Thomas Kyd „The Spanish Tragedy”
Born in 1558, Thomas Kyd began life with a series of good omens. He was the son of a prosperous middle-class family; his father, Francis Kyd, was a scrivener—a type of scribe that was very important in the complex world of Elizabethan law. When he was seven, Thomas began to attend the Merchant Taylors school, a new and modern school for boys. Admission to Merchant Taylors required a significant knowledge of either Latin or Greek as well as the Bible, so Thomas's entrance was no small accomplishment. In fact, among his classmates at the prestigious academy was Edmund Spenser, future author of the Elizabethan epic poem The Faerie Queene. There was little hint, in Kyd's early events, of the misfortunes and sufferings that would plague his final years, sufferings almost worthy of one of his tragic protagonists.
It was at school that Kyd probably first encountered the works of classical authors, such as Virgil and Seneca, who later on would have such a profound impact on him. After completing his education at Merchant Taylors, Thomas did not attend either of Cambridge or Oxford, as did his fellow playwright and sometime friend Christopher Marlowe. Instead, he probably became apprenticed in his father's trade. He also found employment as a translator, but it is believed that by 1583 (or thereabouts) he was already writing for the stage. Here he was to make his reputation and gain lasting fame mainly as the author of The Spanish Tragedy—one of the most popular, beloved, parodied, reviled and influential plays of the entire era, a play that was still being performed and read fifty years later and was to shape the work of all future tragedians to come, including Shakespeare.
Tragedy had first achieved greatness in ancient Greece, in Attica (the region surrounding Athens), where it developed out of religious festivals that celebrated the cult of the god Dionysus. The stories of Greek tragedies generally focused on a somehow gifted protagonist, who, through some act of hubris, suffered incredible misfortune, which usually culminated in a kind of redemptive moment of understanding and usually death. This brief flowering of tragedy was followed by an extremely long hiatus during which tragedy was virtually absent from the drama of the Western world, with the exception of some crude Roman attempts to imitate the Greek masters. And tragedy was almost entirely absent from the Christian drama, which generally tended to focus on celebrating the morality of Christ or, especially in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, inculcating morals through the use of morality plays. It was only with the Elizabethans, most critics agree, that tragedy regained its viability and its existence as a living art form. This would make The Spanish Tragedy a very important play, since it may be the first extant "Elizabethan classic" of the tragic genre, though this depends on whether it was written before or after Marlowe's Tamburlaine I & II and Doctor Faustus.
Interestingly enough, Kyd took as his model not the ancient Greeks, but the Roman playwright Seneca, whose blood-soaked tales of the downfalls of royal families proved fascinating to the Elizabethan mind. Kyd took Senecan conventions, however, and used them to create a type of play, known as the revenge tragedy, that would serve as a fertile genre for contemporary playwrights. Shakespeare's Hamlet became the most celebrated example of the revenge tragedy (as well as being perhaps the most celebrated play ever written). Kyd, interestingly enough, is rumored to be the first playwright ever to put the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark onto the stage, but his version was much less popular than Shakespeare's and has been lost to history.
But Kyd's play does not need to be justified in terms of its effects on later dramatists, since it was a huge success in its own right and was extremely popular with contemporary audiences despite (or perhaps thanks to) its gory violence and sometimes over-the-top rhetoric. This is surely due to Kyd's talent and craft as a dramatist and writer, but it may also have to do with the topical relevance of Kyd's themes.
The theme of revenge, for example, was a very controversial one in Elizabethan times. It is difficult to gauge the exact state of the Elizabethan mind with regards to revenge, because much of what survives on the subject comes from the preachers who were trying to discourage it. But we have reason to believe that there was a conflict between the old custom of seeking private revenge for wrongs done to one's family, inherited largely from the Anglo-Saxon and Danish influences on English culture, as well as from the Christian injunction of Vindicta mihi; "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the lord; I will repay". In other words, for the Christian, revenge against wrongdoers is the responsibility of God, not men. In Elizabethan times, a third factor had entered into the debate, namely the increasingly centralized and powerful state, which also discouraged private revenge in favor of revenge under the auspices of the law. In such circumstances, there was probably a great deal of confusion as to the moral status of revenge, though some types of revenge were definitely held to be worse than others: for example, a hot-blooded revenge committed in a fit of passion was preferable to a cold-blooded revenge, carefully, methodically plotted out in a Machiavellian manner. Though they abhorred Machiavellianism in public, the Elizabethans were fascinated when it was represented on stage, and most of the interesting avengers of Elizabethan drama, including Hieronimo, the hero of The Spanish Tragedy, employ deception and ruse to achieve their ends.
Another emotion that Kyd may have evoked was the strong anti-Spanish sentiment prevalent among his countrymen. Kyd wrote his play sometime between 1582 and 1592, most likely in the late 1580's. 1588 was the date when the first Spanish Armada—the fleet built by Philip II of Spain to invade England—was defeated, and Spain was regarded during that time as England's most hated enemy. The conflict had religious significance in the public mind, with the Spanish begin regarded as the anti-Christ and the English representing God's chosen people. An Elizabethan audience may have therefore been somewhat pleased at the denouement of the tragedy, where the royal lines of both Spain and Portugal are wiped out in a frenzied orgy of violence.
It is ironic that Kyd's play—and therefore his success and fame—may have been party due to this English xenophobia, for it was on suspicion of writing threatening anti-foreigner graffiti that Kyd's lodgings were searched by agents of the Queen in 1593. They found no anti-foreigner treatises, but they did find a pamphlet which they deemed "atheistical." Thus Kyd ended up in prison, being tortured on suspicion of spreading heresy and atheism. Kyd protested that the pamphlet belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had been roommates in the summer of 1591, and that it had accidentally been shuffled in among his papers; Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl before he could confirm Kyd's testimony.
By the time Kyd was released, he had probably been extensively tortured. Moreover, his reputation had been ruined, and the lord on whom he had previously relied on for patronage now turned a deaf ear, unconvinced of Kyd's innocence. Kyd spent the last year-and-a-half of his life in abject poverty, completing a translation of Robert Gardiner's play Cornelia from the original French, in the hope of establishing a patron in the Lady to whom the translation was dedicated. She did not fulfill his hope. He was dead by the end of 1594, as is known from a court document in which his mother, shortly after his death, in effect disowned him, to avoid having to pay his debts. He thus died alone and penniless, but not before having unknowingly bequeathed to the Elizabethan age what may be its first masterpiece and a genre that was to produce that age's greatest accomplishment.
Hieronimo - The protagonist of the story. Hieronimo starts out as a loyal servant to the King. He is the King's Knight-Marshal and is in charge of organizing entertainments at royal events. At the beginning of the play, he is a minor character, especially in relation to Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Bel-Imperia. It is not until he discovers his son Horatio's murdered body in the second Act that he becomes the protagonist of the play. His character undergoes a radical shift over the course of the play, from grieving father to Machiavellian plotter. After his son's murder, he is constantly pushes the limits of sanity, as evidenced by his erratic speech and behavior.
Hieronimo is the Knight-Marshal of Spain and the protagonist of the play. The Knight-Marshal was, in the Spanish government, the top judge responsible for any legal matters concerning the King or his estate. Hieronimo's occupation thus links him to the play's key theme, that of justice and revenge. Hieronimo equates the two frequently, and, indeed, the play seems to support his equation with its various calls for revenge and retribution. Only one character in the play, Alexandro, shows mercy on someone who has wronged him, and in that case the wrong did not end in death.
There are problems, however, with revenge, problems that Hieronimo must face. That Hieronimo does face these problems is what gives him the psychological complexity and verisimilitude typically associated with the tragic protagonist, making Hieronimo a sort of proto-tragic protagonist in English literature. Not even an important character until the murder of his son Horatio, Hieronimo is suddenly thrust into the center of the action. His character then develops over a series of soliloquies, wrestling with several key questions. These questions include: whether to end his misery by suicide instead of waiting to seek revenge, where to seek revenge against murderers with far more influence over the king than he, how to reconcile his duties as a judge with his inability to find justice for his son, whether to leave revenge to God once his legal means are exhausted, and—having decided to seek his revenge—how to do it in the face of enemies who could easily destroy him with their vastly greater influence and power at court.
Hieronimo resolves each of these questions and decides to seek revenge in a Machiavellian, deceitful manner. This is a radical shift for Hieronimo, who effectively adopts the tactics of the murderer Lorenzo against Lorenzo himself. And though his revenge is successful, Hieronimo's grief is not relieved, only death and silence manages to do this.
Hieronimo's conversion to Machiavellianism and his violent, bloody revenge, may raise problems for both an Elizabethan and a modern audience. Sympathizing with someone who reveals himself to be both deceitful and bloodthirsty is difficult. But Kyd does sow the seeds of Hieronimo's conversion in the first Act, when Hieronimo presents a masque to entertain the court. If we think of Hieronimo as an author of stories related to the downfall of Spanish and Portuguese princes (the subject of the masque), instead of a deceiver, then we see that Kyd has foreshadowed Hieronimo's later transformation. And we may see Hieronimo's revenge less as a violent, evil act than as a creative way to find justice in an unjust society.
Bel-Imperia - The main female character of the story. Bel-Imperia's role is prominent in the plot, especially toward the end. The daugher of the Duke of Castile, she is headstrong, as evidenced by her decisions to love Andrea and Horatio, both against her father's wishes. She is intelligent, beautiful, and, in moments of love, tender. She also is bent on revenge, both for her slain lover Andrea and for Horatio. Her transformation into a Machiavellian villain is not as dramatic as Hieronimo's, but only because she shows signs of Machiavellian behavior beforehand—her decision to love Horatio, in part, may have been calculated revenge, undertaken in order to spite Balthazar, Andrea's killer.
Bel-Imperia is the main female character of the story, and she has the misfortune to fall in love with both Andrea and Horatio shortly before they die. She also has the misfortune to have an evil brother in Lorenzo and to be the object of Balthazar's affection, when Balthazar is the very man who murdered her beloved Andrea and then went on to murder her beloved Horatio. She is then forced by both her father, the Duke of Castile, and her uncle, the King of Spain—the two most powerful men in the country—to wed this very same Balthazar.
Bel-Imperia does not, however, appear as a victim in all of this misfortune, which is a testament to the strength with which Kyd has portrayed her. He does this by giving her opportunity to display her rhetorical ability in stichomythia (line-by-line exchanges) between her, Balthazar, and Lorenzo. She also has several soliloquies, during which we have access to a mind, an interiority, with very strong opinions, desires, and motivations. We also have evidence that she has the necessary strength of will to act on her desires and motivations; the clearest example of this may be her participation in Hieronimo's revenge playlet, Soliman and Perseda.
Further, we can object that Bel-Imperia may be too calculating, too cold, and that her thoughts focus too much on revenge. Bel-Imperia, indeed, bears a vindictiveness for the wrongs done to her. Her love for Horatio seems partly motivated by a desire to revenge herself on Balthazar (which, of course, disastrously backfires in Horatio's murder). And she spurs Hieronimo on to revenge when he seems to be lazy in pursuing it. But this makes her murder at the end of the play acceptable—more acceptable, perhaps, than Hieronimo's actions. And as the litany of misfortunes above indicates, if she is angry, then she has very good reason to be.
Lorenzo - One of Horatio's murderers. Lorenzo's character remains fairly constant throughout the play. He is a proud verbal manipulator and a Machiavellian plotter. A great deceiver and manipulator of others, Horatio unsurprisingly has an enthusiasm for the theater. Lorenzo has a foil in Horatio; they are both brave young men, but Horatio's directness, impulsiveness, and honesty, contrast and highlight Lorenzo's guardedness, secretiveness, and deception.
Lorenzo is an example of the Machiavellian villain, typical of many Elizabethan tragedies and dramas. Other good examples of this type of villain include Iago, from Shakespeare's Othello, and Marlowe's Barabas from The Jew of Malta. This character exploited the popular disapproval of the early sixteenth-century Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli, whose The Prince portrayed a picture of a political ruler who (very broadly speaking) used manipulation over persuasion and fear over love to ensure the loyalty of his subjects. These characters also drew heavily on the traditional Vice figure in English literature.
The Vice figure would use verbal cleverness to lead a protagonist into sin, using that protagonist's inherent moral weakness. Similarly, Lorenzo uses his verbal cleverness to lead the people around him to injustice, playing on their moral weakness as well as their lack of knowledge. And like the Vice figure, Lorenzo has a foil. In the morality plays, the foil was usually a virtuous old man. In this tragedy, the honest and virtuous Horatio acts as a foil. But a key difference between the Machiavellian villain and the Vice figure is that the villain is human, whereas Vice is supernatural (much like Revenge in this play). So Lorenzo is weak in the same way those he manipulates are weak, and he is as easily manipulated as those he manipulates. This ironic fact is proven by Hieronimo when he lures Lorenzo into the playlet, manipulating the young nobleman's love of theater and erroneous belief that Hieronimo bears him no hard feelings.
Balthazar - The prince of Portugal and son of the Portuguese Viceroy. Balthazar is characterized by his extreme pride and his hot-headedness. This pride makes him kill Horatio along with Lorenzo, and it turns him into a villain. He kills Andrea fairly, though with help, so it is unclear whether he is as "valiant" as the King and others continuously describe him. But his love for Bel-Imperia is genuine, and it is this love that primarily motivates his killing of Horatio.
Horatio - The proud, promising son of Hieronimo. Horatio sense of duty and loyalty is shown in his actions towards Andrea, and he gives Andrea the funeral rites that let the ghost cross the river Acheron in the underworld. He also captures Andrea's killer, Balthazar, in battle, thus recovering Andrea's body. His sense of pride is shown in his confrontation with Lorenzo; though Lorenzo greatly outranks him in stature, he does not defer, but instead continues to argue his case in front of the King.
Ghost of Andrea - Andrea's ghost is the first character we see in the play, and the first voice to cry out for revenge. His quest for revenge can be seen both as a quest for justice, since it is sanctioned by Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, and as a quest for closure. Andrea is denied closure when he travels to the underworld, because the three judges there cannot decide where to place him; ironically, at the end of the play he becomes a judge himself, determining the places of the various characters in hell.
Revenge - Andrea's companion throughout the play. Revenge is a spirit that symbolizes the forces of revenge that dominate the play's action. He talks of the living characters as if they were performing a tragedy for his entertainment.
Isabella - Hieronimo's suffering wife, her inaction is a foil to his and Bel-Imperia's action. Her inaction, along with her visions of a dead Horatio, torment her increasingly throughout the play, providing an extreme version of Hieronimo's more subdued madness. Her death by her own hand foreshadows Hieronimo's suicide.
The King - The King of Spain is an ambivalent character. At times he appears noble and is definitely a friend to Hieronimo, resisiting Lorenzo's attempts to have the Knight-Marshal dismissed. But he is also complacent (a typical English stereotype about the Spanish), as demonstrated by his callous conversation after the Spanish victory in Act I, his subsequent dialogue with the ambassador, and his failure to know that Horatio has been murdered on his estate.
The Viceroy - The King's counterpart in Portugal. The Viceroy is shown as both a loving father but also a weak king. He is defeated in battle, wallows in self-pity when he believes his son Balthazar to be dead, is easily led astray by Villuppo into condemning Alexandro to death, and then renounces his kingship in favor of his son. All of these are signs of bad leadership, especially to an Elizabethan audience.
Pedringano - Bel-Imperia's servant. Pedringano is easily bribed, and he betrays Bel-Imperia and is one of the gang of four murderers who kill Horatio. In fact, Pedringano seems to have no moral considerations, only following the person whom he thinks can help him most. Ironically, this leads him to trust Lorenzo, who ends up betraying him.
Serberine - Balthazar's manservant who, along with Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Pedringano, kills Horatio. Lorenzo suspects Serberine of informing Hieronimo of the crime, and has him killed by Pedringano.
Bazulto - An old man. Bazulto visits Hieronimo because his own son has been murdered, and he wants the Knight-Marshal's help in finding justice. The appearance of the old man makes Hieronimo feel ashamed at his own inability to avenge Horatio's death.
The Ambassador - The Portuguese Ambassador is the agent of communication between the King and Viceroy. His presence appears purely functional, exchanging information between the Portuguese and Spanish court.
Alexandro - A Portuguese nobleman who fought at the battle in Act I. Alexandro is betrayed by Villuppo, who falsely informs the King that Alexandro has shot Balthazar, the King's son. Alexandro's character appears exceptionally just; even when Villuppo is discovered, he begs the Viceroy (unsuccessfully) for mercy on Villuppo's behalf.
Villuppo - A nobleman who, for no reason clear to the audience, betrays Alexandro. Villuppo's role is so short and so tied in with his lie about Alexandro that he almost serves as a personifcation of deceit, contrasting against Alexandro's personification of honor.
General of the Spanish Army - The General simply describes the battle between Spain and Portugal in Act I. His account of Andrea's death (or lack of account of it) and description of the Spanish casualties as minimal provides an ironic contrast to Andrea's lamenting of his death in battle.
Christophil - A servant who attends on Bel-Imperia while she is kept prisoner by Lorenzo.
The Hangman - The hangman is witty and jovial, and he exchanges verbal retorts with Pedringano before hanging him. Later, the hangman discovers the letter on Pedringano's body that confirms Hieronimo's suspicions of Lorenzo and Balthazar's guilt.
The Page - The page is a messenger boy who brings Lorenzo's empty box to the execution, which is believed to hold a pardon for Pedringano. After the page looks inside, he does not tell anyone that it is empty, out of fear for his own life. This has a distinct impact on the play, since Pedringano's belief that he will be pardoned stops him from exposing Lorenzo as one of Horatio's murderers before it is too late.
"Vengeance is mine; I will repay, sayeth the lord" (Romans.xii.19). This Bible verse is quoted by Hieronimo in Act III, scene xiii, and it can be said to epitomize the official Elizabethan attitude toward revenge: that it is something that should be left to God. But this position is silent on the relationship between revenge and justice, which are are identified with each other throughout the play - Hieronimo makes the connection explicitly several times, and revenge is officially sanctioned by Proserpine (Persephone), the Queen of the Underworld, in the play's opening scene. Revenge should be performed by God (or the State, which derived its power from God), but it still needs to be performed. This is the presupposition that underlies Hieronimo's doubts whether the Heavens (and God) are in fact just, which are doubts he expresses after the murder of his son and the apparent escape of his murderers. This link between revenge and justice also explains why, in III.xii, and IV.i, Hieronimo decides to revenge Horatio's death himself and why he interprets Bel-Imperia's offer of help as a sign that Heaven favors his decision. Hieronimo may here consider himself the agent of the divine vengeance that a just God must bring against his son's murderers, the man chosen by God to revenge Horatio's death. His act would thus be a service to God and not an usurpation of God's role.
There is, unquestionably, doubt in the audience's mind as to whether Hieronimo is right, and a similar ambiguity is felt toward other cases of revenge in the play as well - Andrea's and Bel-Imperia's, for example. Exactly what deaths should be revenged and who should do the revenging were topical questions for Elizabethans, who were living in a time when the Elizabethan state was bringing a centuries-old tradition of private revenge in England under control. It was also a state whose preachers advised leaving revenge to God, while at the same time describing the horrible revenge God would take on sinners. But the problems posed to us by revenge - and the intense desire for it when we or a loved one is injured by another, especially when the law fails to provide us with redress - is something that can be felt by modern audiences as well.
Not only is revenge a form of justice in the play, it is, ironically enough, an expression of love. Bel-Imperia's love for Andrea leads her to desire revenge against Balthazar; Balthazar revenges himself against Horatio because he loves Bel-Imperia. Bel-Imperia and Hieronimo make the most explicit connection between the two, interpreting the failure to revenge one's loved one as a lack of love. The presupposition that underlies all these actions and words is that love for a murder victim finds its fullest expression in vengeance. In effect, vengeance is an assertion that the loved one is not forgotten. Thus, Andrea's desire for vengeance is understandable as a desire not to be forgotten by those still living, and love and revenge are intertwined in the symbol of the bloody handkerchief, which starts out as a simple memento but ends by becoming, for Hieronimo, a symbol of both the memory of his son and the need to revenge his son's death.
The wheel of fortune was a potent image in Elizabethan iconography. It signified, in the Elizabethan consciousness, the vagaries and constant revolutions of Fortune, from low to high and everywhere in between. Lorenzo makes an allusion to it when he notes that the social-climbing Horatio is, hanged from the trees, "higher" than he ever was in life, and the Viceroy makes explicit reference to it in mourning the loss of his son in Act I (though his mourning is ironic, because it is premature). From Andrea onward, the characters we meet all experience drastic reversals of fortune - the loss of a son, the loss of life, the loss of a lover. This vicarious experience of the precariousness of human happiness - the way, in an instant, it can be changed to misery - is one of the unique pleasures that tragedy affords us: we are allowed to experience this loss without actually experiencing the tragic loss ourselves.
Kyd uses dramatic irony throughout the play to drive a wedge between the world as his main characters see it and the world as it actually is. Balthazar and Bel-Imperia see their evening rendezvous in the orchard as a safe space in which to express their love, because Bel-Imperia thinks that Pedringano is a trustworthy servant. In fact, Pedringano is deceitful, and, because of his treachery, the orchard turns into a place of death.
Furthermore, Lorenzo enthusiastically agrees to play his part in Hieronimo's tragedy, not knowing that Hieronimo intends not only his character to die, but for him to die as well. But, perhaps the most concrete and dramatic example of this wedge is Pedringano's belief that a pardon is contained inside the box Lorenzo has sent him. The box then comes to symbolize, in the view of many critics, a more fundamental and general limitation on human knowledge. In other words, the characters' inability to get past appearances is typical of all human beings' inability to penetrate appearances.
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