The Spanish Tragedy and Ur-Hamlet - we do as all tragedians do

I gotta get this train back on the tracks.  Let’s see.  I’ll write this bit about The Spanish Tragedy, then something about the Henry V and Henry VI plays I’ve been reading, then get to Christopher Marlowe’s hilarious farce The Jew of Malta.  Somewhere I will fit in something about Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Marlowe which, happily, is excellent.

The crazy revenge scheme of The Spanish Tragedy is famously a play-within-a-play in which three people die of stabbing (Stab him… Stab him… Stab herself) while the idiot nobility in the audience nod along, thinking it is acting.

HIERONIMO  Haply you think, but bootless are your thoughts,

That this is fabulously counterfeit,

And that we do as all tragedians do  (IV.iv, 117)

Before the scene ends, two more people are stabbed (plus there is the business with the tongue).  It is like a combination of Hamlet’s last scene and its own play-within-a-play.

Which may be what it is, if Thomas Kyd wrote the legendary lost Ur-Hamlet, and if Ur-Hamlet precedes The Spanish Tragedy, in which case Ur-Hamlet invented the revenge tragedy and The Spanish Tragedy is its generic sequel.

Fredson Bowers, writing in Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy: 1587-1642 (1940) is sure both of those things are true.  He for some reason really wants Ur-Hamlet to come first, so it does.  In Chapter III, “The Spanish Tragedy and the Ur-Hamlet,” Bowers provides a detailed, scene-by-scene synopsis of Ur-Hamlet, showing how it led to The Spanish Tragedy and eventually Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

It is a fascinating chapter, mostly because Ur-Hamlet does not exist, in any form.  Two words have survived (“Hamlet, revenge!”, spoken by the ghost).  Bowers just makes the whole thing up.  He takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the French novella that is Kyd’s source (probably) and kind of plots a midpoint.

The Spanish Tragedy has no known source, which bothers Bowers.  It would be a rarity for the period if the story during this plundering period were original.  But I am okay with the idea; also the idea that Kyd did not write Ur-Hamlet and that it was written after The Spanish Tragedy.  Brian Vickers has recently led an effort to massively expand the attributions to Kyd – see The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd and the biography Thomas Kyd: A Dramatist Restored, but boy does the evidence look thin to me, very close to nothing in most cases.  The attribution of Ur-Hamlet to Kyd is based on interpreting a pun-filled line by Thomas Nashe.

The literary history of this period is of the highest interest.  Much of the interest is figuring out how we know things.

I’ll give poor, dim, Balthazar the last word.

BALTHAZAR  Hieronimo, methinks a comedy were better.

HIERONONIMO  A comedy?

    Fie, comedies are fit for common wits  (IV.i, 109)

But revenge is too much fun.

The Spanish Tragedy - Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!

Poor Hieronimo.  His son Horatio, a war hero and lover of the daughter of a duke, is murdered by the woman’s Machiavellian brother as part of some crazy scheme not worth going into.  How will Hieronimo find justice against such a powerful person?  Perhaps some other crazy revenge scheme will do the trick.

The crazier the better.  Thus Thomas Kyd, in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587*) invents the revenge tragedy, which will have an amazing forty-year run, producing many insane masterpieces, until it collapses from exhaustion just before the Puritans finally get the wicked theaters closed for good.

(7) The action is bloody and deaths are scattered through the play.  Ten characters are killed, eight of these on-stage (72)

The mass slaughter is only the seventh most notable aspect of “the basic Kydian formula for the tragedy of revenge” (71)!  I am quoting from the invaluable Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (1940) by Fredson Bowers, still a standard reference which I will write a bit more about later.

Seneca’s plays were full of revenge and murder, but nobody had pushed the genre as far as this.

Enter HIERONIMO with a book in his hand (III.xiii, 85)

That book, from which Hieronimo intermittently quotes, is a collection of Seneca’s plays.

And to conclude, I will revenge his death!

But how? Not as the vulgar wits of men,

With open, but inevitable ills,

As by a secret, yet a certain mean,

Which under kinship will be cloaked best.  (86)

Seneca’s example not only convinces him that revenge is good and necessary but that it demands a crazy, secret scheme.

Kyd is rarely the poet that Marlowe is, although that passage seems good to me.  And sometimes, almost always in Hieronimo’s monologues, he sets his own standard (The Spanish Tragedy, like Tamburlaine, has only one great character, the star of the show).

O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;

O life, no life, but lively form of death;

O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,

Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!

O sacred heavens!  if this unhallowed deed,

If this inhuman and barbarous attempt,

If this incomparable murder thus

Of mine, but now no more my son,

Shall unrevealed and unrevenged pass,

How should we term your dealings to be just

If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?

[skipping ten lines - night, day, hell, dreams]

Eyes, life, world, heavens, hell, night, and day,

See, search, show, send some man, some mean, that may –

                                                                 A letter falleth  (III.ii, 53-4)

This is a famous soliloquy, famous – parodied – at the time, a masterpiece of rhetorical devices (like the address to the heavens) that often grow stale quickly but here are full of life, of meaning to the character.  Then those last two lines feel new to me.  They are not the kind of poetry Marlowe writes.  I wonder how much of the audience really followed the eyes, life, world, etc. all the way to the line where they all return together.  Twenty-two lines in between is a lot!  Perhaps the actor also repeated some big gestures.

Please note the “men / mean” pairing returns in the first speech I quoted, eleven scenes later, with the plea for “some mean” turning into the discovery of a “certain mean.”

I’ll write at least one more post on The Spanish Tragedy.

Page numbers from the 1970 New Mermaids edition.

*  Or much earlier, or somewhat later.  Published 1592, with no author.  1587 puts The Spanish Tragedy alongside Tamburlaine the Great, making the year a turning point for the London theater, an enjoyable fiction that might even be true.

milk-white harts, fiery dragons, the ugly monster Death - some more Tamburlaine

The first character we see in Tamburlaine the Great is the king of Persia, but he lacks “a great and thundering speech,” so he is soon crushed by Tamburlaine.  Great and thundering speech is his superpower.  The real-life conqueror was also a tactician of genius, but the battles in Marlowe’s plays are mostly offstage, so what we get is speech.  Tamburlaine declares what will happen and then it does, although his terms are more metaphorical.  Here he is wooing the princess he has just captured, Zenocrate, promising her not the moon but just about everything else:

TAMBURLAINE: A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee,

Mounted on steeds swifter than Pegasus;

Thy garments shall be made of Median silk,

Enchas’d with precious jewels of mine own,

More rich and valorous than Zenocrate’s;

With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled

Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,

And scale the icy mountains’ lofty tops,

Which with thy beauty will be soon resolv’d.  (Part I, I.2, 114)

We are at the beginning of the play, when Tamburlaine is merely a successful bandit, so those harts and that sled are particularly fanciful.  Zenocrate never does get them, but this is how Tamburlaine thinks about everything.  He is always talking about what will happen.  In another play this might be a sign of his hubris which will eventually do him in.  Not in this one!  His imagery is exaggerated, but not his deeds.

But, since I exercise a greater name,

The Scourge of God and terror of the world,

I must apply myself to fit those terms,

In war, in blood, in death, in cruelty,

And plague such peasants as resist in me

The power of Heaven’s eternal majesty.  (Part II, IV.1, 230-1)

The “peasants” he is addressing are the last set of kings and emperors he has crushed who will next be seen, in one of the play’s astounding bits if pure theater, dragging Tamburlaine around the stage in a chariot, bits in their mouths.  Tamburlaine has also just murdered one of his sons, onstage, for playing cards during a battle.  That is what I mean when I say the battles are offstage.  Onstage, we watch this character play cards with his servant.

Anyway, Tamburlaine:

And, till by vision or by speech I hear

Immortal Jove say ‘Cease, my Tamburlaine,’

I will persist a terror to the world,

Making the meteors that, like armed men,

Are seen to march upon the towers of heaven,

Run tilting round the firmament,

And break their burning lances in the air,

For honour of my wondrous victories.  (Pt. II, IV.i, 232)

This is the pure Marlovian theme again, where the motivation is power, but power to destroy.

In the last post I claimed that Tamburlaine “develops” in Part II; this is what I mean.  His metaphors become more cosmic and grandiose, more meteors and heavens, “flying dragons, lightning, fearful thunder-claps” (Pt. II, III.2, 211), as he begins to believe – or as I realize he has always believed – that he is an avatar of divine power, a force he calls “Jove,” sent to earth to overthrow kings, empires, and religions.

Part I has a terrifying scene where a group of Damascene women plead for mercy from Tamburlaine.  He shows them his sword.  What do you see?  “Nothing but fear and fatal steel, my lord.”

TAMBURLAINE:  Your fearful minds are thick and misty, then,

For there sits Death; there sits imperious Death,

Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge.  (Pt. I, V.2, 165-6)

He orders the slaughter of the women – “charge these dames, and shew my servant Death.”

Meant as metaphor, perhaps, but decades later, in Part II, sick and old, I take Tamburlaine at his word:

See, where my slave, the ugly monster Death,

Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear,

Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart,

Who flies away at every glance I give,

And, when I look away, comes stealing on!

Villain, away, and hie thee to the field!

I and mine army come to load thy bark

With souls of thousand mangled carcasses.

Look, where he goes!  But, see, he comes again,

Because I stay!  Techelles, let us march,

And weary Death with bearing souls to hell.  (V.3, 251-2)

But the days of slaughter are over.  Just one more soul for hell.  I did not really need that whole passage here, but it is so good, and obviously huge fun for an actor.

Let’s see.  It is Part II where Marlowe really begins to pour out the place names.  Like Milton eighty years later, he loves the poetic effect of exotic, multi-syllable names.  The scene where Tamburlaine explains siegecraft to his sons is historically curious.  The scene where Tamburlaine has a gigantic map brought on stage to show his conquests is really curious.

Next week – in a few days – I will move on to The Spanish Tragedy, utterly different, poetically, dramatically.  Then two weeks after that I will be back to Marlowe, to The Jew of Malta.

Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays - Threatening the world with high astounding terms

In Christopher Marlowe’s two Tamburlaine the Great plays (performed c. 1587, published 1590) the great Central Asian conqueror Tamburlaine moves from success to success, defeating a series of opponents and committing a series of atrocities.  He is never even wounded in battle.  He dies, in the final scene, after decades of wars, of natural causes, some kind of illness.

I am not sure what “drama” means, but I am pretty sure for most people this is not it.  Tamburlaine does not struggle much to reach his goals and is not a tragic figure, destroyed by, say, his hubris. In the first play he is narrow (in the second part he does develop), and the other characters are hardly deeper. He murders his son, he blasphemes, he slaughters, and lives a long life of ever-increasing power surrounded by devout followers.  What is the conflict?

Mycetes, the king of Persia but a weakling, is the first king Tamburlaine, a glorified bandit, defeats:

MYCETES:  Brother Cosroe, I find myself agriev’d;

Yet insufficient to express the same,

For it requires a great and thundering speech.  (Part I, I.1, 105)

That’s what Tamburlaine has.  Every time he comes onto the stage he brings a great and thundering speech with him.  How theater-goers loved those magnificent blank verse speeches as delivered by the great Edward Alleyn (was he really only 21 at the time?).  People performed them in taverns.  Blank verse became the default poetry for tragedies.  Imitations and parodies followed for about a decade.

The action, the drama, is in a sense a series of speeches.  What is new compared to say Gorboduc, aside from Marlowe being a much better poet, is that the speeches are less pure rhetorical exercises and instead reveal character, even if the character is a weirdo like Tamburlaine:

Nature…

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering planet’s course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres,

Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,

That perfect bliss and sweet felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.  (Pt. I, II.7, 133)

Pure Marlowe, as I understand him.  Doctor Faustus or perhaps even the Jew of Malta could have given this speech although they would substitute something else for the crown in the last line.  That is new, too, that the drama reveals not just the nature of the characters onstage but the nature of the author.

The Tamburlaine plays were published together in 1590, just a few years after performance, the only Marlowe texts published during his lifetime.  The state of Marlowe’s texts is a nightmare, and these are likely the best we have, and even here the lawyerly publisher wrote in a prefatory note that he “omitted and left out some fond and frivolous gestures… far unmeet for the matter” (Laurie E. Maguire, “Marlovian texts and authorship,” The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, 2004, p. 42).  In other words he apparently cut the comic scenes promised in Marlowe’s Preface:

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

Threatening the world with high astounding terms,

And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. (105)

So now we have ten acts of “high astounding terms” and little clownage.  I will look at some more high astounding terms tomorrow.

Page references are to The Complete Plays, Penguin Classics, 1969.

Where I Walked in September 2025, and with Whom – The great affair is to move

I walked about a third of the Chemin de Stevenson in southern France, accompanied by eight other intrepid Mainers and three jolly donkeys.  Here we are, on the last of our six days, leaving the summit of Mont Lozère, the highest point we reached.

Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing spirit can suppose.  For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel's sake.  The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.  (“Cheylard and Luc”)

This is Robert Louis Stevenson writing in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879).  I have now been to Luc and Cheylard.  Many people go to Luc and Cheylard.  Why?  Because Stevenson went there and put them in his book.  Ironic!  Although this is in the preceding paragraph, about the route from Cheylard to Luc:

It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life.

We followed Stevenson’s path but through a delightful fairy-like forest full of mushrooms and mushroom pickers gathering the mushrooms we had eaten the night before in Cheylard (with pasta) and would eat that night in Luc (in a tarte).  It is hard to imagine the landscape Stevenson saw, the forest eradicated by centuries of woodcutting.  It is much nicer now.

Young Stevenson thought his third book would concentrate more on the history of the region, especially the small-scale but brutal religious war of the early 18th century.  He designed and commissioned a gigantic sleeping bag that was so heavy he had to buy a donkey (Modestine) to carry it and the rest of his gear.  A good writer, he quickly realized that his struggle with the donkey was most interesting thing that happened, and the book shifted.  It’s a good book.

The French embraced the book – the French, in general, embrace books – and eventually developed the trail for hikers.  Farms rent donkeys to people who want them.  Hotels and villages and abbeys have paddocks and hay. Walking this trail with a donkey or two is an ordinary French tourist activity.  A recent movie set on the Chemin de Stevenson, Antoinette dans les Cévennes (2020), has perhaps made the hike more “fashionable,” as Emma told us, but everyone already knew what it was.  Everyone in France I mean; we talked to a young Scottish couple said they had trouble, despite Stevenson’s fame, finding anyone in Scotland who knew the trail existed.

Our trainer.  An hour or two of instructions, mush of it about packing the panniers, and off we go.  We were the only people on our part of the trail with donkeys.  They do complicate the hike.  I wonder what it is like in August.  More hikers, more donkeys, more flies.

Donkeys, or at least ours, are fine companions and a source of great pleasure, except for the occasions when they are not.  They now carry a lot less weight (that is why we had three of them) and are better treated in every way than poor Modestine.

What else.  The Abbey de Notre Dame des Neiges, Our Lady of the Snows, was a monastery when Stevenson visited, but is now run by nuns who have embraced the mission of housing and feeding hikers.  Here we see Flocond (Snowflake), their socil media star, and the bicycle of the nun who manages the hostel.  The donkeys are in a paddock just to the left, their snouts plunged into an immense pile of hay.  Now I am just putting up vacation snaps.

What I Read in September 2025 – A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme

My writing on Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great plays has been hampered by an apparent post-France short circuit in my ability to write.  So I will put up some easier posts to remind myself how to write.

I had two major projects this month, one ongoing, one returned to its stable.

 

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Songes and Sonettes Written By the Ryght Honorable Lord Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt the Elder and others (1557), various – Better known as Tottel’s Miscellany, an enormously important poetry anthology that was much-looted by the great Elizabethan poets.  Thomas Wyatt brought the Petrarchan sonnet into English, in a mix of translation, imitation, and original poems.  Henry Howard was also a superb sonnet writer and basically invented English blank verse, although you will have to go to another book, like the invaluable Five Courtier Poets of the English Renaissance (1969), to see his blank verse Virgil translations.

Howard is a romantic, novelistic figure, who is presumably more famous now than he has been for a while because of the interest in the reign of Henry VIII as a subject for novels and television soap opera.  I hope that has sent some people to his poems.  The bit in the title of the post if from Howard’s epitaph for Wyatt, “Wyatt resteth here…”

Gorboduc (1561), Thomas Sackville & Thomas Norton – We covered this one here.

Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587) &

Tamburlaine the Great, Pt. I (1587? / 1590), Christopher Marlowe – A post on Dido is over here; something on Tamburlaine is in slow progress.

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600 (2000) – Always more to learn.

 

TRAVELS WITH THREE DONKEYS IN THE CÉVENNES

The three donkeys, enjoying having their packs off, as was I.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson

Le Chemin de Stevenson (2023) &

Le Jura... à pied (2023), TopoGuides

Tomorrow I will put up more donkey photos.  Some people may have seen them on Twitter or Bluesky.  It was a good trip.  The Jura book was for the post-donkey wind-down.

 

NOVELS

Guilt (1936), László Németh – This Hungarian novel looks like some kind of social realism but then wanders into stranger visionary territory at times.  The protagonist is a version of the naif character that László Krasznahorkai often uses.  The prose style is utterly different but Krasznahorkai readers will find many interesting things here.

The Ponder Heart (1953), Eudora Welty – Pure Welty comedy in a short novel I had for some reason not read before.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Ishmael Reed – Highly, highly recommended to Percival Everett readers.  Well, not to most Everett readers, now that there are so many.  Not as rich a book as Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) but how many are.

The Poacher's Son (2010), Paul Doiron – A Maine detective novel, the first in what is now a long series, featuring a game warden “detective.”  For most of the book, it is barely a detective novel at all, but rather a story about a complicated father-son relationship that takes a turn when the difficult father becomes a murder suspect.  It is quite a sad book, actually.  To my limited knowledge, it captures the landscape and ethos of its portion of Maine quite well.

 

POETRY

How the Stones Came to Venice (2021), Gary Lawless – Lawless owns a bookstore, Gulf of Maine Books, in Brunswick, Maine that features an astounding wall of poetry.  He is also devoted to rescue donkeys, although they do not feature in this curious hybrid book.

Blood Wolf Moon (2025), Elise Paschen

 

IN PORTUGUESE

Zilda (1924), Alfredo Cortez – An important piece of Portuguese theater, I am told.