¡Hola! ¡Bienvenidos al Podcast de Literatura Inglesa Clásica! I hope that’s right. Full disclosure, the only Spanish I know are culinary terms, profanity, and a few body parts picked up from years working as a line cook with guys from Ecuador and Mexico. So I used Google translate. You needn’t contact me about the appalling accent – I am fully aware.
Why the Spanish? Why that extra continental flair? Because today we’re whisking away to sunny Iberia for a blood-soaked spectacle of vengeance, madness, and betrayal: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. When I said last time that Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was the first blockbuster, I half-lied. Or, as I prefer to think of it, I told a half-truth. The other contender for that honor is today’s play and oooh, is this a trashy one, cats and kittens – really sensational stuff!
But before we pack our bags (don’t forget the stain stick – blood spatters), you should know that the podcast maintains a presence on all the major social media platforms: you’ll find cheeky little videos about literary history, upcoming episodes, feeble puns. I hope they both entertain and inform. Plus, by clicking “like” on these posts, you raise the visibility of the podcast, so more people can find us. I’d really appreciate that. Same thing with posting a positive review on your podcatcher of choice – more good reviews means more ears, and we’d love more ears. Ears, by the way, is not one of the body parts I know in Spanish.
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Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is a play that more literary types know of than know. It’s mentioned in just about every introductory essay to an edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and students (usually at the graduate level) know that it exercised a massive influence on Elizabethan drama, but very few people actually read it anymore, and it is nearly extinct on the stage. It has never appeared on film or television.
But in its own time, it was wildly popular, probably the most popular play of the early modern period. It holds the record as having the longest run on the Elizabethan stage – no fewer than 29, yes, incredulous listener! 29 performances!
I sense your underwhelm-ment. OK, 29 seems a paltry number when compared to Phantom of the Opera’s nearly 14,000 show run (how and why, dear friends, how and why?), but one must recall that the late 16th playgoing public demanded new product at a voracious rate – many playhouses retired their plays after a handful of performances, after only a week or two. So 29 is a remarkably vigorous number given the caffeinated attention span of the audience.
In addition, it was the most circulated play in print, a bestseller of Potteresque proportions. And every major writer of the time – every one: Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Marston, Heywood – reworks the play, makes some allusion to it, or parodies it. Over 100 references to the Spanish Tragedy have been Identified by scholars in contemporary works.
Most scholars agree that the Spanish Tragedy is the first revenge tragedy in English (which is why it features so prominently in Hamlet introductions – it introduced the genre). Its composition date remains a bit elusive: somewhere between the mid-1580s and early 1590s, we reckon. I believe critical opinion generally leans early, given that Kyd makes no reference to the Armada of 1588. It enters the Stationers Register in 1592 in a quarto edition (that is, a fairly small, book-sized book, not a folio, which is a whopper – like family Bible size). It was reprinted several times during the following decade.
Special attention should be paid to the fourth quarto edition of 1602, which includes some 325 lines of additional material (which is usually set in a different typeface, sometimes with separate line numbering, in modern editions). These additions, manifestly not by Kyd himself (who died in 1594), have sparked a bit of a scholarly cottage industry about who did actually write them. We do have an entry in theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe’s diary noting a payment to Ben Jonson for penning extra material, but the additions do not match Bennie the Jet’s style. 10 years ago, Douglas Bruster from the University of Texas, argued that those lines seem to have similar orthographic peculiarities to the handwriting sample we have from a play called Sir Thomas More which is generally agreed to be Shakespeare’s rather sloppy penmanship. So, with some skeptical holdouts, many believe that Billy the Bard himself is responsible for the expanded edition.
That interesting bit aside, however, why was the play such a big deal at the time but largely ignored today? Well, as I said, it’s an over-the-top spectacle: operatic before opera. The plot is quite shallow and the characters quite flat, but there is plenty of juicy intrigue and just swimming-pools full of blood: not discreetly offstage and reported by a messenger. No, right there in front of you: torture, murder, executions, maiming, suicide. It is not, in short, a subtle play and, well, since the advent of Shakespeare, we have come to value psychological nuance and insight over brawling and shouting.
Or, we say we do anyway. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a far larger fanbase than does Elizabethan theatre. We claim to love quinoa and kale, but it’s the cheetos bag that’s always empty, isn’t it?
But we shall munch on. What’s the play about? I’m glad you asked.
The play opens with the ghost of Don Andrea, a Spanish nobleman who is quite, quite dead, speaking to his companion, the allegorical figure of Revenge. They function as something of a Greek chorus, commenting on the play’s developments. Andrea laments his current state of affairs, especially being parted from his beloved, Bel-imperia, the King of Spain’s niece, and wishes he could even the score with Balthazar, the Portuguese prince who killed him in battle. Revenge says, stick around, and you’ll see your beloved kill your killer. Were I staging this, I’d have Andrea squeal with glee.
In the Spanish court, we see that Balthazar is a prisoner and will be held until the Viceroy of Portugal pays a ransom. The Spanish King’s nephew, Lorenzo, argues with Horatio (Andrea’s close friend) about who actually captured Balthazar and thus who should receive the ransom. The king decides that Horatio should get the gold while Lorenzo should be responsible for the prisoner. Then, Horatio consoles Lorenzo’s sister, Bel-Imperia, distraught because she loved Andrea despite her family’s disapproval. But she quickly moves on and falls in love with Horatio instead. Of course, Balthazar also falls in love with the bereaved and speedily comforted Bel-Imperia, which suits the Spanish king down to the ground. He has a great idea: let’s have a wedding to seal the peace between our two nations! Despite Uncle Spain’s brio, Bel-Imperia proves less enthusiastic than you might imagine about having to marry her first boyfriend’s killer.
After an exhaustive, comprehensive, and painstakingly thoroughgoing consideration of all possible alternatives, options, recourses, choices, opportunities, eventualities, and prerogatives, Balthazar and Lorenzo decide the only onliest way to ensure Balthazar’s marriage is to kill Horatio. Which they promptly do, hanging his battered corpse from the arbor of Horatio’s father Hieronimo’s garden. Hieronimo and his wife Isabella discover their son’s body, go a little bit mad, and then decide to avenge this crime.
Bel-Imperia, imprisoned, writes a letter to Hieronimo – in her own blood, ladies and gentlemen, in her own blood – identifying his son’s killers as Lorenzo and Balthazar. Hieronimo doubts the authenticity of the sticky missive and seeks more proof. So he stalls for a bit, Revenge being both literally and metaphorically asleep. Lorenzo, for his part, is busy betraying his minions in an attempt to obscure any evidence. But another letter confirms to Hieronimo that, indeed, Lorenzo and Balthazar are the murderers.
In the fullness of time, Balthazar and Bel-Imperia’s wedding plans move ahead and Hieronimo is assigned to stage a bit of light entertainment. He mounts a masque, casting Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Belimperia, the plot of which loosely mirrors the circumstances of Horatio’s death, and replaces any stage prop daggers with real weapons. I’m sure you’ve sorted that during the performance, Belimperia actually stabs Balthazar and Hieronimo actually stabs Lorenzo. Belimperia then stabs herself. In an antepenultimate grand gesture, Hieronimo reveals to the court that the play was real: everybody’s actually dead! One must assume the amateur perfomances of the courtiers were nonetheless thoroughly convincing. The King of Spain and Viceroy of Portugal are shocked – shocked – that such things happen in this establishment. The King orders Hieronimo to be tortured that he might offer more information. In a penultimate grand gesture, Hieronimo bites out his own tongue so that he can’t confess under torture. Ah ha ha! says the king, you could write out a confession. Hieronimo then, presumably, asks for a pen – bit of charades, I imagine: one word, one syllable, mimes scribbling. Alas, the pen is dull! Might I have a penknife to sharpen this quill, excellently mimes Hieronimo. Then, in the ultimate gesture, he stabs the King’s brother, the Duke of Castile and Lorenzo’s father, before killing himself with the penknife. I must say, you must be seriously committed to sacrificing yourself at the altar of revenge if a pen knife is the weapon – they’re very tiny blades. You’d be at it for a while, I fear, just stabbing away . . . . In the end, Don Andrea is giddily satisfied as Revenge assures him that they will be tormented for all eternity. The end.
Oh, sorry! Should have mentioned: along the way, Isabella stabs herself, too.
The actual end.
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I said earlier that the Spanish Tragedy is the first revenge tragedy in English, but I should fully point out that it’s not the first revenge play ever. They go back to olden days, folks, back to the classical dramatists. The most famous of those, in this arena, is the Roman Seneca of the first century of the common era. He reworked Greek antecedents and set a template that early modern writers would accept, adapt, and embroider. For example, Seneca’s tragedies were divided into acts and the language was often declamatory and sententious blank verse. Check. There are frequent supernatural elements – not gods so much, but ghosts and other ghoulies. Check. Revenge themes and a corpse-strewn stage. Check, check. A lack of onstage action in favor of long reports of offstage events. Ah, no. Kyd and his followers want to show, not tell.
There are other variances, of course. The Spanish Tragedy really doesn’t clear up who the protagonist is until about half-way through. The play’s subtitle “Hieronimo is mad again” (when was he mad before? should we be concerned?) seems definitive, but he lingers in the background for a good while as the play focuses on the young men: Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Horatio. And, of course, the belle Bel-imperia.
Lorenzo’s a quite interesting character, not just because he’s the villain (why are they always so attractive?) but because of the type of villain he is. Lorenzo is what the Elizabethans called a Machiavel – named for the Italian philosopher who wrote The Prince. Machiavels favor expediency over ethics. They are cunning, deceptive, and arrogant. They find moral codes baseless and constricting. They manipulate to achieve their own ends. I would like to say that these characteristics derive from a rather unsophisticated understanding of Niccolo Machiavelli’s political theory, but, be that as it may, a ruthless amorality is the calling card of this stage villain. Lorenzo declares, “I'll trust myself, myself shall be my friend, / For die they shall—slaves are ordained to no other end.”
The Machiavel was a development of the allegorical Vice figure in the medieval morality plays. But what’s interesting about this development is the way it indicates a subtle shift in the early modern conception of evil. In the morality plays, Vice was vice, an everlasting and transcendent embodiment of indulgence, avarice, and selfishness. As such, it did not necessarily need an agent to enact those traits. You don’t need someone to behave selfishly – such a concept exists as part of the cosmic moral fabric of creation. Evil is. Vice is.
But the Machiavel is a particularly and peculiarly human figure – he is immanent, not transcendent. Without the behavior, the action, the human agency, there is no “Machiavellianism” in this sense. I think the Machiavel is an instantiation of Renaissance humanism’s more worldly understanding of evil or vice as contingently human – it is not eternal, but the result of individual choice. Lorenzo’s quote earlier indicates his disbelief in any supranatural order. He must rely on himself. And the ordination of slaves to die is a result of that self-determination, not of some disembodied Fate. So what is his motivation? Why kill Horatio for a former enemy? That, I confess, can be hard to sort. Some refer to that greatest of Machiavels, Iago from Othello, and invoke Coleridge’s claim of a “motiveless malignity.” I’ve never really bought that idea, for either character. It’s not that they have no motives, it’s that they have a surfeit of them. Lorenzo’s jealousy of Horatio’s hero-status and his class-based bigotry against Hieronimo’s family’s “mean” lineage, his desire, as he says to Belimperia, “to save your honor and mine own.” Maybe he’s a few steps ahead and sees a way to punish Balthazar’s impudence. Maybe a resentment of his father, uncle, and sister? A true concern for securing a diplomatic peace between Spain and Portugal? Well, no, I don’t think that one rings true. And maybe he is just a tool.
And speaking of tools, let’s think about the nuanced way Kyd uses some of the language tools in this play. I know, I’ve stressed that the play has a dearth of subtlety, but there are a couple of rhetorical techniques that Kyd employs that point to some rather keen philosophical observations.
Kyd’s use of blank verse, unlike some of the playwrights to follow, is astoundingly regular in this play, and this does contribute to the rather bombastic feel of the text. Other than some passages in which he switches to prose (usually to emphasize a character’s madness – that is, the character cannot express him- or herself in ordered, metered speech – or to indicate a character’s lower social status – that is, one does not speak eloquently), Kyd pretty much keeps to a very regular iambic pentameter. Later writers, like our friend Bill, will massage the pentameter line from time to time to create specific effects. But Kyd also sometimes dips into rhyme and will seemingly alter the rhymed and unrhymed lines willy-nilly within a scene. But I think this is neither willy nor nilly.
To wit: when Hieronimo discovers Horatio’s body in the garden, he cries out:
Alas, it is Horatio, my sweet son.
Oh no, but he that whilom was my son.
Oh, was it thou that call'dst me from my bed?
Oh speak, if any spark of life remain.
I am thy Father; who hath slain my son?
Note that there are two rhetorical devices at work here. First, we have anaphora – the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses. Three lines begin with the exclamation “oh.” Second, we have a rhyme of sorts: three lines conclude with the word “son.” Technically a rhyme, yes, we have a repeated consonant and vowel sound combination, but the fact that the word is the same seems to indicate a kind of stalling, a stasis. We don’t move on to different words with the same terminal sound, we get the same word again and again. Hieronymo's shock prevents him from moving on – he becomes static, paralyzed in the moment. He can’t decide what to do next. Later, in a soliloquy in Act 3, he says:
Wise men will take their opportunity,
Closely and safely fitting things to time.
But in extremes advantage hath no time.
A rhyming couplet with the same word as the rhyme. Time. No time. If we think of time as a period in which a series of actions or events follow each other, it follows that the idea of no time is a state of inaction. This notion gets underscored at the end of Act 3, when we return our attention to the Chorus and find that Revenge has fallen asleep. Andrea rages: “Awake, Revenge! for thou art ill-advised to sleep away . . . !”
Or let’s have a look at Hieronimo’s speech in Act 3, scene 2, just before he reads Belimperia’s letter:
Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
Oh life, no life, but lively form of death;
Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.
Right, the exclamation “oh” repeats, but notice that the first clause in each line is negated by the second clause. Eyes, no eyes, life, no life, world, no world. Oxford professor Emma Smith points out that all these nouns – objects in the world, persons, places, and things, right? – turn out to be nothing.
And so in Act 4 scene 4. After the play-within-a-play, Hieronimo explains his need to avenge his son:
Here lay my hope, and here my hope hath end:
Here lay my heart, and here my heart was slain:
Here lay my treasure, here my treasure lost:
Here lay my bliss, and here my bliss bereft.
Again, we have the anaphorical word “here” (another emphasizing of stasis, stationariness). Hope exists, then it ends. The heart lives, then it is killed. Treasure found, treasure lost. Bliss to blisslessness. Now, this type of rhetorical redundancy was the thing most often parodied about Kyd’s style in the Spanish Tragedy, but once we get past the rather self-conscious writerliness, we begin to realize that, in some way, language fails to grasp the reality of experience. Hieronimo hasn’t words to articulate being. The universe exceeds our ability to define or control or give utterance to anything meaningful.
Once we understand this, other lines in the play begin to take on a far more bleak valence. Hieronimo is the king’s Marshal, the man in charge of the kingdom’s legal affairs. Yet now, he constantly laments the lack of justice in the world, despite his incessant pleas to God and King. Here’s just a sample:
If you unjustly deal with those, that in your justice trust?
Thus must we toil in other men's extremes,
That know not how to remedy our own;
And do them justice, when unjustly we,
For all our wrongs, can compass no redress
Though on this earth justice will not be found.
For here's no justice; gentle boy, be gone, / For justice is exiled from the earth.
He becomes undeceived as the delay and failure of justice becomes increasingly apparent. There’s a beautifully ambiguous line in Act 3, scene 12. It’s part of the additions and its elegance does strike me as Shakespearean. Pedringano tells Hieronimo that he was following orders given by Hieronimo, who denies giving such orders. He replies, now get this:
No, no, you are deceived! not I; – you are deceived.
Here’s one of those points where you have to have the text in front of you to get the genius of the line. The first independent clause is “no, no, you are deceived” and it ends with an exclamation point. So far, so forthright. But the next bit, “not I,” is also an independent clause, ending with a semi-colon. So when heard, one can understand: “You are deceived and I am not” or “You are deceived because I didn’t give the order.” Both things may be true. Now follow me on this next bit.
Look at the play’s obsession with letter-writing and authorship: we have Belimperia’s letter written in her own blood, we have the letter delivered by the hangman confirming Belimperia’s accusations, there is the nonexistent pardon letter for Pedrigano. Is this the futile attempt to control the evanescence of speech, the fact that speech only exists as it is going out of existence? Does the writing down of things give them a sort of permanence, and thus an authority upon which we can rely? We may think so, but it doesn’t seem an immutable principle.
When proposing the play-within-a-play, Hieronimo says that “It was my chance to author a tragedy.” Of course, he literally means the masque he will stage (in four languages, no less – a Babel of confusion in which each “must act his part in unknown languages), but also the figurative sense that his obsessive revenge will write his own tragic end. I get the impression that, in some way, the universe itself is kind of a Machiavel. It offers no real order but its own expediency, and that expediency is inaccessible to us. Language is our primary means of ordering the world in which we live, and it is simply insufficient in an amoral Cosmos. As Lorenzo says, “Where words prevail not, violence prevails.”
Indeed. This play brims with vengeful violence because words could not articulate a satisfactory conception of justice.
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The 17th century essayist, scientist, and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon spoke thus of the difference between justice and revenge: “Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.” I often ask my students what they think of revenge as an ethic of justice. Many believe in the “eye for an eye” approach, while others think revenge only perpetuates violence. Bacon seems to be saying something similar here. Revenge, of the type sought by Hieronimo and Isabella and Belimperia, presumes the ineffectiveness or the nonexistence of a supreme moral order; that is why they must act. Revenge posits a rough vigilantism in which “justice” does not transcend the affairs of humanity, but amounts only to the temporal satisfaction of the aggrieved. This seems tantamount to nihilism, a bleak vision of nothingness. Professor Smith calls it “a vicarious fantasy of power.” And that nihilistic fantasy, I think, dehumanizes us, makes us less than human. We are reduced to mere obsessive, self-absorbed abstractions. The vengeful become vengeance itself, nothing more. Thought about that way, The Spanish Tragedy’s chorus, along with a personified Revenge, we have the ghost of Andrea, whose name comes from the Greek “andros” meaning humankind. This, too, may be an allegorical figure, who takes eternal pleasure in the suffering of enemies.
So is this Thomas Kyd’s moral vision? I don’t know. The play seems to illustrate the futility and cruelty of violence and vengeance. But on the other hand, I’m reminded of a line usually attributed to movie director Francois Truffaut. He says, “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” What does he mean?, I hear you say. What about Kubrick’s Paths of Glory or Full Metal Jacket? Coppola’s Apocalypse Now? All Quiet on the Western Front? The Thin Red Line? What Truffaut’s getting at is that, regardless of the director’s pacifist agenda, the filmic depiction of war will always glorify it. The violence of combat is thrilling. The deep friendship and camaraderie of the soldiers is admirable. The horrors they face give rise to a heroism to be celebrated and emulated. The war movie, even when explicitly pointing to war’s horror and futility, provides an arena for and a counterpoint to the most noble human virtues. That’s why Truffaut says there’re no anti-war movies. They always honor that which they seek to critique.
And I think the same thing about Kyd’s play. While he may attempt to interrogate the justice of revenge and to reveal its degradation, he also wallows in its spectacular excesses. He does away with Senecan delicacy and moves the murder and maiming onstage. He overwhelms with outrage and it thrills. We are too busy rooting for the avenger, seeking with him or her the vicarious fantasy of power, the cathartic release of savage triumph, to offer much consideration to ethical subtexts. Is that the same way we live our lives, outside of plays and novels and movies? All stories thrive on conflict, even the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Do we understand what our conflicts really are, or are we acting our parts in languages unknown?
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