The Spanish Tragedy

The Spanish Tragedy

In 1586 the English language did not have a single tragedy which anyone would read or watch now for any reason other than curiosity.

By the end of 1592 English drama had

• Tamburlaine (Marlowe)
• The Jew of Malta (Marlowe)
• Dr Faustus (Marlowe)
• The Ur-Hamlet (Kyd?)
• The Spanish Tragedy(Kyd)
• The Henry VI trilogy (Shakespeare) and
• Arden of Faversham (anonymous)

Elizabethan tragedy was essentially created as a genre in a couple of years by two men:

Thomas Kyd and Kit Marlowe.

There were plays being written throughout[1] the previous 30 years.

- However, something like William Wager’s Enough is as Good as a Feast (1565) is still unquestionably a Morality Play – albeit[2] a harsh[3] unforgiving Protestant one.

- The only character with a name is Satan.

- There had been practically no progress in the 70 years since Everyman (1495).

Thomas Kyd (1558-94)

Like Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge, Kyd was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School in London, run by prominent humanist Richard Mulcaster.

Kyd got caught up in accusations of atheism against Marlowe, was tortured in prison and died shortly after being released.

The Spanish Tragedy is Kyd’s sole surviving work.

Revenge Tragedy: the righting of a wrong.

Revenge is central to much of Greek tragedy: the story of Orestes and Electra – as told by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – pivots on[4] a revenge plot[5].

The English tradition of revenge tragedies is heavily indebted to Seneca the Younger.

- Seneca was writing at Nero’s court and this period of tyranny required special stoicism and endurance[6].

However, in contrast to his Greek predecessors, the Roman playwright[7] probably did not write his plays for performance.

Seneca’s influence first appeared in England in Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, in which the action is reported (as in Seneca)

- the subject is taken from Ancient British legend (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136).

- Gorboduc had a profound influence on The Spanish Tragedy.

Indeed[8], it had a profound influence on English theatre; it introduced blank verse.

However, it is also important to recognize that popular religious drama, with its vigorous – often brutal – irony, and the tradition of the Dance of Death had prepared the way for Revenge Tragedies.

English and Franco-Spanish (e.g. Lope de Vega and Calderón) revenge tragedies are slightly[9] different.

- The continental model emphasizes the point of honour and

- the conflict between love and duty.

The English model centres more on bloody, vengeful melodrama.

The Vengeance Dilemma

Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights saw in this kind[10] of play the opportunity to exploit a moral tension in their audience:

- if the potential avenger had been wronged, and was not merely a bloodthirsty[11] villain himself, then the audience would sympathize with his plight[12] and wish to see his need for revenge satisfied;

However, morally they could not condone[13] revenge whatever the circumstances:

Revenge was something they understood all too well, but could not justify (“Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” – Deuteronomy 32.35).

- Notice that this verse is actually[14] quoted at Act III. iii of the play

That is why the avenger usually dies in his triumph.

The audience must consider

whether an individual is ever right to take the law into his/her hands should the state’s mechanisms fail to[15] implement justice;

whether a character should ever listen to the pre-Christian voices of the past; and

whether demanding ‘an eye for an eye’ actually leads to[16]far greater injustice than leaving a crime unsolved or unrevenged.

One of the Elizabethan definitions of atheism was denying the goodness of God.

- Hieronimo comes very close to this when he questions, in his grief, whether the gods are just.

Hieronimo tries to sidestep the whole question by setting himself up as the instrument of God’s revenge (the scourge of God?!).

Other Themes in Revenge Tragedies

However, Revenge Tragedies also touched on[17] important questions of the day, such as:

• The social problem of personal honour
• The survival of feudal lawlessness
• The political problem of tyranny and resistance
• The supreme question of providence (= destiny)

The portrayal of wealth and patronage in later Revenge Tragedies reflect

- the decay of the Tudor aristocracy and

- the disenchantment of men of letters.

What really matters in revenge tragedy

- is not the character and the destiny of the individual

- but the quality of his/her response to intolerable adversity.

The flaw[18] is not in the individual but in the corruption of the state.

Elizabethan tragedies tend to centre on royalty and figures of political significance.

In Jacobean and Caroline tragedies domestic settings are more prominent and sexual politics comes to the fore.

Though remember that Arden of Faversham[19] was written in the same few years as The Spanish Tragedy.

Kyd presents a complex web of relationships and interconnecting aspirations and his characters are trapped in a universe controlled by capricious forces like actors in a play (hence the importance of the play-within-a-play).

However, the focus is on the emotional suffering of an isolated individual who finds himself caught between his official function as the agent of royal justice and his overwhelming[20] need to exact private retribution for a murder that lies beyond[21] legal redress[22].

- the cunning[23] and political power of his enemies force him to commit a private revenge that goes against the creed of his own judicial career[24].

Kyd & Seneca

In The Spanish Tragedy(c. 1589, published 1592) Kyd learns from Seneca; there is/are

a corrupt state

a ghost who reveals dreadful[25] truths from the past that have to be confronted,

the need for revenge to satisfy the supernatural forces that oversee[26] the action

real and feigned madness (madness is the result of the mental struggle between the natural desire for revenge and the Christian prohibition on vengeance).

emotionally unstable characters have disproportionately violent reactions,

a tormented heroine

the bombastic style,

evil villainy,

melodrama,

carefully constructed and interlocking main plot[27] and subplot,

dumb shows,

a play-within-a-play,

long and impassioned speeches,

- which characterized Seneca’s plays.

However, Kyd is not dominated by the Roman playwright

- for example Kyd presents his atrocities on stage. : a sensational murder (in Act II), a shooting and a hanging (in Act III), a suicide (early in Act IV) and a stage littered with corpses (at the end of Act IV).

- Kyd’s interest in plot does not come from Seneca. Indeed, The Spanish Tragedy has many precocious elements of a detective drama. For instance, Hieronimo tests assertions by corroborating statements against other forms of evidence, and he analyses the other characters motives.

Seneca followed Aristotle’s Unities.

- Kyd also breaks with his Classical predecessor in rejecting a single location;

- The Spanish Tragedy makes a point of shifting in alternating scenes from Spain to Portugal and from the public world of the court to the private world of murderers and avengers.

The duration of time is not precisely indicated

- but would seem to require fairly substantial delays for the revenger to learn the truth and decide on a course of action.

Seneca’s influence carried through to the Jacobeans and in The Duchess of Malfi (1613/14) we see John Webster showing the same fascination with extreme suffering and stoic virtues.

Seneca did not allow[28] any comedy to intrude on the rarefied atmosphere of tragedy

- Kyd, by contrast, enjoys a bit of black comedy – the scene of Pedringano before the hangman is literally gallows humour.

Later Revenge Tragedy

Bel-Imperia’s love duel with Horatio (II.iv) is one of the most ardently erotic scenes in Renaissance drama, and all the more compelling[29] because it reaches its climax in Horatio’s grisly[30] death by hanging (hanged men often had erections while they were dying).

- love and death: word games of military-amorous encounter culminate in an ‘orgasm’ of onstage violence.

- the repeated stabbing of the cadaver is often compared to sexual penetration.

The linking[31] of sex and death became a staple[32] of English Renaissance drama (e.g. in The Revenger’s Tragedy)

- all this was connected with the idea of sex as la petite mort: the conception of the brief loss of consciousness after orgasm as a ‘little death’.

After Kyd, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedies were also characterized by:

Scenes in graveyards

Severedlimbs[33]

macabre contrasts between death and revelry.

Scenes of carnage and mutilation.

English Revenge Tragedies accentuate the grotesque, the macabre and the horrific. For instance[34], the kissing of a poisoned skull[35] in The Revenger’s Tragedy, a poisoned[36] picture in The White Devil or a poisoned Bible in The Duchess of Malfi.

an expression of the conflict between religious pessimism and the Renaissance glorification of the natural man.

Peculiarities of The Spanish Tragedy

Novelties

Although Hieronimo is obviously the play’s main[37] character

• he is not a person of high position or great power, and
• he does not begin to dominate the play until the end of the second act.

The turn of events suddenly[38]thrusts[39] the role of hero on a minor character a third of the way through the play.

Kyd is immensely concerned with the web of consequence;

- for him, an action ‘complete in itself’ means an action surrounded by layers of causation[40].

Every event in the play looks a long way backwards, or a long way forwards.

War and sex drive the play forward.

Andrea has his revenge,

Hieronimo has his revenge,

Balthazar and Lorenzo have their revenge

Bel-imperia has hers,

Andrea his

- but for each of them revenge has come in a grimly[41] different manner from the way he or she wished or planned it.

With the exception of Lorenzo, we see a group of people who are neither particularly[42] bad nor particularly good, reacting impulsively and violently to the impulsive and violent reactions of others and so on down the line[43].

Lorenzo – predecessor of Iago in Othello – is a mischief-maker [= un liante] (one of the aspects of Vice in the Morality plays).

Metatheatre

The Spanish Tragedy is similar to a dream-vision poem.

- There is a guide (Revenge) and the dreamer (Andrea) just as[44] in dream visions.

Metatheatre: In the scene in which Balthazar and Lorenzo overhear the profession of love between the unsuspecting Horatio and Bel-imperia,

they are all being watched by Andrea’s ghost and Revenge.

And we the audience are watching all six.

Each circle is unaware that it is forming part of a different design seen by the circle around it.

Horatio and Bel-imperia plan their love but it is in the hand of the concealed watchers;

the fate of the concealed watchers is seen in the larger perspective by the ‘spiritual chorus’:

the spiritual chorus are known to be fictional creatures by the audience.

This ambiguity is played upon and further heightened[45] by Hieronimo’s revenge play-within-the-playat Act IV.

- of course, The Spanish Tragedy is also a play-with-a-play.

Similarly, the whole of Act IV.i is a comment on life as theatre with contrasts between tragedy and comedy and between Greek, Roman and Italian theatre.

Dramatic Irony

Kyd’s metatheatre is closely linked to his heavy use of dramatic irony.

The key symbol of dramatic irony is the box that Lorenzo gives to Pedringano:

- the servant thinks it contains his pardon but it actually[46] contains his condemnation.

Dramatic irony works its theatrical magic again and again:

- in the scene of Horatio’s courtship with Bel-Imperia, when we know that the villains are waiting in the wings[47] to do him in;

- in Pedringano’s bravado in the face of his arrest and trial for murder, counting on the protection of Lorenzo that we and even Lorenzo’s page know to be false;

- in the witnessing of ‘Soliman and Perseda’, when the king and his brother suppose the deaths to be merely stage deaths but which we as audience know to be ‘real’. (Of course, there is the added irony that the performance of a ‘real’ death would look exactly the same as a stage death in the play-within-a-play).

The Spanish Tragedy is built on irony

- on the ignorance of the characters that they are being used to fulfil the will of the gods.

Like later works – such as King Lear – The Spanish Tragedy explores the failure of language as a way of expressing extreme emotions.

Like King Lear, The Spanish Tragedy can be conceived as a sequence of trials.

Like Tamburlaine, The Spanish Tragedy can be conceived as a struggle between those who defend the social order (in this case Lorenzo and Balthazar) and those who challenge it: Andrea, Horatio, Bel-Imperia.

Machiavellianism

An Elizabethan audience would easily recognize in Lorenzo, the chief antagonist of the play, the influence of Machiavelli, 16th-century Italian political philosopher.

- indeed, Lorenzo was the first true Machiavel on the English stage.

In Elizabethan England, Machiavelli’s name was synonymous with evil.

- Though undoubtedly its impression of his philosophy was simplistic, Elizabethan England associated Machiavelli with duplicity and use of violence and fear.

- Machiavelli’s philosophy was actually intended for the rulers of cities; he maintained (reasonably) that such rulers could not be bound by conventional morality.

The Machiavellian villain however, of which there are many other examples in Elizabethan literature, applied the philosopher’s principles to private life.

- He is characterized as being treacherous, murderous, atheist, unscrupulous and usually Italian.

Ironically, Hieronimo, the play’s protagonist, is forced to adopt Machiavellian tactics in order to avenge his son.

Over the coming months you will be able to compare Lorenzo with other machiavels such as Edmund in King Lear, Iago in Othello and Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi.

Notice Kyd’s love of contrasts.

- His text is littered with antithesis and oxymora (e.g. Bel-Imperia talks about “warring peace, or peaceful war” [II.ii].

Hanging

No other play of the Renaissance stage dwells on[48] the spectacle of hanging as Kyd’s does, and the Senecan influence will not in itself account for the spectacular on-stage[49] hangings and near-hangings in the play.

• Lorenzo and Balthazar hang Horatio in a spectacularly gruesome[50] scene
• Pedringano’s death by hanging occurs on stage
• Villuppo exits to be tortured and hanged
• Hieronimo tries unsuccessfully to hang himself in the last scene, though he duplicates the efforts of hanging by biting his tongue out.

Hanging is mentioned 20 times in the play.

Moreover, the idea of death as entertainment is emphasized throughout the play.

6160 people were hanged at Tyburn (Marble Arch) during Elizabeth’s reign.[51]

- Hanging bodies and disembowelled corpses[52] were a familiar Tudor sight.

The stage and the scaffold were closely related historically.

The famous ‘Triple Tree’ – the first permanent structure for hanging in London – was erected in Tyburn in 1571, during the same decade that saw the construction of the first public theatre.

Hanging functioned as a public spectacle: At Tyburn

• seats were available for those who could pay
• balconies were rented out,
• hawkers sold food and drinks
• pamphleteerssold the details of the crimes committed by the condemned
• the spectators stood in a semi-circle around the event
• Criminals often gave speeches before being executed and, depending on the mood of the event and the speeches, the atmosphere at hangings could range from carnival-like to tragic.

Hangings were still hugely[53] popular in the 18th Century.

- A famous execution could draw a crowd of 100,000 (London’s population was under 600,000).

Class Rivalry

Another peculiar[54] aspect of The Spanish Tragedy is the emphasis on class rivalry.

While Horatio is seen as a subordinate, his success reflects well on his social superiors.

However, when Lorenzo and Balthazar begin to see him as a rival, his very excellences make him vulnerable.

Lorenzo and Balthazar represent the mediaeval idea of ‘aristocracy’ (= the rule of the best, i.e. noblemen).

Hieronimo prowess is based on the intellectual superiority of the court professional.

We are back with the nobles vs. the new courtiers at the Tudor court.

Notice that Balthazar, Lorenzo and their henchmen have stabbed Horatio to death, so his hanging is technically spurious.

However, symbolically it is satisfying for the aggressors because it assigns an ignominious death to a perceived transgressor of social hierarchy.

The Spanish Tragedy’s Influence

The play’s sensational violence made it extremely popular with Elizabethan audiences.

It may well have been the most successful drama produced and printed between 1580 and 1642.

It significantly influenced Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594) and Hamlet (1603/4) – the play-within-the-play[55] (The Mousetrap).

Bel-Imperia has been seen as reacting to what she perceives in Lorenzo to be a kind[56] of sexual jealousy bordering on[57] incestuous desire.

- This may have influenced Webster’s portrayal of Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi (more in April!).

Chronology of Revenge Tragedies

1589The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd) – Spain

1592Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) – Italy/Rome

1600Antonio’s Revenge (Marston) – Northern Italy

1601Hamlet (Shakespeare) – Denmark

1602Hoffman, or A Revenge for a Father (Chettle) – Denmark

1606The Revenger’s Tragedy (Tourneur? Middleton?) – Italy

1607The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (Chapman) – France

1611The Atheist’s Tragedy (Tourneur)France

(1612 Sir Francis Bacon’s essay On Revenge)

1612The White Devil (Webster) – Northern Italy

1613The Duchess of Malfi (Webster) – Italy

1622The Changeling (Middleton) – Alicant (Spain)

1625Women Beware Women (Middleton) – Florence (Italy)

1626Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford) – Italy

1631The Traitor (Shirley) – Florence (Italy)

Of the 13 major Revenge Tragedies 7 are set in Italy.

Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1592) is a different sort[58] of revenge tragedy.