people.” Such politicians viewed literature as subversive, irritatingly highbrow, and—like socialism—suspiciously European.
Garber’s conceit is to read the HUAC transcripts as “playscripts.” She dramatizes the moment when Joe Starnes, a representative from Alabama, presses Hallie Flanagan, the director of the New Deal–era Federal Theatre Project, on an allusion to Christopher Marlowe: “You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?” (This scene is also recounted in James Shapiro’s superb 2024 study of the Federal Theatre Project, The Playbook, to which Garber’s book acts as a sort of sequel.) In this encounter, literature is a source of embarrassment. In others, it anticipates the failure of Red Scare tactics.
One of McCarthy’s favorite bits of political theater was to brandish a supposed list of card-carrying Communists working in the State Department. The number of those alleged traitors was always specific but constantly varying; across interviews and speeches, McCarthy set the figure at 205, 207, 133, and 57 (this last number possibly taken from a bottle of Heinz 57 ketchup he’d spied on a table). Scrutiny of those numbers during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Garber argues, contributed to “McCarthy’s downfall.” This episode, she proposes, is presaged in Shakespeare. In Henry IV, Part 1, Falstaff, after being pranked by Prince Harry, claims that he was attacked by an ever-expanding group of “men in buckram.” Two opponents become four, then seven, then nine, then 11, the rapidly inflating numbers making Falstaff’s fraudulence comically evident.
Garber’s mode of argument is analogical and evocative rather than causal; her well-trained ear is cocked to detect Shakespearean allusion in a political milieu filled with denunciations, self-mythologizing speeches, and vertiginous twists of fate. (The fall of HUAC Chair J. Parnell Thomas, who was jailed for accepting kickbacks and assumed a new leadership role, in prison, as custodian of the chicken yard, rivals any comeuppance we might find in Shakespeare’s plays.)
[Read: ‘We need to do McCarthyism to the tenth power’]
Garber’s book has a touch of scholarly obsessiveness, as she presses on a word or phrase or gesture to reveal the Elizabethan pattern beneath. And yet, during the Red Scare, Shakespeare really was everywhere. Garber conjures a vanished world in which politicians and TV journalists knew the playwright’s work, could quote him, and appealed to him as an authority. Even Robert Moses, who initially opposed New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park program, could, in private, “recite whole scenes” from the plays.
The single work that hangs most consequentially over this phase of political history is Julius Caesar, in part because of Joseph Mankiewicz’s quietly anti-McCarthyist 1953 film adaptation. In the play, Caesar’s advisers Cassius and Brutus hatch a plot to murder the ever more tyrannical leader of the Roman republic. “With a spot I damn him,” says Caesar’s protegé, Antony, preparing a blacklist of enemies slated for execution. The journalist Edward R. Murrow, of “Good night, and good luck” fame, invoked this tragedy in multiple broadcasts opposing McCarthy’s purges. There followed a war of quotations. McCarthy reached for Shakespeare’s words while on the defensive in the Army-McCarthy hearings. “On what meat doth this, our Caesar, feed?” he declaimed, casting himself as a Cassius besieged by pro-Communist tyranny. Murrow shot back in another broadcast, turning Cassius’s lines “against the man who had so incautiously cited them.” Had McCarthy “looked three lines earlier” in the play, Murrow intoned, he would have found a more pertinent line from Cassius: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Garber has long played a role in keeping literature’s capacities—for revenge or other uses—within our reach. (I took her graduate seminar on Shakespeare at Harvard.) She ascended the ranks of academia in the 1970s and ’80s, the height of the Age of Theory. This was a period when literary critics had real power and were devising new ways of reading—focused on the fluidity of language and the instability of textual meaning—that reshaped the humanities and social sciences. At Yale, where Garber began her career, Jacques Derrida was a frequent visitor, and Paul de Man might be found down the corridor solemnly lecturing on Nietzsche. In the ’90s, Garber developed a reputation for intellectual risk-taking with a series of psychoanalytically inflected books on topics including cross-dressing, real estate, and Americans’ reliance on dogs for unconditional love.
In those heady decades of postmodern language-play and seductive irresolution, claims for literature as a force for truth and justice would likely be dismissed, with a smirk, as humanist pieties. Garber’s prior work tends to celebrate the open-endedness of literature. But here is Garber now: “Literature has always spoken truth to power. That is one reason why autocrats and bigots have tended to treat it with suspicion.”
Perhaps Garber’s earlier relativism was a luxury for less desperate times. Or maybe, as artificial text and images and all sorts of conspiratorial untruths burn through our shared culture up to the highest reaches of power, we are learning that those old humanist pieties conveyed something essential. This evolution might itself be an example of what Shakespeare’s fool, in Twelfth Night, calls “the whirligig of time,” which, going round and round, “brings in his revenges.”
Almost by definition, great literature endures beyond the time of its making. It haunts us. Like that most famous ghost, Hamlet’s father, killed by poison poured into the ear, the literature of the past cries out beneath the stage, nearly but not yet forgotten. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, literature will outlast the foibles of misguided mortals. The great pleasure of A Treacherous Secret Agent lies in its faith that literature gets the last word.