The Spanish Tragedy

A Critical Reader

Thomas Rist, Thomas Rist

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781472522849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The Spanish Tragedy was the first 'revenge tragedy' on the English Renaissance stage: but for its influence, major dramas including The Revenger's Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi and even Hamlet would not exist as they do. It is thus a key text for the study of Renaissance drama and normally appears in introductory undergraduate courses on Renaissance drama and Shakespeare. Despite its initial smash-hit status, after the closing of the theatres in 1642 the play was only once performed in Britain before its gradual revival in the 20th century. Following its first professional performance in 1973, the play has come to be recognised as a Renaissance classic, receiving frequent performance. This volume will bring together its most insightful and influential modern scholars to produce an edition read both by experts in the field and lovers of Thomas Kyd's drama.

1

The Critical Backstory

Edel Semple

The beginnings

The critical history of The Spanish Tragedy is bookended by popularity. Kyd’s play was an instant success in the late 1580s and was widely known to audiences for decades after its first performances. However, with the closure of the theatres in 1642 and with changing tastes, the play slipped into relative obscurity and received only sporadic critical attention. Indeed, the limited interest in the play is evinced by the fact that its author was unidentified until the mid-eighteenth century, when scholars unearthed a comment by Thomas Heywood which quoted ‘M. Kid in the Spanish Tragedy’.1 Gradually rediscovered in the early twentieth century, The Spanish Tragedy is now celebrated as one of the most ground-breaking and influential dramas of the Elizabethan era.

Written between 1582 and 1589, The Spanish Tragedy proved to be a lasting commercial success on the stage and in print. Henslowe’s Diary records a remarkable twenty-nine performances in five years (1592–7), while between 1592 and 1633 the playtext went through eleven editions.2 The variety of likely performance venues is also notable: as well as the Rose on Bankside, The Spanish Tragedy may have been staged at the Cross Keys Inn, Newington Butts, the Fortune, the Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, the Globe, and the second Blackfriars. It also possibly toured the provinces and may even have been performed at court in 1619–22.3 That Kyd’s tragedy remained a valuable theatrical product is demonstrated by the expansion of the play through Additions, printed in 1602,4 and by the appearance in 1605 of 1 Hieronimo, an anonymous play that takes as its subject Don Andrea and Bel-imperia’s romance and that may be a burlesque of or prequel to Kyd’s play.5 The number of performances, the range of venues (inns, private and public theatres), the steady sequence of printings, the Additions, and the staging of a prequel, all attest to the play’s enduring popularity with a heterogeneous audience over several decades. Moreover, The Spanish Tragedy was no less admired abroad. Over the next century, in various forms, the play made its way around mainland Europe. It was performed by English actors in Frankfurt in 1601, by an English company in Dresden in June 1626, in Prague in 1651, and in Lüneburg in 1660. The play was also adapted and printed in German (in 1618, c. 1662–6, and 1680) and in Dutch (in 1615, 1621 and 1638); so popular was this last Dutch adaptation that reprints were issued well into the eighteenth century.6

Despite and perhaps because Kyd’s play was popular, original, and memorable, it became an established cultural reference point and was quickly imitated and parodied. The prevalence and permanence of allusions, homages, echoes, and mockeries further demonstrate how quickly The Spanish Tragedy firmly established itself in the public consciousness. The play was appropriated in a myriad of ways for diverse purposes but, to get the joke or reference or to fully appreciate the imitator’s reworking of the text, the audience must already have had some degree of familiarity with the original. In turn, the echoes and imitations of the play’s most memorable scenes, lines, and characters, then reaffirm and intensify popular knowledge of Kyd’s work. From the beginning, Hieronimo and Don Andrea were key figures for authors and audiences and four speeches were commonly parodied: Don Andrea’s opening speech (1.1.1–85); Balthazar’s rhymed lover’s complaint beginning ‘No, she is wild’ (2.1.9–28); Hieronimo’s soliloquy when he discovers Horatio’s body ‘What outcries’ (2.5.1–33); and Hieronimo’s grandiloquent ‘O eyes no eyes’ (3.2.1–52).7 In a variety of texts, Hieronimo stands as a verbal and visual image for extreme passion, grief, and madness; Balthazar is remembered as a euphuistic jilted lover; while in the ghost of Don Andrea early modern authors and audiences saw a courtier, a soldier and lover, and an otherworldly figure of retribution. References to and parodies of The Spanish Tragedy are widespread in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, as a sample of representative examples serves to show.8

In his 1589 preface to Greene’s Menaphon, Thomas Nashe mocks Kyd’s blank verse and his alteration of the Virgilian underworld (in 1.1.73) by ridiculing unlearned writers who ignorantly ‘thrust Elisium into hell’.9 Andrea’s prologue also appears in Heywood’s late Elizabethan comedy 1 The Fair Maid of the West (c. 1597–1603) when the clown Clem, a drawer arrived in Morocco as a privateer, marvels at his rise in status and proudly identifies with Andrea as a peer:

‘It is not now as when Andrea liv’d,’ – or rather Andrew,

our elder journeyman. What, drawers become courtiers?

Now may I speak with the old ghost in Jeronimo

When this eternal substance of my soul

Did live imprisoned in this wanton flesh,

I was a courtier in the court of Fez.10

As was typical in many dramatic appropriations, the original tragic bent of Kyd’s play is replaced by humour and levity. The bombast and pretensions of Andrea’s speech are also deflated in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1607). In his role as the eponymous knight, Rafe enters to give his dying speech; with an arrow lodged in his head, he begins: ‘When I was mortal, this my costive corpse / Did lap up figs and raisins in the Strand’.11 Here, the absurd demise of the lowly grocer’s apprentice and the scatological wit – Rafe describes himself as a constipated cadaver – are used to poke fun at the play’s lofty rhetoric and to undercut the seriousness and permanence of death.

The play proved to be a favourite target of scorn for Ben Jonson. Throughout his career, he frequently used Kyd’s tragedy as a marker of outmoded drama favoured only by the unsophisticated spectator.12 When, in Every Man In His Humour (c. 1598), Matthew excitedly praises The Spanish Tragedy’s ‘fine speeches’ and recites parts of the ‘O eyes’ soliloquy, it exposes him as an pretentious gull with coarse tastes.13 The Praeludium to Cynthia’s Revels (1600) ridicules an imaginary play-goer with ‘more beard than brain’ who ‘swears down all that sit about him “that the old Hieronimo”, as it was first acted, “was the only best, and judiciously penned play of Europe”’.14 The Induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614), with tongue-in-cheek, states that it will say nothing of the ‘constant’ (old-fashioned) tastes of the play-goer who will ‘swear Hieronimo or Andronicus are the best plays’, even though this conviction is ‘ignorance’.15 Hieronimo’s aside as he is denied access to the King – ‘Hieronimo, beware; go by, go by’ (3.7.30) – became a stock catchphrase in early modern drama, so much so that even forty years after the first performances of The Spanish Tragedy, Jonson’s New Inn (1629) includes the phrase as an expression of impatience and dismissal.16

Like Jonson, Nathan Field employs The Spanish Tragedy as revelatory of character in his comedy A Woman is a Weathercock (c. 1609–10). Full of hope and not a little vanity, Sir Abraham Ninny recites parts of Balthazar’s euphuistic lover’s complaint, but the rhymed responses of his companions show that he is an unattractive buffoon who cannot win the lady Lucida.17 The melodrama of Horatio’s murder and Hieronimo’s histrionic response become the target of Lording Barry’s satire in Ram Alley (c. 1611); finding Boutcher, a broken-hearted suitor, attempting to hang himself, William delivers a parody of Hieronimo’s ‘what murderous spectacle is this’ speech (2.5.9–33). William’s performance of grief goes unappreciated, however, as he discovers there is indeed ‘yet life’ in the would-be Horatio when Boutcher revives only to complain of the clamour caused by William’s recital.18 This reworking of the scene not only deflates the excessive emotion aroused by Horatio’s death, but it also halts and reverses the tragic momentum of the original, for, Boutcher lives and goes on to marry his faithful mistress. The university comedy Albumazar (1615), presented before James I at Trinity College, Cambridge, burlesques Hieronimo’s ‘O eyes’ soliloquy by channelling Balthazar’s ardour for Bel-imperia. In Act 2 the foolish farmer Trincalo, who notably has learned much from attending plays at the Fortune and the Red Bull, expresses his passion by travestying Hieronimo’s speech as an ineloquent lover’s lament beginning ‘O lippes, no lippes, but leaves besmear’d with mel-dew’.19

The Spanish Tragedy also proved to be popular off the stage, with allusions and adaptations in seventeenth-century prose, song, and poetry. Like the dramatic references to Kyd’s tragedy, the allusions in these forms are helpful in determining how the play was received (what caught the attention of its first audiences?) and why it was appropriated (how did the play become so engrained in the fabric of popular culture?). To begin with, Thomas Dekker references The Spanish Tragedy in two of his prose pamphlets. The first of these, The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), which reflects on the events of 1603, includes a tale of a cobbler’s wife who confesses her infidelities on her deathbed. Her husband is counselled by their neighbours to ‘be not horne mad: thanke heauen that the murther is reueald: study thou Baltazars Part in Ieronimo, for thou hast more cause (though lesse reason) than he, to be glad and sad.’20 The cobbler is asked to imagine himself as another Balthazar, betrayed by his mistress; as a married man he has more ‘cause’ for complaint, in the legal and sexual sense, than Balthazar, but, with the ‘murder’ of his honour out in the open and his wife dead, he also has more ‘reason’ (rational judgement and motive) to not seek vengeance. While Dekker’s tale may be a fabrication, it shows how the play and its characters had become familiar, shared images, of use and interest to the urban community. This vignette also demonstrates how Kyd’s work could be imaginatively reworked into a shorthand to illustrate a point and prompt a particular response. Writing on ‘Cruelty’ in the second pamphlet, The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London (1606), Dekker criticizes pitiless creditors and wishes that a law be instated that a ‘miserable debtor’ be buried at his creditor’s door so that he may torment the creditor by seeming to ‘[rise] up (like the Ghost in Jeronimo) crying Revenge’.21 Although no such scene directions are extant, this image may point to Andrea and Revenge’s first entrance as staged in the public theatres: rising through the trapdoor from the underworld and howling for revenge, their identities would have been quickly established and an atmosphere set.22

The Spanish Tragedy was also appropriated in poetic works. In T...