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.

A readalong of Christopher Marlowe and friends - I fear they know we sent the poison'd broth

Please join me this fall in reading the plays of Christopher Marlowe and some of his contemporaries, if that sounds enjoyable to you.  The more I have thought about it, the more enjoyable it sounds to me.  I have many questions.

Below is an attempt at a schedule, with a play every two weeks, slower than when we read all of the Greek plays.  In September, though, I will blow through some early plays the precede the commercial London theater.  They are a bit shorter and frankly I doubt that anyone else will want to read them, so let’s get on to Marlowe, right?  Marlowe is outstanding.

I hope to put up a post every Monday (the dates below), with the alternating posts about some related topic: another play, perhaps even one by Shakespeare, or poetry, or criticism, or even in theory a performance although that does not seem likely.

I think of these works more as poems than as plays; this will mostly be an exercise in poetics and literary history.  But there is no reason anyone else has to read along for that.

Early Precursors
Sep. 1	1552	Ralph Roister Doister	Nicholas Udall
Sep. 8	1553	Gammer Gurton's Needle	authorship much disputed
Sep. 15	1561	Gorbuduc	Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville
Marlowe & Co.
Sep. 29	1587	Dido, Queen of Carthage	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 6	1587	Tamburlaine, Parts I & II	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 20	1587	The Spanish Tragedy	Thomas Kyd
Nov. 3	1589	The Jew of Malta	Christopher Marlowe
Nov. 17	1591	Arden of Faversham	???
Dec. 1	1592	Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 15	1592	Edward the Second	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 29	1593	The Massacre at Paris	Christopher Marlowe

The years are all from the chronological table in the back of The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 1990, eds. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway.  Most of these years are marked with an asterisk meaning “best guess” so please use them skeptically.  The year of The Spanish Tragedy is especially convenient – plausible but convenient – because paired up with Tamburlaine it creates a handy Year When Everything Changed, a concentrated explosion of theatrical innovation.  But maybe it did not happen.

The first London commercial theater (The Theatre) opened in 1576, the next few in 1577.  One of my puzzles is what happened in the ten years before the Tamburlaine / Spanish Tragedy revolution.  Barely more than a dozen plays survive from that period, a number of them closet dramas, not written for performance.  What the heck was on those stages?

Some of what else was going on:

1580s	Astrophel and Stella	Philip Sidney
	An Apology for Poetry	Philip Sidney
	Caelica	Fulke Greville
1590	Henry VI, parts 1 to 3	William Shakespeare, et. al.
	The Two Gentlemen of Verona	William Shakespeare
	The Faerie Queene I-III	Edmund Spenser
1591	The Taming of the Shrew	William Shakespeare
	The Comedy of Errors	William Shakespeare
	Richard III	William Shakespeare
	Titus Andronicus	William Shakespeare
	Complaints	Edmund Spenser
	Summer's Last Will and Testament	Thomas Nashe
1592	Delia and the Complaint of Roasmund	Sanuel Daniel
	Pierce Penniless	Thomas Nashe
1593	Idea: The Shepherd's Garland	Michael Drayton
	Venus and Adonis	William Shakespeare
	Hero and Leander	Christopher Marlowe
	The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia	Philip Sidney

 

The sonnet craze – Sidney, Greville, Daniel, Drayton – is at its peak.  Lots of great poetry of all types, really, but oh so many sonnets.  Then there is the upstart, catching up with Marlowe fast.  I remind myself that Shakespeare was two months younger than Marlowe.  The theaters are closed because of the plague in 1592, which is why Shakespeare and possibly Marlowe switched from plays to best-selling narrative poems (although Hero and Leander was not published until 1598).

Please feel free to offer corrections, major or minor omissions, or really any comment at all.  I have read a lot of this stuff before but have no other expertise.

In December I will think about what happens next.  But in the meantime let’s have some laughs with the hilarious comedies of Marlowe and pals.  The title quotation is from, where else, The Jew of Malta, Act 4, Scene 1.