By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The phrase ‘poetic justice’ is well-known, but its origins are perhaps less familiar to most people. The expression refers, of course, to a situation whereby someone gets what they deserve for their actions. But the ‘poetic’ part of the phrase also suggests that there may be an ironic aspect to the justice served (and deserved).
So, for example, a murderer who shoots someone might be killed by their own gun, or an arms dealer may be killed by the very weapons he has sold to someone else.
Or if we think of classic literary and mythical examples, Oedipus, in seeking to avoid fulfilling the oracle’s prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, flees his parents (who – spoiler alert – he will later learn were not his biological parents) only to run into his real father and mother and inadvertently fulfil the prophecy he tried to avert.
None of that is really Oedipus’ fault, as such. Well, it is to an extent: if he wasn’t so proud, he’d have stood down in his altercation with the man he meets on the road, and would have avoided killing this man (who, in a twist, turns out to be his biological dad). But you get the idea: poetic justice is an especially delicious kind of retribution or score-settling, whereby things end in a neatly symbolic or fitting way, with the perpetrator of a crime or misdeed receiving their ‘just deserts’ (never ‘desserts’; although that’s a post for another time).
Literature is awash with such examples of fittingly ‘poetic’ justice being meted out. Indeed, Hamlet’s famous phrase ‘hoist with his own petard’ (which may have partly been nothing grander than an Elizabethan fart joke) is an example of this kind of justice, where a man is accidentally blown up by his own bomb.
Fittingly, the man who gave us the phrase ‘poetic justice’ had a suitably poetic-sounding name: Thomas Rymer (c. 1643-1713).
Rymer was himself a poet, but he was many other things, too, and his work in writing, editing, and publishing would prove hugely influential and his legacy long-lasting. He was an important and influential literary critic who’s credited with introducing key principles of French formalist neoclassical criticism to an English readership.
Rymer also held the post of Historiographer Royal, a role which was introduced in 1661 following the Restoration but which, unlike the Astronomer Royal, hasn’t lasted into contemporary times, having been laid to rest in 1837. Rymer threw himself into this job, studying reams of medieval manuscripts held in the Tower of London and elsewhere, and publishing seventeen volumes of treaties made between the English Crown and foreign European powers over the centuries.
It was in a printed letter to Fleetwood Shepheard entitled The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d (1678) that he gave us his most celebrated legacy, however. In discussing the Jacobean play Rollo Duke of Normandy by John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Ben Jonson, and George Chapman, Rymer coined the term ‘poetic justice’.
Well, almost. Actually, the phrase Rymer used was ‘poetical justice’, but ‘poetical’ became ‘poetic’ shortly afterwards as the expression was taken up by other writers. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Rymer’s inaugural use of the phrase from 1678:
Though historical Iustice might rest there; yet poetical Iustice could not be so content. It would require that the satisfaction be compleat and full, e’re the Malefactor goes off the Stage.
So it’s poetic (or ‘poetical’) justice because poetic or dramatic tales should encourage good behaviour in the audience or reader by showing how, to borrow from Oscar Wilde, ‘the good ended happily, the bad unhappily’. Rymer wanted dramatic action in plays to be authentic and realistic, but (in keeping with his neoclassical leanings) he also believed there should be a didactic element: drama (and poetry) should lead by moral example.
Rymer coined or helped to popularise a few other phrases besides ‘poetic justice’. In 1693, he gave us an early example of the phrase ‘the gay science’ to refer to literary criticism, in his Short View of Tragedy: ‘This King, Richard Ceur de lion, and his Brother Jeffrey had formerly liv’d much […] in and about Provence, so came to take delight in their Language, their Poetry (then call’d the Gay Science) and their Poets.’