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.