What is the equal to treachery, that act so complete in its sincerity that the bard Dante, in his Romantic wisdom, consigned the greatest traitors in history—Judas Ischariot, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Gaius Cassius Longinus—to the lowest circle of Hell, beneath the frozen river Cocytus in the very maw of Satan to be chewed on for all eternity?

Why, my dear Andrew Rohman, it is that one act which the Elizabethans had reserved for God himself—succinctly, vindicta mihi—and for which the Hebrew gnosticists admired the awesome character of the Old Testament Demiurge, that leveler of worlds and indiscriminate planet flusher. It is that act for which a man is at last consumed by and at once made equal to his passions, and under the power of which he denies himself everything except his commitment to the administration of justice, and the settling of a score, and the execution of his enemy’s wrongs. It is that final utterance at the edge of language, where the uselessness of words is ultimately revealed as a nakedness and terribleness of indescribable despair. For there is nothing that so thoroughly transforms the whole being of a man into a force of intention than vengeance.

And there, fair Reverend, you will find the former judge and aggreived father Hieronomo, who at the end of The Spanish Tragedy, sits incarcerated by the authorities, after he has at last slain his enemies to avenge his son’s death.

KING

Fetch forth the tortures.
Traitor as thou art, I’ll make thee tell.

HIERONOMO

                 Indeed,
Thou may’st torment me, as his wretched son
Hath done in murdering my Horatio,
[But] despite all thy threats,
Pleased with their deaths, and eased with their revenge,
First take my tongue, and afterwards my heart.

[He bites out his tongue.]

Merry Christmas dear sir, and a Happy New Year.